MANAGERIAL SKILLS
Life and death of the knowledge industry
- Find a niche within an ever-expanding yet cash-strapped information market
- Ensure high-quality information endures if not thrives
HOW TO
The quality
conundrum
Whom to trust for
food for thought? In a confusing world, we are left to opt for one dominant
pattern of behavior or the other: to lock ourselves into a bubble, where
increasingly prolific media churn out large quantities of whatever material we
want to ingest, to fit our interests or emotions; or to drift in limbo,
bouncing off such comfort zones in search of bits and pieces of palatable
knowledge more suited to a discerning diet. You feast on sweet corroboration,
or scavenge for smidgens of reason.
There is another,
more practical way of putting the question: “why is it so hard to access
high-quality intellectual content that meets our desire for making sense of
troubling trends and events?” Indeed, it has become paradoxically difficult to
do so, at a time when cognitive needs, analytic talent, archival references,
knowledge-producing institutions, communication tools, and publication
platforms are all in abundance. On the face of it, humankind has never been so
well-equipped to decipher and rationalize the world, and yet wisdom appears as
elusive as ever. Leaving aside the existential interrogations this may raise,
there are prosaic explanations for our ongoing failure to obtain content as
meaningful as we would hope, and possible remedies too.
Inflation
In analyzing what
might be broadly termed the “knowledge production industry,” a first point of
note is the increasing volumes of content. This upward trend has several
causes. The first is an unprecedentedly low barrier to entry in a market where
virtually anyone can publish. Technology played a key role in this respect,
through a string of innovations including the personal computer, the internet,
the multiplication and diversification of elaborate self-publishing and social
media platforms that rest on members simultaneously acting as compulsive
content-consumers and producers.
Humankind has never been so well-equipped to decipher and rationalize the world
Such low barriers
impact both the volume and quality of publications. The market is no longer
organized solely around gate-keepers—professional, dedicated outfits such as
periodicals and publishing houses that determine what reaches the public,
imposing uneven but relatively high standards for style, structure, relevance,
fact-checking and so on. In today’s free for all, the prevalence of such
quality control mechanisms is greatly diminished; the reach of self-styled
publishers depends mostly on their ability to connect with the audience
directly, which often has more to do with the reader’s tastes and emotional
state than the quality of work per se.
Inflation has
economic roots too, as the industry-wide proliferation of content punishes
whoever stays small. As traditional sales and subscriptions decrease,
monetization is largely contingent on clicks (as a yardstick for advertising),
email sign-ups (key to contemporary marketing) and the holy grail of buzz (through
social media amplification). On all three accounts, volume is key: the more you
produce, the more visible you are, the more people register, the greater the
chances of a hit.
Big data feedback,
which has taken center stage in most economic visions, mercilessly ascertains
that business is driven by volume. Publishing platforms adapt accordingly, by
ramping up their derivative products, extending their interface with the public
across all available social media, and seeking content that literally “clicks”
with their audience. That in itself is partly unpredictable, making for a
multiplication of attempts: even traditional publishing houses now release many
more books to maximize chances of a best-seller.
Two related trends
contribute to inflation. On one side, an industry of remarkably cheap content
has developed to support this shift, espousing a “Uber” principle. Rather than
hire, digital news portals pay minimal fees to young professionals reporting in
the field; 150 USD for a paper involving intensive research and interviews has
become normal. Various consultancies follow a similar logic, hardly
compensating an army of stringers who suck up precarious work conditions in the
hopes of kick starting their career. Meanwhile, entirely free content is
increasingly available to publishers too, from experts volunteering opinions,
to “citizen journalists” driven by a cause, through to casual social media
users endlessly generating more material for circulation.
On the other side,
publishers pay—presumably more than ever—to reach the public, creating the
bizarre scenario in which organizations routinely pay to disseminate free
content. Advertising products is not new, but as the market has moved away from
the interface of bookstores or newsstands, the rise of social media has
introduced a novel dimension: platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook
capture a broad base of regular users, which they then farm to content
producers. Indeed, think tanks, journals and individuals may, for a fee,
sponsor their own work to help it swim to the surface. Major newspapers
likewise purchase a “channel” with Snapchat to gain exposure to a coveted
youthful public—with free substantive content serving principally as substratum
for commercial advertising.
The escalating
struggle for visibility has created a bewildering situation, leaving content
consumers unsure how to adjust. Bitter complaints about social media often come
from people who spend most time on them. Many feel that there is so much to
read that they hardly read anymore, skimming to keep up, while fantasizing
about having the time to stop and go deeper. A surprising number of academics
and pundits admit that they do not have the leisure to delve into fully-fledged
books written by their peers, while hoping theirs will have a sizeable
audience.
In the prevailing
pandemonium, there seems to be no obvious go-to-place for anything consistent
and reliable. This creates, in turn, a sense of disillusionment and fatigue among
individuals forced to navigate such inflation. What these consumers generally
do not realize, however, is how much they contribute to sustaining and
intensifying the problem.
Defection
We treat the
volumes of poor material reverberating around the web and into our mail boxes
as an external aggression we must defend against, when it is, to a large
extent, a plight of our own making. As an audience, by and large, we have
become demanding, opportunistic and flippant. We expect content to be both
high-quality and free. We defer long reads for lack of time, and rarely finish
what we start, as our attention span plummets. We prefer visuals over text. We
increasingly reject any form of loyalty, given the proliferation of options
available. Predominantly, we turn to a crowdsourced form of selection and
rating, in which our networks’ response to content flags it to our attention
based on algorithms.
There are obvious
downsides to this mechanism. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the like are not
designed to promote quality. Quite the contrary: the feedback on a
sophisticated article or documentary will always be dwarfed by individual
portraits, personal announcements, cute videos and entertaining factoids. Even
a discerning public rewards such content much more than the meaningful,
laborious products to which we claim to aspire. The result is that, when the
latter do come into being, we are forced to spend considerable time fishing
them out from a sea of lighter content.
This dynamic
inevitably shapes the knowledge production market. On one side, the struggle
for visibility translates into shorter and more visual content and derivatives.
This evolution wouldn’t necessarily be damaging, if it didn’t come at the
expense of deeper research and reporting. But it does. Even a model like
Buzzfeed, which generates mountains of trash while reinvesting a fraction of
its benefits in high-quality investigations, ultimately serves to dilute what
is left of good journalism.
On the other side,
reaching the public entails evermore self-promotion. Authors, to expand their
base of followers, must “engage” with them relentlessly, which also means
producing or circulating more content. Publicizing work across multiple social
media platforms is a must. Creative advertising via teasers, graphic design or
visualization techniques gives an edge. This obligation to clamor adds up into
growing volumes of noise. It is the intellectual equivalent of the Larsen
effect—when sound from a loudspeaker feeds back into a microphone, in a
screeching loop that sends us diving for cover.
The best solution
we have found so far is a tad archaic: we specifically “follow,” on social
media, individual sources of interesting and hopefully reliable insight. But
our broader networks typically expand faster than we can master, obscuring
those curators. Moreover, the time we spend sifting through the clutter eats up
what leisure we have to delve into the most meaningful work anyway.
The ”free content”
economy brings up another issue: the economic model on which production rests.
Researchers, reporters and commentators must, one way or another, support
themselves financially, through an “industry” generating resources. But most
streams of funding appear increasingly detached from quality or relevance.
Advertising
naturally is a function of “clicks” and “views,” which govern journalism a bit
more every day, but the same logic permeates segments of the knowledge
production market that, on the face of it, are not directly subjected to the
reign of publicity. Increasingly, budgets ascribed to academic research centers
and think tanks are attached to expectations taking the form of “metrics”—the
number of peer-reviewed articles published in a year, for instance, or the
volume of briefings and interviews churned out by an expert. The premium placed
on fundraising means that hires, fires and promotions can depend on measurable
output more than qualitative value.
Another source of
capital is deployed in pursuit of conventional wisdom, which doesn’t add much,
by definition, to what we think we know already. Across the knowledge industry,
investments and subsidies all too often follow gregarious trends, making for
production that evolves in fits and fads. A refugee crisis, for instance, can
prompt an overwhelming wave of research, which typically yields its
lessons-learned only after the topic of discussion has moved on, and
nonetheless concentrates finite resources at the expense of a whole spectrum of
other subjects worthy of attention. Catchy concepts, as is the case with the
ill-defined notion of “preventing violent extremism”, cause similar overkill
and side effects.
Another stream of
funding doesn’t aim at generating any understanding at all. Various business
models, in policy-research, economics or management consulting, essentially
revolve around legitimizing preexisting assumptions. Our propensity to
warehouse documentation also underwrites many, costly institutional
subscriptions that remain extraordinarily underused.
Box-checking
extends to a variety of fields. Many media are satisfied with pundits who fit
their formats, regardless of the strength of their arguments. Even the
philanthropic, aid and development sector, which plays a key role in sustaining
the knowledge production industry, is not always the lifeline it once was—and
which it could be. Increasingly, research is relegated to secondary functions,
such as surveys delegated to lesser operators in a chain of subcontractors, or
monitoring & evaluation focused on the impact of operational programming
that already occurred anyway.
Deep, hard-headed,
proactive, contextual analysis is something of an oddity among donors and
grant-makers, even though they increasingly draw on catchwords pertaining
to “needs”, “evidence” and “results.” Growing fatigue with in-depth
intellectual products makes it easier, arguably, to raise 100 000 dollars to
organize a two-day conference than to conduct a groundbreaking investigation
over a year. On the face of it, gathering 25 renowned experts in a room may
give funders more bang for their buck, but it doesn’t answer the question:
how do participants resource, in the period that precedes the event, the
fieldwork required to share meaningful findings around the table?
Erosion
The challenge in
maintaining high standards in the knowledge industry always circles back to
human capital. We cannot depend solely on talented individuals who somehow
follow and grasp events better than average, and reverberate their insight
around the web. Competence isn’t an accident, but rather the outcome of
deliberate, collective investment. This is, perhaps, where the industry is most
dangerously at risk.
There can be no
underestimating the sheer costs of quality research and reporting. A
high-performing news correspondent can easily represent a 250 000 dollar annual
expenditure, inclusive of salary, benefits, fieldwork, support staff and
various forms of overhead. A junior researcher may earn less than 30 000; but
throw in the resources needed for transportation, proper mentoring, management,
and so on, and he or she will total 75 000 a year in an organization’s budget.
This stands in stark contrast to articles paid in the low hundreds, or ten-page
reports commissioned to freelancers and compensated as little as 1 500.
The industry is
increasingly split—not unlike the global economy itself—between a small caste
of privileged employees and an army of underdogs competing to make it to a more
rewarding job. The happy few are no doubt praiseworthy, but—precisely because
they are a luxury in an industry in crisis—they are also expected to do more
than they can deliver. Some foreign correspondents write so much that they have
no time to actually report, and must instead rely on social media feeds, calls
to a rolodex of usual suspects, and rehashed material already on the web. Many
academics spend a crucial part of their time fundraising for the institutions
that employ them. Think tank employees are likewise under pressure, often at
the cost of solid fieldwork.
Meanwhile, as
discussed above, coverage tends to reflect the economic inflections of the
market—thus the concentration of available means around conventional
priorities. Massification around a given conflict or crosscutting topic also
results from, and reflects, a shrinking interface with the world in all its
complexity: publications big on international affairs deploy astonishingly few
correspondents abroad; thorough investigative journalism has waned to the point
of warranting a charitably-sponsored niche market; think tanks have a
decreasing global footprint, despite foreign-based outlets designed to suggest
otherwise; and academia struggles to resource long-term immersive
fieldwork. In this context, intense competition to get into, or remain in,
reasonably secure positions doesn’t favor creative or disruptive thinking.
It is time to reinvest in human capital
A particularly
troubling aspect of the current state of affairs in the knowledge industry is
how little attention is paid to training. Most skills are acquired and honed on
the job, in ad hoc fashion. The process requires appropriate management and
mentoring on the part of senior professionals who themselves lack bandwidth and
relevant managerial honing. News agencies hardly train the army of stringers
they draw upon; editors are often forced by time constraints to rewrite more
than they edit; and some consultancies exploit young graduates for their
ability to synthesize material they garner on the web, while failing to invest
in their research capacities proper.
There are numerous
signs of reinvention within the sector, and intriguing experiments underway, but
few genuine success stories to report so far. Some well-established journals,
such as The New York Times and The Economist, have
been adapting efficiently to an evolving market, blending old-fashioned assets
with digital savvy. Others, like Vox or Quartz, have grown out entirely from
the virtual public space, capturing a large audience—and proportionate
advertising shares—with quality reporting. But the business model of the large
majority of platforms engaged in deciphering the world is either ambiguous or
unsustainable. France offers two outstanding examples: XXI, which credibly
claims to combine the best of journalism with the best of editing, does so
without hiring staff—simply commissioning freelancers; Orient XXI, a unique and
widely-read website devoted to insightful, trilingual reporting on the Arab
world, owes much to retired professionals working pro bono.
The Uberisation of
the industry extends to consultancies, think tanks and development agencies,
who routinely supplement staff output with thrifty subcontracting of research
and writing. A vivacious “knowledge brokering” sector has in recent years
emerged around the need to connect clients with a question to experts with an
answer, under terms that only make economic sense if the knowledge providers
have other sources of income. In sum, what we are witnessing, across the board,
is a distortion between ever more intellectual output for ever less input, with
increasingly obvious impact on overall quality. This in turn has created
expanding space for highly partisan research and reporting outfits who combine
extreme forms of bias with deceptive professionalism and financial firepower.
A sectoral reset
The knowledge
industry has in many ways been giving a bad name to itself, contributing to a
general sense of disenchantment and disaffection that further damages its
prospects, in a self-reinforcing loop. To arrest this downward spiral, a
sectoral reset is in order. As in any other context, it will not occur fast or
unanimously. Rather, it will proceed from a small coalition of discerning
producers and consumers.
First,
forward-thinking elements among the public, whose role is indispensable even in
a non-monetary relationship, must come to terms with their own responsibility
in sustaining the kind of quality they believe they are owed. Ultimately, the
public will receive what it roots for—from videos of puking cats to
resource-intensive investigations. Tilting the balance toward the latter will
be a collective enterprise, in which the audience must, at a minimum,
contribute forms of moral support and consumer loyalty, find time to stop and
make use of what quality work is indeed available, and actively promote
valuable content.
Second, a core
segment of the industry’s paying clients, patrons and benefactors must think
through exactly what is expected from knowledge production, what are the needs
it fulfills, and what precisely is required to fulfill them. When such clients
engage in behavior as flippant as the public’s, the end result will be a downward
spiral from which everyone stands to lose. Currently, fatigue with existing
outfits is leading precious capital to be invested into new structures: banks,
insurance agencies and several billionaires are developing research capacities
on global issues, for instance, which have yet to prove their value-added. What
would help is a more consistent, mature, realistic and stable vision, flowing
from an open discussion, rather than random attempts at disruption.
Finally, knowledge
producers have much soul-searching to do. The absence of any serious, solemn
self-criticism on the part of their mainstream representatives is astounding.
As budgets shrink, competition intensifies and consumer disaffection grows more
patent, there hardly has been an attempt at analyzing our collective failures.
It is time to look into ways of resisting deleterious market trends,
reinvesting in human capital, and addressing the lack of both cooperation and
constructive emulation within the industry.
Such
introspection, starting with a hardheaded review of best and worst practices,
is a matter of survival; it is also a no-brainer if we are to retain a capacity
to intellectualize and navigate global change at a critical juncture. This
open-source platform aims to serve as a small step in that direction; Synaps,
for its part, ambitions to band up with others to lay some of the foundations
of a much-needed reinvention. The knowledge industry, for one thing, has all
the brainpower it takes to have a refreshing discussion.
17 May 2017
Illustration credit: Magnum Chaos by Lorenzo Lotto ; The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole on Wikipedia / public domain.
