Amazon Sells What Sells: Magazines and Newspapers Apparently Do Not Sell Well
March 17, 2023
I read “Amazon Will Discontinue Newspaper and Magazine Subscriptions in September.” The write up reports that Amazon is “abandoning the Kindle for Periodicals … [a] the Kindle Newsstand.” But that’s not all:
Amazon is trying to convince publishers to submit their newspapers and magazines to Prime Reading or Kindle Unlimited, but it remains to be seen if this will happen.
My understanding is that publishers have to give up more content and get less money. The idea is not particularly new. In the early days of the full text online commercial databases, money went into a pool and the money was distributed based on the full text online prints. If a publisher’s content attracted no online prints of the full text, zero money for that publisher.
Also, the early days of selling subscriptions online experienced some user pushback. The reason was that magazine readers wanted a fungible copy. Times change. Now no one wants fragments of dead trees in their in box. (Remember the good old days when publishers of some magazines would give away current copies of their publications to those boarding the Eastern Airlines shuttles from New York to Boston and New to DC and the reverse trips.)
Magazines were a good business once. Now magazines and newspapers are a tough sell. Even new angles like the Monocle outfit are into conferences, swag, and audio programs in an effort to woo subscribers and keep the 20,000 or so the company has amassed.
What’s the Amazon decision suggest to me? Here are my reactions this rainy morning in rural Kentucky:
- How are the other magazine and newspaper resellers doing? Apple, Scribd, Zinio, and a few others are in the game and provide some options, maybe not attractive, but options nevertheless.
- Will the Monocle model or variations of it become the model for revenue best practices? The New York Times dabbles in swag, podcasts, and moving beyond news into what I call MBA type reports. I used to subscribe to the dead tree edition, but the home delivery was so terrible I cancelled. The online version stories in which I am interested is endlessly recycled in blogs and Twitter statements, I am okay with the crazy Lady ruining my breakfast with non-delivery.
- With many people struggling to figure out what information online is accurate and what is quasi-accurate, or what is weaponized, I think some knowledge problems await. Newspapers, like the one for which I worked, were organizations which had editorial policies, some guidelines, quite a few people who tried to deliver timely, accurate, informative news and reports.
Net net: Amazon can sell cheap stuff like Temu.com. The company does not seem to have the magic touch when it comes to magazines and newspapers. Remarkable but not surprising. The cloud of unknowing is expanding.
Stephen E Arnold, March 17. 2023
Real News Professional Employs Ad Hominem Method with Flair
March 17, 2023
I love “real news” output by Silicon Valley-savvy professionals. I read a good article called “Elon Musk Is An Angry Man Who turns on Everybody, Says Longtime Tech Journalist Kara Swisher.”
I found the article interesting because it appeared in a Silicon Valley “real news” organ call BGR, which is acronym speak for Boy Genius Report. The article is a commentary on another Silicon Valley type of “real news” professional. I think this is meta-meta news. It is similar to podcasters, who are “real journalists” interviewing a colleague who is also a “real news” professional. The silly idea of interviewing an informed person who is NOT a colleague is just too darned dull. The trend is that “real journalists” are the best experts to discuss a particular topic. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Ignore someone who works at a research center, a government agency responsible for policy in a specific area, an individual who publishes in non-news publications like a peer-reviewed journal, or a person recognized for excellence by some semi-respected outfit like the ACM or American Chemical Society, among others. Nope. Nope. Nope. Dull.
The write up includes this statement from Ms. Swisher’s podcast On. I am not sure if this is a direct quote about Mr. Musk. The context is that noted biographer Walter Isaacson is writing a book about Mr. Musk. Here’s the passage from the BGR article:
Swisher, in her podcast, went on to warn that Musk will almost certainly “turn on” Isaacson. “There’s nobody he won’t turn on,” she said, “unless he gets some help. And I wish he would.” In response to a question about whether she’s sick of talking about Musk at this point, though, she acknowledged that she isn’t, given his involvement in everything from defense to innovation, space, and cars. “He’s the Thomas Edison of the day, so no.”
Okay, is Ms. Swisher attacking the man Elon Musk, praising his Tesla and SpaceX innovations, or trying to have a bento box of Silicon Valley expert outputs?
I am voting for the ad hominen angle. I am not sure about the Tesla thing because — the full self driving — is not something I plan to test on Kentucky’s gravel roads. The bento box? That has some value in my judgment. What’s next in real journalism from Silicon Valley?
The University of Texas at El Paso provides a handy list of an additional 145 rhetorical techniques which can be applied to Silicon Valley “real news” generation. More podcasts provide an opportunity to try some of these out on Elon Musk type topics; for example, 141 “We have to do something” or 105. prosopology which is the reciting the names of those killed by Mr. Musk’s smart driving system.
Will the Musk – Swisher tension evolve into Silicon Valley’s variation of the Jack Benny – Fred Allen feud. That went on for years. There is so much innovation in Silicon Valley; for example, the Sundar and Prabhakar Comedy Show. Advertisers will battle to fund these programs.
Stephen E Arnold, March 17, 2023
The Gray Lady: Calling the Winner of the AI Race
March 17, 2023
Editor’s Note: Written by a genuine dinobaby with some editorial inputs from Stephen E Arnold’s tech elves.
I love it when “real journalists” predict winners. Does anyone remember the Dewey thing? No, that’s okay. I read “How Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant Lost the AI Race.” The title reminds me of English 101 “How to” essays. (A publisher once told me that “how to” books were the most popular non fiction book type. Today the TikTok video may do the trick.)
The write up makes a case for OpenAI and ChatGPT winning the smart software race. Here’s a quote I circled:
The excitement around chatbots illustrates how Siri, Alexa and other voice assistants — which once elicited similar enthusiasm — have squandered their lead in the A.I. race.
Squandering a lead is not exactly losing a race, at least here in Kentucky. Races can be subject to skepticism, but in the races I have watched, a horse wins, gets a ribbon, the owner receives hugs and handshakes, and publicity. Yep, publicity. Good stuff.
The write up reports or opines:
Many of the big tech companies are now racing to come up with responses to ChatGPT.
Is this me-too innovation? My thought is that the article is not a how-to; it’s an editorial opinion.
My reaction to the story is that the “winner” is the use of OpenAI type technology with a dialogue-type interface. The companies criticized for squandering a lead are not dead in their stable stall. Furthermore, smart software is not new. The methods have been known for years. What’s new is that computational resources are more readily available. Content is available without briar patches like negotiating permissions and licenses to recycle someone else’s data. Code libraries are available. Engineers and programmers are interested in doing something with the AI Lego blocks. People with money want to jump on the high speed train even if the reliability and the destination are not yet known.
I would suggest that the Gray Lady’s analysis is an somewhat skewed way to point out that some big tech outfits have bungled and stumbled.
The race, at least here in Harrod’s Creek, is not yet over. I am not sure the nags are out of their horse carriers yet. Why not criticize in the context of detailed, quite specific technical, financial, and tactical factors? I will answer my own question, “The Gray Lady has not gotten over how technology disrupted the era of big newspapers as gatekeepers.”
How quickly will the Gray Lady replace “real journalists” (often with agendas) with cheaper, faster software.
I will answer my own question, “Faster than some of the horses running in the Kentucky Derby this year.”
Stephen E Arnold, March 17, 2023
Publishers Face Another Existential Threat Beyond Their Own Management Decisions
March 7, 2023
Existential threat, existential threat. I hear that from many executives. The principal existential threat is a company’s own management decisions. Short-term, context-free, and uninformed deciders miss the boat, the train, and the bus to organic revenue growth. If I read a news story, I learn about another senior executive playing fast and loose with rules, regulations, and ethical guidelines.
Today I read the clickbait infused headline: “Big Media Is Gearing Up for Battle with Google and Microsoft over AI Chatbots Using Their Articles for Training: We Are Actively Considering Our Options.” (The headline seems to be pandering to the Google, does it not?)
What is an existential threat? Here a whack at a definition by Dictionary.com, a super duper source:
An existential threat is a threat to something’s very existence—when the continued being of something is at stake or in danger. It is used to describe threats to actual living things as well to nonliving thing things, such as a country or an ideology.
I think the phrase has been extended to cover an action or process which could erode the revenues of a publisher.
The write up cited is, of course, behind a paywall. No existential threat for Business Insider … yet. I learned:
It’s a moment some publishers consider the most disruptive change they’ve seen to their industry since the dawn of the internet — and the threat is no less than existential. The worry is that if people can get thorough answers to their questions through these bots, they won’t need to visit content sites anymore, undermining media’s entire revenue model, which has already been battered by digital upheaval.
But here’s the paragraph that caught my attention. Remember, that Rupert Murdoch and Fox News are in the midst of a conversation about dissemination of knowingly incorrect information. Remember the New York Times is discussing in a positive manner its coverage of some individuals’ efforts to shift from male to female and other possible combinations. Yep, Rupert and the Gray Lady.
“AI is a new frontier with great opportunity, but it can’t replace the trust, independence, and integrity of quality journalism,” said Danielle Coffey, EVP and general counsel of the News/Media Alliance, a publisher trade organization whose members include The New York Times and Wall Street Journal publisher News Corp. “Without compensation, we lose the humanity that journalists bring to telling a story.”
The issue was the loss of advertising revenue. Nope, that money is not coming back. Now the issue is loss of a reason to buy a subscription to “real news” publications. Nope, those readers are unlikely to come back.
Why? How about convenience?
I subscribe to dead tree newspapers. If the paper edition arrives, it could be torn, wet, or folded incorrectly because maintenance of the paper feed rollers is just an annoyance when someone wants to get a coffee.
What’s the fix? The desired fix is the termination with extreme prejudice of the evil Googzilla and its fellow travellers: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and probably a few others on publishers’ dart boards.
A few observations:
- AI is not something new. Publishers have, as far as I know, been mostly on the sidelines in the AI refinement efforts over the last 50 years. Yes, that’s a half a century.
- The publishers want money. The “content” produced is simply a worm on a fish hook. Existential threat to revenue, yes. Death of publishers? Meh.
- The costs of litigation with an outfit like Google are likely to make the CFOs of the publishing companies going after Googzilla and its fellow travellers unhappy. Why? The EU and the US government have not had a stellar track record of getting these digital outfits to return phone calls, let alone play by the rules.
- Which outfits can pay the legal fees longer: Google and Microsoft or a group of publishers who seem to want Google traffic and whatever ad revenue can be had.
Net net: How about less existential threat talk and more use of plain English like “We want cash for content use”? I would ask why the publishers and their trade associations have not been in the vanguard of AI development. The focus seems to be on replacing humanoids with software to reduce costs. Søren Kierkegaard would be amused in my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, March 7, 2023
Summarize for a Living: Should You Consider a New Career?
February 13, 2023
In the pre-historic age of commercial databases, many people earned money by reading and summarizing articles, documents, monographs, and consultant reports. In order to prepare and fact check a 130 word summary of an article in the Harvard Business Review in 1980, the cost to the database publisher worked out to something like $17 to $25 per summary for what I would call general business information. (If you want more information about this number, write benkent2020@yahoo.com, and maybe you will get more color on the number.) Flash forward to the present, the cost for a human to summarize an article in the Harvard Business Review has increased. That’s why it is necessary to pay to access and print an abstract from a commercial online service. Even with yesterday’s technology, the costs are a killer. Now you know why software that eliminates the human, the editorial review, the fact checking, and the editorial policies which define what is indexed, why, and what terms are assigned is a joke to many of those in the search and retrieval game.
I mention this because if you are in the A&I business (abstracting and indexing), you may want to take a look at HunKimForks ChatGPT Arxiv Extension. The idea is that ChatGPT can generate an abstract which is certainly less fraught with cost and management hassles than running one of the commercial database content generation systems dependent on humans, some with degrees in chemistry, law, or medicine.
Are the summaries any good? For the last 40 years abstracts and summaries have been, in my opinion, degrading. Fact checking is out the window along with editorial policies, style guidelines, and considered discussion of index terms, classification codes, time handling and signifying, among other, useful knowledge attributes.
Three observations:
- Commercial database publishers may want to check out this early-days open source contribution
- Those engaged in abstracting, writing summaries of books, and generating distillations of turgid government documents (yep, blue chip consulting firms I an thinking of you) may want to think about their future
- Say “hello” to increasingly inaccurate outputs from smart software. Recursion and liquid algorithms are not into factual stuff.
Stephen E Arnold, February 13, 2023
Modern Research Integrity: Stunning Indeed
February 13, 2023
I read “The Rise and Fall of Peer Review.” The essay addresses what happens when a researcher submits a research paper to a research journal. Many “research” journals are owned by big professional publishing companies. If you are not familiar with that sector, think about a publishing club which markets to libraries and “research” institutions. No articles in “research” publications, no promotion. The method for determining accuracy is to ask experts to read submitted papers, make comments, and send a signal about value of the “research.” I served on the peer review panel for a year and quit. I am no academic, but I know doo doo when it is on my shoe.
Now I want to focus on one passage. Consider this statement:
Why don’t reviewers catch basic errors and blatant fraud? One reason is that they almost never look at the data behind the papers they review, which is exactly where the errors and fraud are most likely to be. In fact, most journals don’t require you to make your data public at all. You’re supposed to provide them “on request,” but most people don’t. That’s how we’ve ended up in sitcom-esque situations like ~20% of genetics papers having totally useless data because Excel autocorrected the names of genes into months and years. (When one editor started asking authors to add their raw data after they submitted a paper to his journal, half of them declined and retracted their submissions. This suggests, in the editor’s words, “a possibility that the raw data did not exist from the beginning.”)
Observations:
- There is exactly one commercial database which added corrections to its entries. Why? Accuracy is expensive and most publishers are not into corrections. I think the feature of that database has been in the trash heap for many, many years. The outfit which bought the database is not into excellence in anything but revenue and profit.
- I found it impossible to get access to [a] the author to whom I wanted to address a question directly; that is, on the telephone, or [b] to get the data on which the crazy statistical hoops were displayed. Hey, math is not the key differentiator for many researchers, getting tenure and grants are the prime movers. A peer reviewer with pointed questions? Sorry, no way.
- The professional publishers want to follow a process which shifts responsibility for publishing error-filled articles to the “procedure”, the peer reviewers, the editors, and probably the stray dog outside their headquarters. Everyone is responsible for mistakes except them.
Net net: Perhaps the notion of open source accuracy needs to be expanded beyond tweets and Facebook posts?
Stephen E Arnold, February 14, 2023
The Intelware Sector: In the News Again
January 13, 2023
It’s Friday the 13th. Bad luck day for Voyager Labs, an Israel-based intelware vendor. But maybe there is bad luck for Facebook or Meta or whatever the company calls itself. Will there be more bad luck for outfits chasing specialized software and services firms?
Maybe.
The number of people interested in the savvy software and systems which comprise Israel’s intelware industry is small. In fact, even among some of the law enforcement and intelligence professionals whom I have encountered over the years, awareness of the number of firms, their professional and social linkages, and the capabilities of these systems is modest. NSO Group became the poster company for how some of these systems can be used. Not long ago, the Brennan Center made available some documents obtained via legal means about a company called Voyager Labs.
Now the Guardian newspaper (now begging for dollars with blue and white pleas) has published “Meta Alleges Surveillance Firm Collected Data on 600,000 Users via Fake Accounts.” the main idea of the write up is that an intelware vendor created sock puppet accounts with phony names. Under these fake identities, the investigators gathered information. The write up refers to “fake accounts” and says:
The lawsuit in federal court in California details activities that Meta says it uncovered in July 2022, alleging that Voyager used surveillance software that relied on fake accounts to scrape data from Facebook and Instagram, as well as Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Telegram. Voyager created and operated more than 38,000 fake Facebook accounts to collect information from more than 600,000 Facebook users, including posts, likes, friends lists, photos, comments and information from groups and pages, according to the complaint. The affected users included employees of non-profits, universities, media organizations, healthcare facilities, the US armed forces and local, state and federal government agencies, along with full-time parents, retirees and union members, Meta said in its filing.
Let’s think about this fake account thing. How difficult is it to create a fake account on a Facebook property. About eight years ago as a test, my team created a fake account for a dog — about eight years ago. Not once in those eight years was any attempt to verify the humanness or the dogness of the animal. The researcher (a special librarian in fact) set up the account and demonstrated to others on my research team how the Facebook sign up system worked or did not work in this particularly example. Once logged in, faithful and trusting Facebook seemed to keep our super user logged into the test computer. For all I know, Tess is still logged in with Facebook doggedly tracking her every move. Here’s Tess:
Tough to see that Tess is not a true Facebook type, isn’t it?
Is the accusation directed at Voyager Labs a big deal? From my point of view, no. The reason that intelware companies use Facebook is that Facebook makes it easy to create a fake account, exercises minimal administrative review of registered user, and prioritizes other activities.
I personally don’t know what Voyager Labs did or did not do. I don’t care. I do know that other firms providing intelware have the capability of setting up, managing, and automating some actions of accounts for either a real human, an investigative team, or another software component or system. (Sorry, I am not at liberty to name these outfits.)
Grab your Tum’s bottle and consider these points:
- What other companies in Israel offer similar alleged capabilities?
- Where and when were these alleged capabilities developed?
- What entities funded start ups to implement alleged capabilities?
- What other companies offer software and services which deliver similar alleged capabilities?
- When did Facebook discover that its own sign up systems had become a go to source of social action for these intelware systems?
- Why did Facebook ignore its sign up procedures failings?
- Are other countries developing and investing in similar systems with these alleged capabilities? If so, name a company in England, France, China, Germany, or the US?
These one-shot “intelware is bad” stories chop indiscriminately. The vendors get slashed. The social media companies look silly for having little interest in “real” identification of registrants. The licensees of intelware look bad because somehow investigations are somehow “wrong.” I think the media reporting on intelware look silly because the depth of the information on which they craft stories strikes me as shallow.
I am pointing out that a bit more diligence is required to understand the who, what, why, when, and where of specialized software and services. Let’s do some heavy lifting, folks.
Stephen E Arnold, January 13, 2023
Internet Archive Scholar: Will Publishers Find a Way to Stomp This Free Knowledge Beast?
January 12, 2023
Here is a new search service worth noting. The Internet Archive Scholar was built to search the extensive, non-profit Internet Archive. The tool introduces itself:
“This full text search index includes over 25 million research articles and other scholarly documents preserved in the Internet Archive. The collection spans from digitized copies of eighteenth century journals through the latest Open Access conference proceedings and pre-prints crawled from the World Wide Web.”
Yes, that is a lot of information and a dedicated search system is a welcome addition. If only it were easier to find what one is looking for; the search leaves some on the Arnold IT team wanting more functionality. But the service is young, and the page notes that “Metadata is being improved and features have not been finalized.“
The About page tells us more about how the tool works, where the metadata comes from (fatcat.wiki), and where to direct certain queries. It also addresses the issue of text and data mining:
“We intend to provide researcher access to the full corpus for text and data mining purposes. Derived datasets may also be posted publicly for analysis, for example a citation graph or N-gram frequencies by year. If you are interested or would like to see specific datasets made available, please contact us.
Currently snapshots of the full fatcat metadata corpus and upstream metadata sources are uploaded periodically to the Bulk Bibliographic Metadata collection on archive.org. Read more in the Fatcat Guide.”
We look forward to seeing what functionality improvements the team implements as the Scholar is developed further. Readers may want to check it out for themselves and/or bookmark the site for future use. We are also curious about publishers’ reactions.
Cynthia Murrell, January 12, 2023
Sesamy for Content in Small Bites
December 1, 2022
Here is good news for anyone who would like to purchase a piece of content without a long-term relationship with its host platform. The Next Web reports, “Swedish Startup Sesamy Seeks to Slaughter the Subscription Model.” It is such a good idea, we wonder whether this company will become an Amazon acquisition target. Writer Cate Lawrence tells us:
“[Sesamy is] So far, the Stockholm-based company has partnered with every major book publisher in Sweden and Denmark to offer users the option to purchase digital content as a single purchase. You can then consume it on any app or device. This means you can play Sesamy audiobooks in your favorite audio app and download watermarked ebooks to any ereader. And you actually own the book instead of renting it with a platform like Amazon Kindle. … Publishing companies are struggling to woo readers who look to cut costs, and Sesamy offers them a new business model and potential revenue source. In October, the company launched SmartID with Swedish publication Breakit, enabling publishers to monetize non-subscribed readers, without cannibalizing their existing revenues from digital subscriptions.
The software will also include built-in price optimization that suggests a fair retail cost to readers and publishers, ensuring that the platform remains competitive. And this incremental revenue may add up at a time when people are culling their subscriptions to save money.”
There must be an appetite for this sort of service—the company just raked in €3.3 million in a recent funding round. It will use this capital to make available single issues of newspapers and magazines. Yes please. Lawrence contemplates an extension to academic journal articles. They should really be free, she notes, but single-article access would be an improvement. Sesamy was founded in March 2021 by the folks behind the podcast platform Acast.
Cynthia Murrell, December 1, 2022
Academic Publisher eLife Shifting to Peer Review Model
November 17, 2022
The racket, er, field of academic journalism has needed a shakeup for quite some time. Will this be the move that does it? Science reports, “Journal Seeks to Upend Scientific Publishing by Only Reviewing—Not Accepting—Manuscripts.” The non-profit, online-only eLife hopes the change will offer readers more nuance than the traditional accept-or-reject dichotomy. The free-to-read journal used to charge writers $3000 if it accepted and published their paper. Writer Jeffrey Brainard relates:
“Under the new approach, eLife will charge authors $2000 if they accept the publisher’s offer to have a submitted manuscript undergo peer review. Regardless of whether the critiques are positive or negative, the manuscript and its associated, unsigned peer-review statements will be posted online and be free to read. If the author revises the paper to address the comments, eLife will post the new version.
Since eLife was founded in 2012, it has tried other innovations. In 2020, for example, it started to require all submitted manuscripts be published as preprints. Abandoning the ‘accept’ stamp is a logical next step, says eLife’s editor-in-chief, biologist Michael Eisen of the University of California, Berkeley.
Eisen, who co-founded the open-access Public Library of Science journals in 2003, says the detailed critiques written by reviewers that eLife recruits are its main contribution to the scientific process. The reviews, he says, are ‘more nuanced, more informative, and more useful to the community than our thumbs-up or thumbs down publishing decision.’ He also argues that the new model will speed up a peer-review process that at other journals is often opaque and slow because it can involve multiple rounds.”
The plan is similar to a practice already put into place by open-research platform F1000Research, which allows readers to review manuscripts posted by researchers. Eisen, however, expects to offer higher quality critiques on his site. Some details are still being ironed out, including how to decide which papers to invite for review. The new policy is to be implemented in January 2023. Researchers funded by the NIH will be glad to know they can declare a reviewed manuscript the final version of record, allowing it to be indexed by the PubMed search engine (a funding requirement). Ultimately, says Eisen, the new approach will push the publisher to the background and researchers’ work to the fore. We wonder how other academic journals feel about that philosophy.
Cynthia Murrell, November 17, 2022
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