Heidi Allen Digital Strategy

The world of newspapers seems to have gone full circle. They have always had the power to topple governments, or at least sway public opinion.  Australia has just taken a step further in that direction.

Australia has two main rival newspaper organisations:  News Limited, part of Rupert Murdoch’s empire, who publish The Australian a national newspaper; and Fairfax Media, whose largest shareholder is now mining magnate Gina Reinhardt. Fairfax publish The Age and Sydney Morning Herald newspapers amongst others.  Gina Reinhardt is Australia’s richest person (and possibly the worlds richest women).  Why invest in an industry that is now barely making money with it’s flagship newspaper, The Age?  The former editor of the Age tells us why in The Conversation.  (The Conversation is a stellar independent news source initially set up using content from Australia’s group of eight universities).  What is written below came through via email on their newsletter. It is not published on the online version (or at least I couldn’t find the link) so I have reproduced it here. Bravely put. It is a matter of national importance:

News of Gina Rinehart’s tilt at Fairfax Media is a circuit breaker in the never-ending story of the media company’s decline.

As a former editor of The Age, one of Fairfax’s prized mastheads, I have spent the day wondering where this might end. Whichever way, it looks bad for quality, independent journalism. This is a defining moment for the kind of Australia we want.

When I arrived in 2004, The Age was earning more than $100 million profit a year, while the Sydney Morning Herald was always just ahead of us. Seven years later, the papers barely make money.
Later in 2007, Fairfax and Rural Press merged into a  $12 billlion behemoth, the biggest in the southern hemisphere. This week it’s valued at a mere $1.7bn, and has become one of the most short-sold stocks on the ASX. No one loves it.  But the papers need to be loved.

And Fairfax’s papers have an awful lot of clout. The combined audience for The Age in print and online is about 1 million readers per day, and the SMH just above. For those who follow these things, that’s higher than for any Channel 7, 9, 10 or ABC news bulletins.  And more importantly, the audience for the Fairfax papers, including The Australian Financial Review, is the influential and affluent “AB” market. For these people, what the Fairfax papers report, matters. Unlike the tabloids read by the bulk of Australians.

The Age, SMH and The Fin, along with The Australian, set Australia’s news agenda and are slavishly followed by the radio talk-back and TV news shows.

So why is Gina Rinehart buying? She has no interest as a shareholder in making money. She wants to buy influence. In 2007 she placed full page ads in The Age and SMH against then-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s proposed mining tax. That campaign ended with the removal of Rudd and the collapse of the tax. Now instead of buying pages, she wants to buy the papers.
Such motivation is deep in the Rinehart family genes. In a 1979 polemic called Wake up Australia,  Gina’s father, Lang Hancock argued: “We can change the situation so as to limit the power of government,” before concluding: “it could be broken by obtaining control of the media and then educating the public”.

And on the miners’ right to mine anywhere, he wrote: “Nothing should be sacred from mining whether it’s your ground, my ground, the blackfellow’s ground or anybody else’s. So the question of Aboriginal land rights and things of this nature shouldn’t exist.”

The Murdoch press in Australia is already favourably disposed to the miners and the Minerals Council view of the world. Fairfax provides an alternative view. And one that Gina no doubt wants neutered, silenced or turned around. Perhaps by Gina’s favourite columnist, Andrew Bolt?

Whether Australia retains an independent and semi-pluralist media will become clear within the near future. In the meantime, The Conversation will keep a close eye on this matter of national importance.

Andrew Jaspan

But then, we can always rely on the muppets to take on the news corps.

With the news that McGraw Hill’s profits are down by nearly a quarter I began to look again at the future of publishing

Here are some stats

• McGraw Hill’s profits down by 23 percent
• Reed Elsevier first half profits down 48% announcing it would sell shares to raise money to cope with debt from its acquisition of ChoicePoint
• Wolters Kluwer first half profit falls 8%
• Oxford University Press laid off staff at the beginning of the year due to a reduction in state and library budgets.
• Penguin profits down by 19%
• Kindle sales: between 20-30% of the total Amazon sales on some books and publishers need to get content on the Kindle

To quote Joe Wikert ‘Any publisher that isn’t already worried about this in general is asleep at the wheel‘

I would suggest that publishers haven’t quite reached their threashold of pain yet to fundamentally change their business models and practices, but looking at McGraw Hill’s figures, and other publishing houses in similar positions, that point cant be far off.

The article by Michael Nielsen suggesting that Publishing Companies will become technical experts was very insightful and it seems that those who are going to survive will become just that – facilitators of information, but not necessarily the keepers of it.

Elsevier’s announcement of their ‘Article of the Future’ seems to be going in that direction, although it is not without some criticism, some saying it resembles websites of the past.

Michael Nielsen, Is scientific publishing about to be disrupted:

What’s all this got to do with scientific publishing? Today, scientific publishers are production companies, specializing in services like editorial, copyediting, and, in some cases, sales and marketing. My claim is that in ten to twenty years, scientific publishers will be technology companies. By this, I don’t just mean that they’ll be heavy users of technology, or employ a large IT staff. I mean they’ll be technology-driven companies in a similar way to, say, Google or Apple. That is, their foundation will be technological innovation, and most key decision-makers will be people with deep technological expertise. Those publishers that don’t become technology driven will die off.

Lulu has partnered with Intrepid Media to provide a one-stop-shop for authors who want to self publish.  To put this in context Lulu has over 1.1 million recently published titles, more than 8,000 new titles added each week and 2 million site visitors each month.

Intrepid Media is a site for writers of very description to discuss and critique each others work (think editorial process provided by Publishers in other words).

What was missing in many of the self-publishing models were ways for the authors to promote their work once published, unless they were on a teaching circuit, or the media picked up the book and talked about it.
Now authors who want to self publish get feedback on their work while writing, their book is published in print and electronic form, promoted via social networks, and sold on Amazon, Barnes & Noble amongst others.  There are no up-front-costs.

How is this different from traditional publishing houses? First your book gets published.  Many books don’t see the light of day because to submit your book idea in the first place is no small task (think find an Agent, get to the right Publisher, proposals reviews, changes to your content to fit in with other books on their list) – in other words months before you can even go ahead even if the book is accepted.

Editorial and creative control remains with the author, along with the copyright and ability to chose the price.  The book is not handed over to become part of a Publisher’s book list, there are no tortuous submission protocols, deadlines to keep to, no royalty negotiations, and no contracts with penalty clauses if you don’t deliver.  Instead authors pay a 20% if the book is bought (and nothing if it is not), straight forward, simple. What Lulu and Intrepid Media provide is the ‘how to’ without taking any ownership away from the author.

Lulu’s publishing steps

A clever author can also market his book to a wide international audience using social media without expending too much time or energy.  Iggy Pintado’s book ‘Connection Generation’ – self published, was promoted with a nice ‘personliased’ email to his LinkedIn connections (over 7000) – I was one, I didn’t mind as I’d opted into his network and was interested to see what he was doing.  Iggy’s Facebook page has 1000 friends,  twitter nearly 5,000 followers and…. you get the picture.

Why pay a publishing house (by way of giving up a significant part of your royalties) to use more traditional (I want to write tired) ways of promoting your book. Follow that up with being able to upload your book on Amazon’s Kindle and really, who does need Publishers any more?

Medialoper published an excellent article written by Kirk Biglione “Traditional Publishers Crash (and Burn at) SXSW”

It has made me so cross I have changed my blog theme to Red for the duration until I simmer down. Kirk is right in everything he writes – what a wasted opportunity.

To the panel: Well done for displaying your profound love of books. Right. We love books. Yes we’ve got that. We all do. Even those of us who don’t love books. Now what? There is so much to talk about, so many new things going on and you had a roomful of people who were there and had something to say — maybe because of the very fact they do love books. Must this industry persist in bemoaning its state and navel gazing.

Here’s how the session was advertised

It’s about how participatory culture and the online world interact with good olde book publishing…. Audience members are invited to speak up about what they think book publishers could/should be doing to better provide relevant information and content to blogs, websites, and online communities. Come tell old media what you want and how you want it.

Thankfully there were people on twitter covering the sessions — a phrase which I presume came from the panel kept reoccurring in the twitter stream “Publishing has never been in my lifetime in such a powerless state as it is now.”

Rubbish. There is so much opportunity at the moment we’re swimming in it.

Yes, I agree. Completely unfair of me to judge. I wasn’t there. Still doesn’t take away from the fact that I’m Cross.

Please can I have an invite to the panel next time.

Postscript 20th March: check out Linda Moore’s post “New Think For Old Publishing” on this subject

Blog design at the time of writing: Red, two column, Nikynik Red theme