Matthew Cowen
About Newsletter Categories Working Library Subscribe License Search Also on Micro.blog
  • Defining Productivity and Collaboration

    The opportunity that COVID-19 provides

    Good morning. I was trying to get up and running with the narrated version of this newsletter, and it took a little more time than expected which is why there was no issue last week. It is now available through Apple’s Podcast Library so you can subscribe directly through your podcast player of choice. That’s the good news.

    The bad news (for me) was that I’d started this article quite some time ago, but recent events, namely the impact of COVID-19, have forced me to rewrite significant portions of it. So much for pre-planning!

    On to the issue.


    Productivity and Collaboration

    Picking up from where I left off in Collaborative platforms the new hotness, you’ll have noted that I didn’t go into too much detail about collaboration and productivity. I wanted to, but frankly, the article was already too long at publication. I prefer reading long-form, but I appreciate that not everyone is like me and hence I try to cut these articles into bite-sized pieces when it’s appropriate.

    For this issue, I thought I’d go into detail about the link between productive and collaborative platforms and what may lie in the future. If you’re looking for a how-to article, this is not that. I suggest you search through your chosen search engine to get copious articles about implementation design and planning.

    This article is not a scientific report either. It simply attempts to show how collaborative platforms have helped in business productivity, sometimes in a surprising way. Firstly, let’s try to answer the question of whether collaboration has an influence on productivity, or if productivity requires collaboration.

    What is Productivity?

    The first at-scale uses of the term was in the production of the Ford Model T by Henry Ford. Ford understood when he observed the build processes involved in making cars and other things. He observed them in their entirety and not in isolation, eventually concluding that efficiencies could be gained by splitting them into component parts and focusing on simplifying and accelerating each step as much as possible.

    That simplification was in some cases extreme; famously Ford would let you buy a car in any colour as long as it was black. A funny anecdote, of course, however, restricting the colour choice meant the process was standardised and simplified gaining significant efficiencies in the manufacturing process.

    The assembly line was born with each worker stationed at a particular point along the line, each contributing to the evolution of the build of the item. In the example of a car, the start of the line concentrated on processes dedicated to the basics of the car, the chassis, the wheels and the supports necessary for the bodywork, interior and engine. Progress down the line steadily adds parts and the car slowly takes its final shape, as do the type and skill of the jobs on the line.

    Each task was timed, and tools that required for each type of task were analysed, so that minimum time is lost when grabbing the drill or spanner required. This timing enabled Ford to build a detailed picture of how long it took to build a car from start to finish. It also helped Ford speed up tasks in places where inefficiencies were identified. Modern car factories are not that far removed from this original vision by Ford.

    Productivity, in this sense, is the ability to breakdown, analyse and render efficient processes that make up the finished product or service. Productivity can be increased by lowering the time taken or decreased by increasing the time spent. But this is a one-dimensional definition of productivity.

    The OECD defines productivity as:

    Productivity is commonly defined as a ratio between the output volume and the volume of inputs. In other words, it measures how efficiently production inputs, such as labour and capital, are being used in an economy to produce a given level of output.

    What is often under-appreciated, is that for productivity to work efficiently all constituent parts need to work together well so that each transition from process to process work smoothly together. Collaboration begets productivity. If there is no collaboration, productivity takes a huge hit.

    Defining Collaboration

    According to various sources, the Cambridge English Dictionary, Wikipedia amongst them, collaboration can be defined as:

    The process of two or more people or organisations working together to achieve a common goal or task.

    When people in a team of people inter-organisational or extra-organisational work together to achieve the desired outcome, we call this collaboration. The definition is intentionally loose because collaboration can take on many forms. A trading contract across two nations may be considered collaboration; they collaborate to enable trade to and from each other. 

    Possibly the most common form of collaboration in existence is Project Management. Henry Gantt first introduced to the world of project management with his bar chart structured to visualise who does what and when on a large-scale endeavour. Initially, it was limited to use in construction, where hundreds of people were tasked with building offices, warehouses, homes and other buildings. Gantt developed a simple way of representing each task aligned by date/time with its length determining the duration required for completion. The structure is self-constructed because Gantt’s model requires links between tasks that show if tasks could be started or not, or if a particular task requires another to be completed before commencement; you can’t fit the windows in the house until the wall is built. These links are called constraints and often expressed as F➔S, or Finish ➔ Start.

    Modern collaboration is a little different but broader in scope. As described in the definition above, working together is the basis by which people today collaborate, but what has changed is the amount and channels of communication used to achieve desired goals together.

    In businesses today, people use email, Instant Messaging, WhatsApp, SMS, as well as specific applications like ERPs to achieve the tasks required of the organisation, and they switch between each of these frequently and freely. The inherent problem with this is that you may start a conversation in email because of something you saw in the CRM, then finish the conversation in WhatsApp, having passed through two or three maybe more applications in the process. This can be confusing to some, and potential loss of information is inevitable. But worse still, a loss of context may cause bad decision-making or cross-pollination of information to those whom the information should not be exposed.

    Modern collaboration tries to solve these issues by grouping as many channels of communication together as possible, thereby furnishing a one-stop interface to achieve optimum collaboration.

    The current landscape of collaboration tools

    There are essentially two players in the market that have offers adapted to efficient business collaboration; Microsoft Teams and Slack. Although similar in their basic functionality, they differ somewhat in execution and the way they integrate to productivity ecosystems.

    A third player seems to be positioning itself in the market. From The Information:

    Google is working on a mobile application for businesses that brings together the functions of several standalone apps the company already offers, including Gmail and its online storage service Drive. The move could help it compete more effectively with application suites from Microsoft and others, according to two people who have used the application and three people briefed about it.

    Google is lagging behind Microsoft on its productive suite, and as this recent development shows, its communications and collaboration strategy too. A handful of utilities were required in the Google ecosystem to perform what are ostensibly tasks with a common link. When you email a Contact or send an instant message to the same person because you are discussing the same project, that link is broken in the Google ecosystem, and it is this the Google is trying to resolve.

    Microsoft, Slack and Google are all trying to provide a one-stop-shop for your productivity needs, but integrating (obviously) their own ecosystem directly into the application and in some cases providing the necessary tools to link external SaaS applications. Microsoft literally stated as such a few years back at one of its conferences I attended; Teams was to become the first thing you open when you got to work, and the last when you left.

    COVID-19 and the opportunity to do more with collaboration tools

    If anything, existing collaborative tools are held back by two competing forces; their usefulness in a society that likes to meet and work together physically and the willingness and expertise of tech companies to develop better and more seamless collaborative tools.

    For the latter, I think there is no doubt that with the right incentives, tech companies could develop better tools to provide even better experiences. Whether it be integration in existing tools or the simplification in the initiation of collaborative sessions like voice and video. There are, no doubt, lots of other technological innovations in labs and around the corner that will appear on the timeline of these increasingly incontournable apps. Tech companies have only just started developing tools that push collaboration further.

    One of the most significant needs across the globe currently, is the response required to prevent the spreading of what is clearly a highly communicable virus. Despite low mortality rates and being concentrated on the old and sick, the fact that it is spreading fast around the globe and that most people will have little or no symptoms at all — many will never know they were a carrier of the virus at all — has forced businesses to halt all non-essential travel. If you’re interested, the MIT Technology Review has a list of some of the best and worst data dashboards to feed your COVID-19 paranoia.

    But as the risk is to the old and infirm, it is wise policy to isolate as much as possible to prevent the unnecessary spreading of the virus. To that end, many businesses around the globe have implemented travel bans for employees, and several high-profile conferences have been cancelled, F8, Google I/O and Mobile World Congress, to name a few.

    This then is the opportunity for collaborative tools to come into their own. Microsoft reports a 500% increase in use of its Teams platform and others such as Slack and Zoom are also reporting increases in use. Microsoft has additionally developed a Crisis Communications App free of charge, to help businesses coordinate their response to this virus and other crises.

    Teams and Slack are still quite rudimentary, but massive development initiatives have kicked off at Microsoft and others to enhance their functionality. We, as users and businesses, will significantly benefit from this — if we don’t all die, of course. But as always in these situations, there are winners and losers. Airlines, for example, are bracing for huge losses over the coming weeks and months.

    It is not clear if, after the COVID-19 pandemic is over, if collaborative software will have had enough time to change the habits of business and their employees permanently. But what is sure is that collaborative software will not be the same again.


    The Future is Digital Newsletter is intended for anyone interested in Digital Technologies and how it affects their business. I strongly encourage you to forward it to people you feel may be interested. If this email was forwarded to you, I’d love to see you on board. You can sign up here:

    Sign up now

    Visit the website to read all my articles and continue the discussion in the Slack group.

    Thanks for being a supporter, have a great day.

    → 5:09 AM, Mar 10
  • Introducing The Future is Digital Narrated

    One of the most requested things, when I started this newsletter, was an audio version, for those that don’t enjoy reading long articles like those I write, or those who simply prefer to listen along during their commute. I’m pleased to announce that this is exactly what I’m doing.

    This is the narrated version of the text-based newsletter. Press play at the top of this email or subscribe through your podcast app of choice.


    The Future is Digital Newsletter is intended for anyone interested in digital technologies and how they affect business. I hope you can forward it to people you feel are interested in the subject. If this email was forwarded to you, please don’t forget to subscribe for yourself. You can sign up here:

    Sign up now

    Visit the archives to read all previous articles.

    Thanks for being a supporter, have a great day.

    → 5:36 PM, Feb 25
  • Introducing The Future is Digital Narrated

    Newsletters as a Podcast = More Choice

    One of the most requested things, when I started this newsletter, was an audio version for those that don’t enjoy reading long articles like those I write, or those who simply prefer to listen along during their commute. I’m pleased to announce that this is exactly what I’m doing.

    Substack, the platform that hosts this newsletter, has provided essential tools for podcasting since April of 2019, and it was something I’d intended a long time ago. It was part of the initial brief for the newsletter. However, at the time was not possible without a significant technical and/or financial investment. I’d hinted about this coming in the 2019 review issue:

    I wrote back then:

    I intend to carry on writing and plan to do a few new things next year.

    On to the issue.


    NaaP: Newsletters as a Podcast

    I'm being a little silly with this subtitle, I know. But I thought it was amusing and intriguing, not least as I’ve seen an uptick in people releasing their newsletter with a podcast element. Venerable publications such as the Harvard Business Review and The Economist have put resources towards producing their magazines in narrated form. Early results measuring adhesion and usage rates are encouraging.

    Podcasts, as in the traditional sense, were generally complimentary to newsletters. They often centred around discussing in detail the central ideas written for the newsletter with a friend or industry expert, often with fascinating discussion resulting. Traditional podcasts required two or more people to make them exciting and attractive to listeners.

    This new wave is a little different. It is a narrated version of the newsletter that replaces the need to read. Some prefer different content types, and it is wise to provide choice for subscribers. I’m an avid reader myself, devouring tens of thousands of words a day, others are more aural or visual. I’m not sure a YouTube version of this newsletter would be relevant, so that’s why I wanted to produce the podcast version.

    I’m releasing this as an experiment, and I am eager to see what happens.


    Who is this for?

    Subscribers that prefer to listen to the content, or those who wish to multitask while walking/running, driving or commuting.

    When will each episode come out?

    I will try to publish the audio version shortly after the text version - you’ll get an email with the audio version of this issue. Although, I haven’t fully worked out exactly when yet, as there are several possibilities to release the audio podcast, I’ll try several options out and see where it takes me. Let me know what you prefer over the coming weeks.

    How can I listen to the podcast without opening the email each time?

    I will publish an RSS feed — that’s technical jargon for a subscription link — for you to subscribe using your favourite podcast players like Overcast, Pocket Casts, or the built-in podcasts apps on your devices. The link included in the email is platform-independent, and you’ll be able to subscribe from Android, iOS and even on your desktop operating system. Listing in Apple's podcast directory is in progress.

    If you don’t find it there yet, you can use this direct link.

    Why now?

    If I’m honest, the recent release from one of my influences (Stratechery) got my backside into gear. As I said in the introduction, it was part of the original brief of this newsletter, but a combination of fear, laziness and technical challenges delayed the production.

    Can I help?

    Things like these take a lot of time and are often a labour of love. Writing each issue that averages over 1800 words per week is difficult even without adding the voice-over work. I would love it if someone could help out with the editing. Any other suggestions are most welcome.

    For now, I hope you enjoy this addition to the text version, and I hope you find it as useful as the newsletter itself. Let’s see where this experiment takes us.


    The Future is Digital Newsletter is intended for anyone interested in digital technologies and how they affect business. I hope you can forward it to people you feel are interested in the subject. If this email was forwarded to you, please don’t forget to subscribe for yourself. You can sign up here:

    Sign up now

    Visit the archives to read all previous articles.

    Thanks for being a supporter, have a great day.

    → 5:34 PM, Feb 25
  • Microsoft Ignite The Tour London 2020

    A Show Report

    A slightly different tack to the issue today. A quick report back on the Microsoft Ignite The Tour London conference.

    On to the update.


    Learning Paths for Microsoft Ignite The Tour London

    Image: Microsoft

    As a long time attendee of conferences and particularly Microsoft conferences (with thanks to a previous employer) I am concentrating on giving feedback on a recent meeting I was at in London earlier in January.

    Microsoft’s future directions in Digital Transformation

    To summarise briefly, the main subjects and points of focus for Microsoft when we’re talking about Digital Transformation, it would come down to three things; Collaboration, Automation and Artificial Intelligence.

    Collaboration

    While I spent my time on the first day furthering my interest in AI and Automation (see below), the second day was primarily related to collaboration and the human side of technology.

    One of the first sessions on the second day, called Intelligent Communications in Microsoft Teams, focused on the possibilities of better meetings, device and telephony integrations. Microsoft Teams focuses on meetings, chats, calling, files and App/Workflows neatly integrated into a single interface that is both efficient and enjoyable to use. Microsoft is setting aside substantial resources to improve the environment and capabilities of the Teams platform.

    I’ve written briefly about Teams and how it fits in with Microsoft’s vision of Digital Transformation here:

    Which brings me to the state of collaboration today. What we see today is specialised collaboration and productivity being developed that take us away from the general-purpose collaborative apps we have now. There are myriad applications for collaboration, but the two most popular and most known are Slack and Microsoft Teams. If you want to know more about them, search for reviews online. Suffice to say that both claim several millions of Daily Active Users (DAUs).

    In the series of 5 sessions dedicated to Teams — of which Intelligent Communications in Microsoft Teams was te second — the introductory session was just as interesting and useful.

    Albeit a rundown of new features in Teams, as I stated earlier, Microsoft is putting many resources towards the development of Teams, and in some cases, it is hard to keep up with all the changes. This session neatly exposed the newly released functions like Private Channels (something I had requested over a year ago) and cross-channel posting, enabling one post to touch several channels simultaneously.

    Another feature that raised a lot of applause was Live Captions. Currently available in test and only in English, Live Captions displays, in realtime, the conversations in the current meeting. This is an excellent enhancement for those hard of hearing, or people attending meetings conducted where English is their second or third language. More languages are planned for the future. Note: captions are not saved and hence not searchable for the moment — recorded meetings are searchable and you can literally search for your name (for example) and the results will show you the timestamp of the video where your name was mentioned!

    The new functions coming “soon” were additionally listed; pinned channels, multi-window support, Outlook integration, Yammer integration and Tasks. These are all additions that make sense and enhance the usefulness of Teams to the point that the platform becomes the place you start and end your workday. 

    It is this that intelligent collaboration is becoming. It is a wise move on Microsoft’s part, as not only does it make work more efficient for business but it also slowly builds a moat around the Office 365 business that Microsoft has judiciously built over the last five years or so.

    Something that I find fascinating as a long time Microsoft expert, is that, unlike the Microsoft of yore, they are listening to their users and trying to implement JTBD theory in all their public-facing applications.

    Automation

    Automation featured heavily in this tech conference, understandably. We’ve seen nothing short of a revolution in automation over the last few years with pioneers in the democratisation of tools, like IFTTT (If This Then That), Shortcuts on iOS and Zapier a more professionals oriented system.

    Microsoft’s answer to this is a previously available product that was both underused and underexposed by itself, namely Microsoft Flow. That has changed in the last year. To demonstrate Microsoft’s renewed focus on the product, Microsoft has renamed it to Power Automate, leaving no doubt in its purpose; to powerfully automate business processes.

    As part of the Power Platform, Power Automate allows the linking and automating of processes from different applications, and this is not limited to the Microsoft ecosystem (a clear signal that things have very much changed in Redmond). The session entitled “Intelligent automation with Microsoft Power Automate” laid-out the return on investment seen by McKinsey, recorded as 5-10% cost savings in 18-24 months and 30% long-term.

    A McKinsey report highlighted the opportunity for businesses to investigate automation in their operations:

    60% of all occupations have at least 30% technically automatable activities

    Almost half of work activities globally have the potential to be automated using current technology.

    Collecting and processing data are among the activities with the highest automation potential.

    By focusing on this potential, Microsoft has developed its Power Platform to target this specifically. The Power Platform presents itself on two levels, the user-facing applications; PowerBI (Business Intelligence and Visualisation Tools), Power Apps (A DIY Application Development Tool) and Power Automate; the underlying back-end to connect data to the upper level with data connectors to over 250 applications, AI Builder (see below) and the Common Data Service to provide almost everything needed for automation in a low-to-no code environment.

    Being Microsoft and being squarely aimed at enterprises, areas such as distribution, security, governance and compliance are integrated by design. Additionally, it is essential to remember that this functionality is built right into the Microsoft Teams collaboration platform, making it easier and better for deployment to non-developers in organisations.

    Start here to learn more about the tools in the Power Platform.

    Artificial Intelligence

    One of the very first sessions of the conference centred on the use of new AI tools with little to no programming, to extract value from unstructured data. While the scenario was a bit contrived, the session did an excellent job of showing how it is possible to use these tools easily to construct useful information.

    The scenario was an invoice database that had been deleted and not backed up, but a copy of each invoice in PDF format was available. Using Azure Cognitive Services, the presenter was able to reconstruct and populate a new database using the PDFs from what is termed “dark data”, i.e., data that is human-readable but not machine-readable (easily).

    Training a simple AI model with just five invoices allowed the extraction of relevant data (invoice number, date, product, quantity, price and others) in a structured format that was subsequently used to populate the previously deleted database.

    It was a nice example of how multiple thousands of data points could be worked on automatically — the case study had nearly 150000 pdf invoices — and in around 24 hours, the data accurately extracted. Take a look at https://aka.ms/AIML10 for further information.

    Further sessions went into more detail about the use of these new Cognitive Services in Azure. One session used the pre-built AI models in Azure to further outline the usefulness of the product in saving time and investment in specialised AI development.

    Microsoft clearly thinks this is an area of clear advantage to its partners and end-users ultimately. We see AI creeping into everyday products like Microsoft Word and Microsoft Powerpoint. Microsoft Word will now create a basic resumé from your LinkedIn profile and suggest enhancements based on the cognitive models it has developed over the last couple of years and the metadata available through their ownership of LinkedIn. Note: this is opt-in, and no information is used, to my knowledge, without consent. Powerpoint can suggest styles, shapes and overall design of a slide just by looking at the content. For the artistically-challenged, this is a great help.

    AI is also extending itself across the collaborative platform, Microsoft 365. Users can be configured to receive emails from the platform entitled “MyAnalytics | Wellbeing Edition”.

    This email gives you an overview of who you have been working with regularly, how much times you’re spending in meetings, the time you’ve been collaboration and what it calls Focus Time (time free from meetings on your agenda), along with suggestions on how you can improve your wellbeing at work. It is relatively rudimentary, but a start and in some cases, I have found it useful.

    We can expect more to come.

    Humanity in IT. The other side of the conference

    Microsoft left much space in the agenda catalogue for initiatives around IT being a more humane discipline, something that has not traditionally been the case for big tech. One could argue that the big tech companies are anything but concerned for human wellbeing and only concerned about monetising humans for every last drop of information, often termed Surveillance Capitalism.

    Microsoft’s renaissance has been powered by a profound change in its corporate governance. Out went the macho, stormy, loud character that was from a bygone era, Steve Ballmer, and in came the more considered, empathic and reasoned disciple of Mindset. It’s a good read, I recommend it.

    Suffering personal difficulties, Satya Nadella has not hidden from addressing the need in IT to be more inclusive and more empathic to the people whose lives it touches daily. Looking at some of the titles in the session list gives you an idea of where Satya wants to take Microsoft; “Practising Kindness in Tech: 5 Steps to Build a Culture of Giving Back and Helping Others in the Community”, “Imposter Syndrome Banishing Spell”, “Learning from Failure” and “Creative Technology - Bringing the Human into IT” (session not recorded).

    It’s a list you would more likely associate with penny store wisdom books rather than a tech conference, but hold judgement for a moment and reflect on why subjects like these are important.

    Much of Tech today has an existential crisis, as users, the world over discover the extent to which lives are surveilled. Usage statistics on the proliferation of ad-blocking technology alone speaks of a world that wants the conveniences but doesn’t want the downsides.

    This cognitive dissonance only fuels the attitudes that have invaded civil discourse on the Internet on forums and micro-blogging sites like Twitter. A few years ago, it was widely joked that the quickest way to come to the conclusion that humanity was doomed was by reading the comments sections on the Internet. Fortunately, we haven’t got there yet. Yet!

    In Practising Kindness in Tech: 5 Steps to Build a Culture of Giving Back and Helping Others in the Community, Dux Raymond Sy outlined a simple framework for IT professionals to use their skills and knowledge to help out in their immediate communities. Setting up PCs for a local group, supporting IT problems for local non-profits, the list of possibilities is endless. And it’s a virtuous circle too. Not only does someone get to benefit from your work, but you get to feel good for doing so.

    I’m currently a bénévole (volunteer) for ADIE; Association pour le Droit à l’Initiative Economique, where I help advise underprivileged startups build their business. I am also on the list of entrepreneurs that visit schools to talk about my experiences in business, through the initiative called 100000 Entrepreneurs.


    The Future is Digital Newsletter is intended for anyone interested in Digital Technologies and how it affects their business. I strongly encourage you to forward it to people you feel may be interested. If this email was forwarded to you, I’d love to see you onboard. You can sign up here:

    Sign up now

    Visit the website to read all my articles and continue the discussion in the Slack group.

    Thanks for being a supporter, have a great day.

    → 7:12 AM, Feb 18
  • Using the France-Antilles failure as a lens to examine what should have been done

    The failed newspaper in the FWI made several strategy mistakes, but what could they have done?

    After writing many words on the failed newspaper business model, I want to write about what could have been done to save France-Antilles and hopefully develop a simple framework for other publications across the Caribbean. Regardless, I hope this promotes discussion. What’s your take?

    You can comment directly from the email by clicking the comment icon next to my profile picture.

    On to the update.


    Missteps and a lack of strategy

    In The long slow demise of France-Antilles and Newspapers in the Caribbean, I wrote:

    The Flawed Business Model

    “Information wants to be free” a phrase attributed to Stewart Brand who founded the Whole Earth Catalog in the 1960s. He argues that technology could be liberating instead of oppressing and at the first Hackers Conference in 1984, he apparently told Steve Wozniak (one of the three co-founders of Apple):

    “On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”

    The prescient point of his argument was that information’s cost was getting “lower and lower” and that is the situation most publications find themselves in today. Much of the information provided in newspapers today is widely available online from multiple services, and here’s the sting in the tail, for free in many cases.

    But what is most important in the statement above, is the fact that he identifies that information has value and is hence, “expensive”, and it is precisely here that most newspapers fail in their strategy. Much of the information is provided in “filler” articles that have been scraped up from wire services such as AP (Associated Press). These articles have literally no value virtue of the fact that every news outlet prints what is, for all intents and purposes, the same article.

    Newspapers are a business built on assumptions from a bygone era. Firstly, the sales and advertising arms of the newspapers require a lot of staff. There is Sales, there’s Account Management, there’s Graphic Design and of course Operations Management. Those are huge fixed cost to deal with for just a pretty advertisement, and only profitable for premium advertising (of which there is less and less as outlined above). Newspapers also operate on the assumption that the bundle of services, is in and of itself, valuable. That was true, but is no longer relevant for readers.

    Couple this with the very real fact that the business model of the newspaper business took a serious hit when Facebook and Google cornered the market for advertising, with very grave effects on the price and availability of advertisers willing to spend on printed ads. The protected environmental factors have prevented newspapers from listening to reality. I find it all the more surprising given that here, in the FWI, there is no real competition, which proves the point about external factors playing the central role in killing these businesses.

    What should France-Antilles have done?

    Firstly, I need to state that I, personally, am not happy with the end result and that I understand that an available and free press — free as in not politically aligned — is essential for a thriving democracy. Newspapers, journalists and investigations are healthy for a country or state, even if they are sometimes difficult conversations. So, to put it succinctly, I want a newspaper in the FWI to flourish out of this debacle. And I want to see the same across the region. For the simple reason that nationalism is currently spreading around the world, and we are not immune from its disease, and one of the first ways nationalism gains ground is through the press. Be vigilant!

    (/end.rant)

    The crux of the problem for FA and local newspapers is that they are not valuable anymore. Or to put it another way, the content sold has lost its value, and is, in some cases is utterly worthless. Be careful not to confuse interest and importance with procuring value that can be sold against advertising or to the public. It is evident that the newspapers are essential (see above), but the fact that their value has decreased is the reason the current business model is unsustainable.

    As I wrote in The long slow demise of France-Antilles and Newspapers in the Caribbean:

    Unnecessary Costs

    In printed newspapers, there are many fixed costs that render the finances difficult to balance. Printing presses cost phenomenal amounts of money and require trained and dedicated staff to operate them. When you are competing against virtually free digital distribution to get the same information out to your audience, these extra costs are a major burden, and I would suggest, unnecessary now.

    Not only that, but the costs of the raw materials required to physically print — i.e., paper and ink — add to the operating budget in a non-inconsequential way. Paper, by the way, is not getting cheaper either due to environmental concerns. Ink is expensive and it is also toxic. Atmospheric fumes from inks are noxious and large costs associated with the handling, processing, usage and disposal of ink are apparent. 

    Then there is distribution. Without going into any detail, it’s obvious to conclude that distribution of reams of paper has associated costs. Those costs being elevated by the fact that, as a newspaper and the importance on getting to the outlet early in the morning, entails higher-than-standard-hours wages.

    Adding high costs and low sale value together, it can only lead to one outcome — the one we’ve seen played out at FA over the last few years.

    The first thing FA should have done is use its brand value and monetise that instead of trying to monetise using simple advertising that, as we’ve noted, enters less and less in the coffers. Using ad networks like Facebook and Google might be an option, but they shouldn’t have relied upon those either. Those networks' payout rates are dropping significantly too, as pressure from competition and the way ads are valued (new channels of advertising are more effective — influencers, etc.). Still, they are also suffering from the accelerating backlash from their surveillance capitalism tactics that the public is coming around to understand better. Monetising their brand value takes the form of using something like a direct-to-customer subscription aimed squarely at digital use (one could consider options for print too, but as a secondary channel). 

    Many will note that FA had a digital offer, but it was flawed in several respects.

    For one, it was considered too expensive as it was priced equivalent to the physical newspaper. The physical aspect imbued value for money, you can’t do that with a URL or email. Considered too expensive was not its only flaw; it was principally a PDF of the paper version originally, and it was downright hostile to use.

    Digital has to offer the same thing with less friction and for less cost. FA did not. Thirdly, being a clone of the paper version, all the adverts printed in the paper version were also visible in the digital version, offering FA zero scope to monetise differently based on context. FA could have essentially double-dipped by providing advertising based on print and digital for the same text article. Digital affords the possibility to micro-advertise on each item, something that is unsupportable for the reader on paper.

    As noted earlier the content itself is the source of difficulty for newspapers and was for FA. Competing with not only freely accessible online publications, but trillions of written words of quality (like these 😀) that are freely available, has made it difficult for newspapers to differentiate themselves. 

    Full disclosure: I fully intend to take this newsletter to a paid publication in the future, as I state in the second paragraph of the about page.

    FA is competing with articles that are on the newswire (national and international), blogs, Facebook pages and tweets more locally and often available faster and they’re trying to bundle all that together into a value-added package to sell to the user. So their costs, their suppliers and the distribution is all tied to a business model that no longer makes any money, and by extrapolation, no longer makes sense.

    A business model based loosely on what I’m trying to do here with this newsletter would have better served FA. A newsletter-type publication with richer content, more personal and better targeted to the audience — following the Jobs to be Done model, i.e. hyper-local news in detail with analysis and context, hyper-local sports news with more detail and more context and the odd super-detailed investigative work about a local issue, Chloredecone anyone? (1)

    So what does this model fix that the old one couldn’t? For one, distribution. It costs much less to distribute digitally having few fixed costs that are exponentially degressive with an increase in subscribers. Secondly value, or as I put it above, reduced expense. 

    With this model, production costs (printing should be outsourced) together with the distribution costs mentioned above, are drastically reduced: no trees harmed. More importantly, there is perceived value.

    A bundle of scraped articles from the newswire (worthless) packed between low-value simplistic reports of local happenings (we don’t need to know that a dog in a far off town soiled the garden of his neighbour), ended with brief sports results with zero opinion or analysis (also of little monetary value to the publication). I'm a little harsh here, I know. It is not that far from the truth, however!

    Why? There used to be value in being informed of a local event; this is no longer the case. Facebook and Twitter tell you about every activity on your Island, and the world, reducing the value of being informed. It's free on Social Media, why would you pay to buy a paper that prints it? It's madness. Virtually every event has its Community Manager dedicated to getting the word out using all the online platforms.

    The fix for publications is to concentrate on informing readers in a more personal manner, with longer more informed and better-developed stories helping the reader understand the impact for him or her. It could include a quick light list of international news to inform, leaving the reader to further delve into the subject using the media better suited to the job. A modern publication also needs to provide an amount of free content — one day a week seems to me to be the sweet spot — and by doing so, they build trust and showcase their best journalism to hook subscribers and capture new converts.

    On the Internet, people pay for what they care for. Developing that feeling between the publication and the reader is all-important to driving long-serving readership and ultimately profit. And when people care about their town, Island or country, they are inherently more willing to pay for quality content that both sustains those publications and allows them to feel they are contributing to development. They are participating in society, tout simplement.


    Footnote:

    (1) Chlordecone in English is Kepone - a significant health scandal in the French West Indies currently.

    Photo by AbsolutVision on Unsplash


    The Future is Digital Newsletter is intended for anyone interested in Digital Technologies and how it affects their business. I strongly encourage you to forward it to people you feel may be interested. If this email was forwarded to you, I’d love to see you onboard. You can sign up here:

    Sign up now

    Visit the website to read all my articles and continue the discussion in the Slack group.

    Thanks for being a supporter, have a great day.

    → 12:20 PM, Feb 10
← Newer Posts Page 13 of 24 Older Posts →
  • RSS
  • JSON Feed