Tam Harbert

Very little of what I write actually gets printed on paper anymore. Most people read my stories online. But most publishers – magazine publishers especially – haven’t adjusted well to digital. The visual presentation is boring, often awkward and sometimes downright ugly. The text is hard to read. A beautiful two-page spread from a major magazine feature gets stripped of its best design elements online. It just stands there, naked.

It’s not all the publishers’ fault. So far, no technology has been able to do justice to the beauty and class of glossy magazine articles. Three weeks ago, I was skeptical about the future of digital magazines . But in the course of reporting a story on e-readers, I’ve learned about recent developments in both publishing and technology that could bring magazines fully into the digital age.

First, e-readers are catching on fast. There are about 50 e-readers on the market today. Semiconductor companies, excited by the potential, are jumping into the market with chips that offer faster speeds and more functions at lower costs. These chips will enable new e-reader makers to enter the market. The drop in electronics cost combined with the increased competition could cut the price of an e-reader – the least expensive of which is about $250 today – to less than $100 by year end. To differentiate themselves, e-reader vendors are experimenting with designs, including a hinged reader that would open up like a magazine, according to Gregg Burke, manager of the e-book business line of chips recently introduced by Texas Instruments. He thinks such a product could be on the market by December 2010.

The displays are still limited to black and white, but some promising color technologies are on the horizon. Jennifer Colegrove, director of display technologies at consultant DisplaySearch, says that within five years, rich, full-color e-magazines could be common.

Second, publishers seem to be finally loosening their death grip on the old print model and rethinking how to sell their product in digital form, taking a cue from Amazon’s Kindle and its digital newsstand, which offers dozens of magazines, including Time, Forbes and Fortune. Hearst Corp. recently launched Skiff, a digital magazine and newspaper service for e-readers. And in December, a consortium of publishers, including Time Inc., Conde Nast, Meredith, Hearst and News Corp., announced a joint venture to create a digital storefront for their magazines.

Independent companies also are trying to make a business out of distributing digital magazines. Zinio claims to be the largest digital newsstand in the world, offering 1,900 consumer magazine titles.

The big question is whether publishers can and will design their content for multi-dimensional digital media rather than plain old analog paper. After all, why would I pay $3 a week for a digital subscription to Forbes when I can already read it on my PC for free? Several reasons:

• It’s hard work to read a long magazine article on a PC. All that scrolling and jumping through pages. Plus the text is hard to read, at least for middle-aged eyes. Take one look at the crisp display of an e-reader and you’ll immediately appreciate the difference.

• I want to read that magazine at the dinner table, in bed or on the subway – NOT at my desk when I’ve got more important stuff to do.

• I get articles with beautiful color and layouts, articles that are presented even more attractively online than on glossy paper.

• I get interactive features that are fun, useful and informative. Clicking on a photo of baseball star Manny Ramirez, for example, might reveal a list of his stats.

Technology is already delivering on the first two points, but that won’t be enough. As for the last two, the next year will be critical. I hope the technology to present rich color develops quickly. I hope magazine publishers invest the time, money and effort to get it right. (To get a sense of how magazines could develop, see this video from Swiss media company Bonnier AB.)

Magazines just might survive. I plan to buy an e-reader so I’ll have a front-row seat to watch.

I did an unusual thing the other day. I called my friend. It’s not that we have been out of touch, but I haven’t heard her voice in months. Instead, we have communicated through Facebook, e-mail and texting.

At least this friend answers her phone. I have another friend who rarely does. She does not even respond to e-mails. She’s strictly text. Most of the time I don’t even have my mobile phone on, since I work at home. I’ve told her that and suggested that she call me on my landline. Still, she texts.

It’s ironic that the more ways we have to communicate, the less we talk to each other — actually use our voices interactively in real time in person to exchange information. It’s called conversation. I first noticed this in my work. It’s rare that I can cold-call a source and actually have someone pick up the phone. Most people let voice mail pick up and then return the calls they want to. Virtually all of my interviews are arranged through e-mail. I did reach an IBM executive on her mobile phone once – she told me to text her my phone number and question and she’d get back to me.

Sure, interviews are conversation. But they are a conversation that’s been prepared for. They are at least partially scripted.

This real-time avoidance seems to be increasingly common in my personal life. Rarely do I have an impromptu, casual, meandering conversation in which there is no agenda. We seem to be using our digital technologies to build a wall around ourselves in which we can view the information that comes in and then choose whether, when and how to respond to it. That’s useful in that it helps us to be more efficient and protects us from confrontation with people we may want to avoid.

But it also has a price. It isolates us and increases the potential for misunderstanding.
Conversation is intimate. It forges a strong personal connection. It can foster an understanding of or at least appreciation for another’s point of view. For all our social networking, each of us is a lone voice adding to the digital cacophony. Electronic communication is fine for exchanging information. But knowledge and understanding requires listening to someone, in the context of a situation, and seeing the light in their eyes and the animation in their gestures. I’m really starting to miss that.

Fortune magazine’s March 1 cover story, “The Future of Reading,”  is an interesting and well-written piece reviewing the quandary that magazine publishers have been in since the birth of the Internet. Author Josh Quittner argues that the new tablet computer from Apple could be the launch, uh, pad that magazines can use to save themselves from extinction.

He tells how his 12-year-old fashionista daughter scours issues of Vogue, then saves and categorizes photos and information she finds there. She’s frustrated, however, by all the work and manual cross-referencing it takes when she wants to, for example, match the right shoes with the right dress.

The tablet and its web browser, he implies, lets publishers solve that problem and offers promise for a new breed of digital magazine.

“Raised to expect instant, sortable, searchable, savable, portable access to all the information in the world, these digital natives — tomorrow’s magazine subscribers, God and Steve Jobs willing — could well become the generation that saves the publishing industry,” Quittner writes.

Maybe. Although it opens on a hopeful note, the article delivers few concrete reasons to believe its premise. What Quittner seems to have in mind sounds more like a mini-Google, focused on a narrow interest like fashion for pre-teens, than the magazine form that I still love and hope somehow survives. I relish the long, creatively written feature article that comes nicely packaged with beautiful photos, artful illustrations and enlightening sidebars. While print newspapers have lost their appeal for me, I still subscribe to several magazines. I skim through them quickly when they arrive and note the articles that I look forward to reading later, in my leisure time. These are the type of deep-dive information packages for which print magazines used to have more space and readers longer attention spans.

Quittner pines for that, too, saying that many people still “crave deep reading experiences.” They do, indeed. But I haven’t seen a computer nor a web publisher that can create those deep reading experiences. I want a hinged e-reader that would open like a book or magazine to two 8-by-11-inch screens. It would be light enough to carry on the subway or take to bed and rest on my lap. I could use it to browse the websites of my favorite magazines (to which I would gladly subscribe) and download the articles I want to read. These stories would be displayed in beautiful layouts with photos and illustrations. There would be the traditional sidebars, but also interactive, multimedia boxes that provide video or audio clips.

Quittner’s point – that the size and shape of the device is a  key to enabling profitable publishing of digital magazines – is right on. The iPad may be a start in the right direction, but it’s not there yet. A slate that retains the attributes readers love about their “dead tree” magazines while using the web to make them even better. That’s what might save the magazine business.

For the first couple of years I was freelancing, I just signed on the dotted line when it came to contracts. I didn’t want to read the fine print because, frankly, I needed the money. It was depressing enough that virtually every contract granted copyrights to my work in any and all forms in existence now or ever to be invented in the future, throughout the universe.

But curiosity and concern finally won out, so now I’m reading the contracts more carefully. I’m alarmed at what I find in some of them:

The writer pays for the lawyers: This clause specifies that I agree to indemnify the publisher from damages, costs and expenses that the publisher incurs because of copyright infringement or even the claim of copyright infringement. Some contracts specifically state that I am to protect and defend the publisher against such lawsuits at my own expense. I have never been accused of infringement in 25 years as a journalist and will gladly promise that my work does not infringe. But editors change wording, sometimes in major ways. It’s not fair to hold me responsible for a mistake an editor introduced into the article. And what if some kook out there falsely accuses me and the publisher of infringement?

The writer sells her soul: A contract I recently declined not only asked me to indemnify the company – a multi-billion-dollar corporation that is a household name – against any claim of infringement, it also wanted rights to use my name, voice, likeness and biography to promote its website in whatever way it wanted. This was for an initial story paying $400.

The writer stops freelancing: Last year I was presented with a contract to work with a custom publishing firm to produce a corporate magazine, again for a Fortune 500 client. It was no surprise that the contract had a section covering confidential information. Routinely, the contractor promises not to divulge or use any confidential information from the client for any other purpose other than that expressed in the agreement. But this contract stipulated that I could not, ever, disclose or use any information not only about this particular client but any client of the custom publisher. It wasn’t limited to trade secrets or even to information obtained during the course of producing the magazine. It was any information, forever, about any client. And I didn’t even know who the other clients were.

Most publishers are reasonable when I call their attention to these inequitable clauses. They are willing to work with me to make changes that satisfy both our needs, even though they sometimes say I’m the only writer who’s ever raised such questions. Although I have lost some business from a couple of inflexible publishers, so far I’ve been able to afford to do that. I hope that luxury lasts.

A story of mine in this week’s Electronic News reports on a trend that many in the U.S. high-tech industry find disturbing. The latest 10-year jobs forecast from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says that U.S. semiconductor manufacturing is going to lose 146,000 jobs, or more than 30 percent of its workforce, by 2018. That’s the second highest job loss of any industry, just behind retail department stores. It even beat out such passé industries as printing and newspaper publishing (projected to lose 95,000 and 81,000 jobs, respectively.)

The fact that manufacturing jobs are moving offshore is old news. On close examination, however, the BLS statistics indicate a flight of high-level jobs. Not only research and design engineering, but also top management functions, are leaving the country. In fact, in the management category of semiconductor and electronic component manufacturing, the BLS projects a 35-percent loss in the number of jobs. For chief executive officers in particular, the projection is 41 percent.

Some will quibble about how the BLS arrives at this forecast, but anecdotal information from a few executive recruiters backs up the trend. Tim O’Shea, group leader for the semiconductor industry practice at Heidrick & Struggles, has clients asking him to find executives willing to move offshore. “Management is being displaced,” agrees Al Delattre, global market managing director of technology at Korn/Ferry International.

The recruiters are alarmed about the trend. The semiconductor industry warns that the United States is losing its competitiveness. My livelihood is threatened. The industry that I’ve covered for 25 years might disappear from this country, taking with it a lot of the trade and technical publications that are my customers.

But if you take out the jingoism and think in terms of pure capitalism, it all makes perfect sense. Twenty years ago, manufacturing jobs moved to places where costs were lower and labor plentiful. Now, it looks like knowledge workers are going through the same transition. Anyone who’s read Thomas L. Friedman’s “The World is Flat” shouldn’t be surprised. The Internet and telecommunications technology make it possible to do many types of knowledge work from anywhere, so knowledge workers in low-cost areas are going to get a good portion of these jobs. Recognizing this, companies are starting to shift their knowledge workforce, not only by hiring offshore workers, but also by moving their current workers to low-cost regions. Last April, for example, I reported on IBM’s Project Match, whereby the company offered to hire laid-off North American workers for jobs in India and other low-cost countries.

The flight of U.S. executives will continue. After all, how many good reasons can you think of for keeping these executives in the United States? Most of the semiconductor industry’s customers are in Asia. Even if the CEO lives in the States, he spends most of his time traveling to visit customers, business partners and suppliers. Thanks to Wall Street’s meltdown, American finance is increasingly owned by foreigners. Plus, as semiconductor industry lobbyists love to point out, U.S. tax law and regulations make this country a less and less attractive place for business. In fact, one recruiter tells me that the executives of at least one chip company are thinking about moving its headquarters to Singapore because of the high costs of being a U.S.-based public corporation.

Maybe I should move, too. From a business point of view, there’s no reason to stay in this country. It’s not like I have to report to some green-eye-shaded editor wielding a pencil and shouting at the typesetter. I already work with all my clients via the phone, e-mail and Internet. Less and less of my work is actually printed on paper in a factory. It’s all online. U.S. newspapers and news agencies already outsource some of their journalism work to India. To remain competitive, I should move to a low-tax nation in a good climate with excellent Internet and telecommunications service.

The world is changing – quickly and dramatically. I don’t think there’s any stopping this. Businesses are recognizing this. Journalists, accountants and x-ray technicians are recognizing this. Government and industry leaders around the world would do well to recognize these forces and work with them, rather than raising fears and fomenting unrest about the offshoring of American jobs.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of journalism is the opportunity to talk to a broad spectrum of people. Not only talk, but ask them questions. And hear them answer. Or not.

It can be fascinating – and frustrating – when a source either can’t or won’t answer your questions. Rarely will he outright admit that – although I have been hung up on a few times. More typical is that he agrees to the interview but then engages you in a game of rhetorical gymnastics. It doesn’t take long into the interview before any good journalist can smell the rat. Here are a variety of ways people I’ve interviewed have avoided answering my questions:

The one-track mind: There’s the source that agrees to the interview, but ignores your questions and launches into promoting his agenda. Regardless of what question you ask, he’ll somehow bring it back around to the idea he wants to promote.

The weak-in-the-knees source: He’ll answer your questions, not with a yes or a no, but with a “maybe” or “it depends.” He doesn’t want to express any strong opinion or ultimate truth, for fear of offending somebody.

The motor-mouth:  After your first question, the source is off on his soapbox, talking his agenda, and you can’t get another question in before your time is up.

The down-the-rabbit-hole source:  These are sources who won’t or can’t dumb it down enough for the average Jane to understand. You ask how something works, and before you know it you’re deep in a PowerPoint presentation with complicated graphs and acronyms that make your head spin. I sometimes suspect that engineers secretly relish subjecting journalists to this treatment.

The back-asswords source: This is the guy who will not say something outright, but backs into it with a lot of double-negatives and passive construction. When you rephrase what he’s essentially saying in direct, active language, what he’s said becomes too bold and blatant, and he won’t admit that’s what he means. He can truthfully say, “that’s not what I said,” even if parsing through the meandering construction would show that’s what he means.

This recent exchange with the head of a technology industry trade association illustrates several of the above methods:

Journalist:  “The employment numbers look bad. This industry has lost 100,000 jobs in the last five years, and the government predicts that it will lose another 146,000 in the next decade. Do you agree with those government numbers?”

Source:  Assuming that the U.S. government takes some action that allows this industry to be competitive, then we’ll maintain our position, we won’t lose any more jobs.

Journalist:  So you’re saying that you disagree with those government statistics?

Source:  No, I’m saying that we can remain competitive.

Journalist:  But that’s assuming that the government will change its policies. Is there any evidence that the government is going to change its policies?

Source:  There’s always hope.

Journalist:  But given a lack of any changes, then you would agree that the industry will lose 146,000 jobs?

Source:  Assuming that the government has its statistics right.

Journalist:  Do you think the statistics are wrong?

Source:  I’m saying that this industry will not lose those jobs if we have the right policies in place so we can remain competitive.

Journalist :  Aaargh . . . . . !

Frustrating, and fascinating.

I have to admit that I haven’t been following the evolution of the health insurance reform legislation in Congress. That’s because it was making me sick. When I saw old people whipped into a frenzy by Republican extremists circulating misleading information about government death panels, I simply tuned out. It’s just not worth raising my blood pressure over. Literally. If I get sick, or even if I go to the doctor for my annual checkup, I pay out of my own pocket. At least, the first $2,600 of it every year.

That’s the deductible on the health insurance plan that I buy through the State of Maryland. You see, I have personal experience with a “public option,” and not by choice. When I went out on my own as a freelance writer, I could not buy private health insurance. It’s not that I could not afford it. It’s that no private insurer would sell me a policy. At any price.

No, I don’t have a terminal disease. I’ve never had cancer. Don’t have HIV. Or a heart condition. Or even high blood pressure. (For some reason, it’s incredibly low. A nurse once asked me if I was dead.) However, like anyone who’s been on the planet awhile, I do have a few conditions, none of which I consider particularly serious. But apparently the arthritis that I was diagnosed with in my mid 40s – just a few months before I left my job to freelance full time – is enough to make me a leper in the world of private health insurance. No one would touch me.

Maryland is one of 35 states that maintain “high-risk pools” for people who are denied private coverage. The premiums are typically higher than private insurance, unless you fall below a certain income, at which point the rates are partially subsidized. The system has worked well for me so far. I pay my premiums and also contribute regularly to a health savings account, which I can tap into to pay for my own healthcare costs up to the amount of the deductible. Because I pay out of my own pocket, I make more careful choices about what healthcare services to use. I’ve found some helpful sites on the Web (like http://www.healthcarebluebook.com) that tell me what the going rate is for certain services, like x-rays.

I’m grateful, and lucky, that Maryland has such a plan. Freelancers in states without high-risk pools have tough choices. They could become a part-time barista at Starbucks, a company that provides insurance even to part-time employees. They could change their marital or dependency status. (Recently, a friend’s 23-year-old daughter left a job and thought she would buy private insurance, only to find that – because of a melanoma removed from her leg 10 years ago – she was denied. She and her boyfriend moved up the wedding by a year so she could get onto his policy.) They could return to the full-time, traditional workforce.  Or, if they are healthy and feel lucky, they could risk going without insurance.

Whether through a state-run program or by manipulating the private system, people like us are getting by, at least some of us are. Anti-reform zealots complain about the government rationing healthcare. The fact is, healthcare is already rationed – by big companies whose obligation is to make profits, not protect the health of citizens. If we don’t get meaningful reform now, we will in a few years, as a larger percent of the population experiences the arbitrariness and unfairness of the current system in America.

At the start of a new year, I have high hopes about making regular visits to the gym, eating healthier, filing information as I receive it instead of letting it stack up on me. But one change I’m making is not one of hope, but rather resignation: I’m cancelling my subscription to The Washington Post.

As a journalist, I feel like a traitor. But I can no longer justify receiving a paper that I spend five minutes glancing through, that makes my fingers black with ink and that takes time and effort to stack up and put out into the recycle bin each week. In fact, if I did the math, I bet I’d find that I spend more time moving that paper around the house each week than reading it.

Increasingly, when I do read it, I’m disappointed. Some of the front-page news is already out of date. The copy editing is abysmal – I usually find several errors on the front page alone. A few months ago the Post moved what used to be a passable business section into the A section. After they did that I watched as the business coverage languished and practically disappeared. The only business coverage still worth reading is Steven Pearlstein’s excellent weekly column. There’s little reason to keep receiving even the Sunday edition. The Sunday book section is no more. Even the weekly TV guide is useless, now that we all have digital guides on our TVs.

I compared the online edition – which is free – to today’s Post and found everything I get in the paper version and more (well, except for the coupons). Plus, I can do a search for topics without having to wade through pages of dirty newsprint. Try as I might, this journalist simply cannot find a good reason to keep my subscription for daily home delivery of a major national newspaper.

I will continue to be a faithful consumer of news, but not of paper.

As we packed for our Thanksgiving trek to the family homestead last week, my son was stuffing his laptop into the suitcase when I pointed out that his aunt might not have WiFi access at her house. At first, he looked at me like I was speaking Russian. Then, as he grokked the concept, he looked at me as if he were being consigned to Siberia.

Age 17, he barely remembers a time when he couldn’t access the Internet from anywhere. Even I, who remembers dialing a rotary phone, have a hard time recalling how many phone calls and how much legwork was required when I first started working as a reporter in the 1980s. I couldn’t google a company to find the exact spelling of its corporate name, its location and a description of its product or service. I used to spend hours chasing down such basic information.

During our holiday, we drove through the sparse Kansas farmland in search of the town where my mother was born and raised. Ost, Kansas, consists of a handful of buildings dominated by St. Joseph’s Catholic Church and the parish school, which houses a total of 94 students in grades 1 through 12. We couldn’t remember exactly where Ost was, but trusted that if we got within a few miles we’d be able to spot the church steeple. No hills and very few trees make this wonderfully possible in the Sunflower State. Instead, my son whipped out his iPhone with GPS.

Problem solved. Adventure cut short.

I wonder what we are giving up when answers come so easily. In the past, it took discipline, planning, imagination and determination to track down a piece of information or to find a tiny town in the vast prairie. Today, it’s literally at our fingertips. There was courage, adventure, challenge and reward in the struggle to uncover a fact or solve a problem. Now, it’s tempting to give up if we can’t find an answer quickly and easily. Like the proverbial tree in the woods that makes no sound if no one’s there to hear it fall, what happens to information that’s not on Google? Will anyone be willing to hunt for answers? I fear we may just stop asking the questions. What an ironic side effect of the Information Age.

Postscript: Even if we are willing to hunt for answers, they may no longer be there because apparently no one’s preserving the archives of dying newspapers: http://www.walletpop.com/blog/2010/01/05/archives-in-peril-generations-of-history-gone-with-the-flip-of/

I’ve written dozens of articles about business continuity and disaster recovery. Experts stress that every company should have a formal plan detailing how it would continue operating when a calamity strikes. They cite horror stories about companies that suffered serious consequences – from bad PR to going out of business – because they weren’t prepared.

How does a freelancer plan for disasters? For years, I simply prayed they wouldn’t happen and scrambled when they did. But as I’ve wrestled with the wrath of nature, spotty utility service and just plain rotten luck, I’ve taped together a few safety nets. They won’t impress the experts, but they don’t cost much and so far have been reasonably effective. Read the rest of this entry »