I have been on retreat from blogging for a couple of weeks partly just because I can and partly because I have been feeling jaundiced about journalism and it is not particularly interesting writing about being jaundiced.However, thanks to a magnificent promotion by Tim de Lisle in today’s Guardian here is a short effort to explain why.Basically I suppose it is boredom. When was the last really interesting thing that happened in journalism here in the UK?I include all journalism in this although I am basically a student of print/web/video rather than TV.I mean, here we are in London, supposedly a leading global centre of competitive journalism and what are most people doing? Slogging away, churning out the same old formula week after week, milking rather dank little pots of inspiration for all they are worth, trying to survive an economic downturn by merging desks and cutting back on expenses.I am not complaining about events. I never believed in the mindless news editors who whined about “quiet days” and “dead news”. I always felt they were revealing more about their inner blandness than anything else.Anyway, events are not letting us down at all. Obama has been and remains an amazing story about the rebirth of America and there is plenty else to get excited about. (How on earth Jesse failed to win I’d Do Anything requires a whole lot more investigation).I am complaining about the lack of new ideas of any kind on the media scene. Has everyone gone to sleep? Worse, I am complaining about the lack of courage among our media chieftains. Given that many of them are metaphorically strapped to a workbench with a whirring saw marked RECESSION slowly approaching their necks, one might have thought they would do something.Look at print developments today. Telegraph titles merge newsdesks. London Evening Standard and London Lite streamline news desks. Thomson Reuters union threatens strike. O’Brien attacks IN&M.Against this backcloth 90% of activity in media companies is simply shuffling chairs around. A new editor; a redesign; a gradual move back to the old design; a new column; a new section; a CD give-away. Oh, of course, I mustn’t forget the really big idea: cut back on the staff and ‘repurpose’ the content for a multi platform age. Man oh man, depressing or what?The last exciting thing that happened? Maybe when everyone starting going tabloid. Maybe when Associated launched Metro in around 10 days flat.For any editors or publishers out there who want to do more than cling grimly onto their jobs here a few ideas……
Make your paper free
Do news on the web - and at least 50% of it in video - and turn your paper into a daily magazine
Redefine what news is - it has been crying out for a rethink for 20 years
Get hundreds of readers to sign up as reporters - pay them if they get stories in
Launch a photo magazine
Life is short!
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It’s a gathering of 600+ creative professionals in a vast former wind tunnel in sunny California. However if that suggests hot air on several levels, don’t be mislead. It was a highly inspiring event.
Personal highlights?
George Smoot (Nobel physicist) and Charles Elachi (Director of the Jet Propulsion Lab) talking about the problems of driving on Mars and especially of landing the latest Mars rover on May 25th.
John Maeda (next President of Rhode Island School of Design) describing his experiment in building a computer out of human beings.
Stuart Brown (Director of the National Institute for Play) explaining how even a ravenous male polar bear will not eat you if you can persuade it to play a game with you first. “The opposite of play is not work; it is depression”. (Or being eaten).
Paula Scher (Artist) describing her personal development cycle from serious to solemn to dead - and her fight against it.
Oh and the guy that spent much of his life so far building slot machines for crows - if they pick up a coin from the street and drop it in the machine they get a nut.
Also key to enjoyment - the whole event was organised like clockwork so that you never felt the absence of professionalism or just enough discipline, absences that can make ‘play’ tedious.
The moral of the whole thing. Work less, play more - and everything will be all right.
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On a visit to Los Angeles for Serious Play, a conference put on by our friends at the Art Center College of Design.
There are some interesting media types around including John Puerner recently publisher of the LA Times. At a dinner hosted by the Art Center’s President Richard Koshalek I get the privilege of saying something about the media.
Here is an approximate summary of what I try to get across.
The upheavals in the global system since 1989 – the fall of the Berlin wall – are the most profound for at least a century. We had the end of history, the unipolar moment, the American imperium, the rise of “the rest”, the victory of hard power, the revival of soft power, the birth of capitalist autocracies, the clash of civilisations and the return of history. All in under 20 years. As Phillip Stephens of the FT says: “we live in an era of jagged lines where established power structures are buckling yet it is far from obvious what will replace them.”
The upheavals in technology and medicine since 1989 have probably been the most profound ever. Consider: the internet, genomics, fibre optics, satellite tv, cell phones, cloning, DNA testing, the artificial heart….to mention just a few
The upheavals in philosophy and religion have been just as huge. Consider what old certainties have NOT been abandoned, to be replaced by, at best, seething doubts and, at worst, short-term cults and extremism.
The upheavals in culture are just beginning. For example the impact of Brahms in Beijing, the huge success of Chinese design in London, the sudden appearance of Russian 19th century art in the West – all evidence of a global trade in creativity that, far from leading to a world which is “flat” are cultivating a world of multilayered identities and deep variety.
And then perhaps in the greatest upheaval of all we are told that we are destroying our ecosystem and consuming our natural resources in such a way as to guarantee the extinction of the human race sometime in the imaginable future……is it any wonder that we are more afraid, confused, anxious and frustrated by the complexity of modern life than any generation before us?
This condition of fearful confusion is the root cause of a very great deal of what is happening in media and design.
First – the obvious point. It has supercharged the general post-enlightenment drift towards individualism. Collective, authoritarian systems and institutions are turning to dust to be replaced by an explosion of social organisms in every sphere of life – “wikinomics” rules.
Second – the less obvious point. It is driving an incredible thirst for explanation. Why else does non-fiction sell so well, even when it is about the history of quinine or how to speak Latin? And what print brands seem currently to be immune to decline? The Week, The Economist, the FT — titles that do most to analyse and set things in context
These two tides are the yin and yang of our media age – a unity of opposites. Readers are separate so want to be together. Readers are together but want to work things out separately.
These wants can be met by designers. That’s the Zeitgeist. It is not rock stars, or bishops or politicians that are going to do it for us. We are not demanding causes, or religions or social ideologies. We want patterns. And creating meaningful patterns is what designers can do best.
Design underpins every form of creation from making a table to the way we plan and execute our lives. Good design (think Iphone) projects a way of understanding the world and creating a community that is both collective enough and individual enough to satisfy the spirit of the age.
You’d think media does this too. Or it should. But the industry is in panic. The accepted view is that a) mass media is crumbling with print and mainstream TV dying the fastest b) social media is taking over the world c) the age of authority (expert, commentator, editorial elite) is over and d) the new reality is “martini media” – anytime, anyhow, anywhere.
However, this is too simple by half. Healthy societies need healthy media. In order to keep our societies healthy, we have to renounce wringing our hands and mentally killing ourselves off and start right now reinventing ourselves for the next generation.
This is the time to do it. Technology has given us the tools for a renaissance in media as powerful and exciting as what happened in 15th century European painting.
Take the newspaper industry. Many people think it is doomed. But I believe it’s no more doomed than painting or live music or film. It’s not like vinyl & CDs because it does something unique. It can’t just be replaced by the web. And it speaks directly to the thirsts of the zeitgeist — the ultimate social organism plus a trove of analysis and explanation.
The debate is sometimes set up as Walter Lippmann (representing: a single national narrative and agreed “set of facts”) v John Dewey (representing the wisdom-of-crowds).
Watch out for Lippmann. It’s his turn for a comeback.
So in the world of newspapers we need to get reinventing. In particular there are five areas that we need to think about:
NEWS: less of ‘what’s new’ and more of ‘what’s important’. Once you have decided what’s important you will find an entirely new kind of news. And deciding what’s important needs to be opened up to millions of people not six editors in a board room
NEWSROOMS: so that networked journalism/user generated content becomes an integral part of the operation not a separate walled-off process
COSTS: so that all barriers to readership are removed: newspapers in future will be free (paid for by advertising)
COMMUNICATION: less words, more graphics, photography, colour, shapes, visual signals
PRINTING: digital printing will allow us to have daily magazines – and personalized daily magazines at that. One day you’ll get your own daily magazine delivered to your home or printed on your home printer. It could be a general briefing on world affairs written by editors PLUS some great writing and graphic art and photograpy selected by editors PLUS a host of conversations and topics selected by readers PLUS all your favourite sporting and cultural news requested by you PLUS the data that you need to run your life (weather, share prices, traffic) selected by you PLUS specialist sections on your particular industry or hobby. And it will have personalized advertising that gently reminds you when you need a new car or your laptop is five years old.
It’s all incredibly exciting. We are in an age of upheaval; our insecurities have created powerful tides; we need to ride with those tides and, more than ever, we need to be bold.
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By Richard Addis April 30th, 2008 at 10:49am Media, Newspapers
Nosing around books on education I find this advice on being a head teacher.
It’s in a book by Tim Brighouse, How Successful Headteachers Survive and Thrive.
Heads should greet children and teachers as they enter school.
They should go on a daily walk, talking to kitchen staff and cleaners as well as teachers, and sometimes follow a pupil through a day’s lessons.
They should be not scolds but skalds - a Scandinavian word for poets who inspire warriors before battle - recalling great deeds and anticipating further triumphs.
They should say “we”, not “I”.
And they should spend two hours a week doing “acts of unexpected kindness”, remembering birthdays and writing appreciative notes.
Not bad advice for editors too.
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By Richard Addis April 28th, 2008 at 03:52pm Magazines, Media
For those of us who follow the fortunes of The Week with an admiring eye there’s a piece worth reading today by John Friedman of MarketWatch in New York.
Basically he is saying that with a circulation pushing 500,000 The Week in the US is threatening Time and Newsweek. An amazing achievement.
The Week formula is driving strong growth at sustainable cost while the Time/Newsweek model is increasingly tired and uninspiring - especially to the people that work there.
Steve Kotok, The Week’s US General Manager says:
My feeling is that The Week starts with what a busy, sophisticated person needs to be well-informed — which we believe is multiple perspectives on today’s current events. And we keep it to just that, and no more, because people today are busy. And because of our reader focus, our readers read every issue.
Isn’t that a pretty good description of what the web is supposed to provide? All the time and for free, what’s more.
And yet a grubby old printed magazine that is perpetually out of date seems to be doing really well.
It doesn’t surprise me at all but it must confound some of the media gurus that I meet.
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By Ryan Bowman April 23rd, 2008 at 02:13pm Media, Newspapers
Shakeup Media is officially “Highly Commended”.
At the 2008 Newspaper Awards, our Financial Times design didn’t quite win but it was “highly commended” (basically 2nd place). The paper itself, of course, was named Newspaper of the Year. For those of you keeping track at home, that is three for three at the big award ceremonies.
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By Richard Addis April 22nd, 2008 at 03:18pm Media, Newspapers
A couple of interesting blogs elsewhere on the launch of The National, Martin Newland’s new paper from Abu Dhabi.
Both comment on the difficulties of running a credible paper in the UAE where press freedom is firmly restricted.
Rob Corder at arabianbusiness.com makes the point that the current market leader, Gulf News, is not going to lose many readers until The National is able to practise bolder journalism - the sort that many UAE expats are accustomed to back home. Judging by the launch issue this is not going to be for a while.
Neil Cook, Editor of The Gulf Times in neighbouring Qatar, analyses a breaking story about a major corruption scandal at Deyaar Development, one of Dubai’s largest real estate companies, that could have made a splash for the launch issue of The National. As it turned out there was apparently no mention of it at launch, although it was followed up on subsequent days once the dust had settled. Cook writes:
“Editors in the Arab world are well versed at answering questions about press freedom and none can deny that there are varying levels of self-censorship, which one senior editorial executive in Singapore once termed, in all seriousness, ‘editorial judgement’”
It was wise of Martin not to run it. But, knowing him, it must have been very hard.
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I wrote/designed a little piece for Good Magazine this month, its not on their website yet (I think they can’t figure out how to post the map) but here it is in case anyone is interested…(the map is based on those old school, ridiculously extravagant USA Today weather maps)…
Weather in east Africa is myth. Relatively limited access to mass media plus simple and predictable meteorological patterns have conspired to make climate inherent, social knowledge. December to February of each year is the dry season, so is June to August. These patterns have always been reliable, so much so that the burgeoning newspaper industries in Uganda and Kenya do not bother to print even the most cursory of weather maps. Until now.
Years riddled with misplaced climate disasters – including last year’s disastrous floods in the usually dry month of August which displaced thousands in Northern and Eastern Uganda – have convinced the Daily Monitor, the leading independent newspaper in Uganda, and The Nation, Kenya’s paper of record, to revisit the weather map question.
I know because they asked me to design the map.
It is a difficult proposition, drafting a weather map for a country that has never seen one. Not that it is a bad idea. Like much of Africa, Uganda is a fundamentally agrarian society; over 80% of the 30m population is involved in agriculture so the people here are more dependent on the vagaries of the heavens than most places in the world. But I can’t help but feel the hefty irony of making a map for a country that the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change recently included on a list of the 100 most vulnerable countries to climate change.
My bright yellow and relentlessly cheery “Sunny” icons seem to betray the depth of desperation in a third world country bearing the brunt of what Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni calls an “act of aggression” perpetrated by the rich world against the poor world. My lovingly detailed “Partly Cloudy” icons could just as easily portend the flooding of thousands of unstable homes and attendant displacement/famine/death as an afternoon shower. In acting out the mundane job of explaining the weather to a nation, I felt, and still feel, overwhelmed by the inadequacy of it all. I started to think about the perfect weather map of Africa, an utterly honest map that takes into account Africa’s unique but perilous position in the world. I think it looks a little something like this.
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By Richard Addis April 21st, 2008 at 03:49pm Media, Newspapers
So Martin Newland’s new paper has come out today.
The National. Launched out of Abu Dhabi. A classy broadsheet launched, as Frank Kane explains in today’s Guardian, by “the richest emirate of the UAE, with some $900bn of oil cash sitting in the bank, to steal the thunder of its blingier neighbour, Dubai.” It comes in four sections: news, business, sport and life & arts.
The paper is designed by Lucy LaCava of Montreal who was a key figure behind Conrad Black’s Canadian paper The National Post on which Martin was Managing Editor, before he took over as Editor of The Telegraph.
It looks a bit like the Guardian before its most recent redesign. Very clean and confident. Sans headlines.
And it has some familiar LaCava touches - briefs at the top of the page for example (see below for some pages).
We’ll do a more detailed critique after it has been going for a while.
But for now we should simply celebrate. It is pretty good to get a new paper out these days.
Many congratulations to Martin and best wishes from us.
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Two newspaper of the year awards (What the Papers Say and British Press Awards, respectively) , about a million nominations at the upcoming 2008 Newspaper Awards (including one for best newspaper design, ahem) a skyrocketing circulation and now, the obligatory pop music name check: a Sugababes music video. Rather bizarrely, one of the girls is wearing a dress made solely of the pink ‘un (around the 1:25 mark)….its the ultimate utilitarian frock, financial news and a slimming waist!
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