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The industry today Publishing in the knowledge economy statistics are collected, which still tends to be confined to the old divisions of books, newspapers and periodicals. This division is adhered to by official bodies, such as the Office of National Statistics and Eurostat. These bodies inevitably lag behind developments in the economy by some years because of the need to gain broad agreement on industry and trade classifications – these aren’t lightly changed because of the importance of comparison over time and between countries. These problems are exacerbated in a sector like publishing where the speed and extent of change has been significant in recent years. However, the industry itself has also largely collected statistics on the basis of the traditional divisions. Of course, it may be argued that any system of collection must be product focused rather than company focused, since a single company can produce a wide range of products across many industries. The difficulty in publishing is that the core asset – content – can be manifested in a range of forms. It may be the identical content, but it may have added-value features – for example in its electronic form it may be searchable or it may be possible to integrate it into the customer’s own computer system. It may be complementary content, for example many newspaper websites differ from the printed edition of the paper. The current data collection process does not really capture that dynamic in any way. 2.3.2 Comparisons Some sectors are highly exposed to international competition through trade, while others are, for various reasons, largely protected. In the case of much of the publishing sector this protection is due to language and cultural barriers to the import of published goods from elsewhere, as well as to the physical problems of distributing time-critical products, such as newspapers, across large distances. While the Internet has exposed some products, for example the Financial Times, to international competition in its home market, the effect is still marginal to the newspaper sector as a whole. Book publishing is a sector where international trade is important but, increasingly, it is difficult to measure its performance solely by means of the trade balance. This is because the industry is becoming more globalised: as well as being exported, books are licensed to local publishers, or produced overseas by the company itself or sent electronically to be printed on demand in local markets. The revenue from these activities is treated in different ways by different publishers, but generally the results are opaque to the outside observer. 2.4 Alternative approaches to measuring competitiveness If products are internationally traded, then clearly the trade balance is one way of measuring competitiveness. In the absence of this, the main approach taken was to attempt to measure the efficiency with which companies within a sector use inputs, or its productivity, in other words. This is because the sector’s outputs form inputs to the rest of the economy and therefore its efficiency or otherwise is a benefit or a cost to other parts of the economy. A sector’s output may form part of the infrastructure of an economy, which also has a major impact on other economic activity. In the case of publishing, its outputs are part of the cultural and political life of the country as well as inputs to other economic activity. For some sectors, the price of output is the key variable of concern (as an input to other sectors). For publishing, price is important (for example books and newspapers need to be within the reach of the mass of people, and the price of business information is significant for company competitiveness), but variety, innovation and quality are also extremely important. In addition, we must try to benchmark a sector’s performance against the performance of corresponding sectors in other countries. 2.5 Dual product markets Many publishing products (newspapers, magazines, some directories and newsletters, much electronic publishing, exhibitions and > 7
Publishing in the knowledge economy The industry today some events and conferences) operate in dual product markets, where the publisher sells a product to an end-user (whether consumer or business) but also sells the attention of that end-user to an advertiser. For these publishers, the growth and distribution of advertising expenditure is critical, as well as the growth and distribution of consumer spending and trends in revenue growth and profitability for the corporate sector. The competitiveness of large parts of the industry is certainly substantially self-defined in terms of its ability to attract advertising revenue. Hence the importance accorded to advertising data in the indicators. 8
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