The End of the Beginning

Even more powerful than Rupert Murdoch…

The closing of the 150-year old Rocky Mountain News was certainly a troubling harbinger of where print is headed. Now word is out that The New York Times is threatening to close The Boston Globe (which they paid an astonishing $1.1 billion for only a decade ago), unless the unions take deep pay cuts.

We are well beyond the canary in the coal mine. The coal mine is clearly collapsing all around us.

However, word out of London today, via The Guardian that the world’s oldest book publishing house is also on the ropes is sobering news indeed – yet another victim of the digital revolution.

Cambridge University Press, founded in 1534 by King Henry VIII, was the King’s reaction to the impact of the then new technology of the printing press.

Henry himself was much influence by the press, as he was one of the first monarchs to read (and agree with) the printed work of Martin Luther (1517) condemning the Pope and the Catholic church (with whom Henry had his own personal problems).  It is probable that Luther’s printed words did much to influence the King to break with Rome and establish The Church of England and drive much of the Protestant Revolution.

A child of the new technology himself (Henry would have been the equivalent of today’s President using a blackberry or the web), Henry sought to take control of this wild new technology as much as he could. Thus he established the first and now the longest operating publishing house in the world.

Cambridge University Press has, for the last 425 years, published the work of such luminaries as John Milton, Sir Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and Stephen Hawking.  It has been an intellectual beacon for the world.

Now, that beacon is on the verge of being extinguished.

The Press is reportedly losing £2 million a year. Certainly a rounding error for places like Citicorp or AIG, but enough, apparently, to drive CUP to closing its doors forever.

In 1942, following the Allied victory at El Alamein, Churchill remarked “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

As the digital revolution sweeps across every aspect of a world that was and has been print driven since 1452, we are going to see more and more institutions fail and collapse.  Newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, TV stations and networks, phone companies.  All of them. No one will be immune.

We are going to experience a complete transformation of society and culture and industry; a transformation that the world has not experienced since the printing press left its own mark on western culture some 500 years ago.

All of our institutions – from Cambridge University Press to The Boston Globe to NBC News are functions of that one piece of technology (yes, even TV, which is architected like a newspaper – one source delivered to many). All of them are going to go through an almost unimaginable transformation.

That does not mean that there is no apetitite for content or news. On the contrary, the demand has never been stronger. But the institutions we built over the past 500 years are derivative, to a large extent, of that one revolutionary piece of technology that was the centerpiece for all the rest – the press.

Now that press is being made obsolete with incredible speed.

What will replace it?

No one knows, but many people are starting to play with new ideas; ideas as radical and revolutionary as Henry’s Cambridge University Press must have seemed in 1534.