E-publishing – Week 5

On-line Journals and the effects of e-publishing

A two-part lecture this week, although the theme that ran through it could be said to be looking at the effects of e-publishing. Firstly, we looked at on-line journals and how access to on-line news has changed the traditional news cycle. Then, in an interesting spin to the lecture, we used systems thinking to look at a system used for e-publishing.

1. On-line journals
2. News on-line
3. A ‘systems thinking’ approach to looking at a disruptive technology


On-line journals

Journals and magazines have been a popular way of writing for particular target audiences for hundreds of years, whether as political soapbox, literary endeavour, or social entertainment. Daniel Defoe, for example, established The Review, one of Britain’s first periodicals, primarily as a means to comment on the political relationship between England and France (http://www.defoereview.org/?page_id=116). Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope published the majority of their works in serial form (http://www.pbs.org/wnet/dickens/life_publication.html). Today we have magazines on just about any subject you can imagine.

According to Art Kleiner, editor-in-chief of strategy+business magazine, “every magazine…reflects the taste and character of a community of people who create and read it. Taken as a blurred whole, magazines reflect the personality of our culture.” (http://www.well.com/~art/maghist01.html)
(hmmm…I wonder what the preponderance of celebrity, gossip and ‘true-life’(!) story magazines on supermarket shelves today says about our culture?)

I mention all this because Eben made a comment in this week’s lecture about how we have to look at a business like publishing not just as a money-making entity, but as a part of our society and culture. It made me think about the effect that the shift towards on-line technology has already had and might have in the future on publishing in its broadest sense.

With on-line journals, for example, the shift to on-line technology means that the costs of producing and distributing a magazine or journal can be minimal. It’s now possible for anyone with an interest in a subject to set up a journal or magazine and attract both subscribers and content.

This means much greater choice for the consumer, which I guess is both a good and bad thing. Good in that we get access to things that traditional publishers may never have distributed, bad in that we have to wade through so much more dross to find the nuggets of worth.

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News on-line

In class we spoke about the traditional life cycle of a news item – from headline story and editorial, perhaps to follow up article/s, to readers’ letters and comments, through to its final demise.

On-line news changes that cycle, and the possibilities for reporting news.

Firstly, on-line technology offers immediate access to the latest news, pretty much wherever you are and whatever time of day or night. We now get the news as it’s happening. This in itself has a few implications, for example:

· we hear of breaking news without any details or real information being known. Commentators are invited to speculate and in the absence of facts their speculation can become ‘the truth’.

· with a need to fill a vast space with ‘news’, things that may not in the past have been deemed newsworthy now get aired. To make them newsworthy, the issues have to be ‘hyped up’

Secondly, we read differently on-line than we do in print, especially when reading for information rather than pleasure (see, for example, Michael Agger’s article http://www.slate.com/toolbar.aspx?action=read&id=2193552).

We scan and surf for information, and if our eyes don’t quickly find something of value, we click away. (Although, I suppose, we’ve probably always read newspapers and magazines like that, haven’t we?)

Perhaps, with tools like hypertext, the web actually ameliorates this, since it offers the possibility of multiple levels of reading, with short sharp articles for nibblers and grazers and more in-depth information just a click away for those that need something more substantial to digest.

Which brings me (quite neatly, if I do say so myself) to the third point. On-line tools such as hypertext, video and audio links allow for much fuller coverage of a news item than was possible in print. We can get background information, find similar stories, see different points of view, etc. The only caveat, I suppose, is that all the links are provided by the same source as the original story and will, therefore, be subject to the same editorial slant or point of view.

Fourthly (and finally, you’ll be glad to hear), on-line news archives extend the ‘shelf-life’ of a story almost indefinitely. As long as it’s well tagged, it’s just a search query string away! A bit different than the days of having to go to the library to find an article on microfiche, as I remember doing.

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A ‘systems-thinking’ approach

And speaking of libraries, they’re a good example of another institution that’s having to reinvent itself because of the ‘disruptive’ effect of digital technology. In class, we used a basic systems approach to analyse the on-line publishing technology used by ‘Lulu’ and its potential effect on the environment in which it operates. We saw that it’s potential effects reach wider than the immediate publishing environment.

This same approach could, perhaps, be applied to libraries, who are having to change their view of themselves in our digital age. According to a website called ‘The Disruptive Library Technology Jester’, this is, in part, “the difference between the management of content that is ‘done’, versus the management of content that is being created.” (in an article called ‘Riding the Waves of Content and Change’ at the aforementioned link), meaning that library services might evolve, for example, by being involved during the creation of acadamic works, offering links to similar or relevant works, potential collaborators, tools for backup and version control and ease of final publishing into institutional repositories.

Finally, for this blog, no conversation that includes a reference to systems thinking, no matter how brief, would be complete for me without mention of the work of Peter Senge, who saw systems thinking as one of the cornerstones of his ideal ‘learning organisation’. In his book, ‘The Fifth Discipline’, Senge discusses how viewing an organisation (or industry, or society) as a system, as both a whole and a set of inter-related parts with complex and dynamic relationships between them, helps us to understand it better. He also discusses how little we usually understand the long-term implications of our actions and that our actions very often have unintended consequences – all very valid comments when it comes to the world of e-publishing.

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