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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A case for reviving dialogues

By Richard Addis
February 19th, 2008 at 07:59am
Magazines, Media, Newspapers

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 7^th. 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.

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Facebook for the 19th century

By Ryan Bowman
February 14th, 2008 at 05:48pm
Newspapers, Politics, Websites

Barak Obama claims that he is raising a $1m a day, mostly online and mostly in the form of relatively small donations from private individuals. This sort of political “micro-philanthropy” is a thoroughly modern affair (see Peter Deitz’ amazing slideshow on the phenomenon–one interesting point: in Apr ‘07 distributed fundraising sites more than $3m; see also ChipIn for a widget version). Or, at least, that is what I had always thought.  Then this morning,  I heard a piece on the Statue of Liberty on Radio 4 that revealed the true father of “micro-philanthropy” - Joseph Pulitzer.

In post Civil War America (postbellum?), newspapers were a genuinely powerful force. The invention of more efficient and cheaper printing presses and an increasingly urban demographic allowed newspapers to become a populist medium for the first time.  As a result, papers had enormous influence on the issues of the day.  One of the world’s great campaigning newspapers, Joseph Pulitzer’s The World (see page on left) is from this era and is at least partially responsible for bringing the France’s greatest gift (besides all that help with the pesky red coats), the Statue of Liberty, to New York. (There is also one in Tokyo - see photo above courtesy of Stefan on flickr and also one in Paris)

France generously offered the huge, 151 ft statue as a gift, leaving the United States to pay only for the plinth on which it would stand.  Alas, most of the fat cats in the country thought of the statue as a New York momument that had nothing to do with the rest of the country and refused to stump for the plinth.  But, then Pulitzer got on the case, haranguing both the rich for not caring about their country and poor for expecting the rich to do all the work.  The result?  Money literally poured in, a great deal of it from school children sending in pennys to see their name in print and to give to what was suddenly seen as a worthy cause.  Today, of course, this sort of social movement would start and end on Facebook of Bebo.

This is a crucial lesson for today’s far less powerful newspapers.  They need to go retro and engage, even uncover, issues people really care about.  They need to become rallying points again.

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