The Press is the Enemy

Amazing to read some of the latest Nixon tapes, particularly his comments on the media and academics, a leitmotif of the 2008 campaign, as Republicans condemned the media and intellectual conservatives deserted the Party.

"Never forget," Nixon tells national security adviser Henry Kissinger in a taped 1972 Oval Office conversation, "The press is the enemy. The establishment is the enemy. The professors are the enemy. Professors are the enemy," he repeated. "Write that on a blackboard 100 times and never forget it."

Here is Sarah Palin’s response to Katie Couric’s question “Do you think the coverage of you has been sexist?”

No, I don't. I mean, I know that there--it's obvious there's some double-standards here, you know, in terms of what the media has been doing, but I think that's more--I think more attributable to just the media elite, the Washington elite, not knowing who I am and just asking a whole lot of questions and not so much based on gender though, but based on just the fact that I'm not part of the Washington herd.

Ron's Vietnam Trip

I met Ron in 1985 when my company acquired a publishing company of which he was the editor-in-chief. During the due diligence he looked me in the eye, shook my hand, and introduced himself. He didn’t fit the stereotype of a scholarly/professional editor and later I learned why. Although he had the requisite academic training as a graduate of William and Mary and was a student of military history, particularly the Civil War period, he was also an ex-marine, and served in the Vietnam conflict. He was extremely personable, while his demeanor was all business.

In addition to being colleagues, we became friends, and later in his career he left our company to lead the Naval Institute Press, an ideal position that combined his professional expertise as well as his passion for military history. He ultimately retired from that job and we remain friends to this day.

During company picnics Ron and I would “throw the pill” around before the requisite softball game. We both played baseball in our youths, we’re both lefties, and, we would like to think we can still throw a ball as we did in the “old days.” But now in retirement, he has been working on golf and he is a very good golfer. So good in fact, he was asked by a national golf magazine to serve as a consultant for a story about golf in Vietnam today as seen through the eyes of a U.S. veteran going back there to play. The Vietnam tourist agency wants to try to promote golf so they and the magazine supported the trip.

Ron accepted and recently returned from the assignment. Barbara, his significant other, met him there for part of the trip. I had sent Ron pictures of our recent southwest tour, which I wrote about in a prior blog entry. This is how Ron responded. It is such a remarkable, thoughtful document, with interesting observations about his trip to Vietnam, how America is now perceived there, that I include it below. Consider it a “guest blog entry:”

Enjoyed the photos of your trip. Your pictures are so well composed. The vibrant colors and magnificent landscapes/architecture of the SW were so alive. Lots of real postcards in the group. They brought back memories as my first job in publishing was a college traveler for Prentice-Hall based in Albuquerque. I drove most of the highways in NM, Eastern AZ, and West Texas. It was a fun job because out there and in those times professors were happy to talk to a salesman about books. They felt kind of cut off from mainstream academic American; and in their eyes, I represented the intellectual East. While this was certainly a misperception of me, I had great access to profs and sold lots of books.

I’m decompressing from my Vietnam trip. Vietnam is zooming down the market economy road (on their 80cc Hondas) with not a commie in sight! I had a wonderful trip on a number of levels (emotional, informational, etc.) and the golf courses I played were fabulous. While in Vietnam I celebrated my 65th in the same place I turned 25. Nice symmetry. Didn’t even think about Medicare! The magazine put me up in the most fabulous hotels (the Caravelle in Saigon where the journalists watched the fall of Saigon in ’75 from the rooftop bar, a former colonial French mansion/Emperor Bao Dai retreat in the 5,000 foot cool, alpine climate of Dalat, and a beautiful new beachside resort at the site of our old China Beach in country R&R spot near DaNang. Here I had a spectacular cottage right on the water. So there I was in a country where thousands of Americans died and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese were killed; and, 40 years after the war, I’m playing golf!! And the Vietnamese like us and surprisingly bear no ill will towards Americans! So what was it all about? Nothing! Iraq, of course, will be the same. Those who believe the surge is working (or even ultimately relevant to the situation) need to review the history of the Vietnam War. We “surged” from 150,000 troops (same as Iraq) to 500,000 and it ultimately did no good. How quickly they forget.

I was able to spend some time in I Corps (around DaNang and Hue) and visit the places where I served. I even sat down in a village and talked with a former Viet Cong. His life has been tough because of Agent Orange but he was very polite. Once we determined that we were fighting each other in the same area at exactly the same time (Tet), a sort of bond developed between us. Over 70% of the population of Vietnam was born after the war and have no memory of it – only old farts like me and the VC! After the golf, Barbara came over and we spent a week touring places I never saw during the war e.g. Saigon, Hanoi, etc. Hanoi was terrific with lots of French Colonial architecture and large, beautiful lakes scattered throughout the city. Barbara and I ambled all through the old quarter of the city. We also took in a number of interesting and surprisingly good museums. Throughout the Barbara/Ron portion of the trip, we stayed in wonderful colonial hotels and ate in great restaurants with terrific food. You would have liked the hotel bars. In the evening they always had a pianist (accompanied variously by a saxophone, violin, singer) who played haunting “love and life” numbers from the 40s and 50s. The French influence in music still survives as many tunes were of the melancholy Charles Aznavour café type. It was quite nice, relaxing, and romantic.

PS Attached is a picture of the old convoy commander at the top of the Hai Van pass on the road from DaNang to Hue – a route I ran many times. Notice the old French fortifications in the background. We always felt briefly safe when we got to this spot as it was manned by a platoon of marines.

God, I Love this Job

Carolyn was my administrative assistant and is still with the company I ran, but now in a much more responsible position. She had a cartoon posted over her desk, one I never forgot. It certainly captured her work ethic and it is the way I felt about my working life.

The cartoon pictured a clearly overworked secretary, slumped over her IBM Selectric (that’s what we used in the industrial age, but I remember my old manual Remington from the pre-industrial age with greater fondness). Although the cartoon character is hardly conscious after a hectic day of work, the bubble caption reveals her thoughts: “God, I love this job.”

I sometimes wonder how I got so lucky or whether it was luck at all -- having work I found so challenging and fulfilling. Was it the nature of the work itself or an inherited attitudinal discipline? My generation, right before the vanguard of the baby boomers, was born to parents who emerged from the Great Depression. Although my father worked in a family photography business that somehow survived the depression, the scars and fears of those economic times reverberated in his thinking.

From the age of 13 on I worked at my father’s photography studio during the summers and I worked part-time jobs throughout college, as a library assistant, in the university’s admissions office, and as a night receptionist at a Brooklyn health clinic. My first full time job after college was as a production assistant for a company that reprinted out of print monographs and journals, a booming business in the early 1960’s as educational funds were flowing to universities in reaction to the perceived scientific leadership of Russia post Sputnik.

My sons argue that somehow it was easier then than it is in today’s Dilbertarian working world. Different, yes, but easier, no. One of my responsibilities in that first publishing job was to prepare original copies of out-of-print publications for photo-offset reproduction. This could involve tens of thousands of pages from runs of periodicals. Every page had to be reviewed and every blemish that would otherwise be reproduced had to be repaired. Exact “page counts” – front matter, illustrations, and the like, had to be detailed and itemized for the print order.

I made a mental game to stay motivated. How much could I accomplish in a day and still come back for more? My co-workers argued there is no reason to work like that, as no one in management appreciated it. But it was not about pleasing anyone but myself; I had to learn to love it to do it, leaving exhausted at the end of the day, muttering, “God, I love this job.”

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“Business” Relationships

During my 35-year working career, I had just two jobs, the first for nearly six years and the last for thirty. Loyalty to the employer and visa a versa was more typical then. But, more importantly to me, was loyalty to the people, co-workers and vendors alike. In fact, these relationships frequently evolved into deep friendships. And, I think that made the difference between “having” to work and loving work.

I was also fortunate to find the profession that found me. I think of the idiosyncratic title of Anne Tyler’s novel, Accidental Tourist, as I was the accidental publisher. As many others of my generation, I married early. At 21 my first wife became pregnant, erasing plans of going to graduate school. Instead, it was off to work I had to go.

At the time my wife happened to have a summer job at Dell Publishing and her boss agreed to give me a one-hour education in the basics of production as a back door into the publishing industry. Knowing the difference between a point and a pica was invaluable lingo to get a job, but, finally, it was nothing more than my typing skills that prevailed in my job search. In 1964 I began work as a production assistant at the Johnson Reprint Corporation, a division of Academic Press.

Publishing became a continuous postgraduate education, providing an opportunity to work with brilliant authors, skilled vendors, and wonderful staff. And treating business vendors as partners – typesetters, printers, and distributors -- made for relationships that spanned an entire working career.

I was particularly fond of our overseas distribution partners who were expert in markets where different conventions and languages made it difficult for a US publisher to compete. We established long-standing relationships in Europe, Japan, Singapore, and Australia. While contracts governed the major terms of these arrangements, a handshake sometime covered the nuances. We shared budgets, forward plans, openly and honestly back and forth.

Over the course of time, I became close to the principals of these businesses, as well as their families. None were closer than ties to Peter G. who was the founder of a U.K. company that covered the European markets. He was a brilliant and articulate businessperson with savoir-faire.

Although Peter was thirteen years older than I, we met and joined forces when our respective businesses were in their formative stages. We supported each other in our separate but similar endeavors. We spent time together in our respective Westport and London offices as well as the Frankfurt Bookfair, strategizing, sometimes agonizing, and always laughing. I can still see that glint in his eye as he ruminated about an iconoclastic approach to marketing our publishing list in Europe.

In the early 1990’s Peter was diagnosed with cancer. His illness never brought his spirits down, at least in his dealings with me. Hearing this troubling news, Ann and I visited with he and his wife and we went out on the town instead of moping.

Peter died at the age of 63, fifteen years ago last month. Just days after his death I received an extraordinary letter, emblematic of the man and our relationship. “If there is a lesson to be learned here….”

Printed Directly from PG’s Personal Disc
Date as Postmark

Dear Bob & Ann:

Although we have not spoken of it much, you will know, Bob, that I have always valued our very special relationship. Few colleagues in publishing have ever shared such a close understanding of each other’s achievements in the face of, and most usually in spite of, frequent adversity, abiding uncertainty, and the constant fear of failure.

I like to think, on the other hand, that we made good use of such time as we could spend together, helping buttress each other throughout the years. Would that we could have seen the next step through together. But, then, there is always yet another step!

Happily, you have inherited relationships (albethey quite different from ours) with both [my sons]. Thus, there promises to be continuity, as indeed there should. However, it now behooves you to play the father figure! The King is dead; long live the King!

I shall remain ever grateful to my surgeon, whose honest and accurate estimates enabled [my wife] and me to crowd our residual quality time together with joyous and memorable events. And, most of all, to [my wife] whose energy, strength and courage have made all things possible. God could not have blessed me with a more loving, caring, and supportive wife.

I want you both to know that I go in peace and with only the happiest of memories fresh in mind. If there is a lesson to be learned here, it is surely that each and everyone of us should value every day along the way – for, certainly, nary a one is given back to do over!

With much love,
Peter

Publishing and Tech Antiquity

Funny how much of a person’s life is defined about what you do (or did in my case). Reading over my first “blog” reveals how self-conscious I am about that. It is like going to a cocktail party and running into that ubiquitous question, “what do you do?” In retirement, I usually answer that I’m a publishing “consultant” (nice euphemism for retired or unemployed) -- but I still do some work on a part time basis, mostly to keep my skills and to stay up to date on my former industry.

Nonetheless, it is true though that so much of one’s life is defined by one’s vocation – the hour metrics simply dictate this reality. After all, more of my conscious adult life has been spent on my business than any other activity. I was one of those rare birds, having worked for only two companies in my entire life, Academic Press and then Greenwood Publishing Group of which I was President from 1973 through 1999.

So I guess it is not accidental that my first blog entry focuses on an aspect of my professional life that anticipated what I am doing at this moment – the ability to publish one copy for one person. I thought about this and recalled that some twenty-five years ago I gave a speech on technology and its impact on publishing at the Society of Scholarly Publishing. This was written at a time when Apple, Commodore, and TRS-80 were the top selling PCs. IBM had just introduced its own PC. The operating system was DOS. Windows was not even in its infancy and the Internet was merely gestating.

I rummaged through my files and found that speech. It is amusing to read it, but the opportunities I described then, still fascinate me today. I excerpt some of that speech here; consider it as a window into tech antiquity:

SOCIETY FOR SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING 4TH ANNUAL MEETING
June 25, 1982

HOW WILL THE NEW TECHNOLOGY CHANGE THE NATURE OF MARKETING FUNCTIONS?

In preparing this speech I have considered whether it would be better to deal specifically with the question listed in the program -- "How Will the New Technology Change the Nature of Marketing Functions?" -- or whether it would be better to review how the new technology is already affecting the nature of marketing functions. I have chosen to speak primarily to the latter question.

Nevertheless, I do not want to leave the first question totally unanswered. To imagine what marketing methods may be employed in the future, and the kind of technology that will be available to the marketing manager, one must speculate about what end products will be marketed. This involves a certain amount of extrapolation.

If we postulate that a unique characteristic of scholarly publishing, one setting it apart from trade book and magazine publishing, is supplying highly specialized information to a relatively small group of users, we might agree that such information ultimately may be disseminated via a "perpetual" electronic data base publication. Publishers would then act as organizers and verifiers of the information in the database.

Users would have access to the data via terminals connected to telephone lines or cable systems. As the providers of the information, authors would assume some of the publishing functions, especially keyboarding. Although this concept is seemingly very futuristic, it is already being attempted. The Source Telecomputing Company, for instance, offers a database of some 1,200 services and programs to personal computer users. The Source explains that its "User Publisher" service is designed to "open your files, ideas and commentary to the community of your fellow subscribers."

In this case, however, The Source is not acting as a true publisher -- it is only an intermediary. If at some point in the future this method of delivering scholarly information predominates, it will have an enormous impact on marketing methods. Once the necessary terminals are in place, they may also serve as a medium for advertising.

Under these conditions, the best marketers may be the best indexers, those who supply the most effective access points, allowing an audience to key in to learn the most relevant information/research for their needs. Then, as Irving Louis Horowitz and Mary E. Curtis point out in their article, "The Impact of Technology on Scholarly Publishing," in the April 1982 issue of Scholarly Publishing, "The wide acceptance of such technology may also affect traditional ways in which publishers communicate with their customers. When searching of bibliographic data banks becomes routine, publishers may no longer need to invest in extensive direct mail to bring certain categories of scholarly books and periodicals to the attention of a wide spectrum of professionals, particularly if only a handful of the recipients are likely to care about the work."

As I stated earlier, however, to pursue this line of thought is to engage in a highly theoretical discussion. Richard De Gennaro states in his article, "Libraries, Technology, and the Information Marketplace," in the June 1, 1982 issue of Library Journal that we should not take for granted that this "new technology" will indeed create the bookless library. Such an assumption could have disastrous consequences for society.

He reminds us of the Chinese philosopher's statement, "Prediction very difficult, particularly of future." Hence, I have chosen to answer the second question: how is the new technology affecting the marketing of scholarly books today?

What exactly is the "new technology"? I think we would all agree with the conclusions reached by May Katzen in her book, Multi-Media Communications, recently published by Greenwood Press, that this technology evolves around "the new silicon chip technology, incorporating increasingly numerous and sophisticated large scale integrated electronic circuits [that has allowed us to produce] ... ever more powerful, robust and miniaturized mini- and micro-computers whose costs have been falling rapidly." A key element in this definition is "whose costs have been falling rapidly." The new technology is the widespread availability -- through the economies made possible by computer-chip technology and large-scale production of hardware and software that allow us to do our jobs better. Initially this technology was available to a select few. Next it became available to a much larger group of users, but only through the expert who knew how to communicate with the machine, the programmer. Now it is available to everyone; all of us as users can communicate our requirements directly, using third generation software.

There is a wide range of physical products; for example, word processors, mini-computers, personal computers, mainframe computers, video discs, computer-assisted microform systems, high-speed photo-typesetting equipment; they are all the result of silicon-chip technology. How is this technology affecting our job as purveyors and marketers of scholarly information?

One of the first areas affected by this technology is the final stage of the marketing process, fulfillment. How many scholarly presses could have survived during the last ten years without the computerization of fulfillment processes? This technology was, at first, "mainframe" oriented and is now available as "canned" programming for the mini-computer. Some smaller publishers can even have their fulfillment services on micro-based systems.

Another area that is being affected is the stage between the actual fulfillment process and the buying decision, the ordering process. This process has become increasingly dependent on various computer-based bibliographic systems. We have often wondered at Greenwood what the detrimental effect would be if we shut off all direct mail and space advertising on a particular title, especially of one geared primarily to an institutional market. Although we have avoided such a risky experiment, we suspect that by participating in "bibliographic systems selling" we effectively cover a large percentage of certain markets.

[Several paragraphs deleted at this point]

Perhaps one of the more revolutionary aspects of the new technology now available to us is the micro-computer, commonly referred to as the personal computer. Actually, it is the software, not the micro-computer, that is the important new development -- the set of instructions to drive the computer has changed dramatically. The genius of the newer software is that the user can now instruct the computer to do precisely what he or she wants it to do without having to interact with a programmer. Today most of the software, and the relevant publisher's applications can run on almost any micro-computer, be it Apple, Commodore, TRS80, or IBM.

As you have undoubtedly heard, one of the most widely used pieces of micro-computer software today is VisiCalc. This has become the best seller of all software, having sold more than a quarter of a million copies at about $200.00 each. It actually evolved out of an idea a Harvard MBA student, Dan Bricklin, had as a result of doing homework that involved a complicated, lengthy set of calculations. These had to be reworked in their entirety because one number changed. It was his idea that a computer program should be able to eliminate the drudgery of these types of calculations, and, after discussing the idea with a Harvard professor, he was sent to Dan Fylstra, a recent Harvard graduate, who had established a small micro-computer software house, Personal Software. VisiCalc became an immediate best seller and, as one of the original users of this program, more than two years ago, when VisiCalc was available only to the Apple (this is no longer the case), I can attest that our decision to buy Apples for Greenwood Press was entirely VisiCalc oriented. The initial availability of VisiCalc only on the Apple helped to make Apple one of the best selling microcomputers.

Visicalc was the first of the "spread sheeting" software programs, of which there are now more than twenty. The genius of the program is that you, the user, can define the relationships between various elements of a problem, and then insert different values for these elements to test conclusions without knowing any programming languages. An excellent description of the spreadsheet programs was given in the March 15, 1982 issue of InfoWorld, a highly recommended source of information on micro-computer software: “.. a spreadsheet simulator is basically a mammoth sheet of electronic paper configured as a work sheet and divided into a large number of rows and columns. In these blocks or cells you can enter numbers, words, or formulas. Numbers and words are displayed as you enter them. If you enter a formula, the program stores it, but computes and displays its value according to the current values of its elements. The magic is that when you change an entry on which the formula depends, the program automatically recalculates and displays its updated value."

Therefore, you can use the spreadsheet for myriad uses, the most obvious being budgeting. The program can be instructed to do laborious "if - then" calculations to determine most cost-effective print runs, pricing determinations, advertising expenditures and their relationship to sales, market research analyses, and other applications.

[Several sentences deleted]

The April 1982 issue of Personal Computing carried an interview with Jack Halbert, personal computing support team manager at Merrill Lynch. Halbert says, "the use of electronic spread sheet programs is in its infancy, just like personal computers." Personal Computing observed, "considering Halbert's assessment, it takes the imagination to try to conceive what the fourth and fifth generations of these electronic record keepers, preparers, and analyzers will be capable of providing for information hungry businesses."

Among other valuable pieces of micro-computer software available to marketing managers are a host of data base management systems. Greenwood Press utilizes a very "user friendly" system called PFS and the PFS Report. The PFS descriptive manual states, "Basically PFS works like a paper filing system without the paper so you can record, file, retrieve, and, most important, summarize information in a fraction of the time it would take with a conventional filing system.

[Two paragraphs deleted]

As you might imagine, given the flexibility of this kind of data base management system, it can be used for almost anything, to maintain small mailing lists for large volume buyers, book club lists, and publicity contacts. And, if the system is not precisely thought out at the onset, the available free-floating search techniques will compensate. For instance, if we were not satisfied with our Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress subject search, we could also search by titles or fragments of titles of the journals themselves.

Bear in mind that to use these programs you do not have to be a computer expert. To use VisiCalc effectively, you must have an understanding of basic mathematics, but need not know calculus or Boolean logic. The PFS Data Base Management system can be used with effectiveness after a twenty minute learning period You do not have to understand Basic, Pascal, PL/l, or any other of the computer languages to make these programs work for you. I am not arguing, of course, that the computer will ever take the place of the often necessary subjective decision making process, but it certainly eliminates much of the drudgery, freeing marketing personnel to engage in other selling activities.

Word processing software is also available for the microcomputer. These are not as sophisticated as most of those accompanying computers specializing in word processing applications. However, some of the software available for the micro-computer now offer eighty column displays and provide the user with a multiplicity of features common to word processing computers, including search and replace, block operations, justification, chain files, and others. Because scholarly publishing addresses relatively limited audiences, one can see real advantages in using this software to personalize the marketing approach. It is now possible to single out very carefully profiled mailing lists that, in combination with a direct sales letter, communicates the sales message best.

[One paragraph deleted]

The silicon chip will no doubt bring about significant changes in the world of scholarly publishing. However, a basic premise of this speech has been that new technology tools are already available to the marketing manager. By concentrating on the present and not the speculative future, I hope I have been able to alert you to some of these opportunities.

Publishing and Lacuna

As a publisher for nearly forty years, “lacuna” best summarizes the publishing strategy of the imprints I directed, attempting to address knowledge or reference tool gaps throughout the social sciences and the humanities. I am a publishing disciple (and former neighbor) of Curtis Benjamin who during my professional formative years in the 60’s and 70’s was the President and Chairman of McGraw-Hill. Benjamin labeled increasing specialization “the twigging phenomenon” – the tree of knowledge constantly developing new limbs as scholarship and scientific discoveries blaze forward. I wonder how Curtis Benjamin would see the Internet world, the ultimate in customized, personalized, specialized publishing. No doubt he would see it as an opportunity. Hence, an opportunity for me to use the medium to muse about my life, interests and experiences over time.