Thanks, David! Two linguistic notes before I begin.

First, please forgive my Yank accent. My great-grandfather Crosbie, who was born in London, would wince at it.

Second, doe anyone here speak Chinese? I ask because, after people who read English, the second largest linguistic group online today is people who read Chinese. To make sure they benefit from my speech, I took the title that the conference organizers suggested - Thriving in the digital age: threats and opportunities for digital publishers - and put that into Google's English-to-Chinese translation engine. Then, just to make sure that I got the Chinese version right, I took that result and put it into Yahoo's Chinese-to-English translation engine. The resulting title is Watts that you say? Screw Gutenberg, the Change Underway is Even Larger. So that's what I'm going to talk about.

Gutenberg. The Screw. Watt. And why the changes today underway are even larger than during Gutenberg. (Don't worry, I'll explain the screw.)

Here is a slide of Gutenberg in Strasbourg. His statue in bronze and a target today for pigeons. He's also a target for quotes about the Internet. My guess is that you've all heard most the quotes before:

'The Internet is the biggest things since Gutenberg.'
'The change underway will be the biggest since Gutenberg.'
'The Internet will change things as much as Gutenberg did.'

Well, don't get me wrong: Gutenberg's invention of the printing press probably sparked the Renaissance. Yet it's time we understand something: The change today underway is even larger!

The change now underway is bigger than mass production was for the medieval calligraphers and scribes who Gutenberg's invention put out of work. Moreover, it's not just a change from production of single calligraphic editions to mass production of millions of books. What is underway is an intellectual jump. It's a quantum jump in how information is distributed to people and how they find information.

I've lately become an academic, and in academia we have a technical term for the magnitude of the change today underway. It is an academic term that combines Norman French and Anglo-Saxon. We call it a Mindf*ck.

It's like a jump from two to three dimensions. And from this new dimension arises phenomenal new opportunities for publishers. Opportunities we'll talk about.

Unfortunately, most publishers today still think only in the old two dimensions - and therein lay the only threat to their livelihoods. Their failure to understand the new dimension underway in publishing is the threat. Understand me: The only threat is not to understand the change underway.

Let's go back in time for a moment. The U.K. Statistics Office says there are more than 10,000 Britons who are more than 100 years old. In 1908, the streets outside this hotel, and all the streets of London, were full of horse carriages and horse carts. Though the 20th Century was new then, people nevertheless knew that the 21st Century would be a mechanized age despite the abundance of horses.

The early automobiles showed promise. Telephones were beginning to become common in offices and homes. Tesla and Marconi were each experimenting with something that would eventually be called radio. Yet nobody knew how quickly all those things would affect London's seven million people, one million horses, 25 daily newspapers. Also, more esoteric and far-reaching things were also being developed in 1908. Things like quantum mechanics, which would later give us devices such as television, the transistor, the computer, the laser, and the CD, DVD, etc.

Today in 2008, people still get information distributed on paper pulp or from analog broadcast transmitters that fundamentally have changed little since Marconi's time. Nevertheless, we know that our new century will be an all- digital age. An age of pervasive information. If the personal computer and mobile phone were our equivalents of the newfangled telephones and automobiles for people 100 years ago, so too can we now foresee things that are only recently being and invented, things we're starting to have a clue that will shape the 21st century.

The one million horses were gone from London's streets by 1920, only a dozen years' after 1908. Likewise, the changes between now and 2020 will be phenomenal. If you think that you've seen change during the past dozen years, you ain't seen nothing yet!

I've a bold agenda this morning. My job is to tell you how much things will change and explain the general themes and opportunities in those changes for publishers in the 21st century.

• I will explain why 1.3 billion people have gravitate online despite their already having access to mass media in much more convenient formats than online.


• I will explain why the fragmentation of audiences is an illusion.


• I will explain why traditional newspapers' and news magazines' circulations, and news broadcasts' viewerships, must ineluctably evaporate. And the reason is not because people don't want news.


• I will explain why most newspapers' and news magazines' and news broadcasters' Web sites won't save their companies. (In other words, why what you here in British publishing circles are calling the Rusbridger Cross won't occur.)


• And I'll explain why people will be even better served by New Media than by Mass Media. In other words, why the change today is even greater than that during Gutenberg's era.

Continue reading "EPublishing Innovations Forum 2008" »

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 10:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

On this day when eMarketer estimates that Google is well on the way to capturing 25 percent of all U.S. online advertisement spending and almost twice the amount of Yahoo!'s revenues, with which Google's revenues only 18 months ago were on par, here are some other issues that my business partner and I are examining:

° What will be the future role of news agents and newsstands? Although they don't play a sizeable role in distribution of American, Canadian, German, and Japanese newspaper (only about seven percent of circulation in those countries), local newsstands and news agent play a most significant role in most other major countries' newspaper ecology. Plus they play significant roles in magazine distribution in every country.

In most of the world's countries, newspapers and their hired wholesalers distributed daily copies to the news agents and newsstands, who then distribute them to you. when you subscribe to home delivery of a daily newspaper, you make your subscription with your neighborhood newsstand or news agent (not directly with the newspaper as is the situation here in the U.S.) The news agents or newsstand has the relationships with the subscribers; the newspapers themselves don't know who subscribes, just that the wholesalers reports how many copies were sold to the retail newsstand and news agents.

Some digerati simply expect newsstands and news agents to go out of business if newspapers and magazines someday switch entirely to online publication. But that would create a major disruption in countries such as the United Kingdom, where 47 percent of the daily newspapers' gross revenues came from newsstands and news agents. Must the newspapers forge direct subscription relationships with consumers? Will physical newsstands and kiosks cease to exist? (Do remember that browsing a physical newsstands if much easily than one online.) Or will they be replaced by physical versions of some sort of electronic kiosk?

° More immediately on that topic, we've today been helping a U.S. investment client ascertain what the U.K. Office of Fair Trade's provisional decision-making about news agent competition means for major newspaper and magazine distribution wholesalers such as W.H.Smith, Menzies, or Dawson News.

In the U.K. wholesalers grant news agents and newsstands exclusive rights to distribute certain titles in specific geographical areas (a rural town, a one block radius in London, etc.). Since 2004, the OFT has been investigating whether such exclusivity is anti-competitive and disserves consumers. It last year issued a provisional finding that these exclusivities weren't anti-competitive with newspapers but were with magazines. Several months ago, it however changed its findings to say the exclusivities are anti-competitive for newspapers, too. It's still investigating, and will issue new findings in the spring.

° Would the regional press be better served using virtual newsrooms? We know several reporters at various regional newspapers who've gotten into trouble by not being at their newsroom desks five days and 40-hours per week. They've defended themselves by pointing out that news doesn't occur in newsrooms. That's all too true. The successful newsroom was an empty one 25 years ago because all its reporters who expending shoe leather, but too many corporations now consider an emply desk or cubicle in a newsroom to mean that the reporter isn't doing her job.

Today's technologies allow reporters to work from anywhere. So, why should they be physically anchored to their newsroom for most of the work day? Newsrooms are a great place for reporters and editors to have story conferences, but with instant messaging, SMS, person-to-person webcasting and voicecasting, mobile devices, etc., the reporter should be able to work from his car, home, local coffee shop, or the news scene. Why chain them to an Atex or SII mainframe six or eight hours each day?

Many journalism schools teach how to report using multimedia and new technologies, but none teach editors how to use those technologies to replace the newsroom itself. It's time that was done.

° Open archives. How much are newspapers really making by charging for online access to stories that might be more than a week old? Do they earn more that way than the online advertising revenues from opening up their entire archives to consumers and search engines? Are publishers being foolishly doctrinaire by charging for archives?

° Regarding paid online content, Netimperative has a B2B case study about how Macmillian's onestopenglih.com, a site for English-language teachers, successfully converted from free to paid access.

° American business publications in print took a revenue bath last month. The Society of American Business Editors and Writers' Talking Biz News reports Magazine Publishers Association data showing large drops in advertising pages and revenues.

Though Barron's, The Economist and Inc magazines showed increases in ad revenue,
Forbes 4.2 percent, Smart Money 5.4 percent, Money 6.6 percent, em>Business 2.0 fell 7.4, BusinessWeek 8.9 percent, Kiplinger 19 percent, and Fortune 28.1 percent (after that magazine had already declined 12 percent in August). It's odd that business magazines would have less advertising once the summer vacation season ended.

° The Financial Times and the weekly New York Sun published 'think' articles about the future of the American newspaper industry, and both make the same point about profit margin versus product development.

The FT story contrasts the Los Angeles Times and the St. Petersburg Times. The former is owned by the publicly-traded Tribune Company and the latter owned by a not-for-profit trust. The FT's reporter suggests that Wall Street demanding too much profit ("trying to push profit margins beyond 20 per cent") comes at the expense of keeping newspapers viable.

The Sun's story looks at The Los Angeles Times and the now defunct Knight Ridder Inc., and is a bit more blunt:

It seems its [Knight Ridder] 32 daily newspapers had been able to record "only" a 20% return on investment in recent years.

Cut back on the quality of a newspaper in order to show an impressive short-term return for the market's sake, and the slide toward disaster has begun. Readers will notice and begin drifting away, and advertisers will soon follow. It won't be long before the vultures are circling.

° Last but not least, the online news pioneer Milverton Wallace, who'd organized the European NetMedia conference during the new-media industry's first decade, looks at the long-term changes underway, in an essay he's written for the Club of Amsterdam.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 05:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today in Ad Age, Steve Rubell of Edelman's Me2Revolution public relations practice and Micropersuation, takes newspapers to task for not adopting 'Web 2.0' collaboratation techniques.

To thrive in the future, the newspaper will need to use the web to turn itself into a 2.0 platform where readers and advertisers working together (not journalists) create most of the value.

Well, I'm still waiting for newspapers to adopt 'Web 1.0' techniques such as using hyperlinks within news stories. If bloggers, teenagers on MySpace, scientists, sports fanatics, pornographers, hobbyists and others who publish websites can embed hyperlinks in what they write, why can't journalists and professional publishers?

Shovelware from print is why. Despite a lot of corporate public relations blather about merging print and web newsrooms or about the future importance of interactive, most news media companies still have the newsprint mentality online. They don't think in 'Web 1.0' terms, nonethless 'Web 2.0'.

Not only don't they embed their stories with hyperlinks to other companies' or organizations' stories, but they don't even embed hyperlinks to their own reporters' source information or their own previous stories about the topics. They should have learned to do that and more in the 1990s.

Almost a week has passed since the American Press Institute presented the second phase of its Newspaper Next project. Upon reflection, I'm even more disappointed with it than I'd earlier wrote. I am friends with many of the people involved, but, please, if that industry didn't already know that it's role is to solve consumers' 'jobs to be done,' then there is something very wrong with that industry. Yes, it helps the industry understand that it produces a service for consumers, not a printed product. But I'd expected much from what API heralded as 'An Historic Moment for Our Industry' and a 'Blueprint for Transformation.'

When I google the name of my friend Dick Satran, with whom I worked at Reuters, I was reminded of Satran's Algorithm. Here is Wired's explanation of the algorithm, in an article about a designer's work on the Reuter building in Manhattan:

Ed Schlossberg's next big thing is the Reuters News Index, an addition to the sign that debuts in 2003. Roughly every hour, a 304-foot thermometer will appear onscreen measuring how "hot" the news day is on a scale of zero to ten. Schlossberg hopes it will inspire people on the street to turn to each other and say, "Did you see that? The News Index just shot up to 6 degrees -- what have you heard?"

The Index is calculated using Satran's Algorithm - developed by Reuters and R/GA, and named for veteran Reuters editor Dick Satran. Every 15 minutes, the formula crunches four data points: the total volume of stories filed from Reuters' 200 offices in 97 countries; the number of priority one and priority two stories filed (editors assign a priority code to each report coming off the Reuters wires); and the total number of Reuters.com hits logged in the previous 15 minutes. At one early meeting with Reuters editors, ESI design manager Gideon D'Arcangelo recalls, "one of them said that if we really wanted to make the index true to life, we ought to factor in the blood pressure of Reuters editors, too."

I live in Greenwich, but it's the American town at 74.5°W not the English one at 0° longitude. I'm thus amused to find myself listed by the Press Gazette, the trade journal of U.K. journalism, as among the people…

"…who are the ' new establishment' of online journalism in Britain? Who are the people shaping the latest developments in bringing journalism to new digital platforms?"

I'm not the only American on the roughly 40-person list: Neil Budde of Yahoo! News, Dan Gillmor, Matt Drudge, Jeff Jarvis, Craig Newmark of CraigsList, and the founders of MySpace are there, too. It's been a very long time since anyone listed me as a member of the 'establishment' in my own country. Should I emigrate?

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 12:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Among the items on our watch list today are:

• Reuters reports that consumers will soon be able to buy songs as they listen to them on digital radio in the United Kingdom. UBC Media, which is the largest independent producer of radio programming for the BBC, will begin testing the technology on one of the Chrysalis Group's digital radio stations in Birmingham at the end of July and that the service will also be available on digital-radio enabled mobile phones later this year. Consumers would pre-pay for songs using a similar credit plan to that commonly used for mobile phone calls.


• The Internet's market share of advertising in the U.K. reached 7.2 percent, according to the Advertising Association, as reported in the Guardian. Of the rest, newspapers accounted for 45.3 percent, television 25.4 percent, direct mail 12.5 percent, outdoor advertising 5.5 percent, radio 3.1 percent, and adverts in cinemas 1 percent. However, if you remove classified advertising and just count display ads and commercials, television had with largest share (35.2 percent), newspapers 31.8 percent, direct mail 17.3 percent, outdoor 7.6 percent, radio 4.2 percent, Internet 2.5 percent, and cinmea 1.4 percent.
• 
  
• Editor and Publisher today reports about a panel discussion held Monday in Manhattan on the topic of "Online Media and the Future of Journalism." (A topic in vogue this month.) Its panelists were Slate founding and former Editor Michael Kinsley; Time Inc. former Editor in Chief and Wall Street Journal former Managing Editor Normal Pearlstine; Slate current Editor Jacob Weissberg; HuffingtonPost.com co-founder Adrianna Huffington; and author and New Yorker magazine writer Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell likened the problems of the U.S. newspaper and airline industries:
  

  "The airline itself never makes any money, but everyone else connected with flying makes tons of money.… Airlines have got to be a bit better at pricing their services, and so should newspapers."

  Gladwell generally is a competent researcher and incisive writer, but I think he missed some subtle differences between those two industries. Foremost among those differences is profit. The U.S. daily newspaper industry earned more than $45 billion in revenues last year; had a profit margin average of 18 percent; and generated more than $8 billion in overall profit. By comparison, the U.S. airline industry last year had $571 billion in revenues than newspapers and a net loss of $4 billion (a negative seven-tenths of a percent profit margin). Another difference is that U.S. airline ridership increased by about 4 percent last year, while U.S. newspaper readership declined by about that same percent. So, Gladwell's point makes no sense; but how like a writer to think that pricing content higher would cure the newspaper industry's problem!



• Speaking of Slate, on Saturday its media columnist Jack Shafer wrote a column, entitled The Incredible Shrinking Newspaper, with which I entirely agree. I've little sympathy for newspaper executives who are suddenly shocked that there is their industry is in dire straits. I and others have been telling them for years that it would happen around now. As Philip Meyer, journalism professor at the University of North Carolina and author of The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism, recently told a Reuter reporter "They're kind of frozen at the wheel because the money is still coming in." I think the Rime of the Ancient Mariner is more like it. About time they finally noticed the albatross around their necks.


• Spain's El Pais becomes the second major European daily to launch an edition for Sony's video-game device, Playstation Portable. Norway's Dagbladet was the first back in September 2005.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 10:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

· I'm a former Reuter staffer who knows the possibilities of 'citizen journalism.', Nevertheless, I can't understand Reuters jumping on the 'citizen journalism' bandwagon and its deal with Global Voices. Perhaps Reuters is doing it for the publicity? Reuters might get some story ideas from Global Voices and Global Voices might get objective source material from Reuters, but it all seems like log rolling (would blogrolling be a better term) for both parties. Mark Glaser of PBS MarketShift reports on the alliance. [By the way, lest anyone think that Reuter without the s is a typographical error, please note that Reuter company policy was that Reuters is the name of the company but that Reuter was its adjectival name. A former Reuter staffer is thus someone who had worked for Reuters in the Reuter Building. Go figure.]

· Speaking of Glaser, he published a good interview with I Want Media Publisher & Editor Patrick Phillips last week.

· Also last week, Brier Dudley of the Seattle Times coined an apt analogy:

But I wasn't so sure after seeing Google and Microsoft address the newspaper industry's top leaders last week at the American Society of Newspaper Editors conference in Seattle. It was like watching the Incas greet the Spanish conquistadors in 1528 -- the leaders of a proud, ancient civilization were dazzled by the technology of newcomers, who were coming to haul off their gold and silver.

The galleons are coming for advertising that Internet companies are using to build their empires.

Google News product manager Nathan Stoll and Bill Gates played the part of priests who came along to enlighten the savages. "We're trying to be technologists who help publishing online be a better business model," Stoll said.

Display tools that Gates demonstrated may be key to newspapers' future success. He also told editors that Microsoft technology can protect their content from unauthorized copying and distribution.

Not mentioned were Microsoft's plans to scoop up a huge piece of the advertising pie. One floor down at the Seattle Westin, planning was under way for a far bigger conference this week, when Microsoft is bringing major advertisers to town to learn about its new advertising platform.

Newspaper baron Dean Singleton played the role of optimistic Incan nobleman, saying it will all work out if his people can get their hands on a musket. Or maybe cut a deal with the invaders.

· Not in Incan lands, but the northern reaches of what used to be Aztec territory, business-to-business magazine and trade journal publishers were having their own confrontation with new-media. the trade association American Business Media's spring meeting was underway in Scottsdale, Arizona. Said incoming chairman of ABM and president-CEO of VNU Business Media Michael Marchesano said:

"We are truly at a crossroads. … As an industry, we can resist these changes and let our editors play the role of 'parent knows best' by dictating content. … Or we can empower them to think differently and to be part of the process of creating communities and building networks."

· Finally, we're glad to see that the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association, the trade association of U.S. wireless network carriers, has launched the Common Short Code Administration site. The CSCA site registers U.S. mobile phone short codes much as Network Solutions has for Internet domain registrations. If you're a publisher or broadcaster who wants provide consumers with mobile phone short codes that work with all U.S. mobile carriers, get the codes from CSCA. It even has a nifty lookup function to see availability.

Posted by Vin Crosbie at 05:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)