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.

Most of my readers who have stuck with me during the extended post-PhD neglect of my blog will know I am working at a magazine publisher. I started as a writer in 2008 and the past year and a half has been something of an apprenticeship. I have been learning how to translate the concepts developed in my PhD into another discourse.

As an intellectual problem I have found this process fascinating. There is a certain media-based commercial discourse that dominates the company, as I imagine a version of it would be dominant at other magazine publishers. I have found it very tricky figuring out how to express what I consider to be the ‘truth’ of a given matter when that ‘truth’ is discounted by the very discourse (ie language, mode of address, authority implicit in the localised rituals of listening and speaking) it is expected to be expressed through. It has allowed me to return to some of Foucault’s work and use it as a resource to think about what is happening.

There are two power struggles in effect and each struggle involves a different set of power relations. The first is relatively simple and could be observed by anyone. This is the struggle over new ideas or a new way to think existing ideas, which rightly or wrongly is interpreted as a challenge to the existing power relations in the organisation. The second is less obvious and gets muddled by being combined with the first. The holders of the current ideas are reluctant to relinquish what they perceive and feel to be the dominant poistion in the power relations in the company by being forced to think ideas that are relatively foreign to them. These foreign ideas serve as the battleground for the second power struggle because they require a new discourse that is perceived to conflict with the existing discourse that enables the existing power relations.

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17.6km apparently. The bit near the end through Newington is wrong as there is a bike path there that avoids all the little stupid streets in Newington.

I will make a bikely map when I have time.

It is past one in the morning and for the last few hours I have been madly trying to put the finishing touches on a job application for an academic position. Over the past several weeks I have been feeling pressure from a number of people I know to get a job in academia. From aquaintences and colleagues at the State of Industry conference to the most intimate of relationships that are very dear to me. I have felt savaged by their explicit bewilderment and brash questions about why I am not working in academia, their well-intentioned assertions that I should be an academic, and the implication that I am basically wasting my time in my current job.

All of this is probably true. Yet I realised tonight as I have been writing my responses to the Key Selection Criteria that I am basically not yet ready. My biggest problem is that I have not demonstrated my expertise. To do this I need to publish. My greatest error has been to treat academia as an intellectual pursuit. It is not. I have over-invested in my capacity to intellectualise anything, to critically engage with it, to use highly esoteric, but powerful social and philosophical theories and to develop my own conceptual tools to genuinely understand social and cultural phenomena. None of this really matters when it comes time to get a job. I need to play the game. This shall involve me going to war, to mobilise and redirect my energies in a slightly different way.

I need to publish from my PhD, rather than simply having a list of interesting but non-expertise-based scholarly and quasi-scholarly (ie blog) publications. Most of my journal articles published have little or nothing to do with the core focus of my Phd. I am beginning to understand that the ruthlessness I have been cultivating in my current capitalist workplace needs to be redirected towards myself and my intellectual pursuits. I can feel an encroaching sadness born of the fact I need to relinquish my naive appreciation of scholarly work and recognise that it must be framed in terms of the current discourse of outcomes. I need to be ruthless with my own thinking, harness it, exploit it and produce outcomes.

What are my outcomes? I need to demonstrate them. I need to go to war against myself.

Maybe I am becoming an adult.

To best use my skills developed during my BA (English) and PhD I am looking at doing some sort of short course. I am not sure if I will learn any new skills, more I want to learn how to use my skills I already have. Plus, more importantly, demonstrate to existing and future employers that I can use the skills I already have.

So far I have found this Level IV TAFE course on the advertising media industry. It seems suitable to learn how to speak the jargon of the advertising industry and learn how to interact with advertising media professionals. I know I would be good at such a job and gaining some vocation-oriented training would be good.

Does anyone else have any ideas about either evening or distance/online short courses I could do?

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.

What is as dangerous as a midnight coffee?

Songs for when IT HAS TO BE DONE. This isn’t the Nike Just Do It song list of inspiration. It is a savage beast that attacks your weaknesses, and gives you the perspective of sickness, thus forcing you to be stronger. The songs have to currently be on a portable music playing device that you listen to at midnight brewing a coffee and getting ready to attack IT (or comparable scenario), and get the job done.

Scenic World by Beirut (a much better version of the song streaming from the band’s website, which can’t be embedded unfortunately)

Part 1 is here

Writing Enthusiasm: Defining a Working Conceptualisation of Enthusiasm

Enthusiasm is defined by the challenges within which it is mobilised. The theoretical point here is that enthusiasm is an event repeated in different ways depending on the situation. One key influence on my thinking here is Gilles Deleuze. It is fun to use the work of a complex and esoteric philosopher to help conceptualise enthusiasm within modified-car culture. One way to think about Deleuze’s oeurve is that he continually worked to conceptualise the architecture of events that characterises actual experience. In my dissertation I developed ways to conceptualise the architecture of events that characterises an enthusiasm. The primary reason for an event-based conception of enthusiasm was to avoid a subjectivist account of subject-object relations by which enthusiasm is mistakenly characterised. The culture may be of modified cars, but the enthusiasm is of the socio-technical challenges inculcated in the biographical transience of the car. The shifting terrain of the culture is the best way to frame and analyse the enthusiasm.

The applied use of this conceptual point is that to write enthusiasm means translating and communicating the specific conditions within which the enthusiasm was mobilised so that readers get an appreciation of the enthusiasm and actually feel the same frustrated engagement or masterful satisfaction experienced by the enthusiast. There is an informational component regarding the technical elements of the automotive technology or more general automobility in question, but beyond this are the affects of enthusiasm itself. ‘Appreciating the enthusiasm’ means having an appreciation of the challenges faced and overcome (or not) by the enthusiast. Firstly, this is a radically different conception of enthusiast car culture compared to that circulated by those plugged into the late-capitalist ‘creative capitalism’ machine where it is all about expression of one’s individual identity.

Scondly, I am still focusing on what is expressed through the car, but this is a semiotics of force and action inculcated in the very material fabric of the car, not a semiotics of style. Secondly, enthusiasm is shared but subjectively experienced. The shared dimension is evidenced through the mobile positive affects of joy and excitement that circulate across the bodies of enthusiasts at car shows and the like. Yet, these affects are experienced and lived through the individual enthusiast’s body in a singular fashion. To reiterate the defining property of enthusiasm, the character of one’s enthusiasm will be determined by the challenges that mobilise the enthusiasm. For car enthusiasts this could be the challenge posed by racing or cruising and tuning heads. Every enthusiasm is a compound of a multitplicity of these mobilisations. As a writer one’s task is to write the enthusiasm by offering an account of the challenges engaged with by the enthusiast.

My current job as a staff writer at Zoom magazine (and earlier Street Fords and Xtreme Fords) has allowed me to test in some of the points made in my dissertation. Does my concept of enthusiasm withstand being applied in the real world? It probably isn’t a valid way to test philosophical conceptualisations of culture, I am not sure, because I haven’t really come across any work that offers an account of a similar process. The below has been written over several sessions, apologies if it is a little disjointed.

Most of the time scholars use esoteric tests of veracity caught up in the power games of the academic workplace in at least two ways. Firstly, scholars have peer review. Here is a judgement call (and a sub-editing role) that is supposed to assess the value of a given piece of work. Publication is meant to represent some kind of endorsement, in principle, of the value of the argument forwarded in a given scholarly work. The second kind of test is more organic and it relies on, in part, something at which I am terrible. I have never been able to fully perform, at least in a sufficient manner, the assumed air of teacherly authority. I know what certain concepts allow one to think, how they can enable, but I left students to discover this for themselves. I would have a total belief in the limits of my own understanding and questions derived from a given problem, but I could never sell ideas. The hardest part of teaching, and a dimension of pedagogcial practice that I tried my best to ignore, was the act of convincing students that something or another is worth learning. (Maybe it has always been like this? I don’t know, but I don’t think so, instead I think it is a product of the commercialisation of the university teaching environment and the problematic casualisation of the teaching staff.) Rather, I would whip up a student cohort into an enthusiastic frenzy and help them develop the intellectual tools to engage with their own challenges relevant for a given course. Sometimes it worked, other times it didn’t. Now, however, this has all changed; I currently work in a job where I am tested in a far more ruthless fashion everyday.

I want to somehow formalise this experience into an academic paper, but not so much focused on my own interest in this (egotistical joy and challenge of testing of my ideas). I want to write a paper on how to write for car magazines. At first glance and by most obvious accounts, even to my own eyes, this is fundamentally ridiculous. Why car magazines? Everyone takes part or engages with car culture in some shape of form in Australian society. Only 2-5% of people, from my rough estimates going off magazine circulation and show attendance in different states, are actually involved in some kind of enthusiast car culture. The first point is that I am not so interested in enthusiast car culture on its own, rather the main goal is accounting for and critically engaging with enthusiast culture in general and that is truly epic in scale. Everyone has enthusiasms. The other perhaps less vocationally-minded, but more important point is that we are all subject to and subjects of our enthusiasms. There are myriad enthusiasms, all of which are serviced in some way by a cultural industry. In an expanded sense of the ‘enthusiast magazine’, much more ‘journalism’ happens beyond the pages of actual printed magazines, than in them. There are still functions of the printed magazine that I don’t think online remediations/differential repetitions will replace anytime soon.

Secondly, I am not so interested in magazine writing either, not in any normal sense of the term, instead I imagine the ‘magazine’ as a kind of abstract machine that currently is discursively and materially embodied in actual print magazines, but which can also be repeated in many different ways: online through direct remediation (pdf readers), online with subtle variation (blog style format), or into different mediums, such as magazine video-journalism, or in a consistent but relatively non-determined way, like when ‘texts’ emerge across blogs, photo/video hosting sites, and forums. So the second task, after introducing what I mean by ‘enthusiasm’, is to define the ‘magazine’ (or more accurately the ‘enthusiast magazine’) in such a way that is relevant for the contemporary less-print-centric configuration of the media. The third task is to discuss how enthusiasm can be written for magazines. I will be posting each of the further three parts as they are written.

I am very fluey writing this, and have easily gone through a third of a big box of tissues blowing my nose. I’ve taken a day off work and with not much else to do I thought I’d catch up on my blogging.

A couple of years ago I flagged the problem of scale when dealing with Deleuze’s conception of events. In a couple of passages from The Logic of Sense he raises the example of a battle and he makes two keen points.

1) “If the battle is not an example of an event among others, but rather the Event in its essence, it is no doubt because it is actualized in diverse manners at once, and because each participant may grasp it at a different level of actualization within its variable present” (100). The virtual battle-event can be grasped by the participants in a multipliticity of ways. The virtual battle ‘hovers’ above the participants. Any conflict can be used as an example of this, particularly those that are not resolved with a shared horizon of experience. The Israel-Palestinian conflict is a good example of differential conflicts being actualised from the singular conflict. This is evidenced by the different temporalities invoked by both sides when discussing/arguing about the conflict, which I saw much of when working at Gleebooks as part of the event staff. One side will raise ‘this’ incursion ‘then’, the other side will raise ‘this’ armed intervention at this other ‘then’ and so on until a cosmic blockade is reached between differential experiences of religion. They are not arguing about the question of causality and who did what to which people when, but they are presenting (at least) two actualisations of the conflict itself.

There is the pure virtual conflict that contains the multiplicity of every singular act inflicted upon/by human and non-human participants, then there is the conflict that emerges on the horizon of experience as experience. Further along the ontological chain, the experience of conflict is discoursed and gains an individuated intelligibility. (Hence, the differend between participants in the singular multiplicity of the pure event who buttress their relative position with differentiated, that is, different conflicts.) In the midst of the actualised conflict the pure event of the virtual conflict can only be intuited, it is not yet actual. A less socially frought example of ‘conflict’ or the clash of bodies is provided by my working through of the shared event of the kiss (from 4 years ago!).

2) “Everything is singular, and thus both collective and private, particular and general, neither individual nor universal. Which war, for example, is not a private affair? Conversely, which wound is not inflicted by war and derived as a society as a whole? Which private event does not have all its coordinates, that is, all its impersonal social singularities?” (152) Every event is a cascade of events. If we were Time Lords like Dr Who, but without the Doctor’s Time Lord capacities, then we would be overwhelmed by the differentiated temporalities (perhaps best represented by Rose Tyler’s absorption of the ‘time vortex’). How can a wound be inflicted by ‘war’? A wound is inflicted by an adversorial combatant, surely? Yes, but only within the restricted temporality of the wounded person’s experience. The ethico-political question, expressed unfortunately in a somewhat negative way, is how to be worthy of the wounds inflicted upon us. The wound considered as an event is already a cascade of events of various temporalities (including relations of futurity with the present). The wound could be an actualisation of a future ‘victory’, a past ‘grudge’, or a haphazard biography absent of any normative consistency, which could all be of the singular pure virtuality.

Deleuze is pushing beyond this kind of delineation of events achored to the emergent horizon of human experience, however. The concept of the fourth-person singular is necessary intervention to even conceive of a horizon of experience that is not bound by normative human constraints. Does this mean that Deleuze is explicitly advocating a position whereby a near-God-like figure can stand above and beyond the triviality of the merely human, a kind of hyper-objectivity? No (lol). How can there be actualisation without experience (in an expanded non-human Whiteheadian sense, of prehensions prehending each other). I want to suggest the fourth person singular necessarily commands a capacity of perception that indeed evades the individuated human subjectivity, but only because of the capacity to emphasise with absolutely open intuition the emergent horizon of experience as the experience of any event as it is differentiately actualised.

My reason for bringing this up again has been the interesting work of Levi over at Larval Subjects as he has also grappled with the problem of scale from a slightly different conceptual orientation, a systems-based or complexity-based object-oriented interpretation of Deleuze and others. Towards the end of this post on Nested Objects and Political Engagement, he writes:

objects or individuals at a larger level of scale tend towards a stable state in the face of most perturbations. Far from the perturbations fundamentally changing the organization of the object, they are, in most instances, simply absorbed by the system or object and function to reinforce the organization of the object.

I suggest that the systems that appear to tend towards a more stable state perhaps only do so because they exist as actualised temporalities experienced as relatively more stable (the US has just had the Fourth of July celebrations; so how old is the US? Ok, which US are you talking about?). The great cultural celebrations of a nation (national days, etc) differentially repeat not only the ‘cultural values’ of the ‘imagined community’ of the ‘nation’ but also enable the experience of the ‘nation’ according to its monumental temporality that is quite literally actualised as ‘monument’. Hence the ideological component of all these moments of cultural reinforcement. They only work if those experiencing them expect them to work. Expectation is a relation of futurity whereby the future past (of the present) is experienced as an already-always. The horizon of intelligibility emergent with the experience of the actualised ‘nation’ on a ‘national day’ works to block other possible futures. Steve Shaviro’s work has been really useful on this question. Here is what I wrote back then:

I think Shaviro’s reading of Whitehead’s concept is actually more productive than Massumi’s notion of ‘anticipation’ briefly developed in Parables of the Virtual. Both attempt to account for relations of futurity, but Massumi’s is organised around the superposition of one moment upon the next, and this, it seems to me, elides the relation of contingency that makes possible demanding the impossible.

Levi notes something similar but from a systems-based perspective of his object-oriented philosophy:

The issue here is one of how individuals that compose a larger scale object can act on that object without simply reinforcing its existing basin of attraction. In part this requires the formation of new organs or objects that, in another post, I referred to as “alliances” following Latour and Harman. The second problem is that even where a new sub-multiple or object is formed through an alliance, and even where this object is intense enough to push the larger scale multiple of which it is a part into a new basin of attraction, this new basin of attraction is itself highly unpredictable.

My interpretation of Levi’s observation regarding the politics of the big and little is of a virtual war waged between (at least) two different actualisations of ‘conflict’ in question.

A contemporary example is the turgid neo-liberal managerial discourse of ‘opportunity’ evident in my current vocation as a writer (and also within the academy). Workers are meant to be on the look out for ‘opportunity’ in the workplace or work milieu (if freelancers). They are meant to capitalise on the opportunity and maximise the positive outcome of opportunity to further their respective careers. There is a continuum of opportunity that is differentiated by relations of futurity made possible by the character of contingency around which opportunity is organised.

1) If opportunity is presented by those in power to a worker, then the contingency is often disciplined in accordance with the outcomes of productivity demanded by the managers and the way surplus value is extracted from the worker’s labour.
2) If opportunity presents ‘itself’, then it is because the contingency of labour relations and relations between worker productivity and the market have not been actualised. A new relation to the market can be actualised.
3) If a worker creates ‘opportunity’, then it is because he or she has critically appreciates the mechanics of labour relations and relations between worker productivity and the market in its virtuality, an example of the limited fourth-person singular; that is, the worker does not perceive the situation though the identity and horizon of experience of a ‘worker’ per se. The worker actively differentiates a new set of relations that can only be apprehended through action. (What Deleuzians call counter-actualisation.)

To enfranchise workers in the emergent entrepreneurial mode of the unfortunately called ‘creative capitalism’ means equipping them with the capacity to appreciate the dynamics of managerial techniques and apprehend new conditions between labour and the market through the praxis of their own labour. It is not a matter of grasping the relations between specific individuals or objects (big or little) but of appreciating how the relations between individuals are actualised and differentially repeated in experience.