An Original Aggregator Teeters on the Brink
December 28, 2009
I sat on this write up for about a week. I read the December 20, 2009, “Revised and Condensed” write up in the New York Times. I don’t know if the piece is available online because I don’t use traditional media’s online services. I am more interested in how the traditional print and magazines to which I subscribe present information about the challenges consumer publishing in the US faces.
For your information, I ran a quick query before scheduling this write up for release on Beyond Search on December 28, 2009, and, to my surprise, this link on the New York Times’s Web site worked. Glory be!
My plan for this write up is to highlight some of the more striking points set forth in the article with the subtitle “A Reader’s Digest That Grandma Never Dreamed Of.” I won’t point out that Ms. Sperling, my anti-Arnold English teacher in high school, would have given the headline writer an F and inked in red: “A Reader’s Digest about Which Grandma Never Dreamed.” But why fiddle around with the small stuff when the overall point of the article is of larger import. I will comment on that at the end of this short write up.
Now that you have the plan of attack, let’s look at the passages I found interesting.
this sentence captures exquisitely the decay, the loss of a future, and the end of a traditional information company :
Walking the hallways now, it’s hard to imagine the bustle. More than half of the building is empty, a ghostly warren of empty cubicles and unused bathrooms. You can walk for long stretches without seeing anyone. A stand-alone brick addition has been condemned because of mold, a company spokesman said.
Ms. Sperling would have inked a circle around “mold” and written you have confused a frame or model with a saprotrophic fungi. Man, she was a picky one. She wanted the word spelled “mould”.
Image source: http://i.pbase.com/g5/61/391661/2/67960731.z5oyTWFv.jpg
Second, I quite liked the run down of changes that the new management team, delightfully presented as “the Blondes, have afoot. Why hire a high priced consultant to save a stricken publication when the New York Times has nailed the steps:
- Impact a notion of action with slogans and an upbeat attitude
- Make employees accountable. Miss your number, no bonus. Just like Dilbert’s fictional company
- Trim staff. Bring in new blood
- Move to a different facility
- Repurpose content no matter what the impact might be on deduplication triggers in online indexing systems
- “Bust silos”. Sorry, Ms. Sperling, not my phrase
- Merge audiences
- Declare bankruptcy
- Rely on connections to get money, credibility, etc.
Third, I liked the Harvard / Columbia business school lingo. For example: “We will create the world’s largest multiplatform communities base on branded content.” This sounds a bit like the mission for a former New York Times’s writer in his new engagement at AOL to me. It also drifts into the black hole of social content.
Fourth, this phrase is telling:
The magazine was dreamed up by DeWitt Wallace, the son of a Greek and Latin scholar. He clipped, condensed and rewrote articles as he recovered from shrapnel wounds sustained in World War I. The original content aggregator, a kind of proto-Matt Drudge, the deeply conservative Mr. Wallace culled articles from the booming world of magazine publishing, mostly for rural readers who didn’t have access to newsstands.
I admit this approach sounds quite a bit like Google’s technology for identifying factoids and whacking them together in reports. I may be wrong, but Mr. Wallace might have been in trouble with Rupert Murdoch if he were creating Reader’s Digest today.
Lastly, I found the reference to the Reader’s Digest readership only second to that of the Bible appropriate. The publishing community, if not the readers themselves, seemingly held the fuzzy finances and rehashed content in reverence. The publishing community finds money glossed with a patina of intellectualism and class a type of noblesse oblige. Add some religious fervor and you have a legend in the making. I don’t think the Rick Warren venture lives up to the mysticism of the Bible reference, but it is nice to include a Higher Power in a write up about publishing.
What did I make of this write up?
Three points:
- I think the information presented, if accurate, makes it clear that the Reader’s Digest has some work ahead. With the lousy economy, I don’t see much in the game plan to alter the trajectory of decline.
- The New York Times is good at describing the problems of other publishers, even making a joke out of Sam Zell’s joust with publishing. I wonder why the New York Times is not making more progress itself if it knows the answers? Perhaps the investment in content aggregator Loud3r will help the Times turn its financial corners?
- The Reader’s Digest write up illustrates that there is not much difference between traditional publishing as practiced by the Reader’s Digest and some of the online challengers. Recycled content, a sense of self importance, and myth making—factors that can be found in common.
I think the Reader’s Digest story could be a business case. But I think there are others that would make more useful analyses. My candidates would be the Chicago Tribune, LexisNexis, or the Cengage play. With MBA degrees taking a couple of shots to the snoot with the Enron affair and the Lehman Brothers adventure, business schools will have quite a few examples to dissect. The Reader’s Digest is more of a historical anecdote in my opinion.
Stephen E. Arnold, December 28, 2009
I report to the USDA that I was not paid to write about the Reader’s Digest or make a reference to mould or recipes.
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