Tag Archives: publishing models

Can Content Save Publishers? Only If They Wake Up

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In an article on Min Online this week, Judy Franks of The Marketing Democracy suggests that traditional media companies are faltering because they don’t value content. Though at first it might seem odd to say that businesses built on content don’t value it, she has a point.

As she explains, pure content businesses like magazines are just one of three types of media options for advertisers. Beyond the “paid media” that advertising represents, they also have the “owned media” of their own blogs, Facebook pages, and twitter accounts, and the “earned media” of online word-of-mouth.   Of these three components, the paid-media element seems the most vulnerable. If you have strong owned and earned media, why pay a third party for theirs?

Great content—at which traditional media excel—should be a compelling reason. But Franks thinks the industry has largely ignored it:

“Unfortunately, we have trained marketers through years of selling that the media are distribution conduits to audiences. We have talked about circulation numbers, demographic readership, readers per copy, and potential/actual ‘exposures’ to ads. We calculate economic value based upon opportunities to see (OTS). We have done little to sell marketers on the value of the content experiences, themselves.”

As a career editor I’m biased, but Franks’s analysis rings true. Though there has been plenty of lip service by the sales, marketing, and circulation types that largely dominate trade publishing, their real interest and belief in content has all too often been minimal. But now that advertisers no longer need publishers for distribution, what’s left to offer them? Content, of course.

With enough effort advertisers can create all the high-value content they need, but most do not have the experience or scale to do so. In theory, publishers still do. But in practice, many have been decimating the very source of their content—their editorial departments.

Content is the key to recovery for traditional independent publishers, not the impediment. Why don’t more of them realize it?

 

Digital Drudgery and Second-Stage Shovelware

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In a post earlier this month, I raised the sensitive question of whether legacy print journalists might be unduly worried about the workload involved in social media. It spurred a substantial number of comments, and even played a small role in that all-too rara avis, a blog post by Paul Conley.

In the most recent comment yesterday, my friend and mentor Howard Rauch argued that excessive digital workloads are very real phenomena for B2B editors. He’s right, of course. But in my reply, I struggled to make the case that the problem is not inherent in online media, but that it lies instead in the tendency of legacy publishers to treat digital media like print.

I didn’t put it very well. But today, without knowing he was doing it, blogger Adam Tinworth rode to my rescue. The problem, he explains, is second-stage shovelware.

The occasion for Tinworth’s observations was his desire to defend liveblogging as a journalistic undertaking. He argues that the criticisms being slung at The Guardian’s liveblog coverage of the Christchurch earthquake are based in a confusion of print and digital media. The journalists who object to liveblogging, he suggests, don’t understand that it is process-driven rather than product-driven:

“Most journalists think in a goal-driven way. It is the finished product that matters; the 350-word inverted pyramid that captures the essence of the story; the 3,000 words, 3 DPS feature on a certain topic. That, though, is a product of the historic fact that a magazine or newspaper was finished. The page was set, the presses rolled, the story concluded. Sure, you could follow it up in the next issue, but the original story was done.

“The internet does not possess this quality. Nothing on the internet has to be finished. . . . Websites never go to press. The medium is a different one, and allows different forms of journalism.”

The problem for many journalists and publishers is that they don’t see the full extent of this difference. While, as Tinworth notes, they have advanced beyond simply shoveling previously published print copy online, they are stuck in a second stage of shovelware: “where you’ve accepted that internet is a viable medium of first publication, but you’re still using nothing but print formats.”

When Rauch points to e-mail newsletters as a key villain in digital drudgery, he’s underscoring the failure of legacy publishers to understand digital media. All they’re doing is stuffing a print-era product into an e-mail skin. In Tinworth’s terminology, they are stuck in the second stage of shovelware.

It’s a shame on at least two counts. First, these publishers are failing to exploit the unique journalistic advantages of the Web. Second, they are taking an exciting new medium for journalists and making it look like drudgery and grunt work.

It’s understandable that those who work for such publishers are upset. The digital workloads many journalists and editors are being handed are indeed excessive. But the real cause for complaint is this: It’s not just too much work, it’s the wrong work.

A Lesson from the Digital Productivity Terrorists

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Portrait by Joi Ito (joi.ito.com), licensed CC-BY

Doctorow: Productivity Terrorist?

Some time ago I came across this comment from BoingBoing blogger Cory Doctorow that inspires both shock and awe: “As a co-parenting new father who writes at least a book per year, half-a-dozen columns a month, ten or more blog posts a day, plus assorted novellas and stories and speeches, I know just how short time can be and how dangerous distraction is.” Doctorow’s intent, I think, is to inspire, but his example is just as likely to depress.

Doctorow is just one of a relatively new breed of writers and reporters who, as digital natives working predominantly online, produce as much in one day as many print writers used to come up with in a month. To the traditional print journalist, their new ethos of digital productivity is not just foreign, it’s al-Qaeda foreign. They are publishing terrorists, threatening the placid print way of life.

From the print perspective, digital media and excessive workloads go hand in hand. Commenting on a Folio: magazine blog last week, an anonymous “Exhausted Editor” bemoaned an increasing digital workload: “I’ve got enough junk to write/post/cover. . . I’m tired of writing the stories, cooking the meals, flying the corporate digital jet and waxing the furniture—figuratively, of course.” And yesterday, B2B editorial consultant (and—full disclosure—my long-time mentor) Howard Rauch tweeted that “continuously overloading B2B editors with digital responsibilities undoubtedly is key reason why original content is dying a slow death.”

As a bred-in-the-bone print editor, I sympathize. And yet I wonder. Is it just our old print ways, our preconceptions and work habits, that make digital workloads look so extreme? We say that quality will invariably suffer with increased output. But does it? The content farms may be spewing out tons of junk, but there’s another digital press corps, found in news sites like Mashable, Engadget, TechCrunch, and ReadWriteWeb, that match high productivity with high quality.

Marshall Kirkpatrick

Kirkpatrick: Workload grueling but great

The prodigious output of some of these writers is inconceivable to most old-guard print people. Earlier this week, ReadWriteWeb co-editor Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote on Twitter (post now deleted) that  he was looking to hire a writer “to produce 5 solid web tech news articles a day, 5 days a week.”  Was this an unreasonable expectation? Maybe so. Fellow twitterer @Alex replied that few could meet this standard: “turns out the number of people who can do that is around 20. And we all have jobs.”

In a subsequent article on ReadWriteWeb, “I Worked on the AOL Content Farm & It Changed My Life,” Kirkpatrick acknowledged that he has indeed been having trouble filling the position. But his title suggests that he sees productivity not as a rare natural talent, but as the product of training. As he recounts in this article and another, he began his career blogging for AOL and two other sites, producing 10 to 12 posts a day. “It was grueling,” he writes, “and it was great.”

What is notably missing from Kirkpatrick’s career path is any exposure to print journalism. There was simply no one to tell him that his productivity was unreasonable.

It is—or was—quite otherwise in print. In my experience, the working environment of a print operation, particularly for monthly publications, was rarely conducive to what now passes for productivity. Yet we were exactly as productive as we needed to be. The deadlines were met, the pages were filled, and our readers were satisfied.

Now, though, digital media have set the bar much higher. There is no longer a limited number of pages to fill, but an infinite amount of cyberspace. Print veterans will have to reset their expectations and definitions of productivity. If not, they will simply fade away along with their medium.

Although it may be messy, the transition to digital does not have to be painful. As a first step, print editors might consider Kirkpatrick’s implied advice about digital workloads: to see them not as a threat, but an opportunity.

Commodity Content, Demand Media, and Quality

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Demand Media LogoAre commodity content and quality incompatible? That seems to be the underlying assumption of most discussions of  Demand Media’s “frothy” IPO successfully concluded yesterday. Ominously, perhaps, that event was preceded by Google’s promise last week to clamp down on high-ranking content-farm sites with “shallow or low-quality content.”

The terms content farm and content factory are meant to be disparaging, as if content is worthless if it isn’t lovingly crafted by hand. Even Demand Media’s CEO is insulted by the label. But the choice of metaphors is odd. Do we really think farms and factories are bad things? Or that the commodities they produce are worthless? Far from it. Their output is essential to modern life.

Likewise, commodity content is essential to publishing, especially B2B publishing and content marketing. Yes, there are unique and exciting developments to cover in any B2B industry, but most B2B media are built on a platform of commodity content.

This is not a new development. Early in my career I was the editor of an industrial product tabloid magazine. Consisting almost entirely of brief descriptions of new products, it was scarcely a glamorous publication. Though now and then it did cover some new, breakthrough technology, the bulk of it was pure, boring commodity content.

Yet through most the 1990s, it prospered. Readers and advertisers alike loved it because it fulfilled an essential need: the discovery of new materials, components, and services.

But the key reason for the magazine’s early success, I believe, was the premium it put on editorial quality. Though many of the products we wrote about were mundane, we made sure the descriptions were readable, accurate, pertinent, and objective. For us, there was nothing about commodity content that was incompatible with quality.

By 2000, of course, the die was cast, and the magazine began a long decline. The Internet is vastly more efficient than print as a tool of discovery.

Demand Media is all about the discovery of commodity content.  It is brilliantly geared towards identifying basic information needs on the Internet and fashioning content that meets those needs efficiently. The element it lacks so far is quality.

That isn’t to say the company is not aiming for quality, or not at least claiming to. CEO Richard Rosenblatt told the L. A. Times yesterday that Demand Media has put in place a “rigorous quality process,” in which each article is “touched by 14 humans, titling, writing, fact checking and copy editing.” The argument would be more compelling if it weren’t so easy to find failures of the quality process (evidently the titler on this one was having a bad day).

The weirdly fascinating thing for me about Demand Media is how it wants to build a high-growth business on commodity content. I’m not convinced it’s possible.

Private equity investors tried to do something similar in the last decade by betting big on B2B publishing as a platform for rapid growth. For most of them, it was a bad bet. The commodity content that B2B publications are built on is essential, but plentiful, and therefore cheap. Quality, the one thing that can distinguish commodity content, is expensive. So the only clear high-growth strategy is to cut expenses, which means cutting quality. As private equity investors discovered, that strategy is not sustainable.

Demand Media has done a brilliant job of recognizing the value of commodity content and making it easily discoverable.  But if it can’t match that brilliance in finding a low-cost way to improve the quality of its content, it may be doomed. Commodity content without editorial quality is a loser’s game.

UPDATE: Really, Demand Media, it doesn’t have to be this bad.

Publishers and the iPad: No Future in Control

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Control. Magazine publishers love it. Especially B2B publishers (why do you think they call it “controlled circulation”?).

Or at least they love it until someone else has it. Then it’s evil.

To a cynical eye like mine, this seems to be the back story to the ongoing tussle between periodical publishers and Apple over the management of magazine app subscriptions. The publishers want to control the subscription process and have full access to subscriber data; Apple wants to keep that control to itself, skim off 30% of the subscription price, and give publishers limited access to the data. As aptly summarized by Peter Kafka, “Magazine publishers used to salivate over the iPad. Now they’re a lot more reserved. ”

What was it that got publishers drooling in the first place? The opportunity to reassert control.

Let’s face it, most publishers have never really embraced the Web. Its openness is a direct challenge to their traditional models of operation. It makes it too hard to control who gets their product, how much they can charge for it, and who they have to compete against. The iPad seemed to offer them a chance to grab back a big chunk of the control the Web was taking away from them. It gave publishers, as Cory Doctorow put it, “a daddy figure who’ll promise them that their audience will go back to paying for their stuff.”

Of course, daddy figures have a downside: if you want complete control, you probably shouldn’t do business with them.

So should publishers turn their back on the iPad? Or should they simply accept Apple’s conditions? Not necessarily. The iPad and other tablets are really distinct new forms of media that offer users a new way of experiencing content, and to the extent that Apple is putting up hurdles to that experience, publishers are right to fight back.

But the future of publishing is openness, not walled gardens; sharing, not limiting. If their main motive for battling Apple is simply to increase their control, publishers may ultimately find they have no future at all.