CARTOON CAROUSEL World’s cartoonists on this week’s events
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'City life has changed, people have changed, and Time Out has changed too.'
The transformation appears to be working for the group, with its most recent half-year results showing digital media revenue rose by 65 per cent, helping its overall media sales climb by a better-than-expected 43 per cent.
Dining success: Time Out Lisbon is one of the Portuguese capital's top tourist attractions
'To drive the business forward,' he says, 'you sometimes have to be ready to let go of elements of your portfolio that no longer feel like the future – our audience is now digital all day, every day, so that's where Time Out needs to be.'
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...The plans signify Time Out's highly commercial operations, one far removed from its beginnings as a countercultural weekly where readers could learn about upcoming marches against the Vietnam War in a section entitled 'Agitprop.'
Named after a Dave Brubeck jazz album, the business was founded by Tony Elliott, who realized London lacked a periodical detailing the vast range of cultural events happening throughout the capital.
Entrepreneur: Time Out founder Tony Elliott (pictured) built the firm into a global powerhouse
Its crudely-printed debut edition sold 5,000 copies, but that number had soared six-fold by the early 1970s when it was publishing reviews, news and interviews with the likes of David Bowie and Andy Warhol, and hiring Monty Python as guest editors.
The magazine espoused a noticeably left-wing bent during the period, campaigning on issues like gay rights and civil liberties, which it combined with a healthy appetite for investigative journalism.
That muckraking spirit reached its pinnacle in 1976 when, in an article entitled 'The Eavesdroppers,' journalists Mark Hosenball and Duncan Campbell revealed the existence of a shadowy intelligence organisation called GCHQ.
It caused such an outcry that Hosenball was deported to the US, and Campbell and his colleague Crispin Aubrey were tried under the Official Secrets Act. Both were found guilty, although they received no punishment.
Yet while the magazine achieved a victory for press freedom, its reputation for radicalism would gradually seep away during the Thatcher era as it adopted a more consumerist outlook. . .
The London print magazine may have gone, but popularity-wise, the business has seen its online audience continue multiplying, reaching 73.1 million per month at last count, a 28 per cent increase on 2019 volumes.
Yet even if digital may be the future of media, people still crave the need to socialise over a burger or beer, something that has changed little since the first Time Out London edition listed health food restaurants under a section labelled 'Rabbit Food.'
This gives Time Out markets an ideal opening to become institutions as big as the magazine in its heyday.
For the markets business to steadily grow, it needs the right locations, managing partners and constant reinvention 'to keep it fresh, exciting and relevant,' says Fiona Orford-Williams, a senior analyst at Edison Group.
In the immediate term, she warns, the cost-of-living crisis will dampen trade as cash-strapped households skimp on eating out, travelling and entertainment.
Nonetheless, the company's association with going out and enjoying yourself makes it well-placed to attract advertisers and businesses operating in the markets.
That reputation for having a good time has always been one of Time Out's greatest strengths, even while the group has transformed itself in almost every other way.
It is hard to imagine that going away, whatever changes the firm decides to pursue."
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Broadband Internet is something many of us take for granted these days. Long gone are the squeals and squawks of a 56K modem and downloads that took half a day and tied up your phone line for hours. Nowadays, we have the luxury of high-speed Internet and can choose from a fixed broadband line or a 5G option.
Since the Nature Index was first introduced in 2014, China’s Share has been rapidly gaining ground, and it was the leading country in the physical sciences and chemistry in 2021.
The latest data — a snapshot of the database taken in April, ahead of the full release of 2022 data in the 2023 Nature Index annual tables — suggest that China also overtook the United States in Earth and environmental sciences for the first time. This leaves only one natural-sciences category — life sciences — in which it is still trailing.
The Chinese Academy of Sciences’s Ming’antu observing station in China’s Inner Mongolia autonomous region.Credit: Lian Zhen/Xinhua/Alamy
"For the first time, China has overtaken the United States as the number one ranked country or territory for contributions to research articles published in the Nature Index group of high-quality natural-science journals.
Data on author affiliations from the 82 journals tracked by the Nature Index show that China had a Share of 19,373 from January to December 2022, compared with 17,610 for the United States (see ‘Role reversal’).
A country’s Share takes into account the percentage of authors from that nation on each paper published in Nature Index journals; an article published entirely by China-based researchers would yield a Share of 1 for China.
Different measures of scientific performance have been pointing to a shift in the national balance of global science since the mid-2010s: a 2018 US National Science Foundation data set showed that China published the largest number of papers, for example.
The focus in the past five years has been on when China might overtake the United States on metrics that attempt to measure quality, such as assessments of citation numbers.
For instance, a 2022 report by Japan’s National Institute of Science and Technology Policy used fractional counting, or the percentage of authors from a given country on a paper, to determine contributions to highly cited research. It found that, between 2018 and 2020, Chinese research comprised more of the top 1% of the most frequently cited papers than did US research.
Source: Nature Index
Although the Nature Index does not assess citations, it tracks journals, selected by an independent group of actively publishing researchers, that are intended to represent a consensus of the upper echelon of journals in the natural sciences. (Nature Index’s news and supplement content is editorially independent of its publisher, Springer Nature.)
Caroline Wagner, a science and policy researcher at the Ohio State University in Columbus, who has published research1 suggesting that China has overtaken the United States on top-cited papers, says that, when measured on “simple bibliometrics like productivity and citations, China has outperformed expectations”.
She adds, however, that it still “significantly trails” behind other nations “in its capacity to absorb and apply knowledge”, and that the impact of the decline in its research collaborations with some major countries, such as the United States, remains uncertain. . .
The Nature Index data do show that China has still a way to go before it catches the United States on Count, a raw sum of all articles in the database that have at least one author from a particular country. In the same January to December 2022 window, the United States had a Count of almost 25,200 articles, compared with slightly more than 23,500 for China.
A brief guide to the Nature Index
In two major multidisciplinary journals included in the Index, Nature and Science, the United States had a Share of 786, much higher than China’s 186.
The 2023 Nature Index annual tables, due for release in mid-June, will provide a full breakdown of the institutions that have helped to propel China to the top in Share last year.
The tables will also feature, for the first time, data on publications in a set of high-quality medical journals that will be added to the Nature Index, so that users can also track trends in the health sciences."
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-01705-7
