Blablabla about Newspapers

When established institutions have to play by Google-Mart rules it generates lots of blablabla.

Take newspapers for example. The public discourse is all abuzz with "saving newspapers." Since the public discourse is mostly controlled by journalist types, the blabla focuses on the "news" and the threat to democracy if newspapers disappear.

Give me a break.

Most people never bought newspapers for the news. Even in the latest surveys, 70% of Americans say they get their "news" from TV. Most people bought newspapers for the sports or the classifieds or the weather or the cartoons or the ads from local stores. Every once in a while there were stories that masses of people cared about; national elections, wars or financial meltdowns. But mostly, most people are too busy living their lives to focus on "general news."

Pre Google-Mart, newspapers lived in protected markets and captured 20% gross profits. But then Craiglist took away the classifieds. That was 50% of the advertising revenue. Then came the internet. This year the internet overtook newspapers as the source of "news."

Meanwhile, newspapers are in the logistic business. The business model is aggregating "readers" and selling them to advertisers. Same business model as TV. Same business model as many websites. But that's not the business model for amazon, ebay or wall-mart. They were the three most visited websites this Christmas season. Those websites are in the logisitics business. They make it easier to buy stuff. The business model is to get people to buy more stuff.

Most of the blabla I've seen, heard and read is about doing better news so that a news organization can aggregate eyeballs. Nowadays, the talk is about well defined groups of eyeballs with special interests, that can be sold at higher CPMS to advertisers. The problem with this approach is that large brands are still having a hard time figuring out how to scale advertising to niche markets. The other problem is that there are many competing ways to speak to niche audiences.

So . . . instead of closing print plants and laying off printers, newspapers might be alot better off trying to figure out ways to outsource the finding and writing about the news and concentrate on their unique defensible advantage: printing and delivery. That's a business with high barriers of entry, a long manufacturing tail with every improving ways to print and deliver.

Consider that Rupert Murdoch is building a state of the art newspaper manufacturing facility in the U.K.

Here's one I found this morning. The link is in Dr. Druck's Shared Items in the side bar.

Parade added 71 new newspaper partners, with a circulation of 2.42 million, to its national distribution. The addition of scores of new newspapers--most of them local dailies serving small and mid-sized cities--brings Parade's total circulation to 33 million, with distribution via 470 newspapers nationwide. Parade claims to reach 73 million readers every week.

Doing a bit of competitive boasting, Parade noted that 53 of the 71 new newspaper partners had switched from USA Weekend, another leading newspaper-distributed magazine. Owned by Conde Nast, Parade added newspaper partners including the Connecticut Post, based in Bridgeport; the Journal Star of Lincoln, Nebraska; Iowa's Sioux City Journal; North Dakota's Bismarck Tribune; and the Napa Valley Register.

The scarcity of big-city papers in the list of new partners isn't a drawback--quite the opposite. Unlike most big metro and regional dailies, which have seen circulation and ad revenue plummet over the last couple of years, newspapers serving towns and smaller cities are faring surprisingly well in both arenas.

It seems that Parade and "newspapers serving towns and smaller cities" are still in the logistics business. They haven't drunk their own kool-aid about newspapers being the important source of news.

Journalists, on the other hand, are gathering around Cloud based functionalities to find and deliver "news." Consider politico.com, the Huffington Post, Open Secrets.org, the hundreds of local blogs and social media sites around the country. If newspapers learn how to outsource the journalism and focus on the core values, they will probably do just fine.

Printers are Part of the Education Business

But they don't realize it. Printers print. Commercial printers print for people who pay them. In the era that is now ending, many commercial printers were in the power of marketers/advertisers who bought Print because it was the easiest way to sell stuff.

Today, Print is no longer the only way to sell stuff. Some printers are having a hard time figuring out how they are going to get paid for the books, news(letters) and posters that they print.

Advertising/marketing is moving to Search and social networks. On the internet, that means Google, Microsoft,Yahoo, Facebook and Twitter. In the real world Search and social networks happen in families, stores, at events and from whatever information emitting products are present in physical environments. That usually means Print.

In the days of information inequality, it was easier to persuade people to buy things. These days persuading is being replaced by being accessible. When people search, they now expect to find what they are looking for.

But Printers, like newspapers, are having a hard time looking past marketing and advertising. There is still lots of money on the table. But until they change their focus, they are going to struggle to get a piece of an ever shrinking market.

So, if "starve the past, invest in the future" is a plausible business approach, printers need to understand their role in learning. Learning is part of life. Once freed from "educational" institutional restraints, it's a growing market. When the global need for learning is considered, it may turn out to be the biggest market Printers have ever had.

A printed piece is either a tool, a toy or a token. Toys amuse. Tokens make the invisible, visible. Tools are "must haves." Highly designed beautiful things are toys. Self published books, family calendars and photo books are tokens. Books, news(letters) and posters are the most highly evolved tools for learning.

Everyone on the planet needs to be learning. As civilization starts to come up against physical constraints on growth, everyone has to get much smarter to figure out ways to use less to make more. The only way to get smarter is to learn. In that context it's not surprising that President-Elect Obama is going to invest heavily in education.

In a world of information inequality, formal institutions have been the place where knowledge is transferred and learning is supposed to happen. In a world of information equality, they are losing their competitive advantage. Now it's possible to eliminate a lot of overhead in buildings, physical proximity, time spent on Tuesday morning from 9 to 11:30 sitting in a "talk and chalk" presentation.

The technology allows asynchronous communication that generates it's own data stream. Feedback loops that measure and inform the process are both possible, scalable and very, very inexpensive. Feedback loops encourage natural improvement. But, contrary to the conventional wisdom in media, people live in the real world, not in hyperspace. Even the active minority that communicate via Screen - computers, cell phones and ebooks - live in physical space.

Once in physical space, Print is still the queen of the media. Signs (posters), news(letters) and books are the information products of physical space. Until now, Print was too slow to market. It is not anymore. Until now use based data streams were not generated by Print. It's not anymore. Once the hurdles of time and data stream generation have been overcome, the intrinsic advantages of Print can re emerge.

In the first edition of Edge Conditions, I selected and published to the screen some bytes about how Print can talk to the Cloud. In the post, TransInfo, Not TransPromo, I talked about publishing the information in the Cloud to Print in the service of changing behavior.

The most important behavior that needs to be changed is to learn how to make better decisions. The most important outcome is smarter people - the operational indicator of education. Until now the efficiencies of communication, which are at the heart of education, have generated excess money that has been captured by institutions. Consider textbooks or standardized high stakes testing or the cost of higher ed or the cost of career technical education.

But the drive to educate faster, better cheaper is leading to new approaches that can distribute that value to the users. We are seeing: cheaper, better, faster alternatives to textbooks; discussions that are starting in the Federal Government on the cost of higher education; and outcome based measures of high school and technical education.

Never underestimate the blind spot that technologists have to the value of Print. Unfortunately it's part of their DNA. But people on the ground understand that the Book is a perfect tool for reading, not scanning. (Kids love to scan. Smart people - kids or adults - love to read.) The Poster - sometimes in the form of a postcard or a club card - is a perfect way to bring information into the physical world. And the News(letter) - the Church bulletin, the New York Times, or the non profit's brochure - is the perfect Search product in the physical world.

Printers make books, posters and news(letters). In a world of information equality, the amount of information that is in the Cloud is growing exponentially. Much of it wants to appear in Print. The only hard part left is to figure out how to make money from publishing it to Print.

Keep in mind that Gutenberg never figured out how to make money. That needed Fust. Figuring out how to make money is called "business development." That was Fust's job. As long as everyone does their job, things usually work out very nicely.

People talk. Designers design. Printers print.

Newspapers are in the Education Business

Now all they have to do is realize it. The real job of newspapers is to educate, inform and entertain. Lately they thought their job was to aggregate "eyeballs" and sell them to advertisers. Now that advertising is moving to Search, it's hard to make a dollar selling eyeballs.

It's the railroad problem.

Papers now seem to be the equivalent of the railroads at the start of the twentieth century—a once-great business eclipsed by a new technology. In a famous 1960 article called “Marketing Myopia,” Theodore Levitt held up the railroads as a quintessential example of companies’ inability to adapt to changing circumstances. Levitt argued that a focus on products rather than on customers led the companies to misunderstand their core business. Had the bosses realized that they were in the transportation business, rather than the railroad business, they could have moved into trucking and air transport, rather than letting other companies dominate. By extension, many argue that if newspapers had understood they were in the information business, rather than the print business, they would have adapted more quickly and more successfully to the Net. from the New Yorker

But, it seems that at least one paper, has started an "Institute." Sooner or later someone at a newspaper will notice that the education business is the most profitable business in the USA.

Found this at Editor's Weblog

A California daily has formed "The Oakland Press Institute for Citizen Journalism," in response to the "changing face" of the industry, according to an editor.
. . .
The course, instructed by Press staff, is open to anyone, "from high school students to retirees," and upon completing the course participants will be considered for freelance positions.

The natural next step is to restrict admissions and get some school to give them cert cover. Or to make it a Charter Technical Education High School. Or to replace the textbook industry that is ready to fall, anyway. If they deliver education, the cert giving school gets a small piece of the revenue, the newspaper has a new source of income, the kids get a really useful education. If newspapers replace textbooks, the revenue stream is pretty clear.

Advances in communication makes much of the educational overhead less necessary. Higher Ed lives in a protected market. The State controls the right to sell certification. The cost of producing learning should be going down. But it's going up. No doubt, there is a top tier of schools that are doing the traditional sort 'em out and nourish the smart ones. But there are also many schools of Higher Ed, that talk the talk, but don't really do their jobs. Not doing their job does not mean not making money. Consider newspapers in the 70's,80's and 90's.

Meanwhile, everyone "knows" that everyone needs a college degree. The market naturally renews every year. More money for "education" is Mom and Apple Pie. My bet is that after January 20, the Federal Government is going to be in the market for lots of Apple Pie. Meanwhile, adjuncts teach most courses at low salaries. Buildings and overhead go up. The spread between cost of learning and the price charged is captured by the institution as opposed to shared with students and teachers.

Sooner or later, a newspaper will realize that the value of learning is the activity and the teacher. Newspapers just have to hire the teachers and change the activities slightly, and they can get a piece of the action.

It may well turn out that as newspapers search for new revenue streams, it's going to mean the end of the textbooks industry and the end of Higher Ed as we've known it.

TransInfo not TransPromo

I got into a thought provoking discussion over at Transpromo Live about the recent InfoPrint TransPromo campaign. Since I've hated the word Transpromo from the first day I heard it, when Lee Gallagher explained what it really could mean, I was happy.

Lee said,
"To me, TransPromo is based on predictive analytics which allows the marketer gain a deeper insights into the their existing customer and their potential needs. Leveraging the predictive modeling, you are better able to target the needs to the customer as well as what messaging, promotions, and or information that may be of interest or drive a call to action. As Pat indicates, and I support, its the data analytics which drives the content and the result is relevant content which grows the customer relationship and loyalty." You can scan the rest of the conversation here.

If "based on predictive analytics" is changed to "can create predictive analytics", that's the thought that was provoked.

If you use a Purl based campaign in combination with personalized Print, you can find out who is interested enough in your offering to go to the website. As important we can know when that interest occured. Then you can use SEO techniques to see what they do once they are at your website. That's a lot of useful information about some people. Those "some" people are people who want to talk to you. In niche marketing, all you can expect to get are "some." If you treat them with respect, "some" is good enough.

An active "some" is the key to word of mouth and viral marketing. That's why some companies focus on evangelists. That's why Wal-Mart set up a mommy's blog. That's where you find the mavens and salesman that Gladwell describes in the Tipping Point. That's where you find the people who are twitter leaders. That's where Obama found the organizers for the ground game that got him elected.

The trick is that once that "some" have raised their hands, they need to be nurtured and supported, not with money or stuff, but with attention. Promo is about one type of exchange - money for stuff. Info is about other kinds of exchange - attention for attention. A click to a website is measurable form of attention. Posting to a blog is another. Adding to a twitter is still another. Every exchange throws off information about the time and motion of people who want to talk to you. Once you can analyze the time and motion of those special someone's, it's much easier to understand how they think and when they think it.

"TransPromo" is about promotion. "TransInfo" is about using exchanges to create new information. Everyone loves information. If the information created by tracking exchanges in real time are stored and analyzed, predictive analytics will get better. Predictive analytics is a discussion that can be held with the CMO or the CTO or the CFO or the CEO.

If I ran IBM or Xerox or Oce or Kodak or Screen, I would do the Printing, but sell the systems that store and analyze. If I were Mindfire or Xmpie, I would help with the Printing and sell the systems that store and analyze. Then I would price the systems based on the number of "somes" and how many times they exchanged attention. Instead of looking at ROI, I would focus on Return on Time, ROT. - Dr. Joe Webb

Since I believe that advertising is a shrinking market and education, health and government (EHG) are the growing markets, consider the organization value that could be created by better predictive analytics in schools, communities and hospitals. Could one use the tech to predict those students likely to be at risk? Or those patients likely to be non compliant in self administered medications?

Consider RFID, QR codes, Cell phones that read bar codes and take you to a website. More at Edge Conditions.

Now, consider the amount of wasted time and the long response times in EHG. Then consider the effects of late responses on desired outcomes in the education, health and government spaces.

More in later posts....

Edge Conditions

Innovation happens at the edges between two or more activity spaces.
Communication happens in physical space and information space.
Information manifests in the physical space in Print or on the Screen.
When it moves to the internet cloud, info is sliced and diced.

Once sliced and diced it can recombine to create new information.
The new information is re inserted into physical space.
Once back in physical space, information affects behavior.
Real life happens in physical space.

The following were picked from the Cloud as of December 9, 2008

Cell phone is barcode scanner by Motorola
"One of the long awaited success products is integrating the cell phone with a fully functional barcode scanner and Motorola did it with the Symbol MC70 and has integrated it with other models.”
http://www.adazonusa.com/blog/barcode-scanners/symbol-bar-code-scanners

iPhone hears music
Shazam, that wonderful program for iPhone that allows us to point the phone at a sound and await identification.
http://www.cultureby.com/trilogy/2008/12/sherlock-holmes-in-the-digital-world.html

Multi Function Printer sits between the Cloud and Print
The full range of ACDI devices, including stored value card and currency systems, card dispenser and encoders, credit card terminals, online card systems and document output tracking solutions, are made available through the partnership.
http://copies.com/?p=455

Google Maps track disease
This is cool: Google has set up a page with a map to track search requests for terms like "flu" and "flu symptoms" around the country (using IP address data to provide a geographic fix). Voila: A map that should show very quickly how this winter's flu viruses spread from state to state.
http://recoveringjournalist.typepad.com/recovering_journalist/2008/11/truly-viral.html

Speech to text translation coming of age
Online video has made major strides in 2008, largely thanks to universal search. Speech-to-text translation, mobile video, and full movie/TV shows on YouTube are just getting started.
http://searchengineland.com/2008-video-search-year-in-review-15613.php
Physical space in Baghdad to the McClatchey Cloud
As usual, the work day ended and it is sunset and I am heading back from Baghdad to Fallujah.
I was in a taxi with two other passengers, and we had to wait for one more. The other two men were not going to Fallujah, but to villages along the way. One of them looked upset. I asked him, Are you ok? He answered with tears, "I want this car to start moving. I want to receive the dead bodies of my two brothers.
http://washingtonbureau.typepad.com/iraq/2008/12/going-home.html

Printer organizes the Cloud and back to Print
ChromaGraphics is a commercial printer that has expanded into the rapidly growing market for electronic document retrieval, distribution and on-demand printing with the acquisition of a Santa Rosa company last month. They are a 24-employee company with $4.5 million in revenue last year
http://www.everydayprint.co.uk/print-news/printing/chromagraphics-expands-into-growing-market-for-on-demand-print.html

Picking up AOL Cloud storage accounts
ElephantDrive Inc. has announced a free and automated file transfer from AOL’s Xdrive to ElephantDrive. The offering is designed to make it easy for users of the Xdrive service to migrate to ElephantDrive before their existing accounts are closed. In the first week of availability of the automated transfer tool, ElephantDrive has delivered over one million files from Xdrive to new ElephantDrive accounts.
http://copies.com/?p=454

Bar Code scanners are one pathway between Print and the Cloud
Did you know there are more then 20 different brands of bar code scanners? The Metrologic bar code scanners are one of these brands. Many of these scanners come from over seas and are sold as cheap barcode scanners with little company backing behind them, but this is not the case with Metrologic.
http://www.adazonusa.com/blog/barcode-scanners/metrologic-bar-code-scanners

Writing in physical space, up to the Cloud, back down to Print
The students participated in the third annual Océ Future Authors Project summer writing workshop, where they compiled poetry, short stories and essays into a book they named, “Confessions of a Teenage Author.” The book was published and digitally printed by the program’s sponsor, Boca Raton-based Océ North America Production Printing Systems Division, a leading provider of digital document management and delivery solutions. http://www.graphicartsonline.com/article/CA6620021.html?nid=3827

German Post Office and personal newspapers
December 4, 2008 – D. Kulenovic) The new web-to-print portal run by the German Post Office, www.titelhelden.de, has been online since October 6. The portal, developed by People Interactive GmbH, a Cologne-based agency, places particular emphasis on usability. The new online service from the Deutsche Post (the German Post Office) permits anyone to create their own newspapers for various occasions. Layout, printing, and delivery are all handled by the Deutsche Post. The portal integrates all these processes.
http://www.beyond-print.de/site/content/en/channel_news/news_0681.html?fromRss=true

RFID, another path between Print and the Cloud
Source: UPM, 2008-Dec-04 Japanese publisher Shogakukan Inc. has implemented RFID technology in its operations to substantially reduce the return ratio of unsold books. A reduction in waste volumes was also critical.
http://www.packagingessentials.com/news.asp?id=2008-12-04-14.52.52.000000

Don't waste time on convincing people. Focus on the ones already convinced. CRM in politics.
Seth Godin has written a fabulous piece about the Obama presidential campaign and the marketing lessons we can learn from it. I believe the lessons learned provide great insight into how we can dramatically influence the educational process and how students learn as well.
http://influenceconversation.blogspot.com/2008/11/education-marketing-lessons-from-obama.html

QR Codes: another path between Print and the Cloud
John Carnell, founder and CEO of Harrogate-based Bullying UK said: "We are proud to be recognised by TalkTalk as one of the UK's most innovative charities. Eighteen months ago we identified QR codes as being key to the uptake of the mobile web and the filling in of another bit of the digital divide. Even if people are in a rush they can snap the code from the poster with their phone and get immediate help from our mobile website."
http://www.bullying.co.uk/blog/blog_item.aspx?id=39