"'The electronic explosion has changed the entire nature of the business,' Carlinsky says. In the past, articles sold to a periodical essentially 'turned into a pumpkin with no value' once they were published. 'But the electronic revolution has extended the shelf life of content of periodicals. You can now take individual articles and put them into a virtual bookstore or put them on a virtual newsstand.'
The second major change in recent years, he says, is 'an increasing trend to more and more publications being owned by fewer larger and larger companies that tend to be international media conglomerates. They are connected corporately with an enormous array of enterprises that might be interested in secondary use of materials'."
To get secondary rights, "the National Writers Union has created a new agency called the Publication Rights Clearinghouse (PRC). Based on the music industry's ASCAP [American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers], PRC will track individual transactions and pay out royalties to writers for secondary rights for previously used articles. For $20, freelance writers who have secondary rights to previously published articles can enroll in PRC. These articles become part of a PRC file that is licensed to database companies." Several companies participate, including UnCover, both a fax reprint service and the world's largest database of magazine and journal articles.
9.3. Multimedia Convergence
Because of computerization and communication technologies, previously distinct information-based industries, such as printing and publishing, graphic design, the media, sound recording and film-making, are converging into one industry. Information is their common product.
Wilfred Kiboro, Managing Director and Chief Executive of Nation Printers and
Publishers Ltd, Kenya, made the following comments during the ILO Symposium on
Multimedia Convergence held in January 1997:
"In content creation in the multimedia environment, it is very difficult to know who the journalist is, who the editor is, and who the technologist is that will bring it all together. At what point will telecom workers become involved as well as the people in television and other entities that come to create new products? Traditionally in the print media, for instance, we had printers, journalists, sales and marketing staff and so on, but now all of them are working on one floor from one desk."
Journalists and editors working on-screen could go directly from text to page make-up, which eliminated the need for rekeying and shifted preliminary typesetting functions from the production to the editorial staff. In book publishing, digitization has speeded up the editorial process, which used to be sequential, by allowing the copy editor, the art editor and the layout staff to work at the same time on the same book.
Employers try to convince us that the use of new information and communication technologies will create new jobs, whereas unions are sure of the contrary.
Heinz-Uwe Rübenach, of the Federal Association of German Newspaper Publishers (Bundesverband Deutscher Zeitungsverleger), carried out an inquiry relating to the on-line services and the staff of European newspaper publishers.