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.
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And yet a grubby old printed magazine that is perpetually out of date seems to be doing really well.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.
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.
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.
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 did 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.
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.
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!
After yesterday’s launch of the new joint company and immediate 14% slump in the shares they are excellent value.
How do I know? I don’t of course. But here is why I believe it.
First I know the Thomson team - or at least the key person/people. They are very clever. Thomson has been hugely successful over recent years. The move out of newspapers was beautifully timed and the focus on professional financial, legal, accounting and health data has been strikingly lucrative. The merger with Reuters will have had some serious strategic brainpower behind it.
Second and more significant, they are onto the right idea.
“Intelligent Information” they are calling it in their marketing.
It’s all based on a very old idea. T.S. Eliot refers to it in The Rock (1934)
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
In other words there is an information pyramid with raw data at the bottom, which once sorted becomes information, which once digested and understood become knowledge, which once tried and tested in the fire of experience can become wisdom.
It has been clear for ages that in the UK - and highly developed markets - value is generally moving up the pyramid from data to wisdom.
(Fascinating how different it is when we are working in Africa. There, accurate data - call it news - is still hard to come by and has huge value. There’s far too much propaganda in the media.)
Papers like the FT and The Economist have cashed in on the hunger for, and value of, knowledge. Now Thomson Reuters want to join them. That’s what they mean by “intelligent information”.
Listen to what they say:
For those who make decisions that matter, information alone is not enough. They require insight, relevance, options………intelligent information begins with data [which once gathered and verified leads to the emergence of] actionable knowledge.
Everyone is overwhelmed and confused. If Thomson Reuters can tell us what it all means then their shares are cheap.
A meditation in the New Yorker a few days ago on the death of newspapers and the implications for democracy. It is by Eric Alterman and titled ‘Out Of Print’.
There are nine main points:
1/ After a lifespan of 300 years the American newspaper industry is suffused with a palpable sense of doom. The rise of the internet has made it look slow and unresponsive; the advent of Craigslist has wiped out classified advertising revenue. Newspaper stocks are collapsing e.g. NY Times company has declined 54% since the end of 2004.
2/ Public trust in newspaper has slipped in concert with the bottom line. Fewer than 20% of Americans believe “all or most” media reporting. More Americans believe in flying saucers than believe in the notion of balanced mainstream news.
3/ Most managers have reacted with a spiral of budget cuts: bureau closings, buyouts, layoffs and reductions in page size. As one columnist, Molly Ivins, complained: the newspapers’ solution has been to make “our product smaller and less helpful and less interesting”. Philip Meyer in The Vanishing Newspaper predicts the final copy of the final newspaper will be printed in 2043.
4/ The idea of news itself has changed from editors telling us what we should know, to getting a point of view about not just what happened but why it happened and being able to talk about and debate this with people who think about the world in similar ways.
5/ If Arthur Miller is right and a good newspaper is “a nation talking to itself” then the Huffington Post is a great newspaper. In two years it has acquired 11m unique visitors per month which is more than all but eight newspaper sites. And it is growing!
6/ Huffington Post has very light editorial interference - they operate the “mullet strategy” (business up front, party in the back). So the home page is controlled while the inside pages are full of the musings of an army of both celebrity and non-celebrity bloggers.
7/The tension between the mainstream media and the web was presaged by the early 20th century debate between Walter Lippmann and John Dewey. Lippmann likened the average American to a deaf spectator in the back row at a sporting event. “He does not know what is happening, why it is happening, what ought to happen”. Effectively his suggestion was to junk democracy and see journalism as a function of the intellectual ruling elite. Dewey saw democracy like a focus group; people needed to discuss and deliberate ideas. “The man who wears the shoe knows best that it pinches and where it pinches”.
8/ The Lippmann model, in which politics became a business for professionals and a spectator sport for the great unwashed, remained unchallenged until the Reagan revolution when the conservative counter-establishment attempted to seize the reins of democratic authority from the liberal media elite. The liberal version of this is now evident in the anti-Bush blogosphere. Joshua Micah Marshall’s Talking Points Memo relies on an army of collaborators who give him a huge amount of valuable information that is not always available to mainstream reporters.
9/ But what happens to democracy when we can no longer depend upon newspapers to invest their unmatched resources in helping people to learn what we need to know? Print and online models will converge: Huffington will hire more staff and the NY Times will do more distributed journalism, more wisdom-of-the-crowd reporting. We are about to enter a chaotic world of news characterised by superior community conversation but diminished first-rate journalism. We will lose the single national narrative and agreed “set of facts” by which to conduct our politics. And what happens to democracy then?
