Feb
6
The Collaboration Game
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, Education, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, Pearson, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, semantic web, STM, Thomson, Uncategorized | 1 Comment
Multi-tasking may be beyond me. I am finding it very hard to travel and blog at the same time. And having traveled 10 hours by train and over 50 in a plane in the past 14 days I must beg forgiveness for the gap in production on this blog. And the annoying thing is that many of the things encountered on these travels have been red meat for bloggers.
Take as an example last week’s Information Industry Summit, organized as ever by the SIIA and held this year at New York’s Pier 60. This is a really important industry event, and I was pleased to be amongst a crowd of some 250 who enjoyed a very varied and interesting agenda. And specially interesting for me these days since these conferences provide a verbal map of industry sentiment. One would have thought, for example, that for many SIIA members 2012 was a disaster worth forgetting. Consolidation goes on apace but many of the “great” players of yesteryear took considerable reverses, and investor sentiment about the “information industry”, if that means failing print to some, must be flagging. With McGraw-Hill dividing into two, and selling the weaker part, and News Corp dividing into two and racking up real problems in the bad bank side, there are plenty of examples of near terminal troubles. And yet the room was full as ever of investors and analysts. I cannot be certain of course whether they were there to pick over the wreckage, or to re-invest post-digital development, but they are still there. And while they are there I really think we should give them a vision of the future which is not framed by our rear view mirror.
So the conference began with George Colony, the articulate and persuasive father of Forrester, giving a talk about Thunderstorms. Indeed, this was a recurrent theme. It reminded me of where we have been these last 20 years. Do you remember the long years when every conference started with a Christensen-esque speech on Disruption? Well, we learnt to live with Disruption, and we ignored the wonderful advice of the author of the Innovator’s Dilemma. For the next five years we were Crossing Chasms, getting one foot into the digital world, rebalancing ourselves. Well, does anyone know if we crossed? Or are we still poised? Then every media sector got involved, and all of a sudden we were Transitioning and Migrating. These may have been words which pleased investors at the time, and helped to explain why nothing much was happening at discernible speeds, but using them now seems laughable. How many major print-based powerhouses of 1993 can you name that have a stake in digital markets that matches a Google, or an Amazon, or a Facebook? We have businesses like Thomson Reuters and Reed Elsevier who have carved out niches in digital workflow, and players like Pearson who dominate education markets which have been slower to move to the network. But giants? Those have been built anew and elsewhere.
So when the conversation turned to Thunderstorm last week I wondered whether Americans had adopted the English art of under-statement. Cataclysm was the word that came to mind that week as I read Gannett’s results statement. If George Colony meant that our industry was under water then I might agree, but I suspect that he was looking or a metaphor for mindless violence, but came up short. Yet the metaphor led me to the totally sane, healthy and interesting part of the week. One objective of my trip was to help my friends at TEMIS, the French semantic analysis software company, launch their LUXID Community, a collaborative network of software players, content companies and platform providers. I was delighted to find some of the themes of the launch event taken up in the main conference. Look for yourself at http://www.temis.com/join-the-luxid-community or come to one of their meetings and express a view.
When extra-ordinary events take place, and change the entire landscape in which we work within a timeframe as short as 20 years, our reaction as businesses might reflect how we react as individuals in an earthquake or a tsunami. We pool our resources and pull together. I believe in what TEMIS are proposing because I do not think we will develop solutions for customers, or exploit to the full the digital opportunities given us by our content, our data, our market knowledge or our ability to develop high quality software unless we work together. Collaboration and co-operation are essential even if tomorrow we also need to buy or merge with some of those with whom we work today. Above all, this collaboration must extend to our customers: the lonely years of competition for competition’s sake must end, and we have to embrace our customers as partners – or they will become our competitors in ways which would be very toxic indeed.
Here then is a theme we could use to re-invigorate investors. Ask them to score us in terms of our proclivity for partnership. Look at us to see if we have a culture of experimentation that involves combining resources and attributes from several different sources to create a value which would have been otherwise impossible. As we move into a networked world where most service and solutions providers will sub-contract, outsource, partner and collaborate as easily as breathing then we in vital information markets could be leaders in proving that Vital is just as important as Big – and maybe more profitable. The LUXID Community may be a small step, but we could look back at this week as a very important one.
Jan
21
Acting Editors and Play-Acting Moguls
Filed Under Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, online advertising, Publishing, social media, Thomson, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
If the play is the thing to test the conscience of the King, then the Emperor of Wapping is in for a tough time. The Times and the Sunday Times in the UK are now in the News Corp Bad Bank, and Wall Street very understandably says that “something must be done” about the continuing losses at Times Newspapers. My friend and colleague, Ken Doctor, clear leader in the critical analysis of newspaper prospects in the US, is an optimist. He sees growing revenues from online advertising and digital subscriptions slowly filling the gap and eventually pulling a reconstructed press out of the mire. Mr Murdoch should surely read him attentively as one of the few hopeful auguries on the market, but it is hard to apply Ken’s logic, which may work for major US regionals, at The Times. There the only medicine that anyone seems to imagine will work is more cuts to the scarred and bleeding body of the Old Thunderer. The three act drama we have been watching for the past few months has now reached Act 2 , but based on the form of the playwright, I am privileged to offer you a peek at the final act (and leave it to you to decide whether this is comedy or tragedy – or farce).
Act 1 opened on a dark heath, at night. Six shadowy figures, half witches, half warlocks, stirred a pot, uttering incantations, as their leader dipped his pen into the broth and used it as ink. “Yes”, said Rupert Pennant Rea, for it is he “this evidence to Leveson will ensure that we six independent National Directors of Times Newspapers will never be overlooked again. Here we remind the noble Lord that we were created in 1981 as trustees in the public interest, independently appointed and self-appointing: no editor can be appointed or fired without our agreement .” Exeunt All, and then we find ourselves in the Imperial Court, where His Majesty, Digger II, sits restlessly on the Imperial Chair, reading a profit and loss account. “By the Guns of Gallipoli and my father’s scoops”, he shouts “I will abolish red ink with red blood. Send for Harding of the Times and Witherow of the Sunday Times and make them Accountable!” As the supplicant editors are dragged into the presence, each man is asked what he will sacrifice to make red ink black. One voice pleads for more independence, an end to new print plants in Essex. The other, more experienced player insinuates the thought that it would be cheaper to run the two newspapers together, to have one newsroom, one accounts department, one sales and marketing presence – and one editor. “You have it!, cries the Emperor, “that is exactly what I would have said , and now I come to think of it, it is exactly what I did say. Since I cannot recall if one of you said it, lets assume it was me. But we certainly don’t want bright young things around here like you, Harding, so you are fired. Meanwhile, loyal and long-serving Witherow, you shall be our chief of editors of all our newspapers. Let the cuts commence…!”
Act 2 brings us back to the Heath, as Rupert P-R briefs his colleagues. “How can this have happened! The Emperor knows that we have rights of approval. Put out a press release showing that Witherow is only acting until we have considered carefully whether this man who we have known and worked with as the editor of one of our newspapers for a decade is suitable to edit the other. But we must be honoured in the breach, or Wapping Wood shall never come to Dun-Insane!”. And then the scene changes, and we open a new one as the Emperor screams “Only acting! Who do they think they are. That agreement I made with Ken Thomson is over thirty years old. Send runners to the people we helped into office to run this accursed country, and ask for a Private member’s Bill to abolish this arrangement. I must be free!”
Of course, I have made all this up and shockingly put words into everyone’s mouths, and I must ask the forgiveness of the innocent when I have traduced them. But, is this really any way to make newspapers pay? If they cannot be run at a profit, why have them at all? Over at DMGT they clearly have no doubts about selling the whole of Northcliffe into Local Worlds. While I do not want to argue that the Times is more important than the Leicester Mercury, I do want to suggest that the way to cure their ills is to re-focus on the behaviour of the customer. David Montgomery, Chairman of Local Worlds, was quoted today in the Telegraph as saying that he would “stop the trend of cost cutting for the sake of cost-cutting”, despite claiming to be “leaving the industrial baggage of print behind”. This too seems to me not to answer the question of how people with networked access will want to be drip fed news and update locally, regionally or nationally.
And so, Act 3. The runners return to the Emperor, saying that the government politely declined. “After the phone hacking scandal, and the allegations of business closeness between the erstwhile CEO of News International and the Prime Minister, this may be an inopportune moment to be seen to be helping the Chairman get out of agreements that he willingly got into.” So the Emperor decides just to go on acting, and refusing to appoint or approve new national directors just as they refuse to approve his editors until the whole cast list approaches retirement or a more final exit – and then they stop arguing for a moment and turn round and find that – the Times has ceased to exist in print. One of those plays then that started as a comedy, became a farce in Act 2, yet turned eventually to tragedy.
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