Apple Daily and Jimmy Lai: Trying to save democracy in Hong Kong

 

In most countries Jimmy Lai would be considered a business hero. That's definitely the case in Hong Kong where he lives as the CEO of Next Media. As you may also know, Jimmy Lai is also the highest profile defender of democracy in Hong Kong and was recently arrested - together with some of his family members and staff, by Chinese authorities under the new 'anti-terrorism' laws which are designed specifically by the authorities (read Beijing) to enforce communist party rule in Hong Kong.

 

Update 12/8/20:  Lai has been jailed on trumped up fraud charges related to the illegal operation of a business. He has been denied bail and his court hearing is scheduled for April 2021.  His attorney's say they will appeal this denial but the government says he is a flight risk even though they have his passport and he's not tried to leave HK. This recent intimidation by the Beijing government occurs in tandem with the arrest of several pro democracy activists. (BBC)

In 1998, I was engaged on a consulting assignment for Next Media in Hong Kong and spent two months working on a technology strategy for the newspaper business which published Apple Daily.  Lai had just sold his retail clothing business and was focusing all his attention on his new newspaper.  He had established Apple Daily three or four years years before I arrived in Hong Kong and he built the business from the ground up including building his own state of the art printing plant. The newspaper was seeing very rapid growth fueled by sensationalist lead stories including one which lead to a suicide. While I was there, the paper was following the rags to riches story of a local gangster who was on trial for murder with other lurid details the paper threw in every day. Apparently, this gangster spread the money around and was nick named "Big Spender" by Apple Daily and became a bit of a cult hero. Perfect material for a newspaper like Apple Daily. Over a three week period, I learned all about Big Spender from my Chinese colleagues and three days after he was convicted Big Spender was hanged. Justice is swift in China.

 

My interaction with Lai was infrequent but I definitely had the sense his vision far exceeded the awareness of the executives (and consultants) who worked for him. I've seen this trait in other interactions with executives (such as Jeff Bezos) where coming away from the conversation you are left thinking that they are almost bored with the discussion because they are thinking so far ahead or far more strategically. At Next Media, Lai was thinking not only about how technology could help support his newspaper but also the many new businesses he wanted to experiment with such as online retail, home deliveries and membership programs. In one exchange he described "UberEats" and wanted his team to investigate establishing a van fleet and supporting logistics. This was 1998 and we hadn't even had the first internet bubble yet. We thought he was a little nuts.

 

Jimmy Lai's Next Media is now the last independent voice in Hong Kong media. Since their start as a sensationalist newspaper, and as other newspapers folded, Apple Daily became a political voice for the democracy movement in Hong Kong. Sadly, the options for Jimmy Lai, his family and employees are stark: either give up criticism of the ruling party or lose everything including their freedom. Leaving Hong Kong would be the only other option. Jimmy Lai doesn't want to do that. Jimmy Lai is a hero. (Listen to The Daily interview with him).

 

My consulting work at Next Media involved a review of the IT environment and internal workflow procedures in the Apple Daily editorial and production functions. I lead the team which conducted interviews and work groups and developed a thorough understanding of the IT environment, internal processes and procedures. Based on our analysis, six key projects designed to support management’s goals and objectives were identified. The toughest challenge in this work was language since most of the workers did not have a good understanding of English. This was also an issue for technology. 

 

We found that software typically found in news operations the US and Europe simply wasn't available. Standard editorial solutions from Atex and Unisys Hermes had not been translated due to the complicated nature of the double byte translation problem. We did locate a local vendor that had 'translated' an older version of Atex into Mandarin which was exactly what we were looking for except for the theft issue. Next Media was producing 300,000 copies a day using a cobbled together set of home grown software.

 

My teams recommendations were fairly rudimentary: The development of a formal IT organizational structure, definition of an IT strategy, stabilization of the network
and a more structured approach to processes, personnel roles and responsibilities. We also provided best practices relative to newspaper publishing and profiled a number of the major workflow package providers for newspapers.

 

This was one of my most interesting projects and to spend that much time in Hong Kong was also a bonus. At the time (1998), the transfer of power from the UK to China was still in its early days and there was hope and expectation that 'one country, two systems' was doable. Just over 20 years later and that hope is gone.

 

 

I ROBOT

© Andrea Danti thinkstock

Artificial intelligence and machine learning tools are making significant inroads into publishing processes and product development.

Those of us who may be short on time and haven’t been able to get to that autobiography we’ve been meaning to write need worry no longer:  Artillect Publishing will do the work for you by scanning your online presence, merging some ancillary information and producing your sure-to-be best-selling biography.  Using artificial intelligence in its production process, Artillect is just one example of the increasing number of applications of artificial intelligence (AI) replacing inefficient processes, creating new products and adding insight to publishing.

News organizations including the Washington Post and Associated Press have been using artificial intelligence tools to create news reports for weather, sports and financial reporting where interpretation of the day’s (or game’s) activity can be fairly straightforward.   As these uses have grown in acceptance and utility, the use of AI to deliver more complex products is also growing.  AI tools can analyze text, images and data and deliver to a journalist sufficiently structured content around which they can build articles and stories.  AI tools can do this faster, more comprehensively and with greater accuracy than traditional research methods.  In analyzing text or images, AI tools can characterize the content: Positive/negative, liberal/conservative, for example.   Journalists have even used this capability to change editorial content to match specific political viewpoints, creating liberal, center and/or conservative versions of the same article.

The accuracy (or veracity) of news content generally sparks emotions and Knowwhere is applying AI and ML to the detection of ‘fakenews’.  Their process aggregates stories from more than a thousand different sources of varying political persuasions to create a “knowledge graph” or database of each news story which is then reviewed by (human) editors.  Mediashift recently reported that USAToday uses AI to create visual and interactive content, which they refer to as ‘dynamic editorial’ and hope will improve attention and raise reader engagement.

Journalism is by no means the only focus for AI and many companies across the media landscape are using and experimenting with AI tools.  In the last few days, for example, journal publisher Taylor & Francis (T&F) announced two partnerships with AI companies to add AI tools to their editorial processes.   In the first of these, T&F are working with Katalyst Technologies to create “contextual copyediting” using AI and natural language processing to assess and score the language quality of articles accepted into their journal’s workflow.  This use of AI is designed to make their editorial process more efficient by identifying and classifying journal submissions.  In the second example, the company announced they are working with UNSILO which will help T&F subscribers optimize the use of T&F content by surfacing additional, highly relevant content based on what they are already reading.   T&F expects that this function will enable users to discover new and pertinent research.

Next month, at the Society of Scholarly Publishers (SSP) meeting in Chicago, I am hosting a panel discussion on how publishers are using AI and machine learning (ML) to rethink how they manage their businesses.  On the panel, I will have executives from Storyfit, Yewno, Unsilo and Molecular Connections.   In advance of that meeting, I thought it would be interesting to explore some of the companies offering their versions of AI to publishers:

StoryFit: Uses machine learning and data analysis to predict content marketability, improve discovery and drive sales for publishers and movie studios.

Yewno: Uses machine-learning and computational linguistics analyze high-quality content to extract concepts and discern patterns and relationships to make large volumes of information more effective.

UNSILO: Provides artificial intelligence tools and solutions for publishers to grow new business opportunities and improve existing customer experiences and workflows.

Bibblio: A recommender system that helps content businesses and publishers deliver more relevant, engaging discovery experiences to their users.

Iris.ai: Helps researchers build precise reading lists of research documents across three parameters: Key information extraction (marking of possible contextually disambiguating information, forming basis for a document fingerprint); Neural Topic Modeling (clustering of semantically similar documents, cluster labeling, document fingerprint update); WISDM (basis for document fingerprint indexing. Fingerprints are matched using the WISDM document similarity metric.)

ECHOBOX: Helps content owners automate their social media presence and “is the best social media platform for publishers.”   Their solution is the “first artificial intelligence that increases your reach.”

Copyleaks:  Detects plagiarized content in scholarly workflows.

StatReviewer:  Uses ML to generate statistical and methodological reviews for scientific manuscripts to discern the integrity for scientific manuscripts.  Product is currently in private beta.

Webbitz: An AI-powered video creation platform that leverages patented text-to-video technology to streamline production of original short-form videos across multiple platforms.  The company works with more than 400 publishers.

Ross Intelligence: Using a combination of IBM Watson and proprietary algorithms, ROSS is the AI-driven successor to tools like LexisNexis and supports both legal discovery and legal research findings.

ScriptBook: Employs artificial intelligence to analyze screenplays.  The Script2Screen-solution delivers an objective assessment of a script's commercial and critical success.  The company believes their AI-driven process delivers both objective and fair results.  It treats every screenplay equally with no bias.

Arkadium: An AI product company which has been used by Sports Illustrated to create infographics.

There is little doubt that AI and ML applications and tools are here to stay within publishing workflows.  But it’s also true that we are only at the beginning of what will be a fundamental shift in workforce management, application and roles.   The prevailing concern is that machines will take all the jobs and leave humans with nothing left to do.  Not only is this excessive hyperbole, the impact of technology on work activities over the last 200 years points more towards a shift in the role of human work rather than the total replacement of workers.   When ATMs were first rolled out more than 30 years ago, there was an expectation that brick and mortar banks and their tellers would disappear.  In fact, the opposite occurred and teller employment increased as banks focused on building closer customer relationships.

AI will improve publisher workflows but will also help expand the utility and benefits of the products we are producing for customers.  Many of the newspapers mentioned above have been able to materially broaden their reporting in a way which would not have been possible without the type of functionality that AI offers.  Expect to see many more examples of this technology within the publishing business more broadly.

Chatting with a Chat Bot. BBC Labs Experiments

An interesting article from Nieman Labs which takes a look at how the BBC are experimenting with Chatbots.  Not just how they an enage but also how to integrate the tool into the journalists workflow:

The BBC News Labs and the BBC Visual Journalism team are trying to solve both issues with a single solution: a custom bot-builder application designed to make it as easy as possible for reporters to build chatbots and insert them into their stories. In a few minutes, a BBC reporter can input the text of an article, define the questions users can click, and publish the bot, which can then be reused and added to any other relevant article. BBC reporters can even repurpose existing Q&A explainers into bot-based conversations.

So, on this story about a typo on State of the “Uniom” tickets, a “Catch me up” module says: “Donald Trump came into office promising to change the face of American politics and transfer power ‘back to the people.’ This BBC chatbot lets you ask: what has President Trump achieved in his first year?” Three potential questions are offered. (How are the President’s approval ratings? How is the economy faring under President Trump? And has the President changed immigration numbers?) Pick one and a chat interface expands with answers. (“He’s one of the most unpopular presidents in the modern era.”) With each answer, one or more new questions pop up as options; the Trump chatbot contains more than a dozen in all.)

The Giant List of Publishing Predictions for 2016

Here is a listing of some interesting predictions for 2016 across the publishing and media sector:

Trade and Self-Publishing

Mark Coker from Smashwords provides a comprehensive exploration of trends for 2016 with particular focus on the Amazon subscription model and its impact on traditional publishers.  His post also includes extensive follow-up and comments: 2016 Book Publishing Industry Predictions: Myriad Opportunities amid a Slow Growth Environment

Jonathon Sturgeon as flavorwire suggests "Books by Committee, Self-Published Books by Computers" may be something we need to watch out for during 2016: From Adult Relaxation to Prole Erotica: Book Publishing Predictions for 2016

Blogsite Bookworks presents: 2016 Predictions for the Self-Publishing Industry

Digital Book World asked Tom Chalmers for his 10 Industry Predictions for 2016

Jane Friedman has 5 Industry Issues for Authors to Watch in 2016

Publisher'sWeekly: What Does 2016 Hold for Digital Publishing?

LA Times: 6 book trends for 2016: Look into the future

Academic and Scholarly Publishing

From Publishing Perspectives five predictions for open access academic publishing

From Scholarly Kitchen: Ask The Chefs: What Do You See On The Horizon For Scholarly Publishing In 2016?

General and Digital Media:

Deloitte Media: Telecommunications and Technology predictions for 2016 report

MediaPost: The Mobile Revolution Accelerates

From Talking New Media Five digital publishing predictions from Arazoo Nadir

From Publishing Executive magazine:  2016: The Year Ahead for Publishing in 12 Words

From MediaShift:  VR Heats Up, Publishers Wise Up to Fraud and 10 Predictions for Media Metrics

Techcrunch: Predictions on the future of Digital Media

What's new in publishing: Digital Publishing Predictions for 2016 

From Mequoda: 3 Subscription Website Publishing Predictions for 2016

A Gartner report Top Strategic Predictions for 2016 and Beyond:  The Future Is A Digital Thing. (but requires registration)

Millward Brown: Digital and Media Predictions 2016

equimedia: Digital media predictions for 2016

Fred Wilson: 2016 Predictions

Top Indian publishers predict digital publishing trends for 2016

Newspaper/Journalism:

Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, released a new report: Media, Journalism and Technology Predictions 2016. 

From Neiman Labs: Predictions for Journalism in 2016

At Forbes and short set of suggestions: Who Will Win The Publishing Battle In 2016? Early Predictions For What's Next

There's more than enough here to keep anyone busy well into 2016.  For my predictions from years past click on this link to list all of them.

MediaWeek (Vol 6, No 40): Open Access Publishing Scam?, US Panorama, Political Biographies, Expensive Journalism, 50 Shades +More

Lots of discussion has been generated by the publication in Science magazine about journalist John Bohannon expose about open access journal publishing.  Here commentary from The Chronicle:

“The data from this sting operation reveal the contours of an emerging Wild West in academic publishing,” Mr. Bohannon wrote in Friday’s issue of Science.
For now, however, allegations of flaws—at least in the way the magazine promoted the piece, if not how the study was constructed from the start—are commanding the bulk of the attention.
Mr. Bohannon offered his fake science submission only to open-access journals, a growing model in which published articles are made freely available rather than restricted to readers with a paid subscription.  More than a dozen critiques have been posted to various news sites and blogs, some of them suggesting a bias by Science, which charges for subscriptions, against the open-access model.
The pique is less about Mr. Bohannon’s 4,200-word article, which suggests he confirmed a problem throughout academic publishing, than his magazine’s 200-word press release (read it here; scroll down to see it), which repeatedly emphasized his findings as an indictment of the open-access model. The sting operation, Science said in its promotion, “exposes the dark side of open-access publishing.”

What the magazine got wrong: Guardian

Favorite fonts from the Observer a pictorial:

Three weeks ago, Domenic Lippa, a partner at Pentagram Design Consultancy, selected his favourite 10 fonts. His list inspired hundreds of readers to pick their preferred typeface. He says: 'Nowadays we all use fonts: the digital revolution has meant that we can choose from thousands every day. Only 20 years ago, most people wrote correspondence by hand, or used a typewriter, using a font called "typewriter". Typography, once the domain of an elite minority, has now become democratic, and with that comes a voice. The hundreds of examples posted here all have something to inspire. If you want to know which type you are, check out this little game my company created a couple of years ago – it might change your view of fonts…'

Why do politicians like writing political biographies so much? New Statesman:

It made for a fine silly-season story to read that Boris Johnson was writing a book about Winston Churchill. Here we see a man, instantly recognisable and quite irrepressible, a master of wit and wordplay, from a privileged background yet with the common touch, always ready to parade his own vices to mock political correctness, and above all a bad party man with ill-concealed ambitions to get to the top. But which man?

The question is hardly new. When a living politician is drawn to be the biographer of a great statesman – that is, a dead politician – we are bound to wonder about the motivation. In the past, the usual reason was piety. An eminent former colleague or political disciple, preferably one with some literary bent, had to be recruited as the keeper of the bones of the saint. John Morley’s life of his hero Gladstone is a classic example. What was expected was a work in at least two volumes, as the conventional “tombstone” biography. De mortuis nil nisi bunkum.

Saturday Night Live - Screen tests for Fifty Shades of Grey: pairings from Seth Rogen (Bobby Moynihan) and Emma Stone (Noël Wells) to Tracy Morgan (Jay Pharoah) and Tilda Swinton (Kate McKinnon) try out for the coveted roles of Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele. (The sketch's casting of Nasim Pedrad as Aziz Ansari serves as a reminder of the ensemble's overall homogeneity). 

Why investigative journalism is still necessary but also very expensive.  A case study in The Atlantic (Peter Osnos) of Propublica.

Clearly, $750,000 is a very expensive story. On the other hand, what price do you suppose a parent with a young, feverish child might put on these disclosures? As a society we have to find the means to underwrite reporting of this magnitude. Of all the funding ideas that are mainly predictable—foundations, sponsored conferences (a particular specialty of the Texas Tribune), annual appeals, donor buttons on the sites--one notion that deserves far more attention than it has received so far came from Steven Waldman, the author of the Federal Communication Commission's massive 2011 study of the country's news media in the broadband era, including "shortfalls in robust accountability journalism." According to a report by Rick Edmonds of the Poynter Institute, Waldman told the conference that he believes that the tech companies that have grown in scale and revenues to a considerable degree from their distribution of news—Apple, Google, Verizon, AT&T—owe these nonprofit content providers a portion of their massive proceeds. "The winners of the new economy. . . . If they would put just a tiny bit of their wealth into this," Waldman said, serious journalism could thrive.

From twitter;
In Maui’s Upcountry, Where the Paniolo Roam NYTimes My old neighborhood.

MediaWeek (Vol 6, No 25): A great presentation, What does social mean for Journalism? + More

Chris Anderson the curator of the TED talks writes about killer presentations (HBR):

We all know that humans are wired to listen to stories, and metaphors abound for the narrative structures that work best to engage people. When I think about compelling presentations, I think about taking an audience on a journey. A successful talk is a little miracle—people see the world differently afterward.
If you frame the talk as a journey, the biggest decisions are figuring out where to start and where to end. To find the right place to start, consider what people in the audience already know about your subject—and how much they care about it. If you assume they have more knowledge or interest than they do, or if you start using jargon or get too technical, you’ll lose them. The most engaging speakers do a superb job of very quickly introducing the topic, explaining why they care so deeply about it, and convincing the audience members that they should, too.

From the Columbia Journalism Review: Streams of Consciousness:  Millennials expect a steady diet of quick-hit, social-media-mediated bits and bytes. What does that mean for journalism?

However, studies show that several emerging shifts—from print and broadcast television to digital news, from computers to mobile devices, and from homepage browsing to social-media filtration—are all widespread among millennials.
How does it change the value of journalism to strip away the context that a credible publication provides? A reader who comes through a social-media side door is given no sense of a story’s relative importance. A blog post on the latest fad diet that would never have made it onto the front page, or even into print at all, can go viral and attract far more readers than the latest news from Syria. Readers who no longer page through a newspaper or sit through the evening news are bound to miss some information they might not click on but could benefit from knowing nonetheless.
To get a sense of these evolving patterns of news consumption, and their implications, I interviewed some two dozen young journalists (mostly editors of new digital publications), as well as social-media directors, digital-media executives, academics, and researchers.
I found four overlapping, and mutually reinforcing, trends:

• Proliferation of news sources, formats, and new technologies for media consumption
• Participation by consumers in the dissemination and creation of news, through social-media sharing, commenting, blogging, and the posting online of photos, audio, and video
• Personalization of one’s streams of news via email, mobile apps, and social media
• Source promiscuity Rather than having strong relationships with a handful of media brands, young people graze among a vast array of news outlets.

Both of the above are long so I will leave it at that for this week.

From twitter this week:
News: Katie Price Is To Release Her Fifth Autobiography Independent”. Four more to go?
Apple sells 800k TV shows and 350k movies a day. That's nuts. Techcrunch
Profiting from a market at the price of zero Brian's Blog
Is Anyone In Charge At Nook Media? MikeCane

MediaWeek (Vol 6, No 14): Window Cleaners, Museum Stores, Goodreads, Media News + More

Confessions of a window cleaner now back in print and coming from Harpercollins. (Independent):

While the films quickly ran out of steam, the books that inspired them didn't. Written by a former advertising executive called Christopher Wood under the pseudonym Timothy Lea, they ran to 19 titles, and Wood penned a further eight under the name of Rosie Dixon. They were overwhelmingly of their time (and there can be no better excuse), but it seems they are about to have their time again. Over the next 18 months, HarperCollins imprint The Friday Project will reissue all of them as e-books.
Good god, but why?
...
The cast of that film might well wish to quickly forget their involvement in it, much as many associated with the Confessions… films do today. Tony Booth, who played Timothy Lea's brother-in-law, declined an interview (much, you suspect, to his daughter Cherie Blair's relief); likewise Lynda Bellingham and Jill Gascoine, both presumably reluctant to revisit their early, naked screen appearances. Robin Askwith, for whom Confessions… proved a career high point, was prepared to give us an interview, but offered us just 20 minutes of his time in exchange for £500 – a figure greater than he would ever have received for cleaning windows.
There is, however, somebody happy to talk, for free – and that is the author himself. I meet Christopher Wood on a cold Thursday morning in a chic London restaurant. Now 77, Wood, elegant in his tweed jacket and wispy white beard, is terribly well spoken (he pronounces "off" as "orf"), and emits the kind of carefree air so common in older people and so envied by younger ones.

In the not really news category - The Observer notes the success of Museum stores that are popping up everywhere selling all kinds of things. (Observer):

Some of the more creative items appear to have been thought up in several eureka moments. St Paul's Cathedral harvested some of the rubble from recent refurbishments and set it into cufflinks. For £210 owners can now decorate their shirt cuffs with marble from the starburst under its famous dome.

Over at the National Theatre shop, the success of Warhorse – turned into a film directed by Steven Spielberg – led to the offer of a £2,500 half-size replica of the geese puppets used in the stage show, created by the puppeteers who made the originals.

At the Science Museum, shoppers can buy vases shaped as Thomas Edison's iconic light bulb, made from recycled incandescent bulbs. The museum has asked its inventor in residence, Mark Champkins, to create more unique items for it to sell.

However, perhaps leading the way in terms of creativity is the London Transport Museum in Covent Garden. To celebrate London Underground's 150th anniversary, the creative heads there have salvaged luggage racks from old Metropolitan line trains – selling them for £250.

At The Atlantic Jordan Weissmann opines why he thinks Goodreads is so valuable to Amazon.

So Amazon has just bought the ecosystem where many of America's most influential readers choose their books. How exactly they'll use it isn't entirely clear yet. Some have suggested they'll integrate Goodreads into the Kindle experience. Others think that, given the problems Amazon has had with writers buying friendly reviews, they might use the site as an a big cache of trustworthy opinions. As David Vinjamuri put it at Forbes, "Goodreads offers Amazon the ability to transmit the recommendations of prolific readers to the average reader." In any event, there's plenty of value for Amazon to unlock. Assuming, of course, they don't do anything to muck up their new purchase.

The Economist as a quick look at news organizations and concludes:

Where is the good news? Last year local TV stations, especially those in swing states like Florida and Ohio, got a welcome boost from the $3 billion spent on TV advertising during the election. And newspapers are now starting in large numbers to demand payment for their digital content. Pew reckons that around a third of America’s 1,380 dailies have started (or will soon launch) paywalls, inspired by the success of the New York Times, where 640,000 subscribers get the digital edition and circulation now accounts for a larger portion of revenues than advertising.

Boosting circulation revenue will help stem losses from print advertising, since it has become clear that digital advertising will not be enough. For every $16 lost in print advertising last year, newspapers made only around $1 from digital ads. The bulk of the $37.3 billion spent on digital advertising in 2012 went to five firms: Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft and AOL. Not much Gandhian equality there.

From my Twitter Feed this week.

Scholarly Publishing: Project Muse and Highwire Press Announce Partnership PressRelease
In digital age, library finds difficulty attaching numbers to its value. Topeka CapitalJournal (They buried the lead).
CourseSmart Analytics Is a Bad idea | Inside Higher Ed InsideHigherEd
Amazon Takes on Dropbox With New Desktop File Syncing Wired
Rosetta Stone acquires Livemocha for $8.5m (Nick Summers/The Next Web) TNW
BBC News - Judge rules digital music cannot be sold 'second hand' BBC

MediaWeek (Vol 6, No 11): Phoenix Flames Out, Pompeii Exhibit, Springer, MOOCs + More

The Boston Phoenix closed down last week. (CJR):

But nobody was expecting the guillotine. I certainly wasn’t. As a longtime Phoenix reader and part-time Boston resident, I’m shocked and disconsolate. The Phoenix is and was one of the best alt-weeklies in the country. From its smart reporting on state and local politics to its tough, nuanced coverage of social justice issues, the Phoenix consistently exemplified the best of the alternative press. Staff writer Chris Faraone’s you-are-there coverage of the Occupy movement was honest, unsentimental, and indispensable; during last year’s presidential campaign, political writer David S. Bernstein offered valuable insight into the Romney cotillion. The paper’s departments were memorable, too—David Thorpe’s loopy The Big Hurt music column; Robert Nadeau’s authoritative restaurant reviews; Barry Thompson’s “Meet the Mayor” series of interviews with various local Foursquare “mayors;” the tenacious local arts coverage. All were lively and occasionally brilliant; all will be missed. 

That’s not to say that the paper was flawless. No publication is. But, from my perspective, the Phoenix’s successes far outnumbered its failures. More to the point, the Phoenix was a legitimately independent weekly in a space largely dominated by conglomerate corporate media. While other alt-weeklies across the country were acquired by national chains, the Phoenix remained resolutely rooted in New England. (The Boston Phoenix had two sister papers in Providence, RI, and Portland, ME, both of which will continue to publish.) Now, the only true alt-weekly in Boston is the wisecracking Weekly Dig, which has a huge opportunity if it plays its cards right. (Many current Phoenix staffers began their careers at the Dig.)

Looks like a fascinating show at the British Museum (where the world comes to see their stuff) about domestic life in Pompeii and Herculaneum (FT):

Paul Roberts, the exhibition’s curator, talks me through the lessons of the double portrait, found at the site of a bakery. “We assume he is the bakery owner. He wears a white toga, which may mean he is a candidatus for political office. But his wife is the amazing one. She is the one with the reckoning tablet. They are equal, and they are shown equal, standing together, members of a confident, mercantile class.  

“And this was the reality of life for a lot of Roman women. They wouldn’t have been little old ladies sitting at home. They were highly visible in society.” Roberts plays down their disenfranchisement. “Think of Edwardian England: no vote, no ability to stand for office but tons of money and tons of influence.”  This is the most complete show, Roberts believes, to illustrate the domestic life of the two cities. It is designed to show the riches that would have adorned the typical prosperous Roman household: its gardens, its dining rooms; its private jokes and its grandiloquent statements of self-importance. The Italian addiction to bella figura, he says, can be traced to the flamboyance of ancient Rome.

Also in the FT, the Springer sale is off earlier than expected since the offers from some selected potential buyers were less than expected. This can mean only one thing. (FT)

But earlier this year, EQT hinted that it may wait until later in the year to start a formal process, after price indications from potential buyers including German media group Bertelsmann fell short of expectations, people with knowledge of the matter said then.
The fact that it is now accelerating the sale process highlights a dramatic shift in sentiment among the largest private equity firms in Europe over the past two months, as debt funding for acquisitions increases amid an investors rush into high yield bonds.
However this time, Bertelsmann says it won’t bid for Springer Science. After signalling for months that it would have a look at the publisher if it went on sale, the German media group said it was no longer interested.

Slightly biased research (which they admit to) on how faculty feel about the MOOCs they have taught (Chronicle):

The findings are not scientific, and perhaps the most enthusiastic of the MOOC professors were the likeliest complete the survey. These early adopters of MOOCs have overwhelmingly volunteered to try them—only 15 percent of respondents said they taught a MOOC at the behest of a superior—so the deck was somewhat stacked with true believers. A few professors whose MOOCs have gone publicly awry did not respond to the survey.

But the participants were primarily longtime professors with no prior experience with online instruction. More than two-thirds were tenured, and most had taught college for well over a decade. The respondents were overwhelmingly white and male. In other words, these were not fringe-dwelling technophiles with a stake in upending the status quo.

Therefore the positive response may come as a surprise to some observers. Every year the Babson Survey Research Group asks chief academic administrators to estimate what percentage of their faculty members "accept the value and legitimacy of online education"; the average estimate in recent years has stalled at 30 percent, even as online programs have become mainstream.

Professors at top-ranked colleges are seen as having especially entrenched views. For years, "elite" institutions appeared to view online courses as higher education's redheaded stepchild—good enough for for-profit institutions and state universities, maybe, but hardly equivalent to the classes held on their own campuses. Now these high-profile professors, who make up most of the survey participants, are signaling a change of heart that could indicate a bigger shake-up in the higher-education landscape.

Also from Wired: Where are MOOCs really going? (Wired):

The initial MOOCs came from a “process business model” where companies bring inputs together at one end and transform them into a higher-value output for customers at the other end — as with the retail and manufacturing industries.

But over time, an approach where users exchange information from each other similar to Facebook or telecommunications (a “facilitated network model”) will come to dominate online learning. This evolution is especially likely to happen if the traditional degree becomes irrelevant and, as many predict, learning becomes a continuous, on-the-job learning process. Then the need for customization will drive us toward just-in-time mini-courses.

And from the twitter feed this week:
How International Pricing Strategy Affects Publisher Profitability EPubDirect
OCLC launches WorldShare Interlibrary Loan service in the US KnowledgeSpeak
Historical audio: Unforgotten songs Economist
Ray Cusick Economist The genius who invented the Daleks. They got him.
ProQuest to Distribute NewspaperARCHIVE to Libraries Worldwide Link