Juxtapositions: Cap't Bob and the Digger

In the early 1970s, Robert Maxwell lost out in his attempt to buy the News of the World, which was purchased by Rupert Murdoch, who went on to create a newspaper empire in the UK. At the same time, Maxwell was castigated by UK financial authorities as someone unfit to run a public company, a charge that dogged him for the rest of this life. As it turns out, he was correctly categorized as 'unfit' when, many years later, he perpetrated one of the biggest financial frauds in UK history. In the intervening years Maxwell and Murdoch 'battled' each other for media supremacy but, in reality Maxwell was never a match for Murdoch and, this was confirmed when Cap't Bob 'fell' off the back of his boat as his media empire was crashing down around him.

Murdoch on the other hand played aggressively and seemed to have won hands down when he finally acquired the newspaper jewel he had long sought in the Wall Street Journal. At the time, the triumphalism that accompanied this huge media purchase knew no bounds, especially when it came to the fate of the New York Times. Murdoch and his revamped WSJ would 'destroy the Times' or so the pundits - and the Digger himself - suggested. The Times didn't help matters with a rapidly falling share price and a seemingly confused electronic strategy. And, the company was even 'forced' to take a loan from a Mexican.

Well, how times change: Murdoch won't be falling off his boat but, he may be out of a job when it becomes clear that the phone hacking at the News of the World wasn't so much the rogue activities of a small group of reporters but a significant element in the business strategy at News Corp. In my view, the phone hacking will be prevalent at other UK newspapers but it seems likely that nowhere else was it so embedded in their operations than at NewsCorp. For that, it will be easy to show NewsCorp as a company out of control and without a moral compass and, for that, the boss will have to go.

And, about that loan from the Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim that the New York Times got so much heat about? They just paid it back early. The Times may not be out of the woods yet, but I bet things don't look so bad from eighth avenue at the moment.

Revisit With Digital Galleys

The Publishing Trends Newsletter from my friends at Market Partners recently took a look at the migration from print to electronic galleys and profiled a company I've been interested in for a while. NetGalley pioneered this migration and they are seeing increased success from publishers willing to make the transition. Here is a sample from the Publishing Trends article:

Carrying the torch in the e-galley revolution is NetGalley, a company owned by Firebrand Technologies, that helps facilitate and fulfill galley requests from site members by providing them with DRM-protected files authorized through Adobe Digital Editions and accessible on Androids and iPhones, desktop computers, and multiple tablets and e-reading platforms. Through the site, members composed of reviewers, media professionals, bloggers, librarians, booksellers, and educators can peruse NetGalley’s available titles, which are provided by over 100 publishers (and counting), including divisions/imprints from four of the Big Six houses. Members can select titles, and NetGalley serves as gatekeeper, passing along requests to publishers for approval (their website even clearly outlines approval guidelines for each publisher). Publishers can set expiration dates for when the galleys will no longer be available, and NetGalley also supports the aggregation of other digital promotional items like video, audio, or artwork under any title’s record page so that publishers can easily create digital media kits for readers to access along with the galley.

“We currently have over 29,000 readers registered on the site,” says Susan Ruszala, Director of Marketing at NetGalley, “and we’re growing by over 12% each month.”

It isn’t difficult to see the value for publishers in using e-galleys. With the cost of postage and printing running anywhere from $5-$11 per printed galley, digital galleys provide publishers with an unlimited amount of digital copies to send at their will instead of being limited by the amount of print copies their budgets will allow. E-galleys are also greener, cutting down on the carbon footprint of print production. To become a NetGalley client, publishers pay a one-time set-up fee based on the number of titles they publish, along with a monthly fee based on the number of titles on NetGalley’s site. There is no cost for professional reader membership.

AAP's Tom Allen on Georgia State Copyright Case

Earlier this week in PW the CEO of the AAP (Tom Allen) expressed his opinion over the Georgia State copyright infringement case (PW):

GSU implemented its policy in a way that invited disregard for basic copyright norms by delegating difficult copyright decisions to faculty without guidance, without meaningful review mechanisms, and without providing any funds to pay for permissions when necessary. The result poses a threat to the creative ecosystem in which copyright protection provides incentives for scholars and publishers to develop and distribute high-quality materials for students of all ages. Academic publishers, faculty, and librarians may have their differences. But they are tightly bound together in a common enterprise: education.

The transition to digital delivery holds great promise for quicker access to a broader range of materials through more channels, with greater flexibility for teaching faculty. And in some cases, lower costs. But the ecosystem is degraded by using digital formats as a rationale for the reproduction and distribution of significant amounts of copyrighted material for "free."

Misconceptions about the GSU litigation are widespread in part because the fair use exception to copyright is not widely understood. An educational purpose is one factor in determining fair use, but it doesn't stand alone. If all copying for educational purposes were fair use, the production of high-quality educational content would decline or disappear.

Also, I posted the following in June from the Chronicle of Higher Ed:

What's at Stake in the Georgia State Copyright Case (The Chronicle)

A closely watched trial in federal court in Atlanta, Cambridge University Press et al. v. Patton et al., is pitting faculty, libraries, and publishers against one another in a case that could clarify the nature of copyright and define the meaning of fair use in the digital age. Under copyright law, the doctrine of fair use allows some reproduction of copyrighted material, with a classroom exemption permitting an unspecified amount to be reproduced for educational purposes.

At issue before the court is the practice of putting class readings on electronic reserve (and, by extension, on faculty Web sites). Cambridge, Oxford University Press, and SAGE Publications, with support from the Association of American Publishers and the Copyright Clearance Center, are suing four administrators at Georgia State University. But the publishers more broadly allege that the university (which, under "state sovereign immunity," cannot be prosecuted in federal court) has enabled its staff and students to claim what amounts to a blanket exemption to copyright law through an overly lenient definition of the classroom exemption. The plaintiffs are asking for an injunction to stop university personnel from making material available on e-reserve without paying licensing fees. A decision is expected in several weeks.

What follows are several different points of view of the case - all very interesting.

Beyond the Book: Curation Nation - Interview with Steven Rosenbaum

The tsunami of content we all face on a daily basis is an unmediated mess, so what do we do to mitigate that? Chris Kenneally interviews Steven Rosenbaum the author of Curation Nation go get to the bottom of it. Some excerpts below and here's the link to the Podcast:

People don’t want more information. They want less information properly organized so that you can help find what you’re looking for.
...
So it’s really as simple as this. The guy who I think in many ways figured this out earliest was Jeff Bezos at Amazon. If you look at Mechanical Turk and its history, what Bezos understood was there are certain things computers can’t do. And the history of Mechanical Turk is about one out of every couple hundred thumbnails on a book jacket or a CD were wrong. The CD would be the Rolling Stones and the thumbnail would be Cat Stevens and there wasn’t any way if the metadata was wrong in that thumbnail that a computer could look at the picture and look at the name and go, wait. Mismatch. Humans do that instantly and so the original launch of Mechanical Turk was to say, I’m going to pay people a very small amount of money to read the title of a book or a piece of music and look at the image and go, oh, good. That’s the proper image.

And so that ability to look at content selectively and creatively and say, you know, I’m going to build a site about Corvettes, but I don’t care about repairing Corvettes or restoring Corvettes. I just want great, cool pictures of Southern California, bright sunshine, beaches. Well, that’s very different than the New Jersey Corvette community. And so all of a sudden – Google would have you believe that if they just had more data, they could chop things up into the right boxes. But really what it comes down to is the job of a magazine editor or a book editor or a newspaper editor or a programmer at a television network is part science and part art, and the art part is the part that computers don’t do very well.
...

But I would argue, with all due respect to Mr. Keen, that he wants to be the one to define who a professional is. And in a world in which the tools are ubiquitous and we all have cell phones and we don’t need a printing press for a newspaper or a transmitter, we’re all going to make content and so what we’re beginning to see is a Web in which everybody is a publisher and increasingly what I want to do is narrow the number of places that I go to listen to the world. I want to kind of dial down this fire hose of information and say, you know, as opposed to listening to the AP feed unvarnished, what I really want to do is listen to my NPR station in New York and CNN and one other professional news organization and maybe Twitter for a different kind of filter. But I don’t necessarily want to be in a position where I’m drinking from the fire hose of data.

Here is the Podcast.

And you can buy it on Amazon.com.

Here is my series on content curation.