Publishing Fantasy: The Hybrid Solution
August 10, 2009
I can visualize the meeting that sparked the idea for “Staving Off A Spiral Toward Oblivion”. You can read the essay by Mary Tripsas in the hard copy of the New York Times in the Business section, August 9, 2009, page 3, or poke around online until you locate a link to a digital version.
The argument references hot metal typesetting, sailing ships, and other chestnuts from the buggy whip approach to business analysis. In today’s world, these examples are intriguing. I recall meeting a talented professional writer named Fred Czufin, who used history to illustrate modern technology. We used his firm to create a remarkable historical view of energy for Eric Zausner, then the head of Booz Allen’s energy practice. This was in the era of a single Booz, Allen & Hamilton at a time when the firm was competing to be among the top two or three management consulting firms in the world.
Ms. Tripsas has used the same method to explain that publishers can save themselves by becoming hybrids. The idea is that by bolting on whizzy new functions to the proven methods, an organization has time and opportunity to make further changes.
Wrong.
Hybrids are at best a bit like Frankenstein’s monster, neither fish nor fowl.
Consider Google. The company focused on solving fundamental problems using available hardware. The company’s focus was on solving known problems and using quite different business methods and processes to achieve the firm’s objective of making the world’s information available.
Google along with Facebook and a handful of other companies have come to define the next generation in information services and systems. Sure, these outfits use established technology but the companies have blended technology with business methods, processes, and models.
The New York Times’s Web site renders its content incorrectly in Firefox. The page displays in Internet Explorer. Perhaps the New York Times will make it possible for Firefox users to view a properly rendered page generated from its hybrid system? I know that’s a detail and probably not meaningful to a company embracing Frankenstein methods.
The problem for publishers and other last-generation information companies is that kicking the habits formed in the past is proving really tough.
I want to mention a couple of examples that hit my radar this week. You may, of course, agree or disagree. Keep in mind I am not in the same kettle of fish as the information companies that are fighting for their lives:
ITEM 1: A large organization cannot deploy a Web site that works. The fix was to ignore the business management and process issues and fix the blame for the problem on the information technology contractor.
ITEM 2: A publisher has reduced its work week from five days to four days. In order to save money, the accounting department makes “errors” that delay the payment process.
ITEM 3: A tabloid publisher cannot create a new online service because the editorial procedures are set up for print and management lacks the appetite to make changes.
ITEM 4: A new media company exits one technical field which makes money to focus on electronic content which does not make money.
What does each of these “items” have in common? Management problems. Hybrids don’t fix management problems. Period.
Each of these outfits has whizzy new technology. Each of these outfits is a hybrid. If that’s the way to save publishing, I must be missing something.
Stephen Arnold, August 10, 2009
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