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.

Two years later, Clare Hart and her work for DJEM remains respected, but times have moved on, and, according to news reports, so has Clare as the enterprise media group at Dow Jones is being merged with their consumer media group. Dow Jones CFO Steven Daintith is taking over the Dow Jones COO role for now, an indication that a promotion into that role for Hart was not in the offing, so moving on seems like a good bet for her at this time. While some may read "glass ceiling" or "Murdoch loyalists" into this move, I think that it's more a matter of where companies like Newcorp need to bring business information services such as their Factiva property to gain more profitability. The direction for more profits from the licensed business media sources in Factiva's database is definitely towards the online media side of Dow Jones operations, a move that requires a different set of skills than those needed to make subscription business information database services successful in increasingly complex enterprise technology markets.

As I noted last October in ContentBlogger when the Wall Street Journal Pro Edition was launched, the rise of real-time Web news aggregation is accelerating the need for business media properties to become more effective news aggregators. At the time I noted that this would be a good move to make better use of Factiva assets in the Pro Edition framework, a move that seems far more likely to unfold now that the siloing of Factiva and other Dow Jones enterprise assets has been eliminated. Among those other assets that are more likely to emerge more aggressively in the new alignment is the Dow Jones Business & Relationship Intelligence group (formerly Generate), whose alerts-oriented mining of news sources will have a broader market to tap into via the Pro Edition platform. Thinking of Newscorp's push to gain more online revenues from paid content sources, these types of premium services are ripe for better integration into ad-supported Dow Jones content.

This is also, of course, a somewhat back-handed way to say that there really isn't much of a strategy available to Dow Jones to increase revenues simply by waving a wand over broader segments of its existing online content. That ship sailed many years ago, as the WSJ Online edition gradually moved towards a large portion of its content being available online without a subscription. Their hope lies in providing more value in their offerings to individuals who may not have access to large subscription databases and sophisticated alerts services in their companies or who have found access to such services harder to justify under central information budgets. Moving to make DJEM resources more available via their consumer and "prosumer" platforms is a natural bridging strategy into these needs that can set up broader enterprise sales strategies over time.

In the meantime, though, this move is somewhat of an admission that the subscription database business for business news is a dying business model. Factiva has been as aggressive as any other player in business information in adding features and integration capabilities to its offerings, but at the end of the day the value-add from such services is drifting away to enterprise technology players more quickly than Factiva or other enterprise news aggregators can counter with improved products and services. There are just too many enterprise platforms in which this type of content is needed, creating broad product and feature disintermediation. Harvesting structured information from unstructured news and information sources is one approach that many enterprise content vendors are taking to counter this trend, but this alone ultimately doesn't justify the typical subscription structure for news databases.

You can see where this consolidation of enterprise-oriented resources with consumer media resources at Dow Jones may spell problems in focusing on enterprise opportunities, but at the end of the day the software and the thousands of licensed content sources that Dow Jones pays for have to grow profits for them more quickly if they are to be worth the price. With enterprises increasingly reluctant to pay for licensed content that offers few or no advantages over Web-accessible content, the Web is the only probable point of strong growth for old-line news aggregators. This may not be a pretty transition for many Factiva staff, but it's one of those long-delayed and necessary moves that will at least set the stage for more robust growth in enterprise markets for Dow Jones in the long run - even if that growth comes from non-traditional channels.

With a packed ballroom listening on (nothing like "free" as the price of admission for networking in this economy), Dave Kellogg opened with a lively video, followed by Outsell's David Worlock pointing out that user-oriented networked services, not pre-conceived publications, are the key to this "revolution" in publishing services. Yet at the same time his slides showed a pyramid of value-add content services from simple published documents to "workbenches" that seemed to be quite standard in its pre-conceived product flow. Databases are indeed key components in today's publishing environment, but as exemplified by Mark Logic's technologies, the database is now - that is, whatever a user needs it to be in the moment. Both enterprise and media oriented publishers are discovering that publishing cultures centered around traditional databases, be they for traditional editorial content, business data or multimedia, are not agile enough to respond to the demands of their markets.

Richard Maggiotto, Founder, President & CEO of Zinio, highlighted similar ironies that print publishers face in confronting mobile markets. Zinio is moving beyond simple "page-flipping" technology for magazines on PCs and mobile devices to enable video-like animations of content, including ads, to draw magazine publishers into more appealing online presentations in their software. One demo that Richard flashed on the screen was for a $30,000 watch, paid for by a manufacturer that refused to produce Web ads. A beautiful ad, but the question becomes: how can you build a market based on a tiny sliver of people who are using iPhones but preferring magazine-like layouts of content? Building beautiful and engaging content is a plus for any audience, but no arbitrary container in today's online world is going to fence an audience in to your message for very long.

I had to take a phone call at this point, so I missed a good portion of a presentation by Chris Tse, Director of Information at BusinessWeek, who focused on their "BX" social media initiatives. Ironically, when I came back, Tse was explaining how social media content was harder to monetize than traditional editorial content, although he acknowledged that it would probably grow in its revenue impact over time. So even when you have good design, interactivity, repurposed content and social interaction, there's no guarantee that you'll have the systems in place to match revenue opportunities to your content - or have a sales force that knows how to sell it.

Kent Anderson, Executive Director for Product Development at The New England Journal of Medicine, a leading Sci-Tech journals publisher, showed off a popular "diagnose the disease" quiz

that they had ported over from their Web site to the iPhone, and, through Mark Logic's infrastructure, easily retooled for Google's Android and other mobile platforms. The growth of the app's use on iPhone was quite extraordinary, paralleling the growth of overall iPhone use. But when Kent was quizzed about the impact on overall subscription revenues in the Q&A, he expressed some optimism for future, non-free applications in mobile markets but didn't offer any indication of how the app helps to boost core journal subscription revenues. Certainly highly functional mobile apps can help to build a publisher's brand value through higher engagement, but there needs to be a clear conversion strategy devised to ensure that the engagement actually converts that brand value into revenues efficiently. Repurposing content in and of itself doesn't ensure those conversions, though it can help to define a much larger addressable marketplace.

Shannon Holman, Director of Content Management for McGraw-Hill Higher Education and Lee Fife, VP of Publishing Solutions for Flatirons Solutions, put on an excellent demo of McGraw-Hill's Create online custom textbook creation application. Their development of Create was based on the assumption that they needed to empower their customers to design and customize their custom textbooks online, instead of relying on institutional sales forces. The Create application does an excellent job of fulfilling this mission, enabling its users to choose specific sections of books, insert personal course materials and papers and produce both PDFs and bound, custom-printed textbooks on demand with remarkable ease. This interactivity that allows clients to package content the way that they really need it packaged was probably the closest example of "the new normal" during the day's presentations. But even here, the very success of the Create application leaves McGraw-Hill's institutional salespeople scratching their heads somewhat. Better that in the long run, though, then becoming a captive of sales methods that may be out of date.

The final featured speaker of the day was Gordon Crovitz, former Publisher of The Wall Street Journal and a founder of Journalism Online, which is preparing to launch in 2010 an online content ecommerce service that will enable people to have one single sign-on for accessing premium content sources across the Web and mobile platforms. Crovitz outlined at a high level the range of use and pricing models that the Journalism Online platform will support, such as single-article micropayments, multi-article/time-based payments, bulk multi-publication subscriptions and print/online bundled subscriptions.

Interestingly, both the questions that came up from the audience afterwards and some discussion in the panel discussion following Crovitz' panel indicated that there was still a fair amount of resistance from some people in publishing to this concept - and not necessarily for the reasons that you might think. Some people were concerned about Journalism Online being a publisher-centric model, solving their own particular pricing problems but not necessarily solving problems for audiences. This is a reasonable point, one that highlights how publishers are to some degree still on a fishing expedition for successful online revenue models for premium online content that no technology alone can answer. Yet Crovitz emphasizes that premium's opportunities lie where people already believe in your content brand. In other words, premium plays well when you have a relationship with an audience that's already valued above the norm. You may, as Crovitz suggests, convert only a fraction of them, but if the relationship will support it, then demand it where the value suggests that it's worth it to them.

So what is "the new normal" in the era of repurposeable content? To put it succinctly, it's having content that's always ready to attain its highest value in audience-defined moments. Be it through search engines, self-published and self-packaged content, real-time collaboration or easily repurposed and relicensed data and editorial content, the companies that can chase those moments most effectively wins. Sometimes this means being able to aggregate content from any number of sources more rapidly and effectively than anyone else, based on your insights into audience demands. But often it means letting your content flow to where your audiences want to consume it and to be ready to know how to make money with it once it gets there. A multi-platform strategy for repurposed content is not simply slamming the same product into different packages.

Multi-platform publishing also requires the recognition that it's not about platforms at all - it's recognizing that your audience has to be the center of your publishing at all times - and to recognize that each platform and application may draw out a different audience persona from the same person. It's not enough to ask "What does your customer do ten minutes before and after they use your content." It's also necessary to ask your audiences, "who are you" in each platform environment. Your hardcore diagnostician may be all business on a PC, but be out for kicks or socialization on their iPhone - or vice versa. These types of variations only enhance the need for good content multipurposing infrastructure, even though that infrastructure will not guarantee that you'll be offering the content that they want most.

Mark Logic's Digital Publishing Summit probably raised more questions for publishers than it answered, but that's probably not a bad thing in a market in which publishers have very few clear-cut options for succeeding in content markets. It also left outside the doors of the ballroom the uncomfortable fact that many platforms are in use today that enable people to aggregate content on their own with minimal assistance from traditional publishers. You can have the best aggregation and monetization strategy in the world, but if your audiences are creating and aggregating more content than you can, then it's going to be an uphill battle for most any publisher. But within those constraints, Mark Logic is showing the way to a "new normal" for publishers in which matching any content to any audience demand is creating a much more flexible, responsive and audience-centric publishing industry.