ACP 2070
Editing Principles and Practice
Semester 1 2014
Footscray Park

Lecture 3
Editing in a Corporate World

1. Lachlan Murdoch on Profit Motive versus Editorial Integrity
2. Look at a history of one particular independent press in Australia and the pressures it came under
3. Look at some economic realities of the publishing industry and how they affect editing.

1. Lachlan Murdoch on Profit Motive versus Editorial Integrity

While I read these excerpts from a speech made nearly 10 years ago, I keep in mind the recent phone hacking scandal in Britain that has embroiled the Murdoch press.

Discuss:

What is a media elite?

To what extent is Lachlan Murdoch not a member of a media elite?

What is good journalism?

How has Murdoch improved the diversity of the news media?

Are there competing conceptions of media diversity? What are they?

How important are colour/design advances?

Discuss picture of girl fleeing her village after it was napalmed by Americans during Vietnam war. Picture quality vs impact.

Slide of colour front page of NT News.

According to Murdoch: what is the role of the news media? When is the appropriate time for no profits? What is media diversity?

Are profitability and editorial integrity destined to be in collision or can they cohabit?

Do you think the phone hacking scandal is a consequence of a profit-drive n media?

2. McPhee Gribble

In her book Other People's Words , Hilary McPhee tells the story of her life as an editor/publisher in Australia in the 1970s and 1980s. She and her business partner, Di Gribble established and ran McPhee Gribble for 15 years, publishing a number of important Australian books.

The 70s and 80s was a period of hope when people believed that they could make a difference to the world through their own efforts. As a result cultural workers were able to consider working for peanuts because the rewards were intangible things like ‘making a difference' or 'changing the world'.

As McPhee explains, she was working in a context where:

The post-1968 generation everywhere was making new art for audiences less constrained by form and function. (141)

It wasn't really until the 1960s and 1970s that Australian publishing in its own right (as opposed to British or American companies with local branches, or the importing of books published overseas) really began to grow and flourish. The late-1960s saw huge social movements for radical change: the struggle for equal pay, women's rights, civil rights in America, campaigns against apartheid and war, anti-colonial and national liberation struggles.

Sections of McPhee's generation felt less constrained by the demands of capital acquisition.

For McPhee (and her partner Di Gribble):

Real publishing, finding the capital and the confidence to enter into a contract with the author, to license their copyright, undertake to edit, design, print, promote and arrange distribution into bookshops around the country – that was another matter altogether. (139)

The two women started out with an ethos rather than a profit-motive, an idea rather than a money-making venture – which tougher heads would say was in the end our undoing. (149)

It was a way of working as remote now as the moon. (150)

When McPhee Gribble realised that their business was going under they tried to court some investors. In the meetings they realised it was going to be impossible because they were coming from completely different perspectives:

The questions they put to us over and over again were revealing. Why should an author take two years to write a book? Can't you put a rocket under them? Why pay advances on royalties, which might be outstanding for years. Why carry stock of titles? Why not print on demand? Why keep books in print if the author has another on the way? Why not cut the staff in half and stop what we regarded as essential work-in-progress? Why not do different kinds of books altogether? A sports series was suggested, as was publishing a list of pornography which one young investment broker had heard was a profitable line. (259)

Competing ideas of publishing:

• Profit vs publishing ethos
• Diversity vs monoculture
• Publishing as a “means of transmission, one of the ways ideas and imagination move through the world” vs “a series of processes which make and sell product”

McKenzie, on p15-17 of your textbook is instructive.

3. Economic realities

Let's look more closely now at some of the processes that make and sell books.

Trade publishing in Australia (and elsewhere) is controlled by a formula which breaks the return from book sales into these percentages:

10

25

25

40

One of the simple effects of this breakdown is that in order for publishers to make a profit, they need to spend less than 25% of recommended retail price on producing the book. 20% is about as high as you'd want to go.

Book price is worked out by dividing total costs by the number of books offered for sale:

Production costs entail the following costs.

• Printing
• Design
• Promotion
• Overheads
• Editing 

In times of economic squeezing one or more of these budget lines needs to be reduced.

You can perhaps see now why McPhee Gribble was doomed from the start.

Why?

• internal dynamics
• external factors

As discussed last week book publishing's ‘profit motive' has also resulted in some of the changes to the industry, including:

• Large publishing houses intent to invest in ‘low risk' books rather than forms like literary fiction that aren't expect to immediately pay off.
• Increased outsourcing of jobs like proofreading and copyediting, which were once done ‘in house'
• Less investment in the ‘structural editing' stages or developing a manuscript
• Increasing attention given to sales and marketing's assessment of projected sales and audience for a book under consideration
• Decreasing turnover time and hence less interest in long-term nurturing of a new writers' talents
• An engagement with, and exploration of, digital/online publishing, e-books, print on demand

Some things to think about:

• Is publishing “just a business” like any other? Should it be?
• What alternative media sources or publishing models exist?
• How might the demand for profit eventually limit what we read, affect quality, or result in a narrower or more ideological media?
• Should there be restrictions on media ownership or will the system “even itself out” naturally to produce high-quality books and newspapers?

For further reading, these sites compare the cost of physical book production with cost of e-books.

www.nytimes.com/2010/03/01/business/media/01ebooks.html

http://bookfinder.com/2009/03/breakdown-of-book-costs.html