Is there a thread for the rapid death of the newspaper industry?

could almost be in another thread the second part of your post there, stet, so utterly unrelated is it.

to be strictly fair on the digital strategy, i was at a big european educational publishers last week and they managed to piss away an annual 30 million euro profit on copyright compliance and their very nascent digital strategy and i literally don’t know how they did it.

consequence, a bunch of pissed off product managers who are now being told to chase short-term ad revenue rather than building a digital platform that needs to come in in the next two years.

protection of huge historically guaranteed revenues and extreme caution about anything that might disrupt that including their own attempt to avoid disruption. it is textbook.

Related: Is there a thread for the rapid death of the textbook industry?

That is a grave we should all dance upon of course

the closed market and high margins of textbooks are awful. but there are considerable difficulties in replacing then. you've got content creators who are producing pedagogical material designed to deliver curriculums, then you've got the content editors and content designers, putting it onto the page. that framework of expertise needs to replicated in a digital space. how you gatekeep and QA that material is complicated

that's not easy for all sorts of reasons. funding is one: the current model generally across higher and k12 educational establishments is a capex/funding ask one. the model for digital platforms tends to be a subscription/opex model, and state and educational sectors generally aren't really set up for that.

another example is just the standard problem of moving behaviour from one mode to another - one example of needing to change editor behaviour is that they're very considerable perfectionists – not unreasonably given a mistake in print could last a full textbook edition cycle (which is, what? 3-5 years?). However, digital deployments allow for early deployments, feedback and iterative corrections - and it's really hard to get the editors to respond to that.

infrastructure in schools (i'm talking about europe here, I haven't got a great knowledge of UK schools) varies greatly. if you're going to start using phones, tablets and laptops as replacements for textbooks you need solid wifi and connectivity (certainly the schools in germany haven't got that yet, though there's a government project to invest €2 billion in school infra in the next two years).

so textbooks do what they need to do generally very well, despite rinsing out institutions - how you retain a high quality educational framework in a digital age is quite challenge from my limited look at it. (that's if you don't factor in the natural conservatism of companies who make $$$ out of the textbooks of course, but it's hard to disrupt because of state and federally/government sanctioned curriculums.

The biggest disruptors at the moment are probably students and teachers who realise that the subject matter doesn’t change much from one year to the next so there isn’t really a bar to just buying a textbook at a quarter of the retail price from the previous year’s graduating class. Amazon Marketplace, and companies that will rent you a book for as long as you need it, make that even easier. That hasn’t affected K12 as much as HE but the margins in HE tend to be far, far higher.

The ‘digital transformation’, ime, has often had more to do with trying to force people away from that behaviour by keeping important resources digitally paywalled - unlocked with unique codes bundled with print books - than fundamentally moving beyond print. You have companies who have proudly been trumpeting a ‘digital first’ strategy for the last five years still explaining why their sales are flatlining or they’re drowning in debt by pointing to a decline in the willingness to buy paper books.

There have been some quite good initial attempts at meaningful blended learning / digital textbook solutions but they have been limited by, as you say, lack of infrastructure in schools and universities - in combination with a lack of experience/ expertise in the part of publishers in managing huge, complex digital platforms. There is also a sinking feeling that customers will always expect digital resources to cost a fraction of print ones, even if they end up being more expensive for publishers to operationalise.

Editors will probably have to get over a reluctance to iterate. The subscription model is likely to be inevitable. Something I keep hearing is a ‘FIFA model’ - minor annual updates to a core product that fundamentally never changes. I suspect that almost everyone talking about it doesn’t know how much people resent having to buy FIFA every year or how much of that purchasing behaviour is driven by the social aspect of needing the same version as your friends in order to play each other.

That’s why the Dragon Quest model is better.

idk I was sort of figuring progressively more educators would write textbooks and upload them as PDFs for free

the scribd / wikipedia model of education. fuck peer review anyway! Sanpaku would mop up, he can teach anything

I mean there's lots of college math textbooks released under this model at least. Couldn't tell you how many classes other than those of the authors adopt them, of course.

interesting post, SV. And your point about packaging 'digital access' with books is otm - when someone told me how they were doing this my response was 'what, like a CD-ROM?!' and they smiled ruefully and basically said 'those were the days' where they made a load of additional cash out of digital.

I don't know much about textbooks in K12 so I won't comment on that.

In France HE textbooks are much less of a thing than they are in the usa (don't know uk). Profs generally write their own lecture notes, and those are made available either (old fashioned) as copies in the library or online (I do the latter). This is obviously the best solution for serious universities, where the teaching faculty are also active researchers. I'm an editor of an "open" textbook in my speciality, managed through GitHub so that teachers can assemble their text à la carte from the components we've collectively written. Obviously this is free as in beer. You can also have the books printed on command so students who don't have good access to the net/machine can use the book (you then just pay for the printing). This is, I hope, the future of textbooks.

also an interesting post, Euler.

as you say, probably harder to do with K12 and state curriculums, but v interesting as a possible future model.

to get this thread back on track this joyous news cross-posted from the rolling UK politics thread:


https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/feb/23/the-sun-records-huge-loss-amid-falling-print-sales-phone-hacking-damages

the end point of this terminal stage of big money liberalism is the heartbreaking plea, "why aren't donors stepping up to rescue [thing they don't actually care about]" https://t.co/QZfjOajpxV

— 'Weird Alex' Pareene (@pareene) April 19, 2020

Someone stick a fork in the Herald

What do you think of David Icke's conspiracy theories? https://t.co/FFkbrunR2n

— HeraldScotland (@heraldscotland) May 1, 2020

We asked Nicola Sturgeon if she had the brainpower to recognise that the coronavirus has been cooked up to help usher in a tyrannical fascist world government.

She declined to comment. 

Seriously get this to fuck.

a mix between shite and bollocks with the swagger of a cunt?

(i tried)

Print newspaper sales figures are supposed to be out today. But following industry representations, they no longer have to be made public. The monthly ABC sales charts have also been stopped permanently as they give "stimulus to write a negative narrative of circulation decline".

— Jim Waterson (@jimwaterson) May 21, 2020

lol

If you keep the decline a secret maybe it will stop.

wow

Note: Tribune Publishing has cut salaries & instituted furloughs citing the pandemic/the economy but the savings to the company is ~less than~ what it is paying in severance to one (1) executive. These decisions are made deliberately to enrich the few on the backs of the many. pic.twitter.com/43KToeEZNf

— Nina Metz (@Nina_Metz) May 21, 2020

probably of no interest to non-pittsburghers but shit is *going down*with the post-gazette. western pa’s biggest supermarket chain just said they’d stop stocking it!

(owner/publisher are right wing racists, see google for most recent details, which are Fucked Up)

hmmm

Scoop from @kdoctor:

"Leaders in the field of nonprofit journalism are deciding over the next 48 hours whether or not to make a bid for all of @mcclatchy, sources tell me."

The idea: create the country's first major nonprofit newspaper chain.https://t.co/UoF082BnjG

— Joshua Benton (@jbenton) June 29, 2020

^ if this can be made to work, it will show the way out of the current hellscape

I believe we slept on 'TEACH BOYS TO DUST'

Came across this montage I made for a presentation when working at EC London office. Wonder if future historians will look at who took decisions to bombard UK public with this drivel day after day, why they did it and did it bring them or anyone any gains in the end? pic.twitter.com/FQHRIUOQma

— Mark English (@EULondonMark) August 5, 2020

disappointing there are only two NOW... headlines there

Oh wait, three

this is amazing https://www.ft.com/content/745e34a1-0ca7-432c-b062-950c20e41f03

sorry that's paywalled. it's about how Wirecard tried to discredit the FT by setting up fake news operations with spies bribing market manipulators and other evil-billionaire nonsense.

I totally thought, for a second, that you were posting about the FT's baroque payment structure.

Such a great read. Like a spy thriller or something.

I mean Jesus Christ lads pic.twitter.com/oDOW6EBh3W

— The Author, Séamas O'Reilly (@shockproofbeats) April 8, 2021

LOL Englishes

Mind you, maybe the editor of the Metro is an Orangeman.

well they did previously get a load of DUP cash for a Brexit ad.

Some questioned if it was a deliberate attempt at humour, or if the positioning of the stories was an unfortunate oversight.

lol yeah sure

Orangeman bad

A whole lot of responses to the question: why did you cancel your NYT/Guardian/Idaho Mountain Express subscription

https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/10/expensive-boring-and-wrong-here-are-all-the-news-publications-people-canceled-and-why/

Interesting piece

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/society-and-culture/the-inside-story-of-backstabbing-feuds-and-intrigue-at-the-daily-mail

Superfluous announcement gets canned

📢 '...put unwanted newspapers in the bin...'

This is one example of the announcements that we're getting rid of, making the passenger experience better and delivering on the Williams-Shapps #PlanForRail. 

Read more on announcements we’re removing: https://t.co/ZZQGqW58Jn pic.twitter.com/l2ITutFsci

— Department for Transport (@transportgovuk) January 21, 2022

Captured on video: the last willing reader of the Telegraph