booklab

The Future Face of Media: Business Models for the Digital Era.

Frankfurt, May 18, 2010.

It was great fun and highly inspiring to moderate two panels with top media leaders on the “Future of news and news publishing” in Frankfurt organized by Mark Schiffhauer for the Maleki Group.

Rona Fairhead, Financial Times, Andrew Langhoff, Wall Street Journal Europe , Arthur O. Sulzberger, The New York Times.

The prestigious group of speakers at the panels included the publishers of many of the top newspaper and agency brands globally and in Germany, notably Rona Fairhead of the Financial Times, Andrew Langhoff of the Wall Street Journal Europe, Arthur Sulzberger of The New York Times, Laurent Joffrin of Libération, Chris Ahern, of Thomson Reuters, Katharina Borchert of Spiegel Online, Christoph Keese of Axel Springer, Malte von Trotta of dpa, Google’s Kay Oberbeck, Hessische radio news editor Katja Marx, and old Perlentaucher chum Thierry Chervel (with Robin Meyer Lucht as my co-host).

What we learned was perhaps not the big surprises, but a first class survey of firsthand accounts of where several of the very top global media brands are set to go from this point – and that we most likely are at the crossroads, really.

There is not the one true model for the digital era ahead, was the gospel of NYTimes’ Sulzberger. But media (aka newspapers) need to be experimental, engage with readers, develop – and keep – their brand promise (“If we lose it, we are lost” – Langhoff of WSJEurope). “Information wants to be expensive”, according to Fairhead, FT, so introducing metering models and building pay walls is the way to go for everybody, at least at the top end of those media brands. And sure, everybody on the panel was excited about the closed system proposed by Apple’s iPad, which allows to retain exclusive control over a media’s brand, content and payments. This sweet promise appears to have triggered instant decisions to investing significant money for the development of dedicated services and formats for the new platform (e.g. at Axel Springer).

Really stunning was the overall optimistic outlook of almost everybody on the stage. The “religious wars” have been declared to be over (Langhoff). Reuters has hired 200 journalists as of last year (Ahearn) to develop high quality, notably for exclusive new interactive services for a post TV era elite, to be branded “Reuters Insider”.

“Citizen journalism” was remembered coolly as yesterday’s challenge. Solid professional quality journalism was declared to be the frontier of the future.

It was much harder though to find clear statements on the requirements for this good journalism to take off. So far, at least in Germany, “agenda setting” from the “crowd” – or twitter, blogs, anonymous voices from out there – are considered as a rare exception to the rule, while the main brands still rule – said at least the voices from the main brands. However, we desperately need a debate on the quality of journalism today and tomorrow (said Borchert of Spiegel Online).

While everybody seemed to nod at such good intentions, it was less obvious who would spend new money on the new journalism’s digital rise, aside from the recently formed 800 pound gorilla of Thomson Reuters (with its 12,997 million $ of revenue at an operating profit of 1,575 $ - this is really big global media!).

And your moderator – me – was criticized, a bit, by labeling some of the less innovative, less aggressive established media companies’ attitude to be “aristocratic” when they expected that the new entrants should politely knock at their doors (von Trotta, dpa, commenting on Google’s attitude).

Of course, bloggers and twitterers from the audience objected to the big media brand’s optimism, not only by pointing to poor salaries paid for most of today’s online journalism. They also deplored the more and more closed walls of those behemoths represented at the panel.

Conclusions:

NYTimes Sulzberger, the natural born leader of the panels’ pack, and Borchert of Spiegel Online, Germany’s youthful, bright and dangerously smiling new front runner in the digital rat race, both insisted that the future may be wide open for everybody who is prepared to move their bottoms vigorously, ready to learn, play pathfinder, take risk – and start all over again every other day.

But disregarding all the optimism which was displayed by the leaders, one other thing was made clear as well: The land ahead ain’t no level playing field. It won’t be offering the same rewards to all, to the many, be they big, medium or small. Instead, there will be winners – and losers - indeed.

Past the religious wars of who’s right – in the trenches of the past five years or so – a hardly original split seems to lay ahead, and the current economic crises will certainly highlight the differences ever more radically:

The landscape ahead – seen from some kind of ‘Moses angle’, knowing that there is a promised digital land out there, yet not knowing exactly who will be allowed to settle in this land, and who is to go away before, in the painful process of finding this land – will be not only highly fragmented, but cascaded.

The boldest of the top media brands go for it in full force, massively investing money and gathering talent now – yet mostly organizational talent, and less often additional talented journalists. They combine muscle now with propositions and guts, so it is only reasonable to expect that some of them will make it, and even make it well.

On the other hand, the crowd out there is nothing less than opaque, or homogenous, in a solitarian “us vs. them” scheme. The crowd includes new entrants and new outcasts, new cowboys and new Indians. And of course, many within the big media fortresses are, at the same time, part of the crowd, as they connect and interact on all available channels, they facebook and twitter and blog and link.

But only a few from the crowds “out there” will be able to end up with a bottom line written in black ink, from providing profitable services, or by leveraging on their digital exposure with other chargeable services, directly or indirectly, from their writing and taping and aggregating and editing. Some will positively do so as niche players in the crowd, yet most will not.

The middle ground, or the majority of actors who used to form the core of “diversity” in the classical media, the local and regional newspapers and radio stations, were only marginally represented in the room and, if so, critically addressed in their desperate lobbying for life saving government regulation, as it is currently proposed in Germany or in France (as ‘Leistungsschutzrecht’, or ‘publisher’s rights’). Their actions will most likely produce some results, but perhaps this is more about buying time, than entering a new safe haven for the long term future.

Personally, I was most comforted – which I had not expected – by realizing that good journalism, broad and in depth coverage, nuances and diversity of angles and opinions seem to have many more realistic perspectives than one would assume from listening to most similar debates over the past few years.

But for those young aspirants who plan to take up such journalism as their profession and career, this is going to be a tough choice. The news and information business will be probably more competitive than ever. Competition will occur between all layers and factions, anywhere, anytime, anyhow, local and global, bringing about a profession that will be unforgiving for most.

At least for most of Europe, such strains will mean a deep change of a professional culture which used to be traditionally based more on a vocation and shared values, than on a struggle for survival. But it will have “manna” on offer for some – the most talented, the most aggressive, or the luckiest.

And a similar pattern may be true for the readers: Top quality journalism will continue to be on offer – at a price. All kinds of information as well as opinion will be available freely as well. But fine, yet clear distinctions will be prevalent, much more than ever before, in what will be accessible by whom, how quickly, under what rules, and at what cost.

For videos of the conference see at Carta;

for Twitter summaries see here and here;

for a German summary in Perlentaucher see here:

and for the complete program see here.

Es ist bemerkenswert, dass all die heiß umstrittenen Themen in der aktuellen Debatte rund ums Buch – seine kulturelle Stellung als Kulturgut, das Urheberrecht, die Rolle der Verlage und des Handels – in so gut wie allen gängigen Standarddefinitionen des Buches seit dem 19. Jahrhundert nicht einmal angesprochen werden. Und viele kolportierte Thesen über Trends und Entwicklungen der Buchkultur – etwa über die Homogenisierung und Verflachung des Angebots durch den übermächtigen Konkurrenzdruck von englischsprachigen Bestsellern, oder die Vormacht weniger angelsächsischer Konzerne – werden zumeist nicht nur ohne empirische Evidenz vorgetragen. Sie sind in ihrer simplen Argumentation schlicht falsch. Wenn nun die Bedrohung der Kultur insgesamt durch Digitalisierung und Aushöhlung des Urheberrechts ausgerufen wird, sind die Evidenzen bei näherer Betrachtung zumindest fragwürdig. Mehr

The wonderful journal “Logos” has published a tink piece I wrote on the “future of the book” or, more precisely, on what e-Books and digitization may have changed - or not changed at all - about books:

What is a book? And, what’s really in it? These
two simple questions are getting both more
complicated and more interesting as books are
moving from their incarnation as “laminated wood
pulp” — as some digerati nerds mock the ink-onpaper
versions of traditional knowledge containers
— to other, mostly digital media.
With a multitude of new manifestations of
the book, initiatives on the book, book-related
gadgets and uses, and with 2008 as a likely
watershed year for the future of electronic books
(e-books), it seems only appropriate to revisit
these two primal questions in a more systematic
and serious way.
Admittedly, this article is more a loose set of
initial observations, thoughts and notes than a
thoroughly researched essay — at best a think
piece, trying to identify and pick up a number of
the loose ends of the current and often emotional
debate on e-books. I try to identify some aspects of
what may change — or has changed already — as
books go digital; what on the contrary will not be
so different, after all, in the digital future; what is
at stake; and, somewhat as a postscript, why ebooks
so far have not been at all successful in
competing with the traditional book.

You find more here

Tracking news about how the crisis affects publishing over the past two months produces some strange findings. Almost instantly, starting as of  November 2008, we saw predictions about how the crisis would hit the industry. Then in December - and now again, with the year’s end reporting - we are told that notably in the US, UK and France, XMas 08 was pretty dark in various segments of the book trade. In Germany, it was not so bleak, but all of the rest of 2008 was not terrific in the first place.

Between these notes, we also heard quickly reports about imminent job cuts (notably in the US, with Simon &  Schuster, Macmillan), restructuring measures and (at Houghton Mifflin) an instant freeze in the acquisition of new titles.

But frankly, these are all pretty dumb, unspecific measures and reactions. What does this mean for a publishing company to stop buying new titles? (And Houghton had build its Himalaya of debt well before the crisis was on the horizon!)

But most amazing is how little we hear about the deeper - structural - trouble in the industry.  Only in France, in Livres Hebdo and in Le Monde, I found some pieces addressing the huge rise of advances over the past years, or more detailed observations about distribution and consolidation.

I didn’t find any well informed reflections about the overproduction (the flood of titles); or the internationalization of the trade, of trends and of author brands; or the probably new dynamics (and competition) between imprints of large conglomerates and independents with regard to the crisis.

Most of all, I would expect that this crisis will trigger digital change, because if you can dramatically reduce the cost of production, storage, distribution and also marketing by doing it all in an integrated digital environment, it is not all too difficult to predict that at least some actors - from within the industry, or some new entrants - will go down that path.

Well, I will do my best in the weeks and months to track information and thoughts along those lines and discuss it on this site.

This has been said, almost a year ago, by my old friend Mike Shatzkin in a remarkable address at last year’s BookExpo America in New York, which include very practical suggestions as to what publishers and booksellers can do.

Here are 2 more quotes:

“It seems intuitively that the explosion of reading on screens — which has happened — will ultimately result in ebook reading on screens, but exactly how is not evident yet.”

“In fact, books will be among the last. That’s not something for us to be proud of as an industry.”

Publishers Weekly writes that the US children classic Dr. Seuss is going digital, thanks to a partnership between Dr. Seuss Enterprises and kidthing, a new content distribution platform. The website kidthing is to go online later this month.

Sometimes, too quick is too late. Publishers Lunch informed us only the day before expiration of the offer about a free download of Charles Bock’s debut novel Beautiful Children. The online site closed the freeby as of February 29 - but still adds to an emerging pattern: Putting up free stuff for only some limited period of time.

Also writers are getting interesting in the new digital movements - only to realize that publishers charge for downloadable books usually roughly as much as for printed books, yet don’t have to pay for all the storage, printing and delivery. This brings Kate Pullinger to write in the British Guardian which triggered some debate.

“Writers can learn a lot from the Hollywood strike. We deserve a better deal from digital publishing.”

This is how the piece opens:

“Writers of the world arise! It’s time to throw off the shackles of traditional publishing contracts and face a brand new digital future with a brand new set of priorities. Let’s copy or, should I say, learn from our brothers and sisters in Hollywood: don’t let the industry take our digital rights away! Give us our digital dues! In the shift from print to digital, writers are in danger of losing out big time.” It will be interesting to see if all those fast written thrillers will be put on hold - and both publishers and us readers shivering.

And at the Leipziger Buchmesse (Leipzig book fair) of next week, there will be an open forum about new digital book communities in germany, with among the speakers Miriam Hofheinz (www.perry-rhodan.net), Janet Sunjic vom Hörspiellabel Lausch-Hörspiele (www.merlausch.de) und Jennifer Nikodem (www.lovelybooks.de).

Co-Blogger Simon Owens told me more details about the Sci/fi publisher Tor Books and his new way of giving away fre eBooks. In his own blog “bloggasm“, he writes:

 ”Two sources who spoke to me on condition of anonymity said that it’s intended to be a “go-to site, a central community” for science fiction and fantasy fans. A few authors have already been approached to submit original short fiction to be published online. Tor is paying upwards of 25 cents per word for these stories and right now is only dealing with solicited authors.”

Thank you Simon.

Within only a few weeks, I came across all sorts of news refering to big publishing conglomerates and small indiependent houses who launch or announced  new approaches to putting books onto the internet. And at the same time, a new debate about eventual business models has started - anywhere between giving away all the stuff for free to charging for the download of a page or a chapter. This was not only triggered by the launch of new digital readers like Amazon’s Kindle and the Sony Reader. It shows that there are a lot of people and companies out there thinking at and planning for perspectives of the book in a digital and connected world.

I certainly will comment on this in future posts, but in a first step, I thought that mapping those debates and announcements may be more useful and valuable. I have written a first overview, in German, in my column “Virtualienmarkt” at the Berlin based Perlentaucher. But here you can look at the ‘tool box’ with quotes and links to the main findings I covered, with only a minimum of comments

US Trade Wholesale Electronic Book Sales

Statistics: Here is a table with ebook sales in trade in the US. 

Examples of new ebook and digital book announcements and reports from recent weeks with quotes and links:   HarperCollins to put books online free (11.02.08 The Bookseller) “HarperCollins Publishers US is to offer free electronic editions of some of its books on its website, including a novel by Paulo Coelho and a cookbook by the Food Network star Robert Irvine, reports the New York Times. (Coelho blog) The idea is to give readers the opportunity to sample the books online in the same way that prospective buyers can flip through books in a bookstore.“It’s like taking the shrink wrap off a book,” said Jane Friedman, chief executive of HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide. “The best way to sell books is to have the consumer be able to read some of that content.”  Top authors to go digital with ebooks (The Sunday Times) “Random House and Hachette, which together control just over 30% of the British book market, are to offer downloadable versions of titles by authors ranging from Delia Smith to Ian McEwan and Michael Parkinson. Every other major publisher is drawing up plans to follow suit, pitching the books at just below the price of a hardback. The publishers have made the move to ebooks to follow the launch of two rival devices due to come on sale in Britain over the next few months – Sony’s Reader and Amazon’s Kindle. (…) In America, the Sony Reader and Amazon Kindle have been on sale since last autumn and about 90,000 titles are now available on them. (…) Borders in Ann Arbor, Michigan, unveiled a digital “concept store”.Publishers  Lunch“Perhaps the most interesting launch is the one without a press release at all so far: Tor Books is accepting e-mail sign-ups for a program that promises “free digital books from bestselling and award-winning SF and fantasy authors…. Once you register, you’ll receive our newsletter and a link to download a digital book. And you’ll receive a link to another new book every week.” The first week’s free book is Mistborn, by rising fantasy star Brandon Sanderson. Next week’s will be Old Man’s War by John Scalzi, 2006’s winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Over the next several weeks, other books still.” Random to sell chapters online11.02.08 The Bookseller “Random House US is to begin selling the individual chapters of a popular book to gauge reader demand for bite-size portions of digital texts, reports the Wall Street Journal.The publishing group’s experiment appears to be the first time a major consumer publisher has offered a title on a chapter-by-chapter basis. It will sell the six chapters and epilogue of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die for $2.99 each.The move comes, says the WJS, at a time when retailers and publishers are looking for clues into how readers want to access digital content.”Publishers Weekly“In the Random test, Chip Heath and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, published in hardcover in January 2007, is being made available in six chapters and an epilogue—the content bunches are priced individually at $2.99 each—at www.randomhouse.com/madetostick. Consumers who buy a chapter will receive an e-mail with a link for downloading the purchased file, which cannot be shared electronically. Avideh Bashirrad, deputy director of marketing for RHPG, said the company chose Stick because each chapter contains standalone lessons. Matt Shatz, Random’s v-p, digital, said the experiment is intended “to gauge the demand for short form electronic content.” Several publishers, mostly in the travel and computer fields, have offered chapters for sale, with mixed results.” Publishers Weekly, 2/11/2008 Random House drops audio DRM 25.02.08 The Bookseller“Random House Audio — a division of Bertelsmann, one of the largest publishing conglomerates in the world — has announced that it will now allow its audiobooks to be sold without DRM by all of its online retailers. According to blog site BoingBoing Random House noted that they’ve been running a DRM-free audiobook program with eMusic for months, and that none of the pirate editions of their audiobooks online came from those DRM-free editions; rather, they’ve come from DRM’ed editions that were cracked, and from ripped CDs.”   Brockhaus stops printed edition and moves online instead“The German encyclopedia publisher Brockhaus said it would place its reference works on the Internet to offset falling revenues. Unlike popular reference work Wikipedia, it will be ad-sponsored and professionally edited.”Deutsche Welle   Brockhaus ceases publication of its paper edition“This news represents a watershed,” was Manfred Schneider’s comment on the announcement by the traditional Brockhaus publishing house that it would be making its encyclopaedia available on-line from 15 April on a free, advertising-financed website rather than publishing a new paper edition of the thirty-one volume work. “A review of the history of Brockhaus forces contemporary book-lovers to draw the wistful conclusion that this move marks not only a change in publishing strategy but also the end of an era. “Frankfurter Rundschau quoted in Courier International  In France, the popular encyclopedia “Quid” stops printed edition“The 2008 edition of Quid, France’s favourite encyclopaedia, has been cancelled by its publisher for lack of interest. The annual sales of the 2,000-page tome, which reached more than 400,000 in the mid-1990s, collapsed to just over 100,000 last year. The book’s publisher, Robert Laffont, says the whole concept of the print encyclopedia can no longer compete with the free information available on the internet.”The Independent 19 Feb 2008 The new debate on how to prepare and serve a free lunchKevin Kelly: Better Than Free “When copies are super abundant, they become worthless. When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable. When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied. Well, what can’t be copied?”“The elusive, intangible connection that flows between appreciative fans and the artist is worth something. In Radiohead’s case it was about $5 per download.“ In: EdgeChris Andersen: Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business “It’s now clear that practically everything Web technology touches starts down the path to gratis, at least as far as we consumers are concerned. Storage now joins bandwidth (YouTube: free) and processing power (Google: free) in the race to the bottom. Basic economics tells us that in a competitive market, price falls to the marginal cost. There’s never been a more competitive market than the Internet, and every day the marginal cost of digital information comes closer to nothing.”In: Wired Chris Andersen on his Blog The Long Tail“I plan to make as many versions as possible of FREE, well,  free, starting with the MP3 audiobook and possibly including a sponsored physical book. Is this going to backfire, given that I’m already on the well-known side of the equation?Well, if all I wanted to do was sell books, it might (although I doubt it, given the usability benefits of the physical form of a serious book. After all, giving away a pdf version of his book on net policy and economics helped Yochai Benkler sell more hardcover books than he would have otherwise. 500+ pages is a lot to print out, to say nothing of reading on-screen).”In Andersen’s blog The Long TailOprah e-freebie now Amazon’s 3rd best p-seller “Can you boost p-book sales by giving away e-copies of the same titles for free? Oprah Winfrey’s book club last week allowed free downloads of the book in Kindle and PDF formats and perhaps others, for 33 hours. It drew more than a million downloads“David Rothman in his blog in Publishers Weekly  February 19, 2008  “Free is more complicated than you think” by Scott Adams, Creator of Dilbert “I spend about a third of my workday blogging. Thanks to the miracle of online advertising, that increases my income by 1%. I balance that by hoping no one asks me why I do it.  A few years ago I tried an experiment where I put the entire text of my book, God’s Debris, on the Internet for free, after sales of the hard copy and its sequel, The Religion War slowed. My hope was that the people who liked the free e-book would buy the sequel. According to my fan mail, people loved the free book. I know they loved it because they emailed to ask when the sequel would also be available for free. For readers of my non-Dilbert books, I inadvertently set the market value for my work at zero. Oops.”Scott Adams in a column in The Wall Street Journal 1 Nov 2007   Tim O’Reilly picked up on Adams’ discovery of the ambivalence of freebies and did the math more in detail, with figures from his own book publishing business. He realized what fabulous numbers of page views and ad clicks would be required to come up with the revenues he had by selling printed books in traditional ways. As quoted by one listener to his presentation: “Assume (hypothetical but probably close to his real business) that he sells 200K books/month @ $20 = $4M/month = $48M/year. Average book is 446 pages, which is equivalent to 90M page views per month. At a $1 CPM (=Cost per thousand impressions), that’s $90K/month. At a $20 CPM, it’s $1.8M — roughly half the size of the book business.”Tim O’Reilly’s conclusion was that at first he had considered advertising to provide a solution for creating revenues out of online publishing („advertising works and we’re just not good at it”), before he flatly understood: “We need to stop thinking of advertising as a model.”  Tim O’Reilly: “Free is more complicated than you think” New publishing models: Case studies and presentation from this year’s O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing onferenceProcedings  of the conference in 2008Ben Vershow, Institute of the Future of the Book: “Books as Conversation”If the book is digital, however, and resides on a network, new possibilities begin to open up. The page margin can become a public space. Authors and readers can interact in close to real time. An entire classroom can operate inside a single text. Books can become conversations.   And let me remind you of sci/fi writer Cory Doctorow who was probably the first writer who understood how to use free online publishing of his writing  (and the usage of ‘creative commons’ licences) to establish his publishing success through a web community of fans.

Here you can find Paulo Coelho’s new megaseller “The Witch of Portobello” - for free. Oh, and yes, it is entirely legal. Courtesy of Harper Collins, Coelho’s US publisher.

Why they give away Coelho’s new book digitally? In order to sell it on paper, of course. And Harper decided, as of today, to start putting books up online for free more or less systematically. With Coelho, this will be one book per month, in a read only, no printing, no saving locally version, yet of course with a direct ‘buy this book’ link attached.

Harper Collins is, after all, a division of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire of News Corp, and he has a reputation of both not doing anything without thinking of the money he can make, and of having a pretty good nose for when is the moment to jump on a band wagon of innovation. Remind you that he had acquired MySpace, and thereby heavily boosted all of web 2.0

In an interview with the New York Times,  Harper’s top lady Jane Friedman called this kick off of serious experimenting (I guess this is what it is, after all): “It’s like taking the shrink wrap off a book“.

This is an interesting concept, I think: Using digital to **open books**.  (I will discuss all the many implications of this in a special post here soon).

But as for today, take note of a number of co-inciding recent announcements, related or not: Simon & Schuster created the office of a Chief Digital Officer “for the full scope of the company’s activities in the digital realm.” Random House meanwhile will start to sell “chapters” of books online, starting with “six chapters and epilogue of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die for $2.99 each”, according to the Wall Street Journal, and quoted by The Bookseller.

While I’m not sure if the price tag of $2.99 for a chapter is a sticky idea - I remember an earlier announcement by RH (or was it Amazon) of a bit more than a year ago of a penny a page - and sorry, I did not check now what was the correct quote.

But the strong news is this: Publishers - and for sure, rather sooner than later, online booksellers even more so - start to take the web seriously (and, oh, right, Amazon just acquired Audible, to sell bookish content truely online, and not from their brick ‘ mortar warehouses).

Add to all of this the sheer number of books that are somehow available digitally online - in all of those restricted forms, as ’snippets’ with Google, in digitalisation projects - with many users craving to access them at once.

My point is: This is how the eBook market will take off for real, not through heavily rights managed closed boxes in the style of Amazon’s Kindle. Cost is not the main hurdle. It is that (a) why should I want to digitally buy a clumsy and bastard variant of a book reading device, and more importantly, (b) why would I allow anyone selling me that digital book to intrude into my ways of using that book, so that I can’t give it to my buddy, or do with my copy whatever else I want.

So, when publishers stop sitting on their digital books and start to experiment, put up stuff for free, cooperate with their writers, and their writers’s communities, when booksellers get serious about downloads of audio (and therefore need to consider if they will use RDM, or learn from the music industry and prefer high usability), and start to consider of all of this in integrated strategies (with some Chief Digital Someone), they may liberate forces that are really relevant.

More on this soon.

It is rare, at least in my observation, to see various pretty serious people - essayists, journalists of high quality newspapers, editors - really in rage to the point of denouncing all (presumed) adversaries squarely as ‘childish’, ‘anti-journalists’ and ‘filthy’, oh, and yes, ‘user generated content’ is called ‘loser generated content’ because alledgedly in websites such as delicio.us, only “3 percent of the posts” refer to  ”news that shape global events”, and the rest is about “making coffee in Japan and the quality of seats in airplanes”.

Since a few weeks, major newspapers in Germany seem to fight for their very survival (and, I must add, use more latin proverbs than normally in years), as they feel threatened by the “Web 0.0” (the double zero alluding to the popular shortcut for a toilet, in fact).

These are the facts and the background: A German court ruled that owners of a website (or blog) can be liable for all posted comments - which resulted in the prestiguous Sueddeutsche Zeitung to allow postings on their website only during office hours, meaning that readers can comment on articles only Monday through Friday between 8am and 7 pm. Freedom of expressions has clear limits: No night shifts or weekend hours.

In another - pretty much unexpected - ruling this morning, a civil case of Sueddeutsche and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) against the online news portal and aggregator Perlentaucher was rejected by the court of appeal in Frankfurt. Perlentaucher (for whom I write a ca. monthly column about culture, books and the digital world), among other things, produces summaries of the daily cultural pages and book reviews of major German newspapers for a newsletter and their website, and sells those pieces to an online bookstore - which infringes, according to Sueddeutsche and FAZ their copyright. The court turned the argument down, explaining that such summaries cannot be interdicted because anyone has the right to publish a summary of a work (e.g. a newspaper article), even with a commercial purpose, provided the summary has its own “creative substance”.

Now the interesting part of the controvery is, at least in my view, absolutely not about copyright, but about culture.  Only an argument about two contrary concepts of culture is good enough for all this fury.

The debate started in fact when in October, member of the publishing board of FAZ, Frank Schirrmacher, an icon of German conservative journalism, had argued “How the Internet Changes Man”, stating - this is already his follow up explanation of the original essay - why printed newspapers have a “purpose” in society as gatekeepers for reliable information and reading, hence are among the pillars of culture (as opposed to the pillows that couch potatoes and web surfers are sitting on, I suppose).

“The newspaper”, Schirrmacher argues, “lasts for at least 24 hours, and with its opinon pieces and reviews, it claims even to have a value for following generations.”

Now, this is an interesting point, as it says that durability, life time, is the measure for cultural value.

Two answers to this. First the Austrian version, which means to point to Karl Kraus, the 20th century critic and aggressive essayist against - newspapers, because of their sloppiness, bad language and shortsightedness (’only for 24 hours!’); by such, he became the harshest benchmark for quality journalism, including for the FAZ. Kraus would never ever have thought for a second of newspapers as a guarantee for cultural value, as opposed to books.

This is the other answer: We see in this stunning German controversy a carbon copy of all those pointless debates over centuries why - please fill in your newest media beast - photography, radio, TV, the internet, comic books threaten the book, culture, civilized life.

At once, we find newspapers among the pillars, not the pillows of culture. How come? Remember the odd word of ‘nothing is less valid than yesterday’s paper’!

The German controversy on culture reflects, of course, the dramatic aging of newspaper readers, the loss of revenues from classified ads, and the competition from all those new actors who are more successful at the emerging online market place.

But the real offense comes from their younger readers whom the newspapers seem not to trust anymore. So they yell at them, in despair.

According to them, the web is  “also a medium that growingly makes not-reading or alsmost not reading possible” (Schirrmacher); those among the readers who post unfitting comments on the newspapers’ websites are “leisure activists with a little scum on their lips” (Sueddeutsche), or, in today’s FAZ: “Every serious blogger will change sides”.

So the argument points at a war - of the newspapers against a portion of their own audience. A civil war for the newsroom?

I guess not that much. It is the culture of the 19th century - where ‘culture’ equals a few knowledgeable, elder men (not women) educating the mass - against what? No, not some bland 21st century thing - but rather against the 18th century, that was much more experimental and laid the foundations of modern democracy, learning societies, peer review (Yes! Those interested readers giving their opinion on a piece, and the result is debate and, yes, often enough, squabble), yet turned from then small clubs and societies to the global mass sociteties of today, fragmented, volatile, dynamic as they are.

This points to a real and substantial cultural divide. A clash of cultures, not only in Germany. Interesting! Let’s see what’s going on next.