Category Archives: content management

Who fact-checks the fact-checkers?

Posted on by
Reply

The recent stoush between POTUS and Twitter on fact-checking and his alleged use of violent invective has rekindled the debate on whether, and how, social media should be regulated. It’s a potential quagmire (especially the issue of free speech), but it also comes at a time when here in Australia, social media is fighting twin legal battles – on defamation and fees for news content.

First, the issue of fact-checking on social media. Public commentary was divided – some argued that fact-checking is a form of censorship, and others posed the question “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” (who fact-checks the fact-checkers?) Others suggested that fact-checking in this context was a form of public service to ensure that political debate is well-informed, obvious errors are corrected, and that blatant lies (untruths, falsehoods, fibs, deceptions, mis-statements, alternative facts….) are called out for what they are. Notably, in this case, the “fact” was not edited, but flagged as a warning to the audience. (In case anyone hadn’t noticed (or remembered), earlier this year Facebook announced that it would engage Reuters to provide certain fact-check services.) Given the current level of discourse in the political arena, traditional and social media, and the court of public opinion, I’m often reminded of an article I read many years ago in the China Daily, which said something to the effect that “it is important to separate the truth from the facts”.

Second, the NSW Court of Appeal recently ruled that media companies can be held responsible for defamatory comments posted under stories they publish on social media. While this specific ruling did not render Facebook liable for the defamatory posts (although like other content platforms, social media is subject to general defamation laws), it was clear that the media organisations are deemed to be “publishing” content on their social media pages. And even though they have no way of controlling or moderating the Facebook comments before they are made public, for these purposes, their Facebook pages are no different to their own websites.

Third, the Australian Government is going to force companies like Facebook and Google to pay for news content via revenue share from ad sales. The Federal Treasurer was quoted as saying, “It is only fair that the search ­engines and social media giants pay for the original news content that they use to drive traffic to their sites.” If Australia succeeds, this may set an uncomfortable precedent in other jurisdictions.

For me, much of the above debate goes to the heart of how to treat social media platforms – are they like traditional newspapers and broadcast media? are they like non-fiction publishers? are they communications services (like telcos)? are they documents of record? The topic is not new – remember when Mark Zuckerberg declared that he wanted Facebook to be the “world’s newspaper”? Be careful what you wish for…

Next week: Fact v Fiction in Public Discourse

30 years in publishing

Posted on by
Reply

It’s 30 years since I began my career in publishing. I have worked for two major global brands, a number of niche publishers, and now I work for a start-up. For all of this time, I have worked in non-fiction – mostly professional (law, tax, accounting), business and financial subjects. I began as an editor in London, became a commissioning editor, launched a publishing business in Hong Kong, managed a portfolio of financial information services for the capital markets in Asia Pacific, and currently lead the global business development efforts for a market data start-up in blockchain, crypto and digital assets. Even when I started back in 1989, industry commentators were predicting the end of print. And despite the best efforts of the internet and social media to decimate the traditional business models, we are still producing and consuming an ever-growing volume of content.

The importance of editing and proofreading still apply to publishing today…. Image sourced from Wikimedia Commons.

The first company I worked for was Sweet & Maxwell, a 200-year-old UK law publisher. In 1989, it had recently been acquired by The Thomson Corporation (now Thomson Reuters), a global media and information brand, and majority owned by the Thomson family of Canada. When I began as a legal editor with Sweet & Maxwell in London, Thomson still had newspaper and broadcasting interests (the family continues to own the Toronto Globe & Mail), a directory business (a rival to the Yellow Pages), a travel business (comprising an airline, a travel agent and a tour operator), and a portfolio of publishing brands that ranged from the arts to the sciences, from finance to medicine, from defence titles to reference works.

Thanks to Thomson, not only did I get incredible experience from working in the publishing industry, I also got to start a new business in Hong Kong (which is still in existence). This role took me to China for the first time in 1995, including a couple of private lunches at The Great Hall of The People in Beijing. The Hong Kong business expanded to include operations in Singapore and Malaysia – during which we survived the handover and the Asian currency crisis. I also spent quite a bit of time for Thomson in the USA, working on international sales and distribution, before joining one of their Australian businesses for a year.

Given the subscription nature of law, tax and accounting publishing, many of the printed titles came in the form of multi-volume loose-leaf encyclopedias, which required constant (and laborious) updating throughout the subscription year. In fact, as editors we had to forecast and estimate the average number of pages required to be added or updated each year. If we exceeded the page allowance, the production team would not be happy. And if the number of updates each year did not match the budgeted number we had promised subscribers, the finance team would not be happy. So, we had a plethora of weekly, monthly, bi-monthly, quarterly, semi-annual and annual deadlines and schedules to manage – even today, I recall the immense relief we experienced when we got the CRC (camera ready copy) for the next release back from the typesetters, on time, and on budget…

This blog owes its title to something that senior Thomson executives liked to proclaim: “Content is King!” We were still in the era of media magnates, when newspapers (with their display and classified advertising) had a license to print money – the “rivers of gold” as some called it. But as the internet and online search came to determine how readers discovered and consumed information, the catch cry became “Content in Context!”, as publishers needed to make sure they had the right material, at the right time, in the right place, for the right audience (and at the right price….).

Of course, over the 12 years I was at Thomson, technology completely changed the way we worked. When I first started, editors still did a lot of manual mark-up on hard copy, while other specialists were responsible for technical editing, layout, design, indexing, proofreading and tabling (creating footnotes and cross-references, and compiling lists of legal and academic citations). Most of the products were still in printed form, but this was a period of rapid transition to digital content – from dial-up databases to CD-ROM, from online to web formats. Word processing came into its own, as authors started to submit their manuscripts on floppy disk, and compositors leveraged SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) for typesetting and for rendering print books as digital documents. Hard to believe now, but CD-ROM editions of traditional text books and reference titles had to be exact visual replicas of the printed versions, so that in court, the judges and the lawyers could (literally) be on the same page if one party or other did not have the digital edition. Thankfully, some of the constraints disappeared as more content went online – reference works had to be readable in any web browser, while HTML enabled faster search, cross-referencing and indexing thanks to text tagging, Boolean logic, key words and embedded links.

The second global firm I worked for was Standard & Poor’s, part of the The McGraw-Hill Companies (now S&P Global). Similar to Thomson, when I started with McGraw-Hill, the McGraw family were major shareholders, and the group had extensive interests in broadcasting, magazines and education publishing, as well as financial services. But when I joined Standard & Poor’s in 2002, I was surprised that there were still print publications, and some in-house authors and editors continued to work with hard copy manuscripts and proofs (which they circulated to one another via their in/out trays and the internal mail system…). Thankfully, much of this time-consuming activity was streamlined in favour of more collaborative content development and management processes. And we migrated subscribers from print and CD-ROM to web and online (XML was then a key way of streaming financial data, especially for machine-to-machine transmission).

Working for Standard & Poor’s in a regional role, I was based in Melbourne but probably spent about 40% of my time overseas and interstate. My role involved product management and market development – but although I no longer edited content or reviewed proofs, I remained actively involved in product design, content development, user acceptance testing and client engagement. The latter was particularly interesting in Asia, especially China and Japan. Then the global financial crisis, and the role of credit rating agencies such as Standard & Poor’s, added an extra dimension to client discussions…

After a period as a freelance writer and editor, for the past few years I have been working for a startup news, research and market data provider, servicing the growing audience trading and investing in cryptocurrencies and digital assets. Most of the data is distributed via dedicated APIs, a website, desktop products and third party vendors. It may not sound like traditional publishing, but editorial values and production processes lie at the core of the business – quality digital content still needs a lot of work to capture, create and curate. And even though the internet gives the impression of reducing the price of online content to zero, there is still considerable value in standardizing, verifying and cataloguing all that data before it is served up to end users.

Next week: You said you wanted a revolution?

Startup Vic’s EdTech Pitch Night

Posted on by
Reply

As part of its ongoing series of pitch events jointly organised with LaunchVic, Startup Victoria last week hosted the latest edition of its EdTech Pitch Night. Facilitated by General Assembly, Weploy, Marketing Entourage and VUInnovations, a quick audience survey at the start of the evening revealed that for 50% of attendees, this was their first Startup Vic event.

The panel of expert judges was drawn from Impact Generation Partners, Xplor, MAP and Education Changemakers.

The pitches in order of appearance were (websites links embedded in the names):

Studychatr

Tag line: “Improving student experience and graduate recruitment”

Many students report that they feel isolated, confused, and lack both a sense of community and a clear career direction. On the latter point, traditional recruitment firms and employers want to target emerging graduate talent, which can be expensive. Studychatr wants to make the hiring process easier for both employers and students.
Users gain access to a knowledge hub, through which students can earn Kudos points and StudyCoins for helping other students, and acquire micro-credentialing credits for their course work.

The service is free to students, whereas recruiters and employers need to pay via job ads, advertising, talent search, and student consultancy (essentially a Sideracket/Upwork/Freelancer/Airtasker-type service that enables companies to commission students to undertake research and other tasks).

With students wary of using existing college-provides LMS and campus portals, and placing less trust and reliance on “free” social media services, Studychatr has managed to strike partnerships with student societies as the key to on-boarding users, with 1,000 user sign-ups in the past 6 months.

Part of the employer/recruiter strategy is help them overcome the challenge of filtering candidates.

The judges were keen to know more about what the app measures – e.g., number of user posts, level of engagement, quality of study materials, depth of the collaboration – and how the AI model works in this context, and to what degree the platform moderates content, collaboration and communication. They also commented that the founding team and their advisors could probably benefit from some further diversity

InquiBox

Tag line: “Experiential learning through play”

How do parents access STEM tools? For InquiBox, the answer is a subscription service to curated educational activity boxes, plus a web platform. Costing A$29.95 per month, and launched in December 2018, the business is experiencing MoM active subscriber growth of 47%.

The judges wondered whether the content comprised unique materials or a compilation of preexisting components, what was in the online content, and what % of the items were Australian made? They also asked if there were any teachers on advisory board, and whether the STEM themes are integrated, given that the core subjects are taught as separate disciplines.

Based on subscriber feedback and the churn rate, some parents felt that the product was too early in their child’s education, or the boxes were too frequent, so there is an option to skip a month and to only select the topics of specific relevance. In future, there may be on option to track a child’s progress via the web application.

Sales have largely come from word of mouth referrals, but the team are planning to forge partnerships with schools, and link content to the curriculum, and develop engagement with the parent community.

RocketShoes

Tag line: “A next-generation education platform”

The founder pitched this as “an education platform where students own their own content”. Using a combination of Blockchain technologies (primarily IPFS for file storage, and NEM for assignment submission and time stamping) students can upload and manage their own content, and retain ownership of their data (unlike other open-source tools, some proprietary LMS and most social media platforms).

The judges asked who is responsible for moderating the content. While it can vary by jurisdiction, the obligation can largely lies with parents and education institutions, although in some cases it may be the students themselves.

The judges were also keen to understand the revenue model – in essence the schools pay, but if content proves to be more popular as measured by IPFS usage, the fees can be reduced. While something of a personal mission for the founder (hence the lack of detail on the commercials), a sensible decision has been made to adopt an API approach, whereby RocketShoes can plug into an existing LMS, and bridge different applications and platforms.

TALi

Tag line: “Happier kids start here”

This is a game-based cognitive training tool for children with learning difficulties, such as ADHD, ASD etc. It is designed to enable early detection and prevention. The tool has been patented, and uses touch-screen access and gamification to leverage the principles of brain plasticity muscle memory.

Key areas of focus are core cognitive functions of Selection, Inhibition, Focus and Control. The process is designed to be both repetitive and intensive. The game adapts to the child’s individual level. Claiming to be clinically proven via medical trials (of which TALi owns the research data), the TALi Train application has been classified as a Grade 2 medical device in the USA. Next up are TALi Detect (pre-school) and TALi Maintain (to extend the child’s development levels).

Distribution is via parents, healthcare and other service providers, and schools; it also has NDIS status in Australia. The tool is designed to be used 25 minutes per day for 5 weeks and can be implemented direct in schools, or in the home (under parents supervision). The key age group is 3-8 years old, before children with relevant learning difficulties are typically prescribed medication such as Methylphenidate (Ritalin).

After the votes were in, and once the judges had deliberated, the people’s choice was TALi, while the overall winner was InquiBox.

P.S. Startup Vic and Victoria University Innovations departments have joined forces on “Found”, a survey-based research project designed to “uncover hidden truths of the founder experience”, the results of which should influence the overall eco-system. Interested founders can apply to participate here: www.found-ed.com.

Next week: Pre-election Musings