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And yet a grubby old printed magazine that is perpetually out of date seems to be doing really well.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.
April 28th, 2008
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.
April 22nd, 2008
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?
April 15th, 2008
In all the many newsrooms where I have worked content has always had priority over form. Except one. Britain’s leading tabloid newspaper, The Daily Mail, treats form and content on the same level. And that is one reason why it is successful. It understands its own intrinsic strengths and weaknesses.
In literature classes we learned that form and content were indissoluble – but only when things are going right. A Shakespeare sonnet is a fusion of meaning and metre. When Baryshnikov moved across the stage at the Kirov you couldn’t tell the dancer from the dance. But life is not all Shakespeares or Baryshnikovs.
In any business, if we knew better how to fuse form and content, how much more successful we would be. All around us is change, revolution, competition. Against such a confusion nothing is more important than clarity: clarity about what you are, what you stand for, what you offer.
I will go to the stake arguing that the media renaissance unleashed by the internet is not killing print but reinventing it. It is like the affect of electricity upon domestic lighting. The lamp changed from wick to bulb but it is still a lamp. Today, print still does something that only print can do as well.
Anyone who is in the media needs to understand more about fusing form and content and about what it is that we can do best. In the past I believe we got away with getting it 30% wrong. Those days are long gone. Today 30% wrong means walking the plank.
The Daily Mail is a properly fused product. It may not be beautiful but it is what it is. The typography, the colours, even the shape of the paper, marries with its message, with what is trying to do and what it is trying to be. The Economist is a fused product too. It is as comfortable in its skin as a horse by Stubbs. Slick, dense, clear, reflective, synthetic. So is Google, for that matter, and many others.
The importance of this should hardly surprise us. We’ve seen it in the arts. Every form has its intrinsic character. Nothing, for example, seems to match the novel in its ability to create a concrete world. (The fact that such a world is build entirely in the imagination of the reader is the novel’s final stroke of genius). Nothing seems to dominate the emotions as directly as music. The fact that music is an entirely abstract medium which works without images, makes it the form of choice for the alchemy of human feeling. (Watch any great conductor to see a human being in a full-blown trance). Nothing has the mesmerising power of a great painting. The sheer power of light to shock and overwhelm the viewer, is an effect that other art forms cannot strive for. A person can reach for a blanket, a shot of whisky or sit by a blazing fire. Each will warm them - but in a different way.
After thirty years working in media I am surprised there is so little appreciation of the power of form. We talk a lot about formats – broadsheet or tabloid, analogue or digital, video or film. However, formats are to form as haircuts are too looks. They help but they don’t really get to the heart of the matter.
Perhaps we are simply too superficial and therefore lack any interest in what lies beneath. Form is an idea that is anything but superficial. Plato’s forms were the archetypes. Everything started there. And still today the word includes the notion of the essential nature of things.
Or, more likely, we have been taught to focus only on brands. To survive today, any business must be good at what it does. We tend to forget that it is just as important for it to do what it is good at. In a consumer culture dominated at every level by marketing, only a fool would say brands are not important. But long before you can have a successful brand you must know your intrinsic strengths and weaknesses. And that knowledge is at the heart of fusing form and content.
We should have listened harder to Marshall McLuhan. Around 50 years ago he said the medium was the message; or more precisely, that a medium has its own intrinsic effects which constitute a great part of its unique message. He said: “People don’t actually read newspapers. They step into them every morning like a hot bath.”
If we were clearer about different forms and what they are intrinsically good at, then we would not only be better at using our existing media to greater effect but would see that we need to keep experimenting with form. Like any industry with a history, the media industry is essentially complacent, lazy and stuck in a rut. Now we are fighting for our future, we have to do better.
Five years ago only a tiny handful of people foresaw the forthcoming surge in social media. The massive dominance of Facebook and MySpace could not have been imagined. Yet the appetite was clearly there. It was latent. And the technology was there. It took a spark of genius to marry the appetite with the technology and come up with a product so fused that it immediately make sense to millions of people.
Do we really think about or understand what the mainstream media is for, what print and television is really good at? Maybe we understand at some level that print is the pre-eminent medium of information. We understand that it is particularly good at filtering and condensing huge amounts of knowledge; that the human mind can absorb more from a well-designed page of text and graphics than it can in any other way.
Maybe we understand at some level that television is the pre-eminent medium of entertainment. We understand that to bring a vivid replica of the world, of thousands of worlds, into the living rooms of millions of families is an incredibly powerful means of distracting people. However I believe we waste a lot of our energy too – trying to achieve things in each medium that are never going to work as well as they would in another. To anyone who knows better, how often we must resemble a man who is using a hammer as a golf club and a golf club as a hammer.
Against this backcloth, I believe there is at least one gap in the market worth mentioning. I think there’s both an unsatisfied appetite and the means to meet it. Yes, it would always be a niche but it would make up in influence for what it lacks in scale.
The gap I see is for ideas. Why? One reason might be education levels. We are introduced to life-changing ideas at school and then the river dries up. Our minds are kept busy but remain stubbornly un-appeased. Another reason might be information overload. The demand for meaning is strong. We are deluged with data. Information springs at us from every angle at every moment of every day. Some of it sticks. We learn a little. But meaning is elusive. Without ideas it is very difficult to translate information into meaning. And without meaning, life is pretty unbearable
A leading publisher explained not long ago the current formula for a best selling book. He said you had to have a proposal (not necessarily a new one) that explained a condition that affected a large number of people (being overweight, for example). Then you had to explain your idea in an easy but convincing way so that once people had read your book they would feel they understood. “Everyone wants to feel wiser”.
Of course ideas are everywhere – in newspapers, magazines, books and on TV. However I do not think any of the above are best way to communicate ideas. People are hungry for more.
What is the right form for a medium of ideas? Firstly, ideas happen best when people are together. The spark of an idea is almost always in a conversation or a meeting. Secondly, ideas connect best when people can experience them being unpacked step by step before their eyes. To bring an idea alive you must participate in making it. All teachers know this. Therefore, what I am essentially suggesting is the relaunch of the dialogue – live, fluid, unpredictable – and surely one of the most effective forms of idea-making available to us in the world.
I see this as the complete antithesis of the ubiquitous business conference, with its keynote speakers and its endless Power Point slides. These are usually dead (and deadly) events in which self-important people from a particular sector get to stand on stage for 20 minutes and give everyone else the benefit of their experience.
The point about dialogues is that they are living discussion. They can not be prepared in advance because you can never tell what paths the discussion might take. There are already signs of a nascent revival in dialoguing today. In the United States the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation has around 800 members and exists to promote the spread of ideas through dialoguing. In Britain there is Intelligence Squared, which claims to be “the only institution in town - aside from Parliament - to provide a forum for debate on the crucial issues of the day” and which attracts considerable numbers even at £20 a ticket.
Ever since Socrates and his friends, newly-scarred from fighting in the Peloponnesian War, sat near the forum in ancient Athens 2,300 years ago, picking apart life, mankind and the universe, we have had evidence that the dialogue is the essential ideas medium. The adversarial debate, with proposer and opposer and votes from the floor in the British style, is just another form of dialogue. (It is a common fallacy that dialogue can only involve two people – from confusing the root di- “two” with dia- “though”).
What if our great institutions and universities were to launch travelling road shows in which leading thinkers were brought together in different cities to grapple with the world’s great problems? Is it impossibly romantic to think that there might be a few thousand people in each city who would pay for a ticket for the chance either to be actively involved in the discussion or to witness it at first hand?
I don’t think so. When you consider the numbers that will turn out to see a favourite author such as Margaret Atwood, giving her stump speech and answering questions, or to hear Gore Vidal talking to Melvyn Bragg in a big auditorium, I don’t think it is merely a romantic thought. Couldn’t we have the intellectual equivalent of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra or the London Philharmonic turning up in cities such as Paris and Pittsburgh to stage a dialogue on climate change or citizenship?
As it happens I do know of one great American college that is doing just this. The Art Center of Pasadena, one of the top design schools in the USA, is launching a rolling programme of dialogues around the world, starting in Spain next month. (To declare an interest: I am helping - which is one reason why I have become a dialogue fan).
Being a design school, these dialogues will have a design focus, naturally, but not a narrow one. In fact, one of the fascinating results of planning the dialogues has been to realise how design awareness is now almost as much a part of science or business as it is a part of architecture or town planning. Art Center is taking 24 brilliant minds and putting them together for a day of intellectual fireworks on the stage of the Palau de la Musica in the heart of Barcelona on Friday March 7th. Tickets are on sale – and are selling.
I believe they are tapping into a idea that, five years hence, will be ubiquitous and as much part of a civilised life as concert going, theatre going or queuing up for the latest exhibitions.
February 19th, 2008
I had to fight my way in with 10 emails spread across the leadership of the NUJ but I did finally luck into a seat (and thank god, there was a twenty person strong rock-concert-like line outside the venue–poor souls) at Saturday’s conference on New Threats to Media Freedom sponsored by and hosted by the National Union of Journalists on Gray’s Inn Road. Let me just say thanks to the NUJ for putting it on, it was a great morning/afternoon, even if it was mighty early for a Saturday. (It was also a chance for me to put my new digital SLR to the test, see photo above and full gallery below for the results…pretty nice camera if I do say so myself).
The highlight was, unsurprisingly, Alan Johnston’s words on his detainment and censorship on war reporting in general. Its hard to pin down but he just sounds so genuine that he is instantly likeable. He betrays no trace of bitterness about his ordeal, and you get no sense of exploitation or that he is ‘cashing in’ on his newfound celebrity. More importantly, he is just plain charming: after the panel, an audience member asked Johnston if he had prayed during his kidnapping, here is how he responded to a question that felt for me too intrusive and not in the spirit of the morning:
I wasn’t praying at the time so I didn’t feel right starting because of the situation. I’m sure God would have understood but….
Its not an answer anyone expected but it was much appreciated, and genuinely funny.
Other Issues Explored:
- Campaigning vs. Informing - where do journalists draw the line? Is journalism meant to crusade for specific policy changes or is its role to reach for ‘truth’ and ‘objectivity’
- Churnalism - a new(ish) term used to describe the plight of jobbing hacks forced to churn out 15 stories a day giving them no time to check facts or develop sources
- Power of Editors - Peter Wilby (who, incidently, was most dynamic speaker of the entire conference) says editors don’t have enough power, that in any editorial meeting, its the head of marketing that holds all of the cards
- Murdoch - Wilby, as the resident Murdoch expert, also gave a little report on his burgeoning influence on the world’s media saying basically that Murdoch is bad (and that no one really believes Rebekah Wade) but not as bad as some. In fact, he would be mid-table in a league table of media owners.
January 29th, 2008
