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Monday, February 08, 2010

The Rebirth of Print: Time for the New Aggregation Plays to Take Off

Somewhere in the world today a printing press operation is preparing to go dark. Mind you, it's not a universal phenomenon; in markets such as India, where a burgeoning middle class is hungry for news and not yet equipped with an abundance of electronic media sources, print media is actually growing. Scholarly publishers are still doing well their premium journals and custom print for B2B and consumer markets is thriving. But in many developed media markets print operations are struggling to stay alive, with 2010 expected to be a year in which newsstands begin to display significantly fewer titles. Barnes and Noble, with its Nook ebook reader, offers free wireless in their stores as a bundled part of the service, trying to encourage both browsers and coffee-drinkers to make more use of their "big box" stores real estate. It's a Web-eat-paper world, and the publishing industry is wearing newsprint shorts.

Yet the broader picture of print is that print publishing technology has never been more sophisticated, cost-effective and capable. Many of the same technologies that enable the Web also enable printing presses to deliver mass-customized printing runs, allowing wholesale book distributors such as Ingram to deliver profitable print runs for titles with as few as two ordered units. Mass print customization also allows ever more effective tailored marketing materials, allowing highly customized color post cards, brochures and other high-value communications tools at very competitive prices. In short, print rocks, if you do the right things with it.

The wrong thing to do with print is to expect to do the same thing again and again and expect different results. That is, as many will tell you, the definition of insanity. Unfortunately, this is the insanity that grips much of the B2B and consumer publishing industry. I paid a short visit to the recent Professional Scholarly Publishing 2010 conference in Washington, DC, though far less time than the event deserved. I was encouraged by the American Institute of Physics winning a PROSE award for their work to advance scholarly publishing through its Web-enabled services. Yet at the same time I was confronted by a surprisingly young attendee who had a hard time getting his head around the definition of publishing that I had used in my book Content Nation, which embraces social media as a key form of publishing. He saw this concept as "too broad" a definition of publishing. In spite of many advances in electronic publishing, many people at the heart of the publishing industry still see the traditional business model and functions of publishing as the "real" publishing industry. You can see this attitude in many of the efforts to adopt electronic publishing platforms that enable content to look more like print publications, as if waiting for the Web to give up its "defects" in failing to adapt to their ways of doing business.

Well, certainly the Web is still a relatively young form of publishing technology, in spite of its rapid advances. But it is not the Web that has failed publishing: it is publishing that has failed publishing. It's only as red ink has flowed liberally in the past couple of years that many publishers have made the hard decisions to adjust their staffing levels to the revenues that they can expect in a Web-first world. There are simply far too may substitute information sources available to the average person that can be discovered via search and social media tools to justify the dedicated brand approach to publishing that most publishers use as their fundamental business premise. If "a brand is what a brand does," then most publishing brands just don't do what Web publishing outlets such as Google and Bing do. If that "doing" doesn't align with the classic "dos" of publishing but still satisfies markets, that doesn't mean that it's not publishing.

This brings us back to print, where, in spite of the capabilities of mass print customization, most publishers insist on creating print artifacts on a mass scale that are in essence the same. Yes, you get some zip code-level tailoring of ads, sometimes, and perhaps some regional content, but it still isn't dawning on most publishers that the real opportunities in print are in creating highly customized artifacts on a massive scale. These are still seen by most publishers as "ancillary revenues," much as they saw Web operations as a little bit of gravy on top of the meat of their print revenues. But now that Web revenues have to sustain them more as their meat in many instances, most publishers have failed to position their print operations as highly targeted and highly profitable value-add operations, Instead, they continue to seek out ever-slimmer markets for mass-produced print content, either resigning themselves to smaller audiences or seeking out larger audiences with ever-slimmer slices of least-common-denominator content that offers little long-term brand value either as a product or as a service.

The answer to this problem can be seen in a now-familiar model: Google. Instead of trying to assemble a portal of perfectly curated content for specific audiences to consume over an indefinite period of time, Google decided to focus on search as a tool to curate content tailored to specific people's needs at specific moments. Each search result is a publication, with its own editorial rules, tailored ads and features. It happens to be a publication assembled from any number of sources, selected based on the editorial recommendations of people using content on the Web, via Google's ever-changing PageRank algorithms.

The question is, why haven't publishers awoken to the opportunities to take a Google-like approach to print? Just as the advantages of search technologies are largely wasted on relatively small collections of content, so are the advantages of today's mass-customizable printing technologies wasted on relatively small collections of content collected by a particular publishing house. The Web exists, and will, in all likelihood, never cease to exist as a medium that reduces distribution costs and speeds to near-zero levels.

This means that print as a platform must adapt to Web economics to deliver optimal results. To do this, print media must adopt a Google-like model of source-agnostic content aggregation tuned to the needs of tiny and/or individual audiences. In other words, just as search engines have enabled people to aggregate content from anywhere that meets their needs, so must print media operations if they are to return high value. Some service, somewhere, will enable people to print any collection of content from whatever source in whatever form suits them best in whatever quantity suits them best.

Some might say that copyright concerns stand in the way of such an approach, that this would be the equivalent of enabling anyone to print up content willy-nilly. Not so. What really stands in the way of this happening is an antiquated sense of "this is what publishing does." If publishing in the classic sense is getting value from copyrighted content, then simply tune that classic model more effectively to the available channels. In this instance, that tuning would require a more flexible approach to content licensing. Today, content licensing is still largely a person-to-person effort, requiring business development specialists or marketing managers, legal departments, and days, weeks or months of process time required to enable one publisher to use another publisher's content, be it in print or electronic form. But if today's printing technologies have the ability to assemble content with Google-like agnosticism and speed in a way that's tailored to very specific needs, then it is content licensing, not copyright, that stands in the way of more effective print revenues.

Thinking of both existing licensing technologies from organizations such as Copyright Clearance Center and iCopyright as well as emerging technologies from organizations such as Journalism Online, we are likely on the verge of a new convergence of licensing and printing technologies that can revolutionize what appears in print. This does not mean that print as a whole will surge back as a primary profit center, though. In the long run, the time that it takes to spool out pages of print will never be a match for the Web's ability to spin out tailored text and multimedia content sets instantly and effortlessly. But it does mean that the wide availability of custom printing technologies and the wide availability of people with professional printing skills figuring out what to do next in the aftermath of the current print apocalypse is likely to fuel the Google-like print revolution of mass-customized print content delivery no matter what. The main question is whether it will be Google taking on that challenge on a large scale or someone else.

The other key question, though, is whether publishers are going to balk at the notion of massively automated content licensing for tailored publications. Given history and publishers' attachment to the notion of their brands being what they want them to be rather than what their audiences want them to be, it's likely that many will balk at the idea. In that period of balking, it's likely that widely available substitute sources of printable content will work their way into these opportunities - leaving established publishers as also-rans yet again, though this time in their native medium.

Publishers failed to optimize their operations for Google-like content searching in time to take advantage of the in-the-moment opportunities available to them, in part because they were afraid that it was a technology that was in conflict with their publications' Web sites. The same sort of tensions seem to exist with customized printing and typical print editorial operations - and the same opportunities await publishers that tackle them proactively with aggressive automated content licensing strategies.

High-value purchasing and advertising opportunities await those publishers that begin to take highly customized printing opportunities more aggressively. Just as Web revenues looked like a puny investment early on, so does custom publishing look more like a sideline than a main line of revenue to many publishers. But in a world in which Google has become the center stage of most of the world's content access, it is imperative that publishers look more seriously at how their print publishing models are affected directly by the same potential for agnostic content aggregation - and leverage them as rapidly as possible for high-margin revenues.

Labels: aggregation, B2b media, consumer, Custom Printing, Google, media

By John Blossom - posted at 11:40 AM

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Friday, December 11, 2009

Farewell, Editor & Publisher: How Many Canaries Can You Ignore?

In the process of selling off several of its core B2B entertainment industry titles, Nielsen Business Media also announced the eminent closing of Editor & Publisher, the century-plus old trade publication that had chronicled the ins and outs of the news industry. At a time at which magazine closings seem to be about as regular as train stops on a commuter line, E&P's demise is not exceptional in many ways. Any number of trade publications are struggling to survive in an era in which online media enables unlimited competition for the attention of its readership and for its advertisers' and subscribers' cash. But there is something particularly poignant about E&P's shuttering. After all, if an industry which insists that the quality of its content will be its distinguishing factor cannot support the high-quality journalism covering itself, then how can they expect others to do likewise for their own interests?

There are few people who can scream about canaries in coal mines and get away with it for long, and I am no exception to that rule. If you haven't figured out that most publishers are caught between highly skilled staffs oriented towards traditional publishing platforms and new platforms that can't deliver them decent salaries with room for both management's profits and platform reinvestment, then you must have been clipping your bond coupons on a tropical island. But that doesn't mean that publications like Editor & Publisher have to die. What it does mean, though, is that in some ways the publishing industry is returning to its roots of scrappy, independent publishing that may do better without the overhead of large, corporate parents.

This doesn't mean that news publications will always do best as independent outlets, but it does mean that publishers that are mean, lean and more focused on their markets than on hitting the train back to comfortable suburban homes are going to do just fine. The good news is that Web infrastructure is perfectly suited to such operations, most especially when publishers listen to their audiences and engage them effectively. An interesting an ironic example of this positioning is the recent rebirth of Conde Nast's former Portfolio.com Web site by American City Business Journals as a portal oriented towards the owners of small and medium businesses. With a platform that is well designed to slice and dice content and functionality for any number of focused local and topic-oriented markets, ACBL's no-nonsense approach to publishing is far more emblematic of what will succeed moving forward in profitable B2B and consumer media than the high-gloss world of major media companies.

The caveat to this approach, though, is that the scrappy publishers must push themselves to the extreme to take advantage of highly affordable publishing technologies to outpace major media companies in having audiences adopt their brands on the platforms that they prefer. This is to some degree why blog-oriented publishers such as TechCrunch and The Huffington Post have survived and thrived in online media. Having been handed the equivalent of a guerrilla fighter's AK-47 automatic rifle in today's affordable social media publishing technologies and deploying the tactics and strategies that they enable, lean and agile online-first publications and their technology partners have carved away a good portion of the meat of publishing's profits.

It's not as if the major media companies can out-tech these smaller rivals easily, either. The expense and useful life of proprietary content technology development is rarely beneficial to a publisher today. There are some exceptions to this rule on the very high end of content markets such as in financial securities trading and other specialized professional functions, but in general it's source-agnostic content technologies that have defined today's most successful publishing platforms. For general media markets, publishers have tried again and again to gain the upper hand through sponsoring source-specific content technologies that simply don't deliver all of the information and experiences that people expect now through source-agnostic technologies.

It's what you might call a prolonged mourning for the mass-production printing press era, the ability to define a marketplace through a technology that only traditional publishers could afford and master easily. Sorry, that train left the station a long time ago. By ceding their technological superiority to others, publishers sealed their fate years ago. If Compuserve had knocked the socks off of the Web in its ability to amaze and delight content audiences, it would still be around today. Consortium services like Hulu are trying to regain some of that high ground of technology, but as long as they fail to leverage all of the content that people find to be valuable based on the artificial divide of "it isn't real content," they will always fall short of audiences who know "real" when they see it.

In short, I do think that the closing of Editor & Publisher is a small but significant landmark in the history of publishing. It marks the point in the publishing industry's history when it admitted that it no longer really cared about its traditional strengths. Print publishing and the editorial disciplines that drove it are now officially legacies that will inform the future, but no longer define it. There will continue to be print products indefinitely, and highly customized print products are likely to be a growing marketplace for some time. But when an industry will no longer buy coverage of its own traditional operations, then it's time to admit that a chapter in that industry's history has been finished. I wish the very best of luck to the staff of Editor & Publisher, they have put out quality journalism in the face of enormous industry change. I hope that we will see E&P resurface in the near future as a web-first publication, perhaps with a focus on the future rather than on the past.

Labels: B2b media, Custom Printing, editor and publisher, magazines, print, Publishing, Web

By John Blossom - posted at 8:42 AM

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Thursday, March 19, 2009

Time MINE: Online Lessons Creep Into Print Content

With newspapers and magazines folding virtually every week now in the face of a global economic crisis Clay Shirky is comparing the scope of change being experienced by the rise of online publishing's challenge to newspapers to the tumultuous change sparked by the rise of printing presses nearly five hundred years ago. From my perspective I think that the scope is actually far broader than that. As I outline in the Content Nation book, the scope of change fomented by the rise of online publishing is likely historical on an even broader scale, a scale perhaps never seen since the rise of centralized publishing by the world's first recorded civilizations thousands of years ago.

Whatever the ultimate breadth of the challenges facing traditional publishers, one thing is for certain: timidity in addressing the challenges presented by online publishing has not served them well. This timidity reflects not just in the online portals offered by most traditional media companies but as well in their print strategies. You'd think that some of the lessons learned from online publishing would have worked their way into print offerings a long time ago. Yet more than two years after Wired Magazine offered its users the ability to put their own photo on a customized cover of their magazine (part of a promotion by Xerox), the mass customization of print remains largely a novelty in the eyes of most mass media publishers. But there are glimmers of hopeful signs that publishers may be getting ready to push further on into print customization.

One recent sign of hope for mass customization is a new offering from Time, Inc.'s consumer media group called MINE, a service that allows people to build their own custom magazines from articles found in eight of their leading consumer publications. The actual customization seems to be quite limited at this point - you may specify your address, your age, up to five Time-owned magazines that you'd like to have content from and provide answers to four questions that indicate your presumed tastes (Like sushi or pizza? Sing in the shower? Would you like to learn juggling or celebrity impersonation? Would you like to have dinner with Leonardo da Vinci or Socrates?). From these choices Time will pop out articles tailored to your profile in five issues of your MINE magazine print or digital form, all for free (Lexus appears to be the major sponsor for this effort).

On the scale of today's print offerings this is a fairly bold experiment, enabling Time brands normally built up separately through their various flagship publications to comingle in a common publication. It echoes in some ways the use of The Wall Street Journal's branded business content in some local newspaper editions, but with a level of customization not seen heretofore the editorial side of a magazine cover. Silicon Valley entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki notes tongue in cheek in a recent Twitter message that perhaps it's even a copy of his Alltop's "online magazine rack" of popular topics concept. While I wouldn't discount that self-flattering comparison of Guy's entirely, I think that it's far more likely that Time has finally started to consider a broader range of lessons from online publications - albeit a bit late in the game - and how they may apply to their traditional strengths as direct marketing mavens.

The truth is that Time has been customizing both editorial and ad copy for years based on zip codes and other key demographic groupings. It may not be apparent to the typical person flipping through Sports Illustrated or whatever, but oftentimes they're highly tailored publications. With the technology in place already to do this type of customization on a per-title basis, it's a relatively small step to stage content on a more granular level from multiple titles into MINE issues. So in most respects MINE is an evolutionary step towards enabling multi-branded content in one delivery package. In a way MINE is akin to a "my [name of portal]" type of customization that has been part of online offerings for more than a decade - not only just evolutionary from a print perspective but old, old news from an online perspective.

So while MINE is a positive development, why is it that it is taking traditional publishers so long to develop business models that make more efficient use of print technology as a content delivery system? I for one don't believe that print is at all a dead medium: it's just a horribly neglected medium that has been allowed to die in the hands of very inefficient business models as all of the publishing efficiencies flow to online venues. Reprint services demonstrate every day that print can be a highly effective and profitable targeted communications medium. Yet most publishers derive single percentage digits of their revenues from custom printing. Hmm, tiny slivers of highly profitable printing versus huge swaths of increasingly unprofitable printing...what's wrong with this picture?

It's great that Time is trying out the market for custom aggregations of its own content, but let's he honest - publishers need to be far, far more aggressive in packaging their content in personalized publications tailored for individuals. Unfortunately for some publishers, the greatest opportunities in custom printing lie with those who are willing to let other business models drive the aggregation technologies that make that possible. Some of those business models may yet wind up in the hands of major publishers, but it's far more likely that after years of whining and wrestling, newspaper and magazine publishers will finally surrender to the notion that enabling their content to be licensed through whatever print or print-like electronic vehicle services their audience most effectively is going to be the most profitable and effective way for their print-formatted content to gain exposure. Applying the lessons of the Web to print must be a priority for print publications to survive and to thrive.

While I agree with Clay Shirky that the triviality of making electronic copies of content has changed the economics of the publishing business fundamentally, until some electronic medium has the simplicity, ease and readability of print publications there will be a highly exploitable market for print. In many instances people love to curl up in a time of relaxation to catch up with a print publication, oftentimes on a weekend or during travel. It's a luxury to spend time reading "unplugged" content - a luxury that will only be spent on a handful of print publications. Why not enable people to put whatever content will be of interest to them into that luxury experience? Branded portals for publishers are becoming less and less of a driver for building online revenues: why shouldn't publishers become more aggressive in putting their audiences in the driver's seat for aggregating the content that's of interest to them in print as well?

So kudos for Time testing the waters for their MINE publication, but I do hope that major publishers will finally begin to see the light and start enabling the printing of massively customized print and print-formatted publications that aggregate content from whatever sources interest their audiences the most. The result will be far higher ad rates, far higher returns on investment and a much more healthy print publishing business in the long run. Let's stop allowing printing presses to go dark in major cities just because the one publishing company running them cannot build a business model to support them. Let those printing presses role with whatever content will command the highest interest from audiences from whatever sources produce it, and the money will follow with due haste.