Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: New York Times

  • Reinventing business in an online world

    Reinventing business in an online world

    Jonah Peretti, the founder of Buzzfeed and formerly of the Huffington Post is widely thought of as one of the smartest thinkers in digital media.

    In a long interview with the Felix Salmon, the former Reuters journalist and himself one of the savviest commentators on the online space, Peretti discusses the direction of both online publishing and business in general.

    “Why do they need so much revenue?” is one of the questions Peretti poses about the recent New York Times’ innovation report and it’s a question worth posing of many organisations – particularly those that are in sectors with declining revenues and margins.

    Reinventing organisations

    As Yammer founder and now Microsoft employee Adam Pisoni told Decoding The New Economy last year, modern collaboration tools mean modern businesses don’t the need the management layers and staff numbers that older companies needed, this is something that has been lost on many modern media organisations.

    Peretti’s views about communications and how stories turn viral is a worthwhile read in itself while his points about fundraising are very pertinent, particularly where he observes that venture capital investors have been reluctant to fund startups which pay writers.

    What stands out in the interview is Peretti’s charitable view towards others in the industry, here’s his view on the New York Times’ innovation report.

    I did read it. There were a lot of interesting things in it. I think in some places, they were a little bit overly critical of their tech and product team. When you look around the industry, The New York Times has a really great website. They’re building lots of things themselves and integrating them. It doesn’t feel like a Frankenstein website with things bolted on from millions of other places. I was a little surprised at the tone, how critical they were of their web products.

    The key question Peretti asks is how do we re-imagine our industries: “What would this be if the readers and the publishers were not focused on making something similar to print?”

    Reinventing industry

    While Peretti’s question is asked of the newspaper industry, it’s a question that every business can ask itself as manufacturing, marketing and supply chains are being reinvented.

    Following that point, Peretti points out the risks in focusing on simple metrics; too much emphasis on one figure can lead to perverse results in the publisher’s view and following a mission rather than chasing a number is a much better strategy to long term success.

    As Salmon says in the introduction, there’s a lot to learn from Jonah Peretti about where the internet and digital media is taking the publishing industry and the business world in general.

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  • Sharks patrol these waters

    Sharks patrol these waters

    The announcement that the New York Times was attacked by Chinese hackers after exposing the financial details of the nation’s Premier doesn’t come as much of a surprise to anybody following either China or computer security issues.

    One of the realities of modern computing is that systems are constantly being compromised, the complexity of IT networks is so great that even the best security experts can be caught off guard.

    Securing our networks

    In such an environment the normal business and home computer user has little chance against sophisticated criminal or government sponsored attacks, by the Chinese or any other spy agency.

    One example of how badly wrong things can go for an organisation is the hacking of security advisory firm Stratfor in 2011, this illustrated how small business practices of having relatively open networks and poor password security can have serious consequences.

    The issue is not how we fortify our systems against intruders, but how we manage the risk. A useful analogy is how supermarkets deal with shoplifters – they can’t eliminate the problem, but they can manage it in ways that control losses.

    Businesses, governments and home users have a range of things they can do to make it harder for hackers to get into a system and limit what they can access if determined one gets in.

    The limits of anti-virus

    Another aspect in the story that doesn’t surprise is the poor performance of the New York Times’ anti-virus software. According to Forbes, Symantec only caught one malware program out of the 45 installed by the hackers.

    I have an entirely rational hatred of Symantec. While running an IT support business, their products were the bane of our lives and we encouraged users to choose alternative security software because of the unreliability of many of Symantec products, particularly the once proud Norton brand that was aimed at home and small business users.

    At the time of the great malware epidemic in the early 2000s, Norton Anti-Virus had a huge market share and it proved to be worse than useless against the various forms of drive by downloads and infected sites that were exploiting weaknesses in Microsoft Windows 98 and XP systems.

    Windows weaknesses

    The common culprit was Windows ActiveX scripting language that Microsoft had introduced to standardise its web features. While a good idea, Microsoft made ActiveX a fundamental part of Windows and gave the features full access into the inner workings of the system.

    Sadly Symantec made the decision to run all their security software on ActiveX as well.

    As ActiveX was the main target for malware writers it meant that Norton AntiVirus or their Security suite would crash in a heap once a computer became infected and the Symantec software would actively interfere with attempts to cleanup a compromised system.

    Making matters worse was Symantec’s subscription policies which cut customers off from vital updates and their bizarre policy of not including important upgrades in their automated updating function.

    The failures of tech journalism

    All of these factors made Symantec a loathed product in our office. It wasn’t helped by a generation of tech journalists who wrote gushing stories about Symantec, gave their products favourable reviews despite the company’s lousy reputation and consulted their employees for expert comment.

    It wasn’t tech journalism’s finest hour. What really grates is the number of these folk still peddling nonsense about IT security and anti-virus software.

    That distrust of Symantec continues to this day and those of us who struggled with their products a decade ago are not surprised at their poor performance on the New York Times’ network.

    State sponsored risks

    In defense of Symantec, the Chinese hackers are very good and its unlikely any security software would stand up to a sustained and determined attack from them or their counterparts in the US and Israeli governments.

    We should also note that government agencies trying to get into systems is not just something done by the Chinese, US and Israelis; every government in the world is engaging in these activities against foreign businesses and their own citizens.

    So we have to accept that these breaches and attacks are a real threat to any computer and any organisation. It may well be should build our security strategies around the assumption the bad guys are already in the system rather than believe we can build a giant electronic fort to keep the bad guys out.

    One thing is for sure, you can’t rely solely on anti-virus software to secure your IT systems.

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  • The Lives they Loved – Another future for journalism?

    The Lives they Loved – Another future for journalism?

    The New York Times’ wrap up of the year’s obituaries may give us an idea of one of the many futures for journalism.

    It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that obituaries are just dry recantations of the lives of dead white men and they often are – particularly when about celebrities or undistinguished politicians and businessmen.

    Good obituaries though are masterpieces and those of society’s genuine unsung heroes are moving and educational. A well written obit of an obscure but deserving person is usually a rewarding read.

    As part of the their summation of 2012, The New York Times has taken their obituaries one step further by asking readers to submit photos and stories of their loved ones who’ve passed away during the year.

    The Lives They Loved is the result, a wonderful collection of touching photographs and stories of parents, partners, children and friends who have passed away in the last year.

    User Generated Content – UGC – is one of the foundation stones of new media. The idea is the audience themselves provide the content which frees services like Facebook, YouTube or I Can Haz Cheeseburger from the costs and irritations of actually creating things that people are interested in.

    The New York Times project may well show that traditional news channels with their dedicated audiences and relevance to communities may do UGC as well as any hot new Silicon Valley startup.

    While User Generated Content isn’t the future of journalism, it almost certainly will be one of the them. Whether it turns out that old media use it better than the newer upstarts remains to be seen.

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  • The death of the short message service

    The death of the short message service

    The New York Times’ Bits Section looks at how in many countries text messaging (SMS) services are declining.

    For telcos, the SMS feature was a happy – and extremely profitable – accident with the Short Message Service feature designed as a control channel for the mobile voice networks.

    The Short Messaging Service cost almost nothing to develop and quickly became a massive profit centre for mobile phone companies.

    Today in markets where smartphones are dominating sales, people are moving many of their communications away from text messages over to Internet based services like email, instant messaging and social media.

    Interestingly, in the United States text messaging still growing although at a slower rate than previously. This makes sense as the US is behind countries that have fully adopted 3G networks and subscribers don’t get the full benefit from a smartphone without a reliable and fast data service.

    For developing countries, we’ll probably see SMS continue to grow as the attractions of a relatively cheap and simple communications channel like text messaging still make sense in markets where data plans are expensive and smartphones scarce.

    As revenues from text messaging drops, we’ll be seeing more telecommunications companies try to replace the lost income with other services. Expect to see more offers for various business and home service bundles and offers to upgrade to the latest phones or packages as providers try to lock profitable customers into cash generating agreements.

    The era of accidental profits for telcos is over, the quest for these companies now is to find how they can maintain profits in an era where data services are commoditising their lucrative product lines.

    For the managers of these companies, the challenge is on to successfully do this – it remains to be seen how well they do in refocusing their businesses.

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