Every summer for the past 32 years book, magazine and digital publishers, marketers, advertising and circulation executives, editors, designers, writers and people in search of their next career have gathered on the campus of Stanford University in Palo Alto California to attend the Stanford Professional Publishing Course (SPPC).
Mr. Michael Keller, after discussions, meetings with students, major publishing executives, and after reading the report of his “Surveyor”, has decided to “permanently close” the SPPC.
The SPPC was a week-long intensive course. It was the only one of its kind, where mid-career professionals from the U.S. and around the globe (40% of all attendees were from abroad) encountered the newest technologies, the smartest thinking and a community of their peers taught by a world-class faculty.
The need for a course that meets this need exists today more than any other time when both book and magazine publishing is in seismic transition. Members of the SPPC faculty are now working with universities who are currently deeply involved in publisher education and have an interest in offering an enriched Stanford-type program.
Michael Keller, on behalf of Stanford, has generously offered to assist in a transition by making available information that would be helpful. I will be keeping you up to date with our progress.
Stanford Closes Publishing Course, and Studies Possible Successor
The venerable Stanford Publishing Course for Professionals, serving book publishing and magazine professionals since 1978, has closed, a victim of both the economy and larger transitions in the program's core fields. Longtime director Holly Brady is leaving Stanford--saying she "expects to continue the conversation from another vantage point here in Silicon Valley"--and her staff has been dismissed. This move comes amidst broad cost-cutting at Stanford University, with the school recently disclosing a 27 percent drop in their endowment capital over the last fiscal year, with investment losses of approximately $3.5 billion. They reportedly cut over 400 positions earlier in the year and intend to layoff another 60 employees soon. University Librarian Michael Keller, who oversees the SPPC along with Stanford University Press and many other resources, says that the publishing program "is believed not to be capable of self-sustaining status." Keller writes: "It is deeply troubling to all of us who have been involved in the SPPC over the years, but the recession is affecting the publishing industries and higher education, as it has all other sectors of the global economy. The other factors are, of course, the fundamental changes wrought by the digital information revolution and its many aspects, the changes in reading habits and expectations of consumers of professionally written, edited, and published information, and the perturbations in the advertising arenas, also brought by the World Wide Web." Paid course attendance reportedly declined significantly last year on both the book and magazine sides. Brady echoes that "the problem that got us here is, of course, the digital transformation of the business which has caused so many layoffs in the publishing industry, coupled with the recession. When a company has laid off dozens of people and is struggling to survive itself, it's hard to send staffers to Stanford," regardless of the potential benefits.
Spurred by longtime SPPC faculty including Martin Levin, Dorothy Kalins and Paul Saffo, Keller has appointed managing director of Stanford University Press Geoffrey Burn as surveyor to study "whether another program with a revised pattern of revenue and a different programmatic governance structure might yield an SPPC that is self-sustaining." Other SPPC academic directors have joined in the efforts to enlist industry support to continue and reinvigorate the program and its reach.Keller, Burn and Levin will meet with course alumni at the Frankfurt Book Fair and are consulting with others in the book publishing community with interest and ideas for a revamped program. Burns's assessment and recommendations are due in January and Keller says he has reserved facilities for next summer "on the chance that the SPPC will be revitalized,...but there is no guarantee that the revitalization will occur."
The above appeared in Publishers Lunch Deluxe on September 30, 2009
Learn all about SPPC…
Make 2010 possible by letting me hear from you… email me at MLevin7276@aol.com. See you in Palo Alto in July 2010.
You can read all about the SPPC course and see photos of the students and faculty in action in the booklet below. To flip through the booklet click the right arrow, and to increase the size of each page click the Toggle Full Screen button in the top right corner of the Scribd viewer. If you wish to download and print a copy for yourself click this download link.
