event mechanics

Online business models. I hadn’t thought about ‘business’ at all except in a critical (but not always negative) sense until about a year ago. Here is an abstract to a paper I have in the works. However, I’ve been thinking about business models for the magazines since I’ve been involved in developing a new online presence for some of them. This post is the result of some of the thinking I have been doing on the subject and has been in the works for a while now (several weeks). I’ve been thinking about it constantly but have little time to actually work on it.

I work at Express Media Group, which publishes a number of niche-market enthusiast titles. EMG is currently developing its online presence and is working on ways to successfully integrate print and online publishing. As well as working as a Production Editor, I’ve been involved in developing some of the websites for the motoring titles. The first new website up is that for Zoom magazine.

We have a massive advertising campaign starting tomorrow that requires the other websites to be up and I am waiting on our overworked web team to finish them. I look forward to seeing the results.

I’ve been carrying out research in my own time to think about new business models that integrate print and online publishing. I have no official role in this at EMG (yet), rather I have been treating it as an extension of my PhD research on enthusiasm in modified-car culture where I looked at the relation between the enthusiast media and the scene over a 30 year period.

I used philosophical concepts to examine the composition of power relations in the organisation of the scene (dispositif) and how this has changed a number of times over the time period (an event-based conception of history). Now it seems my research is going to be the most relevant if it is developed in a simple set of critical tools for understanding legacy business models.

The general character of these legacy business models is mostly well understood. The current public workshops being hosted by the FTC are working on the issues and problems of “how the Internet has affected journalism”. The FTC has posted a Staff Discussion Draft paper that explores some of the points raised over the course of several months worth of hearings. In the first few pages of the paper (2-3) the FTC outlines the general problem with legacy business models faced by all print-based publishers. I have extracted the three main points below:

1. Newspapers’ revenues from advertising have fallen approximately 45% since 2000. For example, classified advertising accounted for $19.6 billion in revenue for newspapers in 2000, $10.2 billion in 2008, and is estimated to be only $6.0 billion in 2009.
2. With the advent of the Internet, advertisers have many more ways in which to reach consumers, including, for example, through a marketer’s own website or through topical websites that relate to the products that an advertiser wants to sell (e.g., a soccer blog for soccer equipment). Search engines also provide sites for advertising related to particular search queries.
3. Although some types of online advertising (e.g., advertising targeted to a consumer’s known interests) can generate greater revenue than other types (e.g., banner ads), the vast supply of online sites for advertising reduces the amount that an online news site can charge for advertising at its site. This means that online advertising typically generates much less revenue than print advertising (often described as “digital dimes” as compared to the dollars generated by print ads). It appears unlikely that online advertising revenues will ever be sufficient to replace the print advertising revenues that newspapers previously received.

First year journalism students are taught about the ‘news hole’ well in the actual publishing business there is often an ‘advertising hole’ as well. As more advertisers have moved online to directly target the niche market enthusiast communities that the advertiser services, there are less advertisers looking at print-based advertising. Of course, this is a generalisation as there are many enthusiast communities, of mostly older enthusiasts, that have not gone online.

All is not lost, however. There are other ways to sell advertising beyond simple ‘display’-type advertising. Dan Blank has a good post up from over a year ago on different sources of revenue for online media publishers.

The main goal here is for editorial teams to be pursuing fewer standalone articles that rely solely on CPM ads, and look to more integrated packages that build many products from a single effort.

For the last six years or so I have long looked at this from the flip side. Media events assembled from a series of inter-related texts. Often these texts are assembled around a non-media product, so a product is doubled as its media-based simulacra. It was the basis of my work I carried out on exchange to Sweden during my PhD looking at media events not as the media coverage of an event, but the event produced through the media.

In social media circles posting the same material across a number of channels is called ‘content leverage’. So a Facebook post about a blog post describing a Youtube video is Tweeted. At EMG I have been working on producing media content from single opportunities that can be distributed across a number of media channels. So far the best example of this was an ECU guide in Zoom issue 147 that is currently on the stands. I have several hours of video that I shot and I am currently editing to be posted to our Youtube channel and posted to our blog. Here is an example:

The real problem with thinking about new business models for niche/enthusiast media that integrate online and print elements is that most of the current discussion about the state of print media has been about ‘hard news’. Niche/enthusiast media and ‘hard news’ work following different journalistic models of content production. For example, Blank writes:

An underlying theme in many of these is to create evergreen content whose shelf life is longer than a news article – with multiple segments that extend the ways you can market it and sell it. Focusing on business needs beyond the cycle of “breaking news” may diminish the reliance on the single revenue model of advertising.

We already do this to a certain extent, but we are going to be doing much more of this style of content production and it is going to be a real challenge for editorial teams working under increasingly tight deadlines (we make a magazine per week on average!). To make this possible Blank has two suggestions:

1) Editorial teams mapping out a product roadmap, not just an editorial calendar.
2) Editorial teams working more closely with their sales teams to come up with these ideas, and ensure that the sales dept has this information with enough time to test the market, and ideally, sell these products.

Working closer to advertising sales teams is not a problem, the other challenge, beyond deadlines, is getting a sense of what is happening in the scene. There is so much activity nowadays that to track it all, even just all the online activity, for the scene in Australia is a full-time role.

So where to go from here? I am currently rewriting some of my PhD research for a draft paper about legacy media business models for niche/enthusiast media.

I’ve been a bit busy lately and have been neglecting my blog.

Firstly, I’ve been promoted at my day job from Feature Writer to Production Editor. This has meant a different set of responsibilities, which I am enjoying, but also a new set of opportunities. I’ve been attacking these new opportunities with gusto as my activities and capacities are now more visible within the workplace. One opportunity has been to take on some of the responsibilities of event management for our presence at certain car shows. I’ve been developing event strategies to maximise the benefit to the magazines and these strategies have been received well by management and the other editorial teams.

Secondly, I’ve taken on another job that is mostly at night. This is back at Gleebooks working events. I have been made Assistant Events Manager and my responsibilities so far mainly include staff rosters and some initial tentative forays into social media. I will also be organising the Gleebooks presence at conferences and other similar events. This is basically all event management work.

There are some other exciting developments that may or may not happen, but more on these as they come to fruition (or not).

I am also behind on some promised writing, including a blog post on here about the Ford Fiesta Econetic which I had on loan from Ford as a media car and a book chapter on Derrida and Marx for a forthcoming book. I am hoping to wrap both of these up by the end of this weekend.

The recent Toyota recall is more about a panic over the forthcoming fully-automated automobility than it is about actual threat, as I argue in a new piece over at New Matilda.

Here is the reading I wrote for the wedding I attended yesterday. It was a very good day. I performed my reading well. I think I have almost come to terms with my stutter, as I performed near flawlessly. Having delivered almost 100 lectures and taught countless (400+) tutorials has certainly helped.

Love and Temporality — Glen Fuller
A reading at a wedding is meant to do two things. Firstly, somehow relate to the couple about to be married and, secondly, contain a lesson that their nuptials can teach to us. ‘Us’ being them and everyone else collected here today.
The defining quality of Tom and Annika’s relationship is how long it has taken for them to get married. [pause]
Roughly 12 years has passed since they originally met and in all that time they have barely parted.

Along the way, we have probably all had a word to them about taking the next step and getting married, but they have always resisted – not in a petulant way but in way that suggested that the timing of these nuptials was always going to be up to them.

For Annika and Tom to stand before us today, shows that they have made the decision that the time is right – that they have so loved their life together that they know they will want it to always be so.

[slowly] In a relationship, timing is everything.

And perhaps what today’s ceremony should show us is that the question of timing can mean so many things.
We must step back to appreciate that timing can be qualitative rather than simply quantitative.
Annika and Tom have not decided to marry today because they have reached an expiry date or a deadline. It is not the date or the time that has made this ceremony.

Rather, today is the time to marry because there is something special and right about this moment that has moved Annika and Tom to take the step to declare their commitment before their friends and family.

[savvy, smile] The ancient Greeks would refer to the qualitative nature of this ceremony and the whole process of engagement and preparation as Kairos. Kairos refers to the right time, the time of opportunity, the time of creation. It cannot be measured. We recognise Kairos in our lives as the sublime moment when something new can be affirmed and brought into the world. Here and now we are celebrating within the Kairos of Annika and Tom’s love on their wedding day.

But it is not enough for the moment to arise. To capitalise on opportunity requires work and the lesson I would encourage Annika and Tom to take from my words is to recognise [pause] when these opportunities are presented to them throughout their lives. Whenever one of you is sick, may the other realise the opportunity to demonstrate their love through caring. Whenever one of you is tired and short-tempered, I hope that the other realises the opportunity to affirm their love through patience. And so on. Basically, to recognise that your love exists within a temporality of opportunity and embrace it. This way your love is re-affirmed and re-created in new ways for the rest of your lives together.

Tom and Annika’s decision to marry is also a lesson in timing to those witnessing this ceremony. Annika and Tom have asked us all to attend and witness at 5 o’clock on the 27th of December 2009 and we have all marked the date in our diaries and checked our watches to make sure we got here on time.

But when we look back on today, we will not remember the time or even the date.

[slowly] What we will remember is the kairos moment – the decision of these two people to marry before us all. So let us not pass today and the days in the future simply asking, “What time is it?” Let us instead reflect on time through the idea of Kairos and go further to ask, “What is this time for?”

I have had an article in the works for a while now where I have tried to address how to write articles for enthusiast magazines with the example of enthusiast magazines that service modified-car culture. The problem I was having was with how to position it. I have some great material derived from my PhD and the many dozen articles I have written (I have written 55 freelance articles this year, about 30 in the years previous, and easily over 100 as a staff writer). Now I have figured out that the best way for me to pitch this in the opening paragraph is to compare it to the introductory scholarship on writing for the news media.

These are the core analytical points I wanted to convey in this opening first section:

1. Writing for enthusiast media is not the same as writing for news media.
2. The enthusiast media is designed to tap into an enthusiasm and use it as a resource; it is primarily an affective discourse. News media is primarily meant to be free of affect and tends towards an ideal of ‘objectivity’.
3. If the point of news media journalism is to convey the Who, What, Why, Where, When and How (5 Ws and 1 H method) in the lead sentence, then enthusiast media attempts to hook the reader by inciting a particular affective response.
4. The news media attempts to represent the world so the reader can implicate it in their own respective lives; there is some truth to the ‘hyperdermic model’ of media transmission. However, the enthusiast media attempts to implicate the reader in the event of enthusiasm being reported on.

The second section then goes on to demonstrate what is required to be able to write in the affective mode.

1. An understanding and appreciation of the enthusiasm is required.
2. To understand enthusiasm means understanding the challenges faced by an enthusiast. Here I am unsure if I should offer a brief account of the post-Kantian conception of enthusiasm developed in my phd? It is by engaging with challenges that enthusiast bodies are mobilised. Within modified-car culture, a co-enthusiast will ‘read’ a given car in terms of the challenges it inculcates. This demonstrates the capacity and skill of the car’s owner to ‘rise to the challenge’.
3. Understanding the enthusiasm does not simply mean knowing about the objects of enthusiasm or even only the practices of enthusiasm. Within modified-car culture a car is not merely an object to be incorporated into the ego to facilitate gendered production of identity (hegemonic masculinity model), it is a topology of challenges that enthusiasts ‘read’ and confer respect accordingly. The aquisition of know-how is a product of practices that engage with challenges. There is a correlation between know-how and respect within the scene.
4. The job of the enthusiast media journalist is to represent how the enthusiast engaged with a given challenge. The affects of enthusiasm are expressed through this process of rising to the challenge, such as frustration, confusion, trickiness (like ‘smartness’), satisfaction, patience and determination.

The third section discusses the relation between an enthusiast magazine and the given enthusiast scene.
1. A given magazine covers a certain niche market which more often than not encapsulates a subculture within a scene.
2. The magazine is in a relation with enthusiasts and commercial interests. Within modified-car culture the commercial interests are mostly workshops and performance parts suppliers, but also includes event promoters.
3. Coverage of the scene is a media event that seeks to translate the affects of a given event through enthusiast discourse in such a way as to implicate the reader in the broader affective mobilisations of the scene.
4. The content of the scene selected for coverage in a magazine is explicitly valorised, through publication, as being worthy of appearing in the magazine.
5. The political economy dimension to enthusiast magazine coverage of the scene is that coverage is shaped by commercial imperatives of ‘keeping the advertisers happy’.
6. Unlike normal media this is not that much a problem in that those elements selected from commercial interests are also worthy of being valorised. The function of the enthusiast media is not to change the enthusiast-determined heirarchies of value within the scene, but to segment and select portions of it according to the commercial imperatives.

The conclusion points out that niche-market media that services a given enthusiasm is the way of the future for media companies that are coming to terms with shifting from being print publishers to being online publishers. In Australia, just as many other national contexts with a developed media ecology, there are many different enthusiast media publications that target and service many different enthusiasms.

Monetizing Enthusiasm: The Missed Opportunity of Social Media and Car Enthusiast Magazines

Abstract: The publishing industry that services the scene of modified-car culture in Australia has largely missed the boat when it came to moving from being a once profitable commercial print industry into a profitable social media enterprise. This paper explores the reasons for this failure in the context of the last 30 years of modified-car culture and the enthusiast media industry that developed around it. A number of possible approaches are proposed for monetizing enthusiasm through social media that should be useful for other enthusiast scenes.

When post-structuralist marxists become capitalist.

My heart is well and truly broken.

So I am doing NaNoWriMo. I am going well. I am writing in a non-linear fashion, which may be against the rules apparently. But, meh.

I will start posting chapters once they are finished and once I have the next five-in-a-row done to ensure continuity. The only goal is write 50000 words. I am writing short chapters of 2000 to 2500 words. At the moment I am starting around two or three chapters a day as I come up with new ideas for the plot and whatnot. One chapter, the first, is finished.

The novel is called The Hoon. It is romance-action story set in the early 1980s of Australia. It is focused around a family that owns a tow truck and fast response mechanical business.

It is good self-therapy.

We are hiring a whole bunch of new people at work, I have been working on a scholarly article about writing for car magazines, but I now realise I need to write a far simpler version so it is useful for people who may actually become motoring writers. The following is based on my experiences as a writer for car magazines (must be close to 100 feature car articles by now) over about eight years on and off and my PhD research where I have read several hundred magazines. The below is a very basic account of the process and different writing styles.

What you will need, but won’t always have at the start of the writing process:
1. Tech sheet. This contains all the various specifications of the vehicle, pretty much every single major part. The owner/builder fills this out.
2. Photos of car. So you know what it actually looks like and/or to be used as a reference resource when writing.
3. Interview with owner or builder of the car. This is to clarify certain elements of the technical details and to also get an account of the build. The easiest way to find out information about the build is to ask for a timeline. Often enthusiasts will describe what they did in terms of how hard somthing was to do and how much of a challenge it was. Without challenges there can not be enthusiasm.

There are three main ways to write the story, and each story could be written purely following these different ways with the right information. However, you normally have mixed information at your disposal so each story will be a combination of these three main types:
1. Use metaphor/simile. This is the last resort for me.
2. Locate vehicle in the scene. Good middle ground when you have little information about the build.
3. Narrative form of the challenges of the build. How I write feature car stories.

1. Stories based around metaphor/simile are normally written when not much about the build or technical details of the car are known. This can be because a new owner has taken possession of the vehicle and actually doesn’t know much or perhaps the owner can not be contacted in time to clarify technical details before the story deadline. Metaphor is when you say thing A is thing B, such as “The WRX is a bomb ready to go off.” Simile is when you say thing A is like thing B, such as “The WRX is like a fashion model transforming the George Street cruising strip into a catwalk.”

The imagery of a bomb or fashion model is used in a similar way to poetry. It works to create an image of the vehicle for the reader that is associated with various thoughts and feelings. In feature car stories the central image organises the rest of the text. Most car builders do not like these sorts of stories because they diminish the role of the car and certainly of the builder in the story which is more about the poetic capacity of the writer.

2. If you have a clear understanding of the particular segment of the scene to which the given vehicle belongs, and you have good technical details on the vehicle, but without much information about how the particular build occurred, then you can discuss the technical details in the context of their socio-technical function in the scene.

‘Socio-technical’ is a term derived from academic philosophy; it refers to the way all technology is not only technical but also social. One way to think about this is in terms of the function of technology to complete or satisfy tests, i.e. performance. These tests are culturally specific. For example, if you are concerned about the environment then you want to know how a vehicle performs as technology that produces pollution. Or if you are concerned about the speed and acceleration of the vehicle then you want to know how well the car performs in speed and acceleration tests. Certain humanities scholars and social scientists would describe this as the discursive dimension of technology.

‘Performance’ here has an ambiguity in modified-car culture when thought in a socio-technical manner. Modified cars also perform when they are turning heads, cruising the strip as well as when they are being raced on the drag strip. By locating the vehicle in the scene and drawing on knowledge of the scene you can explain the performance of various modifications. How well does the vehicle perform tests of acceleration because of ‘this’ and ‘that’ modification? How well does the vehicle turn heads cruising or at a car show with ‘this’ or ‘that’ modification?

3. My preferred way of writing feature car stories is by writing up an account of the build. My signature modus operandi is to focus on the challenges of the build that demanded of the enthusist that he (or she, but normally it is a ‘he’) mobilise his (or her) enthusiasm. Real enthusiasts know that building modified cars is about facing the challenges they present. A modified car is a topological inculcation of socio-technical challenges that an enthusiast has ‘risen to’ and overcome. The subject of the story then is less the poetic form of the story or the car itself.

All three types of story are often incorporated into each story.

Structure of main copy.
Opening paragraph: I normally open each story by using imagery to create a tone and creating a relation to the scene by describing or implying the location of the vehicle in the scene.
First section: Describes the aquisition of the vehicle and how the project started.
Second section: Provides an account of the main features of the build and the challenges that they posed.
Third section: The remainder of the technical details.
Repeat: Sometimes vehicles have undergone more than one build, so repeat sections 1-3.
End section: What is the character of the enthusiast’s satisfaction, what goals were accomplished, and what goals are remaining (if any beyond pure enjoyment of a completed project).

Besides the main copy you will also need to write up a few different bits and pieces:

1. ‘Tech breakout box’. This is a separate box from the columns of the main text and it contains every major technical component that has been modified or replaced.
2. Owner profile. This is basic biographical detail about the owner and perhaps a few direct answer to specific questions.
3. Captions for photos. As the writer you are the expert about everything you are writing about (or should be), you isolate particular important elements of the car and make sure the photographer takes proper photos.
4. Possibly another breakout box depending on the nature of the car. Often you’ll use a particular fact, component or technique to expand and add another dimension to the story. I often ring up the engine builder or someone else associated with the build and get an expert opinion on some facet of the car.

That is purely on the writing side of the job. Before you start writing, you need to find the cars. This is the journalistic function of the job, to investigate what is happening in the scene and know when cars will be finished and so on. After you have finished the story, and hopefully spoken with the owner/builder, you will also have to supply ad leads to the ad sales department based on the businesses that did work on the car and are mentioned in the tech sheet.

I recently had a discussion with a mate over some beers about intellectual property. My mate was worried that I ‘give away my ideas for free’ on this blog. My mate intimated that there are examples where ideas that at the very least had been ‘inspired’ by my writing on here was actually finding its way into other people’s work. My mate would not elaborate with examples. This is a very serious matter within academia because it goes to the heart of what an academic or scholar is meant to do. It really doesn’t worry me, in the way my mate was talking about it, however. Beyond professional contempt, and even the ethical question of using someone else’s labour for your own purposes, is a bigger problem for me that bankrupts intellectual culture.

My immediate response to my mate was to point out the difference between having the capacity to create and being able to think an idea. Most people who have read a bit of Deleuzean philosophy or maybe some of the secondary literature will be able to understand the sort of posts I write on here and that my mate was talking about. Being able to think ideas and understand the arguments developed here on my blog is of course what I hope will happen. Otherwise there would be little point!

Sure I’ve taken the time to read half a library’s worth of books, as have most people of a similar age with a scholarly disposition, not because I want a job out of it*, but because I actually enjoy reading. I find almost nothing as pleasurable as engaging with the challenge posed by the text; yes, I am an epic geek. (That is what I find so frustrating with some contemporary philosophy in particular, it valorises obvious ideas and seems content to dress up regurgitation. The challenge becomes a bullshit rhetoric of defending a position or term, rather than working towards something.) I feel sorry for those people who do not experience this pleasure (and I meet these people everyday!) as books provide a near infinite resource. When it is someone who has read a whole bunch of stuff, then reads my blog and finds the arguments or points made worthy enough of being included in their own work, but keeps this connection to themselves, I feel there is a far more profound problem than some bullshit to do with whose ideas are used by whom and when.

Intellectual practice is always distributed across many acts of creative thought. Inspiration can come from anywhere. It seems to me that the ‘paranoid’ academic misses out on this. To appropriate ideas is not inspiration, there is little transformative potential in appropriation. An appropriated idea is liquidated of the capacity to bridge between thinkers and the virtual structures of thought assembled by the thinker-architect and the power of their imagination. Imagination is like a muscle, it needs to be exercised, otherwise it atrophies.

*That is not to say that I don’t want to have a proper punt at academia at some point and for me to do that I need to publish. I have started this process of churning out journal articles.

I have finished a first draft of a journal article derived from my PhD; it is primarily focused on the concept of homosociality that I use and expand in the context of actual experience.

More work needs to go into the introduction section. I’d be keen to hear from others who have not read my PhD as there is a danger of not explaining points/examples/arguments enough or too much with the whole dissertation in the back of my mind.

I have decided to ramp up my quasi-scholarly work of producing articles. Expect anywhere between a few to several articles to appear over the next several weeks.

It is available here.

I have retained the Endnote fields as it is a work in progress.

Lastly, please do not cite without permission. More than likely in the atemporal database of the internet someone will find this blog post in the future and download the article. If it is published I shall make a note of the publication location here so you can find the final version of the article.