Archive for September, 2008
Pondering the new-look Independent on the 21.28 train back from Oxford last night I became increasingly puzzled. It was not at all what I expected.
For our select band of loyal blog readers from Africa, the Gulf and India, I should explain that the Independent’s new editor, Roger Alton, is undoubtedly one of the best in Britain.
In the two schools of British newspaper editors - the writers and the doers - he is one of the tiny handful of pre-eminent doers along with Paul Dacre (Daily Mail), Peter Wright (Mail on Sunday) and John Witherow (Sunday Times).
Any remaining doubt in this country about the relative merits of the two types of editor has now disappeared: the doers are widely recognised as the only sort of editor that can be successful in our modern, supercharged, competitive conditions.
Which is all a precursor to saying that when Roger Alton does something major then we observers of the journalistic world must sit up and pay attention. We are likely to receive a master class.
Roger Alton is a wily fox, however, and his master classes are not straightforward. For a start, he does not like talking about what he does. When forced to, for reasons of decorum or marketing, he rarely says what he means. He has an aversion to theory. He adopts a heavy armour of irony.
Thus almost everything he said in his Independent pre-relaunch interview in Monday’s Guardian really means roughly the opposite of what he said.
In that interview he said that:
• Managing director Simon Kelner has a much more arduous job than he
• He loves taking the tube
• He felt absolutely fine about being shunted off The Observer
• He likes advertising that goes across the top of a double page spread
• He does not see the Guardian as competition
• Alan Rusbridger is one his editorial heroes
• David Cameron, Tony Blair and Nick Clegg are all good blokes doing the right thing (remember Roger was the editor that ran the most powerful of all the campaigns against Tony Blair: Henry Porter’s series on liberty).
This is all quite funny. And it finally dawned on me, as the train arrived at Reading, that Roger’s irony may be the clue to understanding the new Independent. Here was a master class in daily journalism delivered in a thoroughly post-modern or post-ironic way.
About five years ago in The Guardian, Zoe Williams, wrote a very witty piece about post-modern irony. Like the post-modern in art, architecture, literature, film etcetera the new Independent makes sense as an exclusively self-referential commentary - its core implication is that newspaper creativity is used up, so it recycles and quotes its own tradition. As Zoe said of post-modern art, its stance, which is highly self-conscious, precludes sincerity, sentiment, emoting of any kind, and thus has to rule out the existence of ultimate truth or moral certainty. Indivisible from cynicism, post-ironic irony is vacuous, agenda-free and often highly amusing.
Consider Tuesday’s front page. Here is the newspaper craft reduced to its essence: splash, teasers and colour. The splash must naturally be a world exclusive and, if possible, it must threaten that same world to which it is exclusive: thus “The Methane Time Bomb” (an unconvincing story about massive deposits of underwater methane), a perfect example. The teasers must appeal directly to our most powerful urges: sex, money and eternal life. Roger does not bother with money and eternal life but takes three different angles on sex, which makes the irony perhaps a touch clearer. As for colour, we have loads of blue and red, which print well, and then quite a lot of yellow and a dab of green - very little from the paint box is left unused.
Now consider that classic of re-launched papers, the page two “Letter from the Editor”. Roger’s is beautifully pitched. From the first words “You may have noticed a new look…..” to the last “Ultimately, it is your Independent” he does not miss a beat. Every formula of newspaper redesign - “colour-coded sign-posting”, “easier to navigate”, “as bright as it is authoritative” - is lovingly placed in the correct order like some amusing recreation by Tracy Emin of a 1960s Indian restaurant complete with flock wallpaper.
He even describes “improvements to the structure and content” including a pull-out section called Independent Life concentrating on daily themes. When it comes to the footnote about typefaces, another classic of the genre, the requisite words (modern and elegant) are much to the fore especially in relation to the sans font Amplitude which is not very modern (being five years old) and is famous not for being elegant but more for its quirky characterfulness, a sort of Boris Johnson of fonts.
There is then, on page three, a brilliant post-modern commentary on the art of the “page three” (and remember Roger has just declared that pictures of semi-naked women make the world a better place). Guess what? Two rather clunky cut-outs of a pair of extremely unattractive French public intellectuals (Houellebecq and Levy) leap from the page. The story concerns a book due on October 8th in which they supposedly go head-to-head in a clash of the Titans. In fact it emerges that they are not “clashing” so much as jointly savaging some sacred cows of French culture. But it is a good tease: a page three about two middle aged blokes in suits who will be attacking some (unnamed) French public figures: in many ways as brave a parody as Piero Manzoni’s 1961 art work Merda d”Artista.
I have not time here to do the whole paper justice. It must be kept as a collector’s item and there is much more to enjoy - as, for example, on the day after huge explosions in Pakistan and yet more cataclysmic events in the Western financial world, the most expansive World story in the paper is a double page spread on a US soap opera, Mad Men, which may or may not be much good. But perhaps the World really is run by Mad Men?
It is a complex master class, as I say, and my only fear is that without a special Indy edition of Coles Notes, some readers might not get it. Nor will it be easy to sustain every day.
But I think the canny John Walsh has got it. At the end of his Tales of the City weekly column is a description of a recreation of Francis Bacon’s London studio in which copies of the Independent are strewn on the floor. “One of the broadsheet pages on the floor featured lovely monochrome photographs of ballerinas; another displayed an interview with Michael Gorbachev. Can it be that the newspaper you hold in your hand unwittingly helped Bacon develop his vision of a bleak, cruel, nightmarish, monstrous world without hope of salvation? I’d like to think so.”
Other Opinions
Mark Porter at the Guardian
Press Gazette
Roy Greenslade at the Evening Standard
September 23rd, 2008
Apple’s new music recommendation tool, the Genius button is….genius. It’s not a new idea by any means - see Pandora, last.fm or even Amazon - but its so seamless, so easy and simple (in fact, you don’t have to DO anything) that it is already more useful and more widespread than any of the original pioneers.
Note: Of course, like any collaborative tool, Genius will get more genius as it learns more about users but its worth noting that even now it works pretty darn well….usually, at least…I just genius-ed a maudlin but amazing Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy song and bizarrely got lots of fast-paced happy music from the the Pixies, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and (huh!?) Bloc Party.
We at Shakeup always harp on about the value of personalization and recommendation to news sites but, the truth is, I still don’t see it done on any of the mainstream newspaper sites, at least not on any large scale.
News organizations clearly understand that their greatest asset is the huge and ever-expanding store of stories, photos, videos, etc that they control. They are already starting, thanks to many an Internet evangelist, to look at this pile of information as a database that can be manipulated (for instance the now ubiquitous Most Popular/Most Commented/Most E-mailed lists). But they haven’t quite taken the next step - matching this undifferentiated database with very individual readers. That is, taking what they know about readers and their habits to suggest specific personalized stories, photos, etc, for them.
Again, not a new idea. But the secret is to make it all seamless. To make sure, like in iTunes, that users don’t have to actually do anything for this service. They just have to interact with the site and, before they know it, they have the nice little surprise.
Another note: On the difference between recommendation and personalization - Personalization is what a user chooses to see, how a user chooses to cut the information available to him (ie. asking to see the weather on the frontpage, or a specific stock). Recommendation is what a smart computer predicts a user will like (ie. a list of stories that match the reader’s history). In combination with an editor’s intelligence, they are very powerful information systems that provide: a) things I don’t know about but are important (what an editor chooses) b) things I don’t know about but will probably be interesting to me (recommendation) and c) things I am already interested in but want to learn more about (personalization).
September 17th, 2008
How bad are things really? I mean for us in the press.
In Britain the answer has to be at least “pretty bad” and many friends would put it in saltier terms than that. The rumour is that in some categories of advertising the numbers are nearly 50% off last year. That’s a serious rate of collapse. It goes without saying that all of the main newspaper groups, local and national, are facing the autumn with as much relish as a wisdom tooth extraction.
And yet, there’s another way of looking at things which suggests that we’re on the brink of the most exciting five-year period since the war: a period that we’ll look back on as a renaissance during which innovation and invention blossomed.
I don’t buy into the common notion that mainstream companies will crumble like the investment banks, while nimble niche companies (most of them www something) and Google soak up readers and ad dollars. I don’t underestimate the British newspaper.
It’s already possible, I think, to take a guess at the sort of changes coming, based on chatter from the strategic thinkers and other subterranean rumblings. Here’s my list of things to look out for.
- The campaign for real journalism
There’s going to be a flight to quality. I think this is the inevitable reaction to a period of mass production and focus on price. Just like the food industry, which has evolved from 15 years of price-led marketing to a quality-led period, so people will turn to journalism that explains and excites. The predominant journalistic streams are a) commoditised news b) confessional feature writing c) consumer guides and d) celebrity watching. There’s growing weariness with all this. The revived streams will be a) expert analysis b) long-form reporting c) cutting-edge gossip and d) intelligent aggregation. You can see evidence in the success of The Week and The Economist and Private Eye although no-one is yet producing great British reportage. Of the British newspapers my opinion is that The Times is ahead of the game.
Quality is expensive and by no means do I think people will be prepared to pay for all of it. Monocle, an archetypal quality magazine, costs £5 which is steep. On the other hand, companies have an ever more sophisticated idea of customer relationship which includes corporate social and cultural responsibility. I believe we will see the public demand for quality reading and the successful business model of the customer magazine sector combining to produce titles that are independent, free-standing and largely supported by a new set of journalistic patrons - companies that simply want to do something good with their money. Look out for Mercedes-Benz monthly or Starbucks daily. My pet longing is for a new weekly magazine of photo-journalism. Perhaps Sony or Nike could sponsor that.
Not the sub-editor, mind you. We may as well face the fact that new publishing technology is pretty easy to learn and many (younger) journalists can already write, sub, draw a graphic, edit a photo, write headlines and design a page. (I know one who can do all those things and write CSS code too). No. What I mean is the return of the directing and selecting brain. Algorithms are wonderful and computers make them gloriously cheap but I’m pretty sure that Daylife and its cousins were the new thing of 2008. For 2009 we’ll have The Daily Beast, Tina Brown’s latest enterprise, to be curated by editors and given a distinctive point of view.
Forget the death of print: this is the new print. Everybody’s making them. E-readers that are light, portable, flexible and as easy on the eye as print and come in a variety of shapes and sizes have been launched almost monthly since half-way through this year. Yes, they are still prohibitively expensive but they won’t be for long. It can only be a matter of months - say 24? - before a newspaper offers its readers a simple e-reader that will exclusively deliver their title once a day or even once an hour. If you are spending £50m a year on print and distribution you could give away 250,000 e-readers today and cover your costs in one year. You could produce a well-designed paper that was constantly updated and with unlimited pagination. I believe you could sell advertising on page impressions. And yes, you could customise that advertising too.
- The first editorially-based website to get media funding
Rather amazingly, Ashley Norris, co-founder of the British blog network Shiny Media, has pointed out that not one journalistic website has attracted any sizeable investment over the past few years. He ascribes this to the relative paucity of British online eyeballs compared to the US, a conservative British ad industry, a strong British loyalty to newspapers and magazines and overwhelming online competition from the BBC. This is the year that the mould will be broken and the maturing of the online advertising model will begin to make commercial sense of journalism on the web. At first it will have to be low cost. But I believe once the mould is broken, then there’s no stemming the tide of change.
- The continued rise of the frees
Much has been written over the summer about the deaths of free papers around the world and it is a fact of course that many of them have not been healthy and have been snuffed out by the crunch. Two points, however, have not been sufficiently highlighted. The first is that free newspapers are a young sector that has experienced explosive exponential growth so you are bound to have a bubble effect, just as dotcom did. The second is that nobody comments on the quality of the papers that close and yet, of course, that must be crucial to their survival chances. It is high time free newspapers did get properly reviewed for quality rather than discussed as if they were more or less identical. One of the best free newspapers in Europe is our own beloved Metro, produced by Associated. Profitable, Metro has added more than £200m to the value of Associated in the past decade. Free papers will continue to encroach on paid-for titles and the free sector will increasingly split into clear market segments, just as the paid-for sector did.
What have I not mentioned? User-generated content. Networked journalism. Interactivity. Social websites. Why? Because I do not believe they are the big story. Of course, I very well know that I may be stupendously wrong.
September 16th, 2008
As you can see, we have redesigned ourselves. As part of the process we are also going to end our summer hiatus from blogging - its officially wet, cold and gloomy here so we feel obligated. Richard is going to write a weekly column every Tuesday and I am going to try to do more little things throughout the week. In the meantime, any comments on the new design (here and on the main page) are always appreciated.
September 9th, 2008
