Jan
6
Leaders and Insurgents
Filed Under B2B, Blog, data analytics, eBook, Education, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, online advertising, Publishing, Search, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | 2 Comments
Lying on my back this last month, recovering from spinal surgery while keyboarding with difficulty, I have had plenty of time to reflect on the industry while not quite having the energy to respond to what I read. Yet amidst the flow of fatuous nonsense that surrounds the interesting and insightful, the faux management guru who pronounced on how hard it was for a leader to be an insurrectionary, and how change could not be expected from businesses that had “transitioned”, got my goat so royally that I am still vibrating with indignation, even now that I am mercifully sitting upright again. And to compound this I missed all the countless award ceremonies and suchlike so I feel out of it. So here come my own awards – For Insurrectionary Leadership of Traditional UK Information Companies in 2014. These awards have not (I hope) been checked for compliance with diversity, gender equality, or any other of the social requirements of modern life. But they do reflect my absolute conviction that the right people in leadership positions can change everything; that from business model to innovation style, everything can be re-invented; that real leadership attracts support, from colleagues and investors, only if it is prepared to question the fundamentals at each phase of our discovery of the challenges and opportunities arising from living in a networked society/economy.
So, without more ado (drumroll), let me introduce my joint winners of this distinctly un-prestigious award. Neither of them work in sharp and shiny Shoreditch start-ups, but in companies which, when last sold by their traditional owners, were seen as commoditised smokestack businesses which had run their course. Today both of these companies are seen as leaders in their respective sectors, reaching global markets with brand enhanced prestige. Significantly, both of these companies were able to recruit senior management in 2014 at a very high level because they were perceived as change agents. Equally impressive, especially for me (having railed at traditional players who did not understand their new users for 30 years), both of these companies are widely seen as being close to users in service value and understanding. Yet, when I first knew these companies in the 1970s, both were subscription based publishers who seldom encountered a user in the flesh, so safely were they protected from reality by library and institutional subscription services. Both had an advertising base which they have had to re-invent. Neither had an automatic access to investment capital and both had to earn their inputs either from private equity or within a corporate ownership where there were other choices.
So as well as a restless questioning of the way business was done, and an ability to get into the place of the end-user and visualize value, both of my winners needed tireless advocacy, and the ability to win hearts and minds and trust. I am sure (omelettes/eggs syndrome) that each has made some mistakes, and that some who got moved on or out – in the disruptive course of change – will feel cause to argue my choices. But at the beginning of 2015 I see no companies that stand higher in the estimation of their users than Macmillan Science and Education, and the newly renamed TES Global. My awards therefore go jointly to Annette Thomas and Louise Rogers.
Of course, there is always more to do. The Education side of Macmillan, for example, remains in transition. But for a company founded in the second half of the nineteenth century, its renaissance in a digital world is remarkable. In 2015 I really appreciated how the use of Macmillan’s Digital Science as a greenhouse for investment in start-ups critical to the future role of researchers was blossoming into the development of investments like ReadCube as hub technologies around which other players, like Wiley in one example, could develop their own access and distribution strategies. In other words, do not compete with your old rivals: work on capturing the new value points. Users will recall 2014 as the year when their subscription value to Nature and its journals reaped additional value through the release of access controls for subscribers. And many of staff will recall the year as their first on an integrated campus site in Kings Cross which brings benefits in communication, and understanding of the whole customer base. Things will continue to change, especially as Digital Education as well as Digital Science, makes a contribution, but for the Holtzbrinck family investors, who bought from the Macmillan family when their nerve failed and whose courage has backed Annette and her talented team, there must be great satisfaction at the value enhancement here, as well as the return.
At TES Global the picture is very different. The Times Educational Supplement and its smaller sister, the Times Higher Educational Supplement, were sold by Murdoch’s News International when he persuaded himself that advertising teaching jobs in the UK would be done on government websites and was thus a dead duck. Two private equity owners have since made real money from this supposed write-off, and a third is shaping up to do the same. Not only have traditional markets been held but taken online and increased. TES Connect, a resource sharing innovation developed to allow teachers to share their own work and lesson plans, commands a global marketplace and has a joint venture with a major US teaching organization. 2014 will be recalled as the year when the new PE owner decided to back management in buying relevant tech companies in Silicon Valley to support this global growth and delver fresh layers of value as a way of getting a leverage on the value added through the resource sharing process. And to widen the market by acquiring agencies in areas of recruitment that the company never previously considered. Here is another company, a child of the great age of late nineteenth century print dominance, which has shown how determined questioning of the status quo can recreate value. As expansion opportunities now appear, 2014 saw several high level managers with new skill sets arrive to take up the challenges. And it was the year when it changed its name – to better reflect the TES brand it has so completely rebuilt.
My two award winners are very different, but share much in common. One has a background as a science researcher, the other as a B2B magazine publisher. Yet both understand the culture of users online in a way that has evaded many of their contempories. Both understand the workflow of their users and how their services must add critical value. Both have been prepared to take historic business models and shake them until they worked, or new ones were ready for adoption. But for me, the award goes to them because they were both prepared to lead change from the CEO position. They have demonstrated that they are prepared to dare to be wrong. This quality is called courage, and there is less of it about in the information industry than we need at a time when the speed of change is ever quickening.
Oct
7
The End of Editing?
Filed Under Blog, data analytics, eBook, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, STM, Uncategorized | 2 Comments
If you are near Hall 4.0 at the Frankfurt Book Fair on Friday this week at 10 am, do yourself a favour, take an hour out from frenetic rights trading, and consider for a moment one of the critical issues of publishing as an industry in our times: does editing still matter in a digital world, and if it does, who should be doing it? And it is not just an issue of rational organisation and growing margins. For those who have invested a lifetime here, the litany of job titles (copy editor, sub-editor, commissioning editor, managing editor, executive Editor in my own case) recognises the scope of the editing function from selection of what to publish through to the preparation and validation of the published material. It recognises that “editor” has often meant “marketing manager” in some circumstances. And we should nor forget that all those grades and variations in editorial job titles demonstrate the willingness of publishing management to trade a new job title when what was requested was a pay rise!
I wanted to be there to moderate the debate in Hall 4.0. Instead a slipped disc has me on my back, but more than adequately replaced by David Attwooll of David Attwooll Associates (www.attwoollassociates.com), who knows the changing structures of the publishing business far better than most of us. Together with Dr Sven Fund, who runs Walter de Gruyter, and Dr Helmut Pesch of Lubbe this session will explore a question that would have made our publishing grandfathers blanch. Is editing the core of our business, or even a core competence?
One characteristic of a life in publishing is the decline of editorial standards debate. As soon as a new acquaintance realises that you are connected to the trade, then begins the chorus of criticism around standards: in your new friend’s youth, there were no literals in printed books, all the facts were always correct, the index was extensive and the bibliography was right up to date, and above all, the stream of inadequate drivel and trivia now published with fanfares at Frankfurt would have been strangled at birth. The latter comments are pure marketing, and relate to age and changing tastes. The former claims, discounted for failing memory, reflect something very odd about our industry. In a place where brand is mostly invested in the author, and seldom in the publisher imprint (OUP and Penguin may be the exceptions), editorial standards in regard to content preparation can only have been important as a way of attracting authors. Now that we are in an agent and author auction-based world the publisher surely has every right to demand a finished product, edited and ready for publication, and thus we see the trend towards editorial work moving out of publishing houses and going freelance or outsourced.
So the role of the consumer publisher devolves to Investor+Marketeer. Would Max Perkins or Dick Seaver find employment? They would probably work for literary agents , who may or may not be interested in investing in re-shaping and rewriting on the heroic scale of these two representatives of the Great Age of Editing (1925-1960) But notice that none of these changes in the business of publishing has a specifically digital edge. And none of them brings self-publishing into the equation. Yet in a publishing world dominated by these factors, Amazon can offer freelance services to would-be self-publishers, who can also buy into a huge range of specialised self-publishing bureaux, from Blurb to eternity. Editorial standards could improve in an EaaS world. Matching systems derived from the dating world could match editor with author. Fact-checking in a data analytics world will be automated, leaving the editor with the task of resolving clashes of opinion or fact.
And all of this may be fine for consumer publishing, but where does it leave educational, or academic or professional publishing, where there have long been disputes about who is responsible? In the early years of this century I was often told that the end of the publisher role in peer review meant the end of the STM publisher. While the glory days of late 1990s +45% ebitda are now long departed, there is no major journals publisher who is not now an important Open Access publisher. More recently, we have been told that the reason why commercial publishers are more expensive than other routes to market is a result of their high editorial added value. They both improve the accuracy and the literacy of the finished article while ensuring that it’s linking and citing functions work immaculately. Metadata may be the answer; if publishers can prove that they can make content more discoverable and improve user access then surly here is a line of defence for traditional publishing process – the digital need coming to the rescue of the craft industry of copy preparation! While academics debate their article publishing strategy (PLoS One -cheap and quick , but peer review only reaches to validation of methodology Versus Publisher – expensive and slow but thorough in terms of mark-up and metadata) the choices may come down to how quickly these articles are needed in the academic marketplace and whether the research is funded by an institution willing to pay for the editorial added value. And if the editing funding is available is it best spent with the publisher or one of a host of specialised agencies (often created by unemployed publishers’ editors) who can be competitively cheaper and faster?
Or why not just let the crowd do it? The insane desire of the human race to point out the deficiencies of others is so readily channeled into crowd-sourcing that we have turned the vice of promulgating ill-prepared communications and pushing them into the public space into the virtues of crowd-editing in the Age of Wikipedia. And it does work very well, until you reach the point of “who edits the editors?”. Then you find yourself back in St Paul’s Churchyard in London in the eighteenth century, where booksellers like Thomas Longman were protecting their migration to publishing and basing their attractiveness to authors upon the better presentation of their works… publishing does move in some very full circles.
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