Hi, i’m Eliot Fineberg

I watched some of Digital Britain, it was frustrating, Sly Bailey made me want to scream, sometimes I think she believes she has right to make a profit.

Dan Hon said something interesting – they (Sixtostart) manage to work with Penguin and Channel 4 as there are pots of money specifically for trying new things. A “lucky”* position for Penguin that they have access to a ring fenced pot of money from Pearson (their owners) and again a lucky position that Channel 4 Education have in that they can play slightly looser with this money due to their public service remit.

* its not lucky, Pearson have the forsight to set aside profit derived from the current business model to invest in future unknown business models, its just being smart…

This reminded me of an event I went to at NMK on the future of newspapers some months ago, (nearly) everyone on the panel was not a progressive as I had hoped and for good reasons, they had short term targets that needed hitting and the targets were certainly not going be met with speculative investment in project which might have future return.

There was a desire to only invest in projects/things where a return was already obvious (non risky investments) yet a complete disregard that the market in which they were operating was in complete flux.

I sensed that they knew that the long term trajectory of the businesses they worked for were bad but still needed to hit the short term targets. The ability to take risks was being suffocated by the size of their organisations, only able to invest in sure-fire-profit-makers so that they could remain as large organisations. By forcing themselves to iterate towards (inevitably ever decreasing) short term targets they were managing their own demise.

If the large businesses/organisations/governments of the pre internet era are aiming to continue to be of a similar scale in the internet era they are going to need to set aside next weeks profit/election-win and try something different and potentially risky. Better to do it is sooner rather than later, as by then they may have managed themselves into positions where they no longer have the fat in reserve to take the hit.

We now have a big sharing, copying and communicating tool – its agnostic about which market/subject it affects (swap out newpapers and put anything in its place the logic still stands), embrace it and take some risks.

One last thing – aimed mostly at Sly Bailey – <rant> please don’t play the 4th estate card and try and get legislation in place to help support a faltering business. The fact you no longer have a monopoly on the means of production is just a fact of technological advances, not googles fault, and the fact that consumers are moving towards a different (more efficient) medium by which to consume media is not anyone’s else fault but your own for not seeing it coming… and if your going to try and defend newpapers on the grounds of journalistic quality… well… i think i will leave that one there. </rant>