Thomson Reuters share tip

By Richard Addis
April 18th, 2008 at 01:11pm
Media

My first share tip. Buy Thomson Reuters.

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.

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Newspaper tribes

By Richard Addis
April 17th, 2008 at 05:16pm
Media, Newspapers

How would you define the British newspaper tribes today?

Impossible probably. However surely all would agree: five years ago it would have been very different.

Peter Wilby had a go at some of it in Monday’s Guardian.

This is the way he put it:

• Guardian - public sector professions
• Times - the old establishment (just)
• Telegraph - the Tory heartlands
• Independent - “readers of refined sensibility, the sort who attend art-house cinemas, prefer Japanese cuisine, and abhor plastic bags”

He said the first three were tribal, the last not.

I’d say something like this:

• Guardian - public sector professions (tribe)
• Telegraph - fogeys young and old (tribe)
• Times -’the suits’ (non-tribe)
• Independent - greens (small tribe)
• FT - the ruling class (tribe)
• Mail - shoppers (non-tribe)
• Sun - lads both young and old (tribe)

The gap? A paper that’s cool. Everyone under 35 I know is trying to be cool. It’s a huge tribe without a paper.

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Print and democracy

By Richard Addis
April 15th, 2008 at 11:11am
Magazines, Newspapers

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 20^th 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?

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Helping Roger

By Richard Addis
April 14th, 2008 at 10:23am
Media, Newspapers

There was much free advice for Roger Alton around the media pages this weekend. Some of it was in his old paper The Observer yesterday, some in The Guardian today. I trust he will sensibly ignore it all and get on with the job. But it is irresistible to add to it - especially since, unlike Mr A, we don’t have to risk our necks by actually doing it.

Contrary to those who think The Independent should go free, we think it should get more expensive. (And this is despite our general excitement about the free papers). With full colour presses coming on-stream in September, why not lead the way yet again and declare the newspaper dead and buried. And no, don’t transfer the whole thing to the web and go 100% digital. Launch a daily magazine instead.

At least, this is how we would market it. The reality is not that shocking and surely would not dangerously ruffle the daily 134,000 full-price loyalists that the Independent currently commands. The paper is already half magazine. The famous ‘viewspaper’ covers are straight from the magazine world. The consumery parts (50 best etc) and the promotions (mini-books) would sit comfortably in many a magazine package.

However there is a lot more that could be done. You could first of all drop the idea of covering news at all, at least in the conventional way. Instead you could transfer 85% of the staff to features duties and retain 15% to provide an excellent and intelligent news aggregation service that would be printed, say, in a single column on page one and then, perhaps, in a 16 page outer section with 8 pages of international and national briefings at the front and 8 pages of business and sport at the back. There would be no pretensions to original reporting. These briefings would simply recount what was happening, factually and succinctly. They could be laid out in a completely new way - perhaps using mapping to locate the events described. Each briefing would have a simple URL that would take you, via the website, to the best longer version of that story that the Indy could find that night - anywhere in the world in any medium.

The main page one story would be your best feature. It might be news but often it would not. It might be an interview, an essay, a piece of reportage. Of course, it would always aim to be utterly compulsive reading and it would have to be, on some deeper level, of the moment. It should always be surprising.

The heart of the paper would then become a fully fledged magazine. This would take a long time to think through. It would have to be a mixture of general, business, sport and consumer topics tailored expertly for the progressive, aesthetically-driven mindset of the core Independent reader. Magazine design standards should apply i.e. 30% better and more careful than your average newspaper page. Photography could return to the heart and centre of the Indy’s being. In fact, at the weekend (for which we have another plan to be blogged about later) we’d relaunch a Picture Post style photo magazine. And the general editing levels would have to be the best in the business.

The whole package - news summary plus features - could be considerably shorter than any current daily paper and also than the current incarnation, thereby saving paper and possibly, depending on the new presses, allowing it to be stitched.

As for the website, apart from becoming the central exchange for directing readers to news sources, make it a TV station. All those new feature writers, not to mention educated readers, will have so much to say, so many background stories to tell and will so quickly learn to take a camera with them everywhere that you can see the Indy becoming a upmarket mini-You Tube in just a couple of years.

Executed well –and few would do it better than Roger — this would go a long way to achieving the following:

1. Reinvigorate a paper that, being fourth out of four in its sector, needs to keep its adrenaline high
2. Make it yet more distinctive and different from its peers
3. Anticipate the drift of all papers (predicted by Harry Evans 40 years ago) as news loses its value
4. Use print and colour to full advantage with more emphasis on pictures and design
5. Save paper
6. Make the Indy a great place to work
7. Give the website a proper role and purpose

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Evolving Times

By Richard Addis
April 11th, 2008 at 10:56am
Newspapers

I like the way The Times is becoming more serious.

The lead story today, for example, is the economy, no lightweight subject. The treatment is thorough with a good spread on pp 8 and 9. And the whole thing is extremely skillfully handled to make it as broad and accessible as possible. The packaging is good: case histories, Q&A, analysis. And therefore as night follows day the design is good too.

The single blurb on page one is thrillingly and daringly dull: an interview with Khaled Hosseini flagged with the words ‘The Book Seller’. Whoever wrote it should not shrink from doing something similar again. It is simple and understated, saying almost nothing about the piece inside except that there is an interview with a man who sells a lot of books. And the interview is good and interesting.

I like the idea of putting the briefs along the bottom and opening up the main page area. There is really no need to have a column of briefs down the side except that it adds an important vertical element to an otherwise cake-layered front page.

My only front page design reservation is the placing of the blurb above the masthead. I have always found it the hardest choice; far worse than which end of a boiled egg to crack open and far more worth going to war over. At various papers in very different circumstances I have tried above and below. In the end, after much deliberation, I have decided that blurb below is best.

The main reason, I always believed, for having the blurb above is that it somehow separated the bingo and the free packet of seeds from the beginning of the real paper. That was marked by the masthead, below which one gave readers a sense of real priorities.

In a previous incarnation I put the FT blurb above the masthead for similar reasons. Even though there was never any bingo in the FT, I still thought that a funny piece by Lucy Kellaway should be the other side of the title from the serious news coverage.

Now I think that was wrong and I am glad that Ryan and the new FT regime have moved the blurbs back below. First, no ordinary reader gets the message that above the masthead means somehow ‘not at the heart of what we are about’. So it is a semiotic redundancy. Second, where the paper is stacked in upright racks with other titles slightly below and in front, all you could see was Lucy Kellaway and not Financial Times.

Moreover, today I believe newspapers have to try as hard as possible to present themselves as a rich and varied mixtures. It is not news that sells newspapers. It is the quality of the mixture around the news: everything from the comment to the cut price plane tickets. The information and entertainment package that is The Times includes a whole lot more than news and by putting the masthead right at the top and then mixing the other elements of the front page below, you support that message.

Having the blurb at the top does slightly lessen the impact of the title and hint that I might buy the paper more for an interview with Khaled Hosseini than for the fact that it is The Times. For 90% of readers the opposite is likely to be the case. And anyway, a good interview with Khaled ‘the book seller’ has no diminishing effect upon the new, more serious, positioning of the paper.

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The Monitor Launches

By Ryan Bowman
April 7th, 2008 at 03:47pm
Media, Newspapers

I went to Kampala last Wednesday to see through the Monitor launch…looking at it again today after a long (and much delayed, as usual) flight I still think it looks remarkably good. Much more on this later but suffice to say its success is a credit to a hard working and dedicated staff. Congratulations to all….below see selected pages from the first three editions (click on the pages to see full-sized versions)….

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Hail

By Ryan Bowman
March 21st, 2008 at 05:21pm
Media

If I learned anything this Good Friday, it is not to underestimate the odd hailstorm in supposedly Springy London, it felt like our poor building (we are working this holiday like a good little company) might topple under the bombardment of thousands of little bits of ice. First, crocodiles in humid Entebbe, now ice in unnaturally freezing London…what next?

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Excuses

By Richard Addis
March 21st, 2008 at 11:04am
Media

Okay….we know it hasn’t been updated daily for a while. Here’s what has been going on.

We were in Kampala finishing the work for The Daily Monitor which is now planning to do its relaunch on April 4th so we should soon be able to show you the results.

We were nearly a crocodile’s breakfast in Lake Victoria (see Evening Standard story above) when we were on a BA flight that aborted take-off. Or try this version of the story.

When we finally got home there was the large and unruly Disruptive Thinking gathering in Barcelona to organise and moderate. You can watch the dialogues here on video or read about the event here on the website.

Then there was a birth and a death in company (well my son was born and my father died within three hours of each other) so I have been useless while poor Ryan has been working incredibly hard. My dad’s obituary in The Times came out today. I feel bad that I gave them a fine portrait by Eric Baldauf but forget to ask for a picture credit.

Now I am disappearing to a mountaintop for week to collect myself before leaping back into the fray.

There is a great deal that could be said about all the experiences above but, sticking to the theme of this blog which is media, the main thing that struck me was how good the fact-checker was at The Times classified when I called to place the death announcment for my father.

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Web or print?

By Richard Addis
March 21st, 2008 at 10:34am
Media

I like this quote from Tyler Brule (talking about Monocle)

 “We’ve developed a brand that employs both formats and uses them to the best of their abilities. Paper and ink for pictures and words, the web for audio and video. I think it’s more a case of media owners forgetting how to innovate with paper, and the web has provided a perfect excuse for a market that’s been stagnating for far too long.”

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Feature idea (102)

By Richard Addis
February 20th, 2008 at 03:44pm
Feature ideas

An interesting person to read in praise of Fidel Castro’s achievements would be Margaret Atwood. She has travelled often to Cuba. Her husband Graeme Gibson goes birdwatching there and has written a book about it. She herself wrote the preface to a book about Cuba (Grace Under Pressure by Rosemary Sullivan, 2003) and I would not be surprised if she compared Castro favourably to many US political leaders, not to mention leaders of her native Canada.

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