Earth faces sixth extinction-level event, scientists say, while the mass media, as we know it, faces its first, according to the fossil record compiled by today’s advertisers and readers/viewers

A research article published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science last June 19 by scientists Gerardo Ceballos, Paul R. Ehrlich, Anthony D. Barnosky, Andrés García, Robert M. Pringle and Todd M. Palmer from Stanford, Princeton and Berkeley universities in the United States suggests that the world has begun a sixth extinction-level event, this one driven primarily by humankind. Mind you Ehrlich’s 1968 best-seller, The Population Bomb, should have had us pretty much extinct by now anyway, had it come to pass, so who knows?

Meanwhile, as scientists pronounce on the likelihood of a sixth mass extinction for the Earth  – to wit, the Holocene extinction, advertisers and readers are delivering a similar message, or so it seems, to what’s left of the incredibly shrinking mass media manufacturers, which are in some ways today’s equivalent to yesterday’s buggy whip, typewriter and video store retailers. Blockbuster, we hardly knew you.

As for so-called “digital disruption,” well, it’s not just digital disrupting the heirs of Gutenberg these days, and it’s no longer just a disruption. Can you say ad blockers and mobile platform-of-the day?

Back around the dawn of the 21st century, when newspapers still had a few new millennium choices or even just good bets that might have ensured their survival on some sizeable scale, there was talk about the theory of disruptive innovation invented by Clayton Christensen, of Harvard Business School.

The “innovator’s dilemma” for print media newspapers was the difficult choice they faced sometime between the mid-1990s and the 2000 Millennium (it really was in retrospect, with the benefit now of uncorrected 20/20 hindsight, a much narrower window of about five years, give or take, than publishers realized before they were left behind forever) in choosing between trying to hold onto readers in their existing market by doing the same thing a bit better (the Glacier Media-owned Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News, for instance, went online with the same content only slightly repackaged from their print editions in June 2009, about a dozen or more years after most larger Canadian daily newspapers did pretty much the same thing) or capturing new markets by embracing and adapting to new technologies and adopting new business models.

Where are we today, 16 years post-millennium?

Consider these three exhibits, if you will.

Exhibit 1: Jeff Gaulin graduated from journalism school at the University of Western Ontario in 1995. He started Jeff Gaulin’s Journalism Job Board that same year as an online employment service to help his classmates find work after graduation. His job board quickly became the go-to online job board for new journalism graduates across Canada looking for their first job and to a lesser but not insignificant extent also became an important resource for even experienced journalists looking to switch jobs. I landed four newspaper jobs off it myself in a six-year period between 2001 and 2007.

Before Jeff Gaulin’s Journalism Job Board came on the scene, aspiring journalism job applicants, believe it or not, often sent out resumes hit-or-miss over the transom in 9 x 12 brown envelopes, which also contained their “clips.” As terribly inefficient and labour intensive as that was, it actually worked. At least sometimes. I landed at least a couple of my early daily newspaper jobs in the 1980s that way.

I also interviewed a fair number of job candidates between 2004 and 2013, as a result of Jeff’s job board, and was involved in hiring a number of them as reporters. As recently as several years ago, it wasn’t unusual to see 60 to 70 print jobs advertised on any given day, although the number fluctuated, and dropped briefly but dramatically in 2008-09, during the Great Recession, before rebounding.

As of noon today, there were just eight print media jobs from coast-to-coast listed on Jeff Gaulin’s Journalism Job Board. Eight. And if you think things might be better on the digital side in Jeff’s “new media” section, think again. It has four – half as many – jobs advertised as the “print” section.

Exhibit 2? RBC Dominion Securities just cut its price target on Postmedia Network Canada Corp., publisher of the National Post and proprietor of Canada’s largest newspaper chain and various digital media properties, to zero from $0.50.

Zero. As in zero-sum game.

Exhibit 3:

Mass extinction, niche survival.

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Libraries and hotels: Different sectors, but value-added information is a hot, proprietary commodity for both

In late 2006 and early 2007, I did some work in Trenton, Ontario for TeleTech Holdings Inc., an Englewood, Colorado-based company, as a high-speed Internet specialist offering technical support to their client, St. Louis-based Charter Communications, owned not by Bill Gates, but by Microsoft’s less famous co-founder, Paul Allen. The facility, which had just opened in May 2006 with more than 200 employees, had superb computers and desks and chairs, which ergonomically would put to shame any newsroom I’ve ever worked in.

Sadly, TeleTech closed that Trenton facility on Aug. 31, 2009, little more than two years after I arrived in Thompson, Manitoba. Why? “There is a change in the needs of the client. The work will be moved around to other centres,” TeleTech explained, adding the closure is “not a reflection” of quality of work completed at the Trenton centre. The closure came sandwiched somewhere between Outsourced, the 2006 romantic movie comedy, which won the best film award at the 2007 Seattle International Film Festival, and the one-season NBC sitcom by the same name that aired in 2010-11, telling the story of a fictional all-American company, Mid America Novelties of Seattle, outsourcing its call centre operation to Gharapuri in India.

Apparently newspapers aren’t the only type of business to go out of business. Or outsource their work to India. Although in the news biz it is more likely to be layout and production work, increasingly editing, and to a limited degree, at least so far, local reporting. The old real estate adage, “location, location, location,” which once seemed to apply to community newspapers, as much as your home, as where both were located was the most important factor in giving them value, in the case of papers for what was thought to be a unique commodity – local news – not so much anymore. Still, call me a Luddite, but it is hard to picture local council and school board meetings being covered remotely from 12 time zones away. Technically possible, yes; But likely on a wide scale? Probably not, although it has been done with some fairly unimpressive results to date.

Not long before I worked for TeleTech, I spent some time in 2005 and 2006 living in Amherst, Nova Scotia and Sackville, New Brunswick, both on the saltwater Tantramar marshes, and worked as a financial agent at Moneris Solutions in Sackville. I always marvelled at how I could walk into the lunchroom at Moneris in the remodeled red brick historic Atlantic Wholesalers building at 2 Charlotte Street, and pick up a hard copy of the Harvard Business Review off a shelf to read at lunch, or maybe chat over lunch with a fraud detection specialist about things like the language of a purchaser one of our merchants was dealing with half-way around the world being different from the primary language spoken in the location where the true IP is registered, etc., raising red flags for us. The other nice thing about both Moneris and TeleTech was they were “inbound” call centres – the client is calling you for help, as apposed to “outbound.” If you want to know the difference, ask a telemarketer.

My Moneris boss, Tom Rusted, had a M.Sc. in entomology, and was a black fly specialist, who in a career as a banker, had been involved in the pioneering rollout of mbanx in 1996 for Bank of Montreal, which was the first North America-wide virtual, full-service bank. Moneris Solutions, established in 2000, is a joint investment between RBC Royal Bank and BMO Bank of Montreal, and with more than three billion transactions a year from over 350,000 merchant locations, is Canada’s largest processor and acquirer of debit and credit card payments.

Moneris was a very different world than journalism, but not uninteresting by any means. I met a number of very bright and talented people at Moneris. Mind you, like the hotel industry where I devote my efforts now (along with the university library), Moneris is very much built on proprietary data – as much or even more so than the hotel business – and you couldn’t leave your computer without doing a “lock-and-walk.” Documents had to be turned facedown when you went away from your desk because there could be non-employee contractors or visitors in the building, although I can’t recall them letting many visitors in. Documents had to be paper shredded at the end of every shift. I remember not so long ago Googling the remodeled Moneris red brick historic Atlantic Wholesalers building at 2 Charlotte Street and no images came up for it! Sort of like Area 51 or Groom Lake, Nevada. My favourite story from that line of work was having a food and beverage manager from the Calgary Saddledome (now known as the Scotiabank Saddledome) call me at Moneris in Sackville because one of his concession clerks the night before at a Calgary Flames NHL hockey game had sold a fan a hotdog or something for $7 (in 2005-06) and the customer had paid by debit card.

The transaction had gone through not as $7 but $70,000 – immediately, of course, out of the customer’s bank account, courtesy of our Moneris point-of-sale (POS) hand-held terminal device.

Too many zeroes punched in, I guess. The manager was totally beside himself, desperate to refund the customer and credit his bank account before he found out about the mistake. It would have been a lot simpler, of course, if he had paid with a credit card, not a debit card, because you wouldn’t need the credit cardholder physically present with their card to do the refund, unlike a debit card. Although even a credit refund for $70,000 wouldn’t be that simple given the staggering sum.

I remember the manager asking me how it could possibly have been approved on our end and gone through and telling him presumably the customer had the $70,000 in the bank account linked to his debit card, and the bank had obviously not imposed a daily withdrawal limit for him, like most customer have. The poor manager said, “I’m not even sure I could get a mortgage right now for $70,000, much less buy something on my debit card for that amount.” I told him maybe do a quick refresher with his clerk on punching in numbers on the Moneris terminal keypad a bit more slowly. One of my favourite non-journalism true work stories.

Whether community newspapers can continue to monetize with much success their local information remains something of an open question, but much of the rest of the world is ever increasingly living on proprietary data and value-added information. For hotels, think cloud-based hotel property management systems.

But the phenomenon is, of course, much, much bigger than the for-profit private sector payment processing and hotel industries. Here at the university library, where we’re part of the institutional not-for-profit public sector, we’re also always dealing with proprietary information and data, albeit of a different type sometimes, in terms of copyright and intellectual property issues. Make no mistake; libraries monetize information. Want an inside-the-ballpark library term? Think GOBI3 (Global Online Bibliographic Information).

GOBI3 is an information source and bibliographic database that enables research libraries and consortia to have access to print and electronic titles.

A company called EBSCO, founded in 1944 and headquartered in Ipswich, Massachusetts, supplies a fee-based online research service with 375 full-text databases, a collection of 600,000-plus e-books, subject indexes, point-of-care medical references, and an array of historical digital archives. Last February, EBSCO bought Yankee Book Peddler, Inc. (YBP Library Services), located in Contoocook, New Hampshire, and founded in 1971 as a bookseller for academic libraries, providing books, collection management, and technical services in print and electronic formats to academic, research, and special libraries in the United States and internationally. There is also Midwest Library Service, out of Bridgeton, Missouri, a book jobber serving libraries since 1959.

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