NYMag Nails The Progress of Digital Publishing
NYMag‘s Daily Intel published today one of the many stories about the $1B purchase of Instagram by Internet giant Facebook. This story gets it right in so many ways.
What was a website is now a product, what was a webmaster is now a product manager, and, then the main point of this all — the content: “This is, after all, the way of our new product-based civilization — in order to participate as a citizen of the social web, you must yourself manufacture content.”
What’s next? Stay tuned, this buyout promises to shake up a lot of the landscape quite a bit.
The Ecosystem of Content
As the shift of available content continues to tilt to the digital side of the world, companies are finding that while becoming your own publisher is easier than it’s even been before, it’s not as easy as it looks.
Content connects, it informs, it entertains, but gets lost if it’s not managed well. As Ted McConnell states in his blog for AdAge, “Content Conundrum: How Owned Media Changes the Game“, in advertising there is a conundrum of connecting quality content with the audience.
Advertisers can manage the conundrum by thinking of content as part of brand experience and delivering it with care. Value, not persuasion, is at the center.
And, looking at the truly big picture:
Recently, in a room full of advertising brain trustees, one executive said, “The “new creative’ might be an ecosystem of content.” Brilliant. The brand lives in the connections, the juxtapositions, the inferences, the feeling of reciprocity.
So, how do you make that connection with your audience? Surround yourself with content professionals, and, as Arthur Rubinstein once said, “Practice.”
Blaming the Brand at Kodak
Leave it to marketers to blame the brand for Kodak’s failure, and not the product.
A very interesting article by Al Ries regarding the fall of Kodak. Instead of pointing out the fails and missteps the company has seen over the years that have brought them to bankruptcy, Ries contends that Kodak lost it all by not re-branding their digital products, to separate themselves from their film heritage.
Also interesting are some of the comments already rolling in. I tend to agree with commenter #1, metro xing, who in remarking about Kodak’s products, “Kodak had branded themselves to the industry as high end and to consumers as low end.” When I think of Kodak, I think of the best film in the industry, but cheap cameras, film and digital.
The next commenter, Tim Lundberg of London states he saw this coming years ago unless they “rebrand, diversify considerably or extrapolate their brand into other markets.” That rolls into the hindsight-is-20/20-category, but he finishes with an ominous thought of who will be the next giant to fall.
“A great case in point is Woolworth’s in the UK, a huge brand name that became a dinosaur over night and then extinct in the blink of an eye. We may even be having this conversation about Apple, or Intel or someone one day.”
The Lessons of Digital Content – Where is the Paperboy?
We’re past the point of just dabbling with content on the Internet. Gone are the days of pontificating “Content is King!” as you throw your print stories on your website and wait for the world to come to you. Content Marketing is more than a buzzword, and content management systems are becoming plug-and-play.
Mathew Ingram of GigaOM takes News Corp. founder Rupert Murdoch to task for a punchlist of online offenses the media baron has committed lately in the name of digital content.
Ingram continues on about the “democratization of distribution” and even newspaper paywalls – points and arguments that are making their way into stories more every day now. The answers aren’t necessarily clear yet, but what’s clear is that the next generation of publishers need to be better plugged into how the current –not future –readers get their content.
And we’re not just talking about newspapers. Companies of all kind are now publishers. Whether they’re selling cars, cans of cola, or where to eat dinner, content is your connection to the customer.
Today’s reader is now in control. They get more information about a company from the Internet or from each other than they do from any advertising. They know how to research and find content.
Gone is the paperboy on his bike delivering the news to the doorstep. What publishers need to know now, is how to better deliver.
The Lessons Learned from Kodak and Fujifilms
The Economist has a great story on why Fujifilm is surviving while Kodak is fading away. The correlations with the publishing world jump out in this article. For instance:
Both firms realised that digital photography itself would not be very profitable. “Wise businesspeople concluded that it was best not to hurry to switch from making 70 cents on the dollar on film to maybe five cents at most in digital,” says Mr Matteson. But both firms had to adapt; Kodak was slower.
Swap out “classified advertising” with “digital photography” and you have newspaper publishing in the 1990′s. And:
Another reason why Kodak was slow to change was that its executives “suffered from a mentality of perfect products, rather than the high-tech mindset of make it, launch it, fix it,”
Newspapers have traditionally collected the news, decided what was the most useful, then distributed to their readers. Before the Internet very few people had access to information like publishers did.
Take some time to read the full story, it applies to many industries beyond publishing and manufacturing.
And yes, the irony is not lost here that I’m quoting, and linking, to a story for free.
Fujifilm has mastered new tactics and survived. Film went from 60% of its profits in 2000 to basically nothing, yet it found new sources of revenue. Kodak, along with many a great company before it, appears simply to have run its course. After 132 years it is poised, like an old photo, to fade away.
Generational News Publishing
For generations, how we received news has changed.
Ok, a bit of a “harumph” here, but this piece reminds me of the “Filter Bubble,” argument so well described by Eli Pariser.
Clicking on links on a news website is not like reading a newspaper because there’s so much information online that only the links already of interest get clicked. That’s like political conservatives only going to Fox News for their news, or liberals relying only on MSNBC. And it may be another contributing factor to the political polarization of America, each side oblivious to the concerns of the other.
Editors, Algorithms, and the New Media
I had a very enjoyable and informative breakfast with a good friend the other day. He’s the editor of a large suburban newspaper in the Chicago area, and they are taking a pretty bold step in the digital subscription front (don’t call them paywalls, he asks.)
That day he wrote in his column, Talk with the Editor, about how a train crash was covered differently by the local newspapers. In the column, I think he hits the nail right on the head when he says:
Meanwhile, with the increased fragmentation of the audience for news and information, newspapers more and more are understanding an age-old truth: To be valuable, we have to be different. And we have to have our own personality.
It speaks volumes to the fact that newspapers have to find their niche again in the publishing scheme with readers of today, and especially tomorrow.
The next day, Matt Silverman of Mashable.com, wrote on a similar subject in his story, How Algorithms and Editors Can Work Together to Burst the “Filter Bubble” citing my of my favorite TED videos of all time, Eli Pariser’s TED talk about “filter bubbles.”
It’s a column that is worth a read for all journalists and news consumers. He writes about “7 Things That Personalization Algorithms Do Poorly” and some ideas on how to fix that.
Where newspapers will be in the next few years is still up to the people behind the scenes of those newspapers, but one thing is for sure, they’ll need to find their own voice along the way.
Patents as Assets, like Google’s Purchase of Motorola Mobility
Interesting timing, as the day after I listen to This American Life’s episode, “When Patents Attack,” Google buys Liberyville, IL based Motorola Mobility.
Within minutes of the surprise announcement, the attention has turned from Google buying a company that is their largest Android phone builder, to a warehouse of patents.
Quick reactions from Forbes, Marketwatch, and an enormous (and growing) list of stories from one of my favorite aggregators of tech news, Techmeme have turned this to a story about patents as assets. TAL does a very good job of digging into the history and maybe future of how we invent.
