A NOTEPAD ON COMPANY AND FINANCIAL LAW, NEWS AND REGULATION
1. FT review of various parenting books. Excerpt:
“Our society is in thrall… to “the cognitive hypothesis: the belief, rarely expressed aloud but commonly held nonetheless, that success today depends primarily on cognitive skills – the kind of intelligence that gets measured on IQ tests, including the abilities to recognise letters and words, to calculate, to detect patterns – and that the best way to develop these skills is to practice them as much as possible, beginning as early as possible.”
This is the edifice upon which modern, academically focused, pushy parenting has been built, yet Tough finds plenty of evidence that it is, at best, shaky as a predictor of future success. What matters more, he argues, is “a very different set of qualities, a list that includes persistence, self-control, curiosity, conscientiousness, grit, and self-confidence”.
…
Love, consistency and support are the best guarantees of nurturing a child – any child – towards a good life. All the rest is froth.”
2. A very different account from the front line by Drew Magary. Excerpt:
“When I was single and saw parents losing it with their kids, I used to frown at them. I’ll never be like that, I promised myself. But single people are pathetically naive. They don’t know what it’s like to spend fourteen consecutive hours with a child. They don’t understand how that massive span of time allows for every single possible human emotion to be bared: anger, fear, jealousy, love … all of it. More to the point, they don’t realize what little assholes kids can be. They have no idea.”
From The Media Briefing, 9 job titles changing the face of modern media business.
From The Media Briefing on “FT’s mobile-first product launch and web publishers’ shift towards the stream“:
“Digital content for digital platforms: The majority of newspaper website content is – still, today, in 2013 – republished from that day’s print edition. The commissioning structure of newspapers is predominately print-based. fastFT is an example of a publisher moving away from that mindset and accepting that 600 words of unbroken text isn’t what online consumers want.”
A survey from the New York Times.
““It’s like being in Florence during the Renaissance,” is how Xavier Lasa, a Spanish computer coder, put it recently. He sounded dead serious. He had come to Mountain View, just south of San Francisco, on a short-term business visa to join a technology incubator program called 500 Startups.”
Here. From the overview:
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From Medium: 2000, the Year Formerly Known as the Future.
Here. Interesting throughout. Slide 73 shows the percentage of global GDP 1820 to 2012, US v Europe v India v China v Latin America.
From the Forum of Small Businesses, here.
Here.
An interesting and reflective article by Laurence Kaye of Shoosmiths on some of the legal issues prominent in the digital revolution.
As background to the “revelations” that Bloomberg journalists can (or could) see certain information about how individual customers use their Bloomberg terminals – NYT report here, Bloomberg statement here – an excellent piece from Quartz about Bloomberg’s culture.
Excerpt:
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From Paul Johnson’s FT column: “There are a host of websites and magazines for entrepreneurs, but no one who works for themselves can afford to spend hours a day surfing. So I have selected a handful of my favourite sites to save you time.”
The list is here.
“How paywalls are evolving” – Felix Salmon. Refers to MediaPass.
“…it’s a mistake — at least from a purely financial perspective — to treat all readers equally. Some readers have a much greater propensity to pay than others; ideally, you want to extract a lot of money from those readers, while also allowing the vast majority of your visitors — the ones who will never pay you anything — to still consume your content and view the associated ads…
…And certainly it seems to be a good idea to offer a range of subscription lengths, priced so that there’s a strong incentive to go for the longer-dated annual subscription, even if again that means a substantially lower rate on a per-month basis.
I’s not all that hard to tell who’s likely to be willing to subscribe, and who isn’t. Print subscribers, for instance, are much more likely to be willing to pay for a digital subscription than a reader who doesn’t already pay for the print version. And people who visit frequently, and who read a lot of local news, or sports news, are also more likely to subscribe.
In general, the trick is to get as many subscribers as you can — because once a person subscribes, they generally turn out to be surprisingly loyal and price-inelastic. You can keep on charging their credit card, even at steadily-rising rates, and they’re not going to unsubscribe. And then, for the 90% of readers who don’t subscribe, it’s a good idea to find content for them, too. The paywall shouldn’t just be a “pay here or get nothing” option: the “no thanks” button should take you to valuable free content…
…the act of putting up a paywall is the act of “essentially harvesting revenue from a loyal long-term audience” — people who have been reading the publication for years, and have turned it into a habit they don’t want to give up. That’s fine, as a short-term means of maximizing revenues. But it’s dangerous in terms of getting new loyal readers. Which is one reason why online media startups almost never have paywalls: they want as many people as possible to discover them.”
Two articles from The Media Briefing:
From the NYT: “Living With Less. A Lot Less.” Excerpt:
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The New York Times review of Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead” here.
Ms. Sandberg is famously ex-World Bank, ex-US Treasury, ex-McKinsey, ex-Google and now Chief Operating Officer at Facebook.
Excerpt from the NYT Review:
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“Why, oh, why, after the newsroom carnage of the last decade, are we only now seeing paywalls being erected and reader revenues being harvested? We can sum it up in two words:
Err, right…From a BIS press release today:
“A government sponsored business study published today has found that employee satisfaction and commitment to their place of work has significantly increased despite the economic downturn.
The 2011 Workplace Employment Relations Study (WERS), which was last run in 2004, explores the current state of workplace relations and covers a wide range of issues such as the relationship between employer and employee, work life balance, equality and diversity, training, pay and working hours.
Report highlights include:
• Job satisfaction levels increased. 20% of employees in 2011 were satisfied or very satisfied with all aspects of their job measured, compared to 16% in 2004;
• Since 2004 employees’ levels of commitment to the organisation in which they work increased. The largest rise was in the percentage of employees who said they shared the values of their organisation, up from 55% in 2004 to 65% in 2011;
• Managers are communicating more with employees. Managers are now more likely to hold team briefings to keep staff informed about changes at work (up from 60% to 66%) and they are more likely to provide employees with more information on workplace finances (up from 55% to 61%);
• The proportion of employees with high levels of autonomy increased between 2004 and 2011. The most common areas of discretion are how employees do their job (52%) and the order in which they carry out tasks (51%); and
• The percentage of high training workplaces (where at least 80% of experienced employees had some off-the-job training) rose from 35% to 41%.”
See also: Geoff Dyer on work
Cambridge researchers find way to use DNA to store digital data:
“Researchers at the EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) have created a way to store data in the form of DNA – a material that lasts for tens of thousands of years. The new method, published today in the journal Nature (“Towards practical, high-capacity, low-maintenance information storage in synthesized DNA”), makes it possible to store at least 100 million hours of high-definition video in about a cup of DNA.”
More here (Nanowerk).
The FT editor’s e-mail to staff, via The Guardian:
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A thought-provoking infographic on Internet use and Internet addiction here.
See also: The Shallows: what the Internet is doing to our brains – Nicholas Carr
Bonfire of the Vanities author in the Daily Beast on the demise of traders and the rise of quants, via the Facebook IPO:
“But it proved to be more than one unbelievably bollocksed-up IPO. May 17 was the day Wall Street got vaporized. After Facebook Day, all that “Wall Street” had been a metonymy for, the big money, the Big Picture of America’s economy, the excitement, the sense that this is where things are happening, was gone”
and John Coates’ work on the physiology of trading floors.
Sensible article from The Economist on the slow initial effect of radical innovation:
“In general, a very good way to underestimate the potential impact of a new innovation is to consider its possible contributions all other things equal, that is, assuming that nothing in the economy changes to accommodate or complement the new discovery…
A truly revolutionary new technology rarely has an enormous immediate impact. It’s influence unfolds slowly but powerfully as its reshapes society.
…consider that trinket the smartphone. It has only been in the last two years or so that half or more of the rich world has begun wandering the streets carrying a powerful, networked handheld computer at all times. In that short period, humanity has come up with some nifty uses for such things. But these are a scratch on the surface of the possible. Only in time—as new business models are created and technology improves and norms change—will be begin to understand and exploit the possibilities of so much distributed, mobile, connected information-gathering capacity and processing power.”
See also: “There has never been a truly innovative idea put forward that was not laughed at”
With 4 PRs to every journalist, apparently.
“PR people are starting to make it to the top of businesses. John Fallon, ex-corporate affairs chief at publisher Pearson, will become its CEO next year. At pharmaceuticals giant GlaxoSmithKline, Duncan Learmouth, ex-head of global communications, took charge of a new emerging markets division in 2010. The director of the Institute of Directors is Simon Walker, formerly of City spinners Brunswick. And our prime minister was once head of comms for Carlton Television.
In the 1970s and 1980s, it was advertising and marketing types who had the ear of the boss. In the 1990s, it was the strategists’ turn, while in the noughties it was HR people leading the war for talent who were in favour. Now the comms chief is the individual that the CEO and chairman require to be right behind them. They are the eyes and ears of the organisation in uneasy and austere times, the consigliere, the trusted adviser.”
Article here.
http://top100innovators.com/. Although the methodology appears to be based entirely on patent registration, weighted to size and global presence.
“Collider12 is looking for 10 ‘B2Brand’ Startups. These companies will receive £100,000 each and be coached by Pembridge Partnership Ltd, the Brands and selected experts intensively over 13 weeks in order to deliver their ‘Execution Plan’ for ultra-high growth.
The Startups will achieve customer validation and product market fit in the fastest possible way – by working with the big brands early in their lives and throughout their product development.”
FT review of Bill Janeway’s book “Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy”:
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Here, 8 December 2012.
Implicitly condemns the Guardian’s historic error that content must be free.
See also: Paywalls and the future of print and online media – Gawker
Good article from Gawker on online paywalls and the future of media:
“Examples of media outlets that can support paywalls: high quality national newspapers (NYT, WSJ, probably the WaPo, and… ?), sites that offer quality financial news to an audience for whom a paywall’s cost is negligible (WSJ, FT, Bloomberg), sites that cater to very specific niche audiences with highly specific news that can’t be easily found elsewhere (Politico, trade publications of all types, small local newspapers), sites offering very high quality proprietary longform journalism published on a frequent basis. Additionally, magazines that maintain their quality should be able to offer online subscriptions to their loyal subscriber base.
Examples of media outlets than cannot support paywalls: mediocre or shitty newspapers that have decimated their newsrooms, shitty magazines with little quality content, sites full of mostly opinions and listicles and other entertaining but easily reproduced things of that nature, most blogs. For example, Gawker Media—a fine, fine company that entertains millions of readers online every month—would not be a good candidate for a paywall, simply because no matter how good our content is, a paywall would immediately cause readers to go and seek out similar (lower quality, of course) content elsewhere online, where it is freely available. The situation is different for, say, Jane’s Defence Weekly. The fact that readers like you is not enough to support an online paywall; readers must need you.”
See also: Final edition of the Financial Times Deustchland says it all about the future of print media.
A very funny profile of Elizabeth Murdoch and the hungry Matthew Freud in the New Yorker.
See also: Rupert Murdoch’s mother dies at 103 - FT
Differing views on news and tablet publishing from Felix Salmon (comments also interesting) and from John Gruber.
TechCrunch interview with Toni Schneider, the CEO of WordPress.com’s parent company Automattic.
“Overall, if you look at the entire Internet and just go down the list at what all the different sites run… 17.4 percent of all sites on the Internet are powered by WordPress. The next number two platform is Joomla, which is around 3 percent, and Drupal is around 2 something. And then, I believe Blogger is number four with one or 1.5 percent.
If you notice, that doesn’t add up to 100 percent. So actually, the majority of the web is still custom made sites that don’t even use a content management system.”
WordPress.org is the open source version to download and run yourself, and WordPress.com is run as a service.
