Chris Oakley: On the future of regional journalism

I used to work with Chris Oakley, former editor of the Liverpool Echo later owner of the Birmingham Post and Mail and then the Yorkshire Post, and he was and is a fine newspaper man. Later, he became chairman of Venturedome.com where I was editorial director. Venturedome no longer exists – but local newspapers are still around. Not for much longer according to Chris.
As a person obsessed with print journalism I was going to do a critique of a speech delivered by Chris last night to the Society of Editors regional conference in Manchester. However, there is not much to critique.
Entitled Five Minutes to Midnight:  The death and possible re-birth of the regional newspaper industry, Chris gave his own devastating critique of the current state of the regional press, which he argued now needed to be rebuilt from the bottom up. Here is the speech in full:

We live in strange times.
That theatre of selective amnesia, the Leveson inquiry, plays to a largely indifferent public at a cost of tens of millions to reveal what? That politicians saddled up and sucked up to media tycoons who, in turn, sought favours as all leading businessmen with access to ministers do, that journalists buy their contacts a pint or four and that celebrities want publicity – but only on their own terms. Well, surprise, surprise.
When the curtain finally falls, what will have changed? Politicians will still be slippery, businessmen will still seek to influence them, whining celebrities will still be trying to get their non-stories into newspapers…and we may have some new curbs on press freedom to work our way around.
Hacking into people’s telephones and emails is already illegal and those who do it should be prosecuted unless they can show an indisputable public interest. We don’t need to spend lorry loads of public money at a time of austerity to tell us the obvious.
On the other hand, the regional and local newspaper industry, whose titles are read by more people than all the nationals and which have a bigger influence on the lives of individuals and communities, is on the point of collapse. Twenty per cent of the UK’s local newspapers have closed in the last seven years, more than 240 titles, leaving sizeable communities from Port Talbot to Cannock from Leominster to Long Eaton without a title.
What is the government doing about that? It stood aside when Ofcom prevented a takeover of weeklies in Kent that would have saved titles from closure. In contrast, the Welsh Assembly has already launched an investigation into the local Press and the Scottish Parliament is considering a request to do the same.
Meanwhile, our wise, impartial and incorruptible Culture Secretary is devoting time and money to stimulating the launch of local television, a tried and failed experiment long ago, in an age with less competition for viewers’ time from satellite channels and the internet. Just 50 years late then.
If this is the best that arrogant, posh rich boys can do, then no wonder the Caravan Club has more members than all our political parties combined.
This week Greece has been back in the news, the disintegration of a country where the economic growth of the boom years wasn’t invested for the future but recklessly spent and used to accumulate debt.
Now Greece is no longer an independent country; it’s a province of Brussels or Berlin. Real power lies with bureaucrats and bankers whose priority is not the future of Greece and its people but to protect the money the lenders have at risk.
Thousands of workers are sacked, assets are sold off, there are no jobs for trained young people, no investment for the future. The country is moving inexorably closer to collapse.
The parallels with the big newspaper groups are disturbingly uncanny.
Take Johnston Press.
In the boom years, the Stock Market valued Johnston Press at more than £1 billion and investors and analysts applauded as the company ran up nearly half a billion in debt.
Now Greece, which has debts of 1.5 times its annual GDP, looks positively stable in comparison to JP which has debts nine times its £40 million market value.
Johnston Press first threw itself on the mercy of its lenders in 2009. Mercy and lenders do not usually co-exist in a sentence – and they didn’t in this case. The financial journalist Peter Kirwan estimated that, including fees, JP had to agree to pay an interest rate of more than 15% to secure a three-year extension of its loans.
Those millions paid to the banks equate to the salaries of about 1,000 journalists, according to Peter Kirwan’s estimate, and JP has been cutting staff ever since.
Last month, JP was forced to go back to its bankers again. This time, the interest rate is 10% and the first year fees alone are nearly £12 million. A cull of editors and their deputies was duly announced, offices were closed, staff centralised and more cuts are promised. Across the group, staff numbers have been shrinking faster than the Polar ice cap.
Yet JP last year had a profit margin beyond the imagining of most businesses – a margin of 17%…before shelling out nearly £40 million in interest.
The company’s chief executive, Ashley Highfield, plans to reduce the debt burden by doubling that margin over the next eight years.
That’s an objective as achievable as the regular predictions by another leading businessman.
It is not Mr Highfield’s fault, but the days when 35% profit margins were in reach are long gone.
If JP is a zombie company, kept alive so that the banks can suck the last drop of cash from it, then, on the face of it, Trinity is in a more comfortable place with debts of only about £265 million, just over three times its market value. That value, by the way, is down more than 96% compared to five years ago.
Trinity, too, is walking a knife edge. It has to repay more than £160m to American creditors over the next three years and has decided to do this by making a 70% reduction in its contribution to a staff pension fund, which already has a growing deficit. The ghost of Robert Maxwell must have been applauding in the boardroom when that decision was taken.
The Pensions Regulator is investigating whether he should stop Trinity paying back US creditors at the potential expense of UK pensioners. To be on the safe side, the company has arranged to borrow a further £110 million.
How will the creditors’ repayment be financed? Well, it won’t be through growing profits – they were down 40% in 2011 in spite of the addition of profits from the acquisition of the Manchester Evening News and its associated titles. So profit growth is out – Trinity is following 2011’s £25 million of cuts with a further £15 million in 2012.
Not a lot of room for investment in regional titles, then.
Sly Bailey may have fallen on her sword – or tripped over her pay packet – but her successor will have no choice but to follow the same policy: more cost reductions.
Newsquest contributes 17% of the profits of the biggest US newspaper publisher, Gannett, but hardly rates a mention in the company’s annual report.
It has not, though, escaped the parent company’s substantial and continual contraction which will increase this year on the evidence of the first quarter performance when newspaper profits fell by almost half.
Northcliffe is in a stronger position than the other three major groups but has shed almost a quarter of its 3,000 workforce since 2010 and announced a further 13% cut in regional editorial costs this year.
For decades, the regionals kept the Daily Mail afloat but some years ago the company decided to exit regional publishing…and then turned down an offer of more than £1 billion for its titles. It’s an offer that will never be repeated…and the company has been chipping away at the regionals’ foundations ever since.
So why are companies saddled with this unsustainable debt burden at a time when revenues and profits are flowing away from newspapers?
The last decade of the 20th century and the early years of the present one were a golden age for newspaper owners. Advertising spend was growing rapidly, TV and radio advertising slots were limited, the internet was in its infancy and newspapers were the obvious outlet for the rising expenditure.
Newspapers with profit margins of 25% or more were cash rich and their valuations soared. There was no shortage of banks prepared to lend to acquirers on the most improbable of forecasts. City analysts fed the frenzy, endorsing the promises of chief executives for continually growing profits and margins.
To attempt to make good on those promises, companies were compelled to compete to acquire titles because such growth could never be achieved organically…and as the groups became bigger, the acquisitions needed to be bigger too if they were to have any discernible impact on the bottom line…and so the debt mountains grew.
Between 2005 and 2007 Johnston Press spent almost £1 billion on acquisitions including £250 million for 11 paid weeklies and 10 freesheets in rural Ireland. Two years later, they tried to sell the titles. The best offer was less than £40 million.
That golden age, which generated profits that could have been used to secure the future of local newspapers, will never return.
As margins reached their peak, markets had already changed. The internet was making inroads into key classified categories because managements, with their focus on acquisitions and meeting impossible City expectations, were not prepared to divert cash to investment.
If publishers had supported Fish4, the industry’s far-sighted initiative to upload motors, property and recruitment advertising to the Internet, regional newspapers could now have the largest and best used property, motors and situations vacant sites…and RightMove would not be worth more than even the biggest regional newspaper group.
Instead, managements at first largely ignored the Internet; then they launched online sites but severely restricted them to avoid cannibalising their print titles’ advertising. Even now, many groups shy away from using the power of brands built up over a century or more and invent new names for their websites. Most give away their only trade-able commodity, local news.
Contrast that with publishers in Europe. In Norway, Schibsted decided in 1999 that classified was made for online and online for classified. They set up an independent online division to drive classified with no responsibility for print advertising. That business now produces 36% of the group’s revenues with a higher margin than its newspapers and has established Schibsted as the country’s online market leader.
In Finland, newspaper publisher Sanoma believed from the outset that its editorial had a value. It charged even seven day a week print subscribers extra for access to its online editorial. More than a third of its titles’ readers now pay that annual subscription.
You didn’t need to be a Northern European to see the threat and the opportunity. In 1999, we set up in Leeds an online only company, Regional Interactive Media, free to compete with our print titles to be the definitive source for local information, services and shopping.
We believed our ownership of the local information franchise, our instant brand recognition, our relationship with readers, buyers and sellers made us ideally placed to capitalise on internet opportunities. We could also use our newspapers to provide constant and free promotion for the sites.
In the first year of operation we uploaded one million vehicle advertisements, 350,000 job advertisements and 250,000 properties for sale and achieved 12 million page impressions. Our revenues grew from nothing to £500,000. Two years later, revenues stood at £2,500,000 and the division was on the point of breaking even.
That strategy was unpopular with most investors who believed, correctly but shortsightedly, that money invested in the Internet could instead have boosted profit. In 2002 Johnston Press bought our titles. It closed Regional Interactive Media and that investment did indeed fall to the bottom line, a short term boost at the expense of a long-term future.
Opportunities were missed that it is now too late for UK publishers seize.
So what does all this mean for the future of titles that in many cases have served their communities for more than a century?
Unfortunately, companies which produce more than half the UK’s remaining 1,101 local newspapers are run to service their debts and to maintain the illusion that they will match the exceptional profits and margins they achieved in boom times. Mutally exclusive and mutually assured destruction.
So how long, can this continue? On my clock, at the stroke of midnight, it’s oblivion.
I share the view of Ashley Highfield that time has run out for the big city dailies. The policies pursued by the big groups in recent years have run the clock down and the internet has hit regional dailies particularly hard.
Most dailies have historically been profitable only three days of the week - the days on which the motors, jobs and property ads appeared, the days incidentally on which they also had their largest sales. Now those categories have largely migrated online.
The bigger dailies are almost exclusively owned by publicly-quoted companies whose own future is uncertain.
As a result, costs continue to be cut in ways which have rendered the regional dailies less readable and less relevant. You know better than me how editorial workloads have been increased while staff has been reduced; how page designs are templated in a one-size fits all approach.
JP is creating five templates for all its 270 newspapers. It’s a policy which makes nonsense of shaping a paper to project best that day or week’s news, of designing a page around the perfect headline or the compelling picture.
Remote printing has led to 'evening' titles having deadlines the previous afternoon - and that matters because readers still expect to find the day’s most important local stories covered in their own daily.
A former editor of the Newcastle Chronicle Paul Robertson has written about the backlash from readers when they found they couldn’t read about the shooting of PC Rathband by Raoul Moat in that day’s paper.
Distribution has been handed to wholesalers, rather than local teams, cutting costs but offering less flexibility for editionising and home delivery and less availability in fringe areas.
In many cities, sales and household penetration have fallen below a level which can produce an acceptable response for advertisers. In Birmingham, the evening paper now sells around 40,000 a day in a city of a million; in Leeds the Evening Post sells 34,000 to a city of half a million; and it’s a similar story from Bristol to Bradford.
The response of debt-burdened companies is to rack up cover prices to replace lost circulation revenue while trimming paginations to meet rising newsprint bills. The predictable result is that sales are falling even faster - 8% in Bradford, 9% in Bristol, 10% in Birmingham, 15% in Leeds at the last count.
On top of the relentless reduction of costs, those of you who are editors of big city dailies face another problem not of your companies’ making. Local or regional newspapers need to be able to reflect the identity of the community they serve but in most major cities that identity has fractured into different and often conflicting ones, represented by race, religion, culture and economic divisions.
No daily newspaper, particularly one with a limited ability to editionise, can now, for example, meet the needs of most people in multi-cultural Birmingham or economically divided Leeds.
Not all our dailies are owned by the big groups, of course. The family-owned dailies are mostly in smaller cities with a more coherent community identity, but they are not immune to decline. In Cumbria, the News and Star saw newspaper sales fall by 10%.
But these titles are more likely to survive, although perhaps as a weeklies or bi-weeklies. Northcliffe began the conversion of evenings to weeklies and reports some success in places such as Bath, Torquay, Exeter and Scunthorpe. Johnston Press announced the conversion of five of its smaller evenings to weeklies last month.
In my view, this strategy is unlikely to offer more than a temporary reprieve for big city titles like Trinity’s Birmingham Post and Liverpool Daily Post.
Weeklies with their lower cost base and less dependence on national, property, motors and jobs advertising stand a better chance. Those chances are improved the further their circulation area is from major cities because shared identity remains stronger in more rural communities.
Survival chances are best for family-owned weeklies. Those of you editing weeklies owned by publicly-quoted companies will know only too well that you face similar cost-reduction challenges to those of your sister dailies.
I believe it is no coincidence that the latest ABC figures show that while 84 of the 693 paid and free weeklies increased their sales or distribution, the worst performing, losing almost 20% of their sales, were - all bar one - owned by one of the major groups, Trinity.
Mr Highfield’s claim that weekly newspapers are not sensitive to cover price rises, with some of up to 25p planned by JP, would be laughable if it wasn’t tragic - especially as this is coupled with a plan to have half of all editorial content, in print and online, written by 'citizen journalists'.
But all is not black. Recent major research by Deloittes reported that 40% of people read a local newspaper at least once a week. Unfortunately, we have trained younger readers to expect those newspapers to be free, just as most newspapers have trained their online readers to expect news to be free. The over 55s are the most likely to buy a local newspaper and 62% still do every week.
The research also discovered that newspaper advertising has more impact than online advertising with 62% saying they paid more attention to newspaper advertisements. In fact, Internet display advertising lost ground in 2011. Asked the same question in 2010, only 49% of respondents said they paid more attention to print than online. Interestingly enough, discount coupons cut out of newspapers were also more popular than online social couponing.
So, there is a market which reads and trusts newspapers, which can be profitably served although probably only weekly.
And why wouldn’t there be? Newspaper Society research shows that 80% of the population spend half their life and 90% of their money within five to ten miles of where they grew up. Most people still have local roots.
But those people, those potential readers, expect to see faces they know in the pages of their local paper, to read names they recognise, to be alerted to decisions and events that might impact their day-to-day life or budget, to read stories that involve or affect them, about their family, their friends, their neighbours, their team, their club, their street, their town or village
That requires feet on the ground, journalists visible, accessible and part of the communities they serve.
The owner of what is now the UK’s fifth largest group with more than 220 titles demonstrates every week how truly local newspaper empires can still grow and prosper.
Sir Ray Tindle has built his group over the last half century. For many years he was regarded with faint amusement by larger publishers as he bought weekly titles others considered to be insignificant. Unlike Sir Ray, those publishers are not smiling now.
I once asked him what the group profit margin was. He said he neither knew nor cared. What he did know was the titles made bigger profits each year, that the company had no debt and that all acquisitions were financed out of profits. The last time I spoke to him, every one of his titles was turning a profit and, incidentally, if you want to read that local news online you pay it - and people do.
Ray is not alone. The family owner of the Gossweiler Media in Switzerland launched a newspaper for his 45,000 community, bi-weekly in print and constantly updated online. Advertisers and readers pay for print, online and mobile access as one package. With margins of 30% - something the UK’s big groups will never see again - he is now rolling out the model in Austria and Germany.
At a recent conference, he held up a picture of Barrack Obama and said: This man has never appeared in our newspaper. Then he held up a picture of the local mayor and said: This man is always in our newspaper.
How Ray would applaud because, week in and week out, he demonstrates that the demand for local news and information is as great as it has ever been.
The opportunity has not gone unnoticed. Ironically, there have been more UK newspaper launches in the last two years than at any time during the last decade and 70 in the last five years.
Entrepreneurs have recognised the void opened up as the major groups retreated into their hubs and have responded by launching highly-localised publications, some weekly, some monthly, some paid for, some free, some in newspaper format, some in pocket-sized magazine format.
It is hard work to get them off the ground and individual profits are small but each title can be the building block in an expanding group.
From Saddleworth to Dewsbury, from Corby to Tenby, across the country, these new publications are packed with the sort of advertising my first newspaper, the Sevenoaks Chronicle, once carried. Most have a long way to go before they can bear journalistic comparison with traditional weeklies of the past but, as paginations grow, the breadth of their content expands.
These start-ups will never be a private equity investment vehicle, never a City favourite but they remain a good lifestyle investment - which is why families launched local newspapers more than a century ago.
So do local newspapers have a future? Not as part of the industry we now know but one rebuilt from the ground up.
The banks may yet have a part to play. Last month Lloyds wrote off the £25 million debts of the Dunfermline Free Press group to allow a management buy-out to go ahead. The bank holds 90% of the shares in the new company and how it wields the power of that shareholding to get its money back will determine whether this may be a way to salvage a future for the smaller indebted groups and titles.
Neil Fowler, a former editor and associate of Nuffield College, Oxford, has suggested, the government might help the large groups to negotiate an orderly default on their debts with the titles sold to local businessmen or communities.
It would certainly be a better, healthier use of public money than funding months more of failed recollections at Leveson but while the companies can pay the bank’s exorbitant interest rates the price of default would be high.
In any case, many of the major groups’ titles are too damaged to attract buyers.
Would I buy a big city regional daily tomorrow?
Not even for £1 debt free - unless I was an asset stripper, looking to cream off the last few years’ profit before a title’s collapse or a billionaire prepared to invest unrecoverable millions for reasons other than profit - for status, to have a platform for my views, for serve my community. In fact, billionaires are buying newspapers for just those reasons - among them Alexander Lebedev in London and Warren Buffett in Omaha, even though - in Buffett’s words - newspaper finances are dire.
If I were a young journalist today, I would start my own weekly newspaper in one of those areas which the big groups nominally call theirs but from which they have to all intents and purposes retreated - and it’s important for a free, democratic and open society that young journalists do just that.
Our councils and our courts need to be covered, authority needs to be challenged, press offices need to be bypassed. This cannot be left to citizen journalists.
The paid-for local press grew up to be a mirror in which a community could see itself and more, much more besides. It was there to alert and to protect individuals, to build and to bind communities, to defend and to campaign for those in need of support, tobe the voice of those who would otherwise be unheard.
If local newspapers continue to disappear where will communities turn when planners slice up their neighbourhoods, Tesco bulldozes their tennis courts and the local school or library is closed?
Economic historians may take the view that regional newspapers were never suited to becoming public companies. Titles provide a bespoke service to a defined geographical market; their opportunities for expansion are limited; their main revenue streams cyclical.
They may conclude that regional newspapers were and are better in the hands of local entrepreneurs or families who look to enjoy the good lifestyle newspapers can provide alongside the status and service to the community that goes hand in hand with ownership.
Regional newspapers could never sustain the City’s demands for constant growth in profits and margins and we see now the consequences of attempting to do so.
In a couple of decades, managements overpaid for acquisitions, over-promised to City investors, failed to recognise the threat and opportunity of the Internet and have come close to destroying an industry.
The losers are not managements whose salaries continue to rise as their companies’ value declines, not even the many journalists whose jobs have vanished, the real losers are communities up and down the country which are now worse informed than a century ago, a depressing outcome in what is supposed to be the age of information overload.
And so we end back in Greece - where they have a word for the cause of it all - hubris.

Coca-Cola vs Pepsi

This infographic created by CnnTees. Read the original blog here.

What an amazing place: Coldstones Cut

Had an amazing day at Coldstones Cut, North Yorkshire. Created by the artist Andrew Sabin, The Coldstones
Cut is Yorkshire's latest visitor attraction. A massive construction which visitors can freely walk through and explore, the sculpture overlooks the huge working Coldstones Quarry and offers spectacular views over the scenery of Nidderdale in the Yorkshire Dales.
Andrew Sabin studied at Chelsea College of Art between 1979 and 1983. He taught there as a part-time lecturer and later as a 0.5 Senior Lecturer between 1987 and 2005. Between graduation in 1983 and 1990 he practised as a highly experimental object maker. Between 1990 and 1997 he made three major installations first at The Chisenhale Gallery, then 'The Sea of Sun' for The Henry Moore Institute and finally 'The Open Sea' at The Henry Moore Studio in Halifax. In 1998 he began to concentrate his energies on applying his understanding of the potenetial sculpture has in the public realm in a series of projects culminating in 'The Coldstones Cut', which won the Marsh Award for Public Sculpture in 2011.
This place has been open since 2010 - and I only found out about it this week. Here's some pictures:

The Ten Commandments of Typography

The Ten Commandments of Typography by Paul Felton
1. Thou shalt not apply more than three typefaces in a document.
2. Thou shalt lay headlines large and at the top of a page.
3. Thou shalt employ no other type size than 8pt to 10pt for body copy
4. Remember that a typeface that is not legible is not truley a typeface.
5. Honour thy kerning, so that white space becomes visually equalized between characters.
6. Thou shalt lay stress discreetly upon elements within text.
7. Thou shalt not use only capitals when setting vast body copy.
8. Thou shalt always align letters and words on a baseline.
9. Thou shalt use flush-left, ragged-right type alignment.
10. Thou shalt not make lines too short or too long.

But you can break all these rules...

A Life Online

Congratulations, and a big pat on the back, for Tom Woolley and the team at the National Media Museum in Bradford on the launch of the new Life Online Gallery last night. It was a great event and even included an online appearance from Sir Richard Branson (Virgin Media is one the sponsors) and from Vint Cerf. Vint Cerfis an American computer scientist, who is recognized as one of founding fathers of the internet, who was a program manager for the United States Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency funding various groups to develop TCP/IP technology. When the Internet began to transition to a commercial opportunity during the late 1980s, Cerf moved to MCI where he was instrumental in the development of the first commercial email system connected to the Internet. Life Online is the world's first gallery dedicated to exploring the social, technological and cultural impact of the internet. This permanent gallery will trace the history of the internet, uncover how it has changed people's lives and track the latest trends. The gallery covers two spaces within the Museum. The first is a permanent exhibition in the foyer with the second being a changing temporary exhibition on Level 7. The first exhibition to feature is [open source]: Is the internet you know under threat? - an exploration of the open source nature of the internet and the current threats to net neutrality which could signify the end of this culture. Full Disclosure: I am a member of the Museum's Internet Gallery Advisory Board Check out the discussion on twitter with the hashtag #LifeOnline. I also think it's neat that the acronym for the new gallery encapsulates the digital zeitgiest: L.O.L. Here's some (dodgy) pictures from the night:

Trolls and fakers on Pinterest

Every time a new social media platform gains any sort of traction with the public - people start abusing it and other people. So it’s no surprise then that Pinterest already has a fair number of trolls and squatters sitting on hiding behind celebrity names and famous brands and trying to pass themselves off as the real deal.
Pinterest, a visual bulletin board service, recently announced a brief policy statement on usernames that hardly clears things up for companies, celebrities, and satirists alike. Is this Michelle Obama? It seems unlikely, that the First Lady’s "Eat As I Say Not As I Eat" section, in which she pins pictures of "Places where I've consumed incredible amounts of calories while campaigning for America to eat healthier."
Meanwhile, there are countless other examples where the likes of Starbucks, Foursquare and others have been squatted on by jokers or malicious trolls.
Brands and celebrities have an invested interest in maintaining the public perception of their names. Erosion of that image damages their ability to make money in the long run, and some companies are required to maintain a vigilance over their names to retain a functioning copyright.
The most popular social networking sites have already come face-to-face with the reality that early adopters will claim names, identities, and brands that may not truly belong to them. But the way each site deals with instances that could involve accusations of libel, bartering user names for money, or other unsanctioned uses of social networking property, has varied.
Twitter uses the Verified account to denote celebrities, and allows parody accounts but will shut down impersonating accounts. Facebook requires real names with some narrow exceptions. Google+ originally required real names, but now will support pseudonyms, and also verifies celebrities' accounts.
Pinterest seems to still be coming to terms with the issue, even as its popularity grows. This has pretty much been the case for most social media platforms who have evolved terms and conditions to address squatters as their sites have evolved and morphed over time.
The most famous instance of Pinterest misnaming is Mitt Romney. His campaign pursued the shutdown of a fake (though pretty clearly satirical) account using his name. Pinterest itself says: "Pinterest respects the trademark rights of others.
 Accounts with usernames, Pin Board names, or any other content that misleads others or violates another’s trademark may be updated, transferred or permanently suspended." Those who feel their usernames have been affected can register a complaint via Pinterest's Trademark Complaint Form where they say: "Pinterest will review your submission and take whatever action, in its sole discretion, it deems appropriate, including temporary or permanent removal of the trademark from the Pinterest site."
The key thing here for brands is to stay on top of your social media and ensure you are an early adopter for the new, new thing. Or, at the very least, be prepared to take action if you think your brand is being abused. Anyway you can check out some daft spoof Pinterests here.

One for Bradford Veterans

BARC Vets at Vesta Veterans 2012

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KONY 2012: It's gone viral

Just noticed on Facebook that my daughter has joined the KONY 2012 group which is part of a fast-growing online campaign to defeat one of Central Africa's most notorious and elusive rebel groups.
Just this week the campaign has gone viral with Twitter users around the world have inundated the micro-messaging site with calls to stop the Lord's Resistance Army and its leader Joseph Kony.
Messages tagged #StopKony2012 and #MakeKonyFamous lit up Twitter for the better part of the morning today, and were listed among the top trending topics worldwide.
Invisible Children, which is solely focused on bringing an end to the Lord's Resistance Army, started the online campaign to bring attention to a new film on the subject called "Kony 2012."
This is interesting because the Invisible Children have really done their homework on the use of social media and are rolling out the campaign across all platforms from Twitter to Facebook to Vimeo (see the video here) and back again and inbetween.
The Lord's Resistance Army started in northern Uganda in the late 1980s as a rebellion against the country's armed forces.  Under the leadership of Joseph Kony, the group evolved into a militant cult that has forcibly recruited thousands of children into its ranks, mutilated or killed tens of thousands of people across Central Africa and displaced many more.
The topic gained momentum with the help of some celebrity heavyweights, including American singers Taylor Swift and Rhianna, who have both endorsed the Invisible Children campaign on the site.
To give an idea of just how much sway these celebrities have on Twitter, keep in mind that Rhianna has more than 14-million followers, which makes her more popular than Barack Obama. 
The Lord's Resistance Army, once thought to number in the thousands, is now believed to consist of only a couple hundred fighters.
But even in small numbers, the group has continued to attack villages in South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic. 
It will be interesting to see where this campaign goes - what do you think?

New interest in pinterest

Pinterest has sort of crept up on us at GREEN but it looks set to become THE social network of 2012.
The web-based "pinboard," which launched almost two years ago, barely got a mention on the techy news sites until six months ago, when early adopters suddenly realised that the had site had millions of monthly users.
My initial reaction was not very positive when I first encountered and could briefly be summed up as NOT ANOTHER BLOODY SOCAIL NETWORK! But at GREEN we have been impressed by what Pinterest does and what the potential is for business.
Pinterest has grown a devoted base of users who enjoy "pinning" items they find around the Web. It’s really a simple concept.Think virtual scrapbook or bulletin board. If you find a photo of something you like online, you add it to one of your Pinterest boards.
Then all of your images are shared with Pinterest users from around the world. They can see your stuff, you can see theirs.
Where Pinterest win is that sharing on there involves less effort over time and that social sites are becoming more visual over time.
And the third is that "people-centric" recommendations are being augmented by "topic-centric" networks - which is to say that while Facebook lets you explore the Web through information shared by friends, newer social networks organise content by topics of interest which should be of real interest to business. I particularly like the “localism” of the site as “local” is where I think social networks will go this year.
Our friend and social media pioneer Steve Davis has done a very excellent SlideShare which we publish below.

An Interest In Pinterest

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Font of the Week: Ode

Writing for I Love Typography about his font Ode, Martin Wenzel says: "When designing a typeface, I prefer to explore a construction principle rather than revive an existing typeface idea. These principles or writing models are based on the tools and techniques originally used. Understanding these workings are often a great source of inspiration for me." Read more here

An ILT special edition: a magnificent A2 print designed by Swedish graphic & type designer Stefan Hattenbach. Screen-printed in Tokyo on beautiful red Plike paper with gold, white, and black inks. Size: A2 (594 × 420 mm / 23.4 × 16.5"). Text set in Tarocco Bold.

Social media doesn't come cheap

We’ve worked on a number of social media campaigns now - many of them very successful. You might remember some of them - Beat Blue Monday is now an annual news feature and Wensleydale Creamery is doing very well too.
But whenever we mention social media to some prospective clients their faces light up as they think social media is free. Social media saves time they think. Social media will save our business thousands, if not millions.
And yes you can save on the equivalent costs from a traditional deadwood media marketing or advertising campaign and better still you can get instant results and measurement. But that level of service does not come cheap - it can if you do it yourself and chuck up a blog, set up a Facebook page, a Twitter account and maybe do something with YouTube.
But what’s your strategy? Do you know what people are saying about you - have you done an audit? What are your objectives? Which social media tools are you going to use?
Just answering those questions demands a lot of expensive time and your costs are already rising.
So let’s do the maths on hours and the development costs of creating blog/microsite, mobile apps, online video, podcasts and then the crucial stuff of social media monitoring and assessment.
So for our hypothetical 12-month campaign for ACME Company we would need: account director for 15 hours a week at £150 an hour, account manager for 30 hours at £85 an hour, account executive on say £65 for 30 hours. Then we chuck in a blog/microsite and some mobile apps and maybe a few widgets – lets say the lot for £20,000. Then there’s the ongoing monitoring, engagement and evaluation for a conservative £30,000. That adds up to £400,000 for the year.
Maybe that’s a bit ambitious but even if you scaled it back to something more palatable - lets cut it in half to £200,000. Still the client is looking a bit green around the gills. But this is probably the same client who thinks nothing of booking a £70,000 page advertisement in the Daily Mail.
We would love to hear about other people’s experiences.

Font of the week: Karbid

The FF Karbid family has been augmented with two entirely new sub-families. The first one, the Text version, is intended for body copy in small sizes. The eccentric, serif-like swashes in select letters have been abandoned, while the friendly, lively forms of l, y, z and Z show the close relationship to the FF Karbid family. The other new sub-family is a Slab version. It has a sober, journalistic character, inspired by the typography in magazines of the 1920s (see Memphis, etc.). The strong serifs lend the typeface footing and an air of reliability. To improve legibility and balance the contrast was increased in comparison to the sans serif version. FontFont’s Christoph Koeberlin and Ivo Gabrowitsch recently had the opportunity to talk with Verena Gerlach about her diverse super family.

Font of the week: Gotham

Gotham is a family of geometric sans-serif digital typefaces designed by American type designer Tobias Frere-Jones in 2000. Gotham's letterforms are inspired by a form of architectural signage that achieved popularity in the mid-twentieth century, and are especially popular throughout New York City.
Since creation, Gotham has been highly visible due to its appearance in many notable places, including a large amount of campaign material created for Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign, as well as the cornerstone of the One World Trade Center, the tower to be built on the site of the former World Trade Center in New York.The Gotham font was initially commissioned by GQ magazine, whose editors wanted to display a sans-serif with a "geometric structure" that would look "masculine, new, and fresh" for their magazine. Although the magazine was initially considering a series of fonts that either looked like techno CD covers or were more traditional like Futura, they agreed that they needed something "that was going to be very fresh and very established to have a sort of credible voice to it," according to Jonathan Hoefler.
Frere-Jones' inspiration for the typeface came from time spent walking block-by-block through Manhattan with a camera to find source material, and he based the font on the lettering seen in older buildings, especially the sign on the Eighth Avenue facade of the Port Authority Bus Terminal. "I suppose there's a hidden personal agenda in the design," Frere-Jones said, "to preserve those old pieces of New York that could be wiped out before they're appreciated. Having grown up here, I was always fond of the 'old' New York and its lettering."
The lettering that inspired this typeface originated from the style of 1920s era sans-serifs like Futura, where "Type, like architecture, like the organization of society itself, was to be reduced to its bare, efficient essentials, rid of undesirable, local or ethnic elements." This theme was found frequently in Depression-era type in both North America and Europe, particularly Germany.[4] This simplification of type is characterized by Frere-Jones as "not the kind of letter a type designer would make. It's the kind of letter an engineer would make. It was born outside the type design in some other world and has a very distinct flavor from that."
Reviews of Gotham focus on its identity as something both American and specific to New York City. According to David Dunlap of The New York Times, Gotham "deliberately evokes the blocky no-nonsense, unselfconscious architectural lettering that dominated the [New York] streetscape from the 1930's through the 1960's."Andrew Romano of Newsweek concurs. "Unlike other sans serif typefaces, it's not German, it's not French, it's not Swiss," he said. "It's very American."
According to Frere-Jones, Gotham wouldn't have happened without the GQ commission. "The humanist and the geometric ... had already been thoroughly staked out and developed by past designers. I didn't think anything new could have been found there, but luckily for me (and the client), I was mistaken."

Movember: Day 21

I've been growing this thing for 21 days now - doesn't appear to have grown much since last week. And, drum roll, have decided to ditch the side burns. The itch like hell. What has surprised me is how much grooming a moustache needs - I always thought the whole point was that you just didn't shave.

To find our more read earlier posting here. Slight improvement on the previous week - see below:

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

This is a prepared text of the Commencement address delivered by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, on June 12, 2005. The reason I reproduce it here is because I went to my daughter's school prize giving where she won the trophies for French and English (she is a clever girl - and, no it dosen't come from me). However, they had a guest speaker at the event to inspire the kids as they entered adulthood and tell them what they should strive for.
It was disappointing! Basically, she just told everyone how fantastic she was - for no reason I could discern - and the entire speech sounded like a recital of every self-help book over the past 20 years. I asked my daugher if I was being too cynical and she said no. She thought the best speech she had heard to students was by Apple's Steve Jobs. I think I agree. It applies to undergraduates, graduates, you and me, and people at the end of the line. Here it is:

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky - I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.

Movember: Day 14

To find our more read earlier posting here. Slight improvement on the previous week - see below:

Hirsute pursuits

I’ve donated my face to Movember and for the rest of the month will be growing a luxuriant moustache for charity. I’m going for the full mutton chops too! I started on November 1.
Movember (the month formerly known as November) is a moustache growing charity event held during November each year that raises funds and awareness for a number of male-related charities including the Prostate Cancer Charity and the Institute of Cancer Research.
During November each year, Movember is responsible for the sprouting of moustaches on thousands of men’s faces in the UK and around the world. The aim of which is to raise vital funds and awareness for men’s health. On Movember 1st, guys register at Movember.com with a clean-shaven face and then for the rest of the month, these selfless and generous men, known as Mo Bros, groom, trim and wax their way into the annals of fine moustachery.
Supported by the women in their lives, Mo Sistas, Movember Mo Bros raise funds by seeking out sponsorship for their Mo-growing efforts. You can support me (who is pictured here on November 1 with his starter stubble) on my Movember web page here.
Mo Bros effectively become walking, talking billboards for the 30 days of November and through their actions and words raise awareness by prompting private and public conversation around the often ignored issue of men’s health. The funds raised in the UK support the number one and two male specific cancers - prostate and testicular cancer.
The funds raised are directed to programmes run directly by Movember and our men’s health partners, The Prostate Cancer Charity and the Institute of Cancer Research. Together, these channels work together to ensure that Movember funds are supporting a broad range of innovative, world-class programmes in line with our strategic goals in the areas of awareness and education, survivorship and research.
Here's me after 7 days:

 Cheer up Mate!

Why infrographics work

The Value of Data Visualization from Column Five on Vimeo.