Social Media and the Decline of Editing

Earlier this month, after writing his final column for Inc. magazine, Joel Spolsky blogged about his experience in the magazine world. His feelings, clearly, were mixed:

“Writing for Inc. was an enormous honor, but it was very different than writing on my own website. Every article I submitted was extensively rewritten in the [...]

Signals of Quality vs. Good SEO

Last month, I wrote about a discussion on an episode of This Week in Google (TWiG) featuring Google’s Matt Cutts. I noted that Cutts seemed to say that Google was aware of the rise of so-called content farms like Demand Media and that it would adjust its search algorithm so that low-quality commodity content didn’t [...]

Blogging Strategies: Post in Haste, Promote at Leisure

My lizard brain, always scanning the horizon for reasons not to publish, got very excited yesterday.

Thanks to a Twitter lead from @TomPick, I came across an article by Devin Sugameli offering “5 Tips for More ReTweets.” Sugameli’s final tip for how to get more views of your blog posts was “Don’t [...]

A Lesson from Demand Media: Embrace Your Commodity Content

Editors of trade publications are confirmed believers in the preeminence of high-quality content. In their minds, everything in their publications is or should be outstanding. But the fact is, across-the-board brilliance is rarely possible, or even, perhaps, desirable.

Like it or not, there is a role in most publications for run-of-the-mill, commodity content. The challenge for [...]

The Shift to New Media Cannot Be Gradual

CJR: Huge culture gap between print and online

In the B2B publisher’s dream world, the transition to online media would come as a natural evolution from print. The vocabulary, the ethos, the culture, the methods would all be organic extensions of print.

Reality, of course, is brutally different.

The shift to online media is not an extrapolation [...]

Gimmicks and the Decline of Print

In an article published this week on Folio:‘s Web site, Jill Ambroz reviews a panoply of print “innovations” that, she writes, “are breathing fresh air into a mature industry that is battling its own digital counterparts for survival.” It’s hard to tell how seriously she takes these innovations, especially as she twice refers to them [...]