IFRA

Recently, at a WAN-IFRA conference, I had a conversation with somebody who could be described as a successful veteran of the newspaper industry. The topic was software. “I wish we could totally outsource it,” he complained. “All this rubbish that they are selling us, the complexity, the interfaces, and in the end nobody is responsible and puts the blame on somebody else.”

I am sure he was expressing the sentiment of the industry, as I have heard similar - albeit not so cutting - statements on many occasions. “Software should be like electricity,” “cost cutting by outsourcing,” etc. Indeed, very few people seem to love this technology.

Thinking about it in a quiet moment, it occurred to me that it is a bit comparable to a newspaper publisher in the 16th century hating printing technology. At that time, printing was probably very hard, a “black art” in the verbal sense: Dirty, loud, error-prone and rapidly evolving. Investments in presses were probably obsolete within two years, negotiation with the vendors of the presses difficult and I am absolutely certain that you had to know a great deal about this thing to just make it work.

So imagine if a newspaper publisher of that time would have been acting like that: Outsource it. No question somebody would have done it - for a price. And it seems to me that the printer would probably have realised very quickly that he can make a newspaper himself - just get a few underpaid writers, organise distribution and you are in business. Actually, a lot of them did just that, as many newspapers were historically founded by printers.

Now this is exactly what Google does, and what some “service providers” for the newspaper industry are simply trying to imitate (“just send us your PDF”).

Surprised? When you think about it, not really, and I honestly do not understand all the bashing, at least not from a business point of view. Somebody is mastering the technology of a new sector better than others, understands the new business models (for instance, for advertising) before his competitors do, and makes a hell of a lot of money (well, at least Google does).

The only thing that surprises me is that statement about software and how to get out of it.

I have seen many newspaper CEOs getting steamy eyes when talking about the latest printing press, hotset vs. coldset (sorry I do not really understand this one) and all the quality that they can get out of it and how it makes them more successful in the market.

While I do not doubt this, it still seems to me that printing is a comparatively mature technology. It should be after 570 years... and from that I would conclude that it could be much more of a commodity (that now can be outsourced) than software.

Software is far from being that, i.e. far from being a commodity. The whole industry is just slightly over 60 years old. New versions are coming out in a cycle of two years coming down to one year, and most of the stuff is still so hard to use and so buggy that it almost hurts - just like a printing press in the 16th century. Devices like the iPhone that “just work” amaze us, and rightly so - I got a computer in my pocket that is probably 100,000 times as powerful as the the first one I used in 1979, which occupied a whole floor of a building.

So the point is not to get out of software, but to get into software. Software is the printing press of the 21st century, and the companies that will master it will dominate the universe of publishing. And those with the better software and the better long-term strategy will almost certainly win over those who just don’t want to know about it.

Mind you, I am not saying you should develop your own software, but I am saying you should understand software. Trusting the next big vendor to solve all your problems is a recipe for mediocrity, if not disaster, and a guarantee for big price tags. Many times, innovative software is made by small companies (not the IBMs, so to speak). Investing in small steps - each step based on success of the previous one - is the best strategy in my opinion. But to work with any of these companies and to understand them, you must really know about that stuff. Already a good buying decision requires a lot of knowledge, and even more the daily running of that “machine” so that it does not consume to much of your human resources and - gives you that edge in the digital business that those amazing heatset (on coldset) printing presses are giving your printed newspapers today.

Otherwise, think of a typical book author selling his or her “content” for 10 percent of the cover price. At least I am absolutely sure this is not what you would like to do as a newspaper publisher.