MediaWeek (Vol 7, No 9): New newsroom practices. Artificial intelligence, Amazon bad for Books?

A look at the (new) local newsroom from CJR:

One reason the record can devote itself entirely to local news is because its parent company operates something called Thunderdome. In 2012, Digital First opened a newsroom on the 25th floor of a Wall Street office building where about 50 journalists produce most of the non-local content for each of its newspapers. They create national and foreign reports; package videos that populate each paper’s site; write food, health, and tech features; and jump on big breaking stories.

Unlike a traditional chain’s national bureau, Thunderdome doesn’t have beat reporters out covering major news events. Thunderdome is an artifact of the digital definition of journalism. It mainly aggregates and repackages material from wires, other content partners, and local papers. “If we get a story from The Washington Post, we’re not reediting it,” says Mike Topel, the news editor. “We’re looking for what digital enhancements we can do.” Thunderdome producers also jump on breaking stories and memes so all of Digital First’s sites around the country can reflect what’s happening in the moment.

Digital First’s editor in chief, Jim Brady, says he built Thunderdome in part to help his newsrooms remake themselves as places where the face-off between print and digital could become irrelevant. The room is populated largely with veterans of print newsrooms and Brady’s plan is for them to marry print traditions of completeness, verification, and authority with the digital imperatives for speed and connection with the audience’s interests. “The battles are still there,” he says, “but they’ve receded, as digital people have moved into leadership roles, and as everyone learned that aggregation can only take you so far, and as people from both backgrounds learn that it’s better to be second than wrong.”

....

On the Friday I spent at Thunderdome, I had a story back at my own paper that was being edited for that Sunday’s Washington Post. After I spoke to Prieto, I checked my messages to find that five levels of editors had questions or thoughts about my story—my assignment editor, a copy editor, the section editor, another section editor, and the Sunday editor. That multi-layered approach—unusually dense because this piece was going A1 on Sunday—comforts the writer, but is no guarantee of perfection. Within four hours after the story appeared on the Web, one of the main characters complained that I had endangered his family by providing too much detail about where he lived—a decision that had generated zero discussion among the six of us who read the piece closely before publication.

The dawn of artificial intelligence (Atlantic)

In addition to powerful and useful AI, the other recent development that promises to further accelerate the second machine age is the digital interconnection of the planet’s people. There is no better resource for improving the world and bettering the state of humanity than the world’s humans—all 7.1 billion of us. Our good ideas and innovations will address the challenges that arise, improve the quality of our lives, allow us to live more lightly on the planet, and help us take better care of one another. It is a remarkable and unmistakable fact that, with the exception of climate change, virtually all environmental, social, and individual indicators of health have improved over time, even as human population has increased.
This improvement is not a lucky coincidence; it is cause and effect. Things have gotten better because there are more people, who in total have more good ideas that improve our overall lot. The economist Julian Simon was one of the first to make this optimistic argument, and he advanced it repeatedly and forcefully throughout his career. He wrote, “It is your mind that matters economically, as much or more than your mouth or hands. In the long run, the most important economic effect of population size and growth is the contribution of additional people to our stock of useful knowledge. And this contribution is large enough in the long run to overcome all the costs of population growth.”

Is Amazon bad for books (NewYorker?

Publishers weren’t troubled that Amazon sold their books at dramatic discounts. They all wanted to collaborate with the Seattle upstart, and they used Amazon as an information resource; it was a vast improvement over the old green-bound copies of “Books in Print.” A New York marketing executive told me, “When Amazon came into the picture, metadata”—code numbers, Library of Congress categories, search keywords—“became an integral part of books.” A few farsighted publishers wondered if Amazon would eventually control so much of the market that it would stop selling books at cost and raise prices to become more profitable.
By 1997, when the company went public, Amazon’s book inventory could have filled six football fields. But someone who read Bezos’s year-end letter to shareholders might well have thought that Amazon’s eight-hundred-and-thirty-eight-per-cent sales growth had been in shoes, since he barely mentioned books. In the letter, Bezos noted tersely, “We are planning to add music to our product offering.” (Unlike Jobs, Bezos wasn’t a passionate listener: he once agreed to be interviewed for a program about the Beatles, and when employees, prepping the boss, asked him to name a favorite Beatles tune, Bezos chose “America,” by Simon & Garfunkel.) Soon after music came DVDs and consumer electronics. A New York literary agent told me that books were Amazon’s version of “a gateway drug.”

From Twitter;
Lossius to step down at Publishing Technology | The Bookseller http://shar.es/FStr2  
University of Central Lancashire to offer 'self-publishing' MA (From Lancashire Telegraph) Lancs Telegraph
Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers Nature
Pearson Plunges as Earnings Drop on Education in North America BW  

Friday Image: From Above - Blurb Book

Another blurb book I put together recently. There won't be any more for a while now.

From Above: Photos from the Window Seat. by Edited by Michael Cairns | Make Your Own Book

MediaWeek (Vol 7, No 8): Amazon Work Practices, Medical Information, London Romance, Lending eBooks, Newspaper Paywall +More

Over at Salon Simon Head suggests Amazon is worse than WalMart.

As at Walmart, Amazon achieves this with a regime of workplace pressure, in which targets for the unpacking, movement, and repackaging of goods are relentlessly increased to levels where employees have to struggle to meet their targets and where older and less dextrous employees will begin to fail. As at Walmart, there is a pervasive “three strikes and you’re out” culture, and when these marginal employees acquire too many demerits (“points”), they are fired.
Amazon’s system of employee monitoring is the most oppressive I have ever come across and combines state-of-the-art surveillance technology with the system of “functional foreman,” introduced by Taylor in the workshops of the Pennsylvania machine-tool industry in the 1890s. In a fine piece of investigative reporting for the London Financial Times, economics correspondent Sarah O’Connor describes how, at Amazon’s center at Rugeley, England, Amazon tags its employees with personal sat-nav (satellite navigation) computers that tell them the route they must travel to shelve consignments of goods, but also set target times for their warehouse journeys and then measure whether targets are met.
All this information is available to management in real time, and if an employee is behind schedule she will receive a text message pointing this out and telling her to reach her targets or suffer the consequences. At Amazon’s depot in Allentown, Pennsylvania (of which more later), Kate Salasky worked shifts of up to eleven hours a day, mostly spent walking the length and breadth of the warehouse. In March 2011 she received a warning message from her manager, saying that she had been found unproductive during several minutes of her shift, and she was eventually fired. This employee tagging is now in operation at Amazon centers worldwide.

Author Robin Cook penned an item in the WSJ about digital medical information will save us:

The brave new world of digital medicine is coming about by the convergence of three rapidly evolving technologies: IT, or informational technology, involving wireless signaling, cloud computing and, most particularly, the spread of ever more sophisticated smartphones; medical applications of nanotechnology; and the progressively lower cost and availability of genome sequencing.

Today, all the physiological data monitored in a hospital intensive-care unit—including ECG, blood pressure, pulse, oxygenation, sugar level, breathing rate and body temperature—can be recorded and analyzed continuously in real time on a smartphone. A small piece of hardware, either the size of a cellphone, or one integrated with a cellphone, held against your body, functions as an ultrasound device. It can deliver information instantly to you or anyone you designate, and the information rivals that collected in a physician's office or hospital setting. It can do so when you are experiencing specific symptoms—no appointment necessary—and at virtually no additional cost.

Thanks to more than 20 Silicon Valley startups and advances in microfluidic technology, smartphones will soon be able to function as a mobile, real-time resource for rapidly obtaining all the studies done currently in a medical laboratory, including chemistries, blood values and microbiological studies. A device worn on the wrist, called Visi, has been approved by the FDA for hospital use that can measure your heart's electrical activity, respiratory rate, blood oxygen and blood pressure (without a cuff), and transmit the data wirelessly. Many other such devices are coming out that could be used by patients in their own homes.

Mind the Gap in London: Where's the romance? (More Intelligent):

Romance, generally, is not something London does well. Paris, Rome and New York, yes: the boulevards, the ruins, the fountains, the cafés, the autumn leaves: even, for heaven's sake, rude waiters and the steam from the manhole covers. But, London: the river's too wide, the parks uninspired, the weather too grey: where is there in London to weep and linger over, memory pricked? Oh, it has a certain grandeur, and, even sometimes, a rough charm, a brusque wink in the bustle; but where is the love?
Or so it seemed until the recent revelations about one of the announcements at Embankment underground station. In the unfathomable ways of transport authorities, the northbound Northern Line platform at Embankment had become the last place on the entire system where the spoken version of the famous warning—"Mind the Gap"—could be heard. And so it was that the widow of the man who made the recording began to make special journeys to listen to it, and remember; until, inevitably, it was replaced by a digitised announcement, leaving the widow to write and ask for a recording.

Etymology of swearing.  Where do the words come from? (NewRepublic)

"The Girl who" titles (NewYork)

Consortia begins experiment to inter-library lend e-Books (Chronicle)

The Greater Western Library Alliance, a consortium of 33 academic libraries, came up with the idea. Developers at Texas Tech University and the University of Hawaii-Manoa, both members of the alliance, created the software, and the publisher Springer agreed to let its e-books be guinea pigs in the experiment.
Scheduled to begin in March, the pilot will run for a year. If it works well enough, the library alliance hopes to make Occam’s Reader available to other academic libraries and perhaps to persuade other publishers to join in.
Joni M. Blake, the alliance’s executive director, says the idea for Occam’s Reader dates to a meeting a few years ago. "People got to talking and saying, What are we doing? We’re buying all these e-books with licenses that say we can’t lend them to our consortial friends and neighbors."
Everyone agreed that had to change. But nobody had built a good-enough software platform for lending e-books. Other groups, including the Triangle Research Libraries Network, had tried, only to be tripped up by problems like how to respect copyright while giving designated borrowers access to only the specific books they wanted.

CJR takes a look at the London Times paywall and suggest it may be working:

One problem with the “newspapers have more readers than ever” notion, is that most of those readers click on a link, leave after 20 seconds, and don’t come back. They’re worth virtually nothing unless you can ramp up the scale, which tends to happen by going for the lowest common denominator. Indeed, in saying about the Sidebar of Shame, “Don’t confuse Mail Online with a business based on professional journalism,” Darcey sounds like Audit Chief Dean Starkman, who’s argued that paywalls necessarily bring a quality imperative while the free model tends to push the other way.
Subscribers, on the other hand, are loyal readers who spend lots of time and attention with one paper. Total time spent with a newspaper’s website is far, far below the time spent with its print editions.
But core readers are different online. The Times says its digital subscribers spend 40 minutes with it online, just shy of the 44 minutes print readers spend (though Sunday digital usage is still well below Sunday paper dwell time). That’s a big deal for advertisers and means The Times can charge exponentially more for each digital reader than it could with a clicks model.
The unanswered question, though, is how much digital ad revenue The Times is foregoing with its hard paywall and how a meter model would fare instead.

From twitter this week:
Here’s An Actual 3D Indoor Map Of A Room Captured With Google’s Project Tango Phone Techcrunch
Finally! How to walk across Dublin without passing a pub. http://goo.gl/qA0ngh 

Photo: Arizona Desert 1992

Saguaro cactus from the desert around Scottsdale Arizona.  The channels in their trunk help to push the wind up and over the plant so that they don't topple over.  Learn something every day here at PND.

My Slideshare presentations: Value Chain, Predictions, Speaking

I have 16 presentations on Slideshare.net and they send me a weekly (excessive) update on their activity. 

I would like to know who these people are.  
This presentation below always amazes me.  It was done in 1996 to help my fellow PriceWaterhouse (before the Coopers) consultants understand the publishing industry.  It is very out of date and I have actually been contemplating a revision but the downloads continue.  A number of years ago I walked into a client's office and one of the staffers had it up on their screen and they were busy making notes.
 
Here is the complete list of presentations with their stats.

Publishing Value Chain & Trends 1996 2000 from Michael Cairns

MediaWeek (Vol 7, No 7); Rain in Fiction, Library of Congress Holdings, MOOCs, Adobe Killer + More

There's a lot of rain about in England at the moment. (Guardian)

Some of these books began their lives in water: English literature has for centuries courted the rain. The Canterbury Tales, the first great epic of English daily life, starts out with the sweet showers of April which bathe the dry land. This first shower is an alluringly sensual one, piercing the earth, finding its way into every bodily "veyne" of plants and people alike. If Mediterranean writers found their hot dry climate conducive to love songs, the English were not going to miss out on the competing erotic potential of rain. For Edmund Spenser, too, launching The Faerie Queene from a standing start as Una and the Redcrosse Knight go gently "pricking on the plain", rain is the beginning of narrative. Weather breaks into the stillness: "The day with clouds was sudden overcast, / And angry Jove a hideous storm of rain / Did pour." The change has been made; the action begun. Moving to shelter, the protagonists find themselves in Faerieland, with adventure springing up around them. These rainy beginnings loosen language and storytelling into life. Rain, being rained on, and finding shelter will become central subjects and structuring principles of British writing.
But things get much wetter than benign April showers. Even A Midsummer Night's Dream, so often chosen by directors for staging on warm evenings in the park, promises no such thing as balmy entertainment. The play's imagery of midsummer is not headily hot but confusingly sodden. A personal quarrel between Titania and Oberon has leaked out to become an atmospheric disturbance, legible in the winds and the cold and the rheumatic dampness of the air. There was foul weather in 1594 and drowned summers in the two years following. Titania's images were apt when the play was first performed – "The fold stands empty in the drowned field … The nine men's morris is filled up with mud" – and are no less apt today. We have all seen work and games thwarted, rotting crops in puddled fields and rain stopping play.

The Library of Congress reported on its activities during 2013 (LoC):

• Recorded a total of 158,007,115 physical items in the collections:
• 23,592,066 cataloged books in the Library of Congress classification system
• 13,344,477 books in large type and raised characters, incunabula (books printed before 1501), monographs and serials, music, bound newspapers, pamphlets, technical reports and other print material
• 121,070,572 items in the nonclassified (special) collections, including:
• 3,530,036 audio materials (discs, tapes, talking books and other recorded formats)
• 68,971,722 manuscripts
• 5,507,706 maps
• 16,816,894 microforms
• 1,697,513 moving images (film, television broadcasts, DVDs)
• 6,751,212 items of sheet music
• 14,472,273 visual materials, as follows:
• 13,728,116 photographs
• 104,879 posters
• 639,278 prints and drawings
• 3,323,216 other (including machine-readable collections)
• Welcomed more than 1.6 million onsite visitors and recorded 84 million visits and more than 519 million page-views on the Library’s web properties. 
• At year’s end, the Library’s online primary-source files totaled 45.2 million.

From IHE, Stanford are beginning to see some success from MOOCs:

The most significant change, however, “is that the course is now explicitly about participation, not about getting a good grade at the end,” Devlin said. He has stopped short of giving students points for a task such as posting on the forum, saying he wants students to appreciate the rush of solving problems that at first glance seemed impossible. “What I’m looking for is intrinsic rewards,” he said.

Devlin said he has also changed what it means to complete his MOOC. To earn a certificate of completion in one of the previous versions, students had to score 60 percent or higher on a final exam. Now, students who are consuming the lecture materials and interacting with their peers can still experience “valuable learning, even if they haven’t solved a single math problem,” he said. After the standard eight weeks, students are also invited to join a two-week “Test Flight” program, which challenges them to apply the “mathematically-based thinking skills” they have learned in the course to math itself.

When "news" isn't current (CJR):

Other educators agree that assessing the timeliness and contemporary relevance of a piece of content is a foundational concept in news literacy. “The issue of recirculating content relates to several information trends and important news literacy lessons,” says Peter Adams, senior vice president for educational programs at the News Literacy Project, also via email. “It often comes up in discussions and lessons with students about viral content and the need to use specific fact checking tools (like reverse image search, which can show you how long an image has been circulating).”

Over at the Good E-Book reader "Adobe has killed e-Readers"

Adobe has issued a proclamation that starting in July, the vast majority of e-reader apps and hardware devices will not be able to read purchased eBooks anymore.
This announcement stems from a massive upgrade to the encryption system Adobe has implemented in their new Digital Editions 3.0 and will have reverberating effects on ePub books all over the world. Unless thousands of app developers and e-reader companies update their firmware and programming, customers will basically be unable to read books they have legitimately purchased. In effect, Adobe is killing eBooks and e-readers.

Is Self Publishing killing anything? (Guardian):

Publishers are now racing to recapture the digital ebook market from self-published authors, particularly in pivotal genres like science fiction, fantasy and romance that have proved so popular with ebook readers. New digital-only imprints like Hydra seem designed to compete in that space, but it's an open question why any author would sign deals that have been staunchly challenged by professional writers' organisations. The more natural strategy seems to be for major publishers to cherry-pick the most successful self-published authors and promote them to genuine bestseller status, as they have done with EL James and Hugh Howey. The "hybrid" author, who retains control of ebook rights while signing print-only publishing deals, may now become the new standard for publishing.

From the PND Twitter feed:
Strong, interesting female characters are the secret of House of Cards’ success New Statesman
Classic films reimagined by Federico Babina – in pictures Guardian 
Reader's Digest sold for £1 Guardian
Piers Morgan was questioned by Scotland Yard's hacking squad Guardian
Sid Caesar - The German General Youtube
Library contest has teens create video trailers for books Modbee

Looking South from Rock Center 1968

Looks a little different now.  My kind of town.

BISG Report: Student Attitudes toward Content.

From BISG:

The Book Industry Study Group (BISG) has just relased the first report in its annual two-part study, Student Attitudes toward Content in Higher Education, available for purchase here.

Now in its fourth year, this study provides trend information and analysis about the ways the traditional print textbook is changing to reflect technological innovation and (or sometimes in spite of) student preferences.  Each volume is published annually in two parts: the first each February, reflecting surveys completed the previous fall, and the second each July, reflecting surveys completed in the spring.

Nadine Vassallo, Project Manager, Research & Information said, “Today's students are becoming increasingly flexible about their course materials selections, and more open to new product innovations than ever before. BISG's Student Attitudes survey provides the data, analysis, and guidance publishers need to anticipate challenges and identify emerging opportunities in the higher ed space."

New findings from Volume 4, Report 1, include the following major shifts in content use trends:

·        From October 2010 to October 2013, the percentage of students who report that their courses require “no formal course materials” increased from 4% to 11%. This change in perception suggests students are becoming more flexible about what they consider “required,” and increasingly substitute alternative materials for those assigned by faculty – or avoiding purchase altogether.

·        Required content as reported by students continues to evolve away from one or more core textbooks toward new digital alternatives, although open educational resources have yet have to show an impact.

·        Despite low sales numbers, interest in tablet versions of textbooks is quite strong, especially among students who have already purchased an e-book. Students prefer tablet versions of textbooks over PDF replicas or even print textbooks, assuming at least a 25% lower cost. This finding supports other research suggesting students' willingness to adopt digital formats increases significantly with exposure.

·        Some 17% of students reported renting textbooks for their courses. This is down slightly from almost 19% last spring. In October 2013, about 75% of respondents reported they were either somewhat or very satisfied with their rental experience.

For the first time, the Student Attitudes survey was supplemented by interviews with higher education administrators from leading institutions including the University of Kentucky, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University System of Ohio. This panel of was asked to comment on some of the key strategies, issues, and opportunities they face as instructional technologies continue to evolve for a more contextual analysis of the trends in content delivery.

The report, available as dynamic online access via Real-Time Reporting* or as broad stand-alone PDF summary reports, provides practical guidance to companies working to refine their business strategies and better serve an ever-changing higher education marketplace.  More information is available here.

Student Attitudes toward Content in Higher Education was prepared by the Book Industry Study Group, Inc., with reporting and editorial content by Steve Paxhia and John Parsons. Portions of this information were provided by Nielsen Books & Consumers and used with permission of the Nielsen Company.

MediaWeek (Vol 7, No 6) The Troubles Archive, Dickens, Open Access Models, Innovation in Scholarly Publishing +More

This story broke last year but it remains a intense story about how to capture for posterity difficult and traumatic recent history.  In this case an oral history of the Troubles in Northern Ireland and the archive established at Boston College. (Chronicle)

Mr. O’Neill, head of the John J. Burns Library of Rare Books and Special Collections at Boston College, might have seemed a surprising partner in such a risky venture. His was a world of manuscripts and manicured campuses. But he also had extensive connections in Ireland, traveling in both the north and the south to develop one of the most comprehensive collections of Irish literature and history in the world. Now, with peace in the air, he was looking to fill a gap in the Burns Library, focusing on the recent political history of Northern Ireland. When Mr. Moloney, Northern Ireland editor for The Sunday Tribune, heard of the librarian’s interest, he proposed an archive collecting the stories of former paramilitary members at “the cutting edge of the conflict.”
Thirteen years later the three men would have vastly different recollections of their first meeting. The two Irishmen walked away from dinner thinking that Mr. O’Neill would not pursue the project unless he could assure them that its secrecy was legally protected. Mr. O’Neill insists he would never have made such a blanket promise.
But all agree on one point. In those heady, early days, when talk of reconciliation dominated public discussion in Northern Ireland, none of them imagined their project would get caught up in an international criminal investigation into a four-decade-old murder. How that happened is a tale of grand ambitions undermined by insular decision-making and careless oversight.

I've been trying to get through the Dickens books I haven't read (currently reading Tale of Two Cities and last year Bleak House) and from the New Republic is a rehash from 1933.  (New Republic)

In short, as everybody who has read him will admit, Dickens can stand a good deal of cutting. But Dickens has been abridged before, and nobody cried blasphemy; it is quite true that most people who have read “David Copperfield,” “Nicholas Nickleby” or “Oliver Twist” have read them only in a juvenile abridgment. What Mr. Graves has done, however, is more than merely cut away adipose tissue and supernumerary tear-glands: in order to shorten the length without sacrificing the continuity he has rewritten the whole book. His version is “not an abridgment for schools, but a rewriting for the ordinary reader”; and therein lies his crime. But none of the famous scenes or dialogues or characters is lacking. In fact, you cannot tell what is lacking until you read the chapter of the original which Mr. Graves has appended as contrast with his own version. Then you will see that what is missing will never be missed. If you were to read “The Real David Copperfield” without knowing what impious hands had been laid on it, your inevitable comment would be: “I had forgotten what a good book ‘David Copperfield’ is!”

Looking to show a willingness to accommodate new revenue models, Academic and Scientific publishers have been experimenting.  Last week IOP announced an 'open access' model with an Austrian consortium (THE):

The agreement between the Institute of Physics’s publishing arm; the Austrian Science Fund; library consortium the Austrian Academic Consortium and the Austrian Central Library for Physics at the University of Vienna will see the Austrian Science Fund cover the article fees for every author it funds to publish open access with the Institute.
In exchange, the publisher has agreed to lower the cost of accessing its journals for participating members of the Austrian Academic Consortium in proportion to the extra funding it receives from article fees.
Last week the UK’s universities and science minister David Willetts called on publishers to give a boost to the take-up of journal-provided gold open access by reaching such price offsetting agreements with individual universities, ensuring that their total expenditure on journals did not increase.

A long article on innovation in scholarly publishing from the LA Review of Books:

To make sure humanities scholarship thrives, it is crucial that we cut through the fog of pixel dust–induced illusion to the practical realities of what digital technology offers to scholarship. Among the prevailing misconceptions about digital production of any kind is that it is cheap, permanent yet somehow immaterial, and that it is done by “machines” — that is, with little human labor. We could add to this another pervasive two-part misperception, that “everything” is digitized and that everything digital is available on Google. Each of these views is profoundly inaccurate. Costs of production and maintenance (or, to use the current grant-required buzzword, sustainability) are much greater with digital objects than print. Every aspect of the old-school publishing work cycle — acquisition (highly skilled and highly valued/paid labor), editing (ditto), reviewing, fact-checking, design, production, promotion, and distribution (all ditto) — remains in place in the digital environment. The only change is in the form of the final production, which becomes a matter of servers, licenses, files, delivery, and platform-specific or platform-agnostic design instead of presses, paper, binding, and so on. The fact that the print object is removed means the single obvious revenue-producing part of the work cycle is eliminated, replaced with a dubious business model of digital sales that as yet doesn’t seem to work well for most authors, and even less well for scholarly monographs.

From Twitter:
CJR Be the next Ezra Klein! CJR
Twitter is offering a small number of research institutions access to its public and historic data Nieman 
ONIX 3.0 Raises Standard for Ebook Metadata, By Graham Bell, Chief Data Architect at EDItEUR /bookbusinessmag BookBusiness 

Photo Friday: Another Blurb Book

Since it is Friday and last weeks post got so many views I thought I would add another Blurb book but this one I did for my in-laws.  My father in law spent a few years in the army in 1956-8 or so and was stationed in Iceland.  These images have stood up well considering they were in the basement for 20+ years.  (Blurb Bookstore)