Cipriani's is filling with the more than 400 registrants for the fifth SIIA Information Industry Summit, the annual East Coast confab of major publishers and content services companies. Kicking off the first morning of speakers was Terry McGraw, Chairman, President and CEO of The McGraw-Hill Companies. McGraw-Hill has been hitting some heavy numbers as of late, with a well-integrated online content strategy that is moving towards responding to users where they need premium and ad-supported business information services. Terry noted that there were "seismic shifts" in the content industry, but not without precedents. In the 19th century, he noted, the industrial transformation of nations created both enormous growth and enormous inequality in incomes. In the early 19th century the railroads and telegraph technologies provided that era's economic and communications highways. Telegraphs were particularly important to the growth of newspapers, which could then collect and disseminate content from all over the world with then-lightning speed. It seems that we've had these technology-driven upsets before.

Corporations drove many of those changes, as they do today, but today we're confronted with the progress of individuals using today's highways both paved and electronic to build a global consumer lifestyle. Part of that lifestyle is publishing by individuals who are using leading-edge technologies to create their own content ecommerce. The doubling of broadband usage over the next few years in the U.S. that Terry mentioned offered as a benchmark is certainly impressive, but it's just one corner of a global content marketplace that is accelerating in many global regions faster than U.S. markets. Users are taking control of information as never before, which opens the door to "micromarketing," outstripping mass marketing of media over the next few years. This flattening of both publishing and marketing is creating a global knowledge economy, Terry noted, requiring content providers to cater to users who expect to be catered to and to accommodate their roles as publishers. Trusted brands will become ever more important, Terry believes, based on editorial excellence and integrity that provides actionable information. Insight and expertise will never be commoditized, and must be refreshed constantly to provide competitive advantage.

Hopefully the economic disparities that arose in the 19th century's booms, Terry notes. A middle class is essential for this vision of prosperity. Terry underscored the need for social reforms that can ensure better education in the U.S. and elsewhere. If people don't have an interest to express themselves through an educated outlook, who will man the user-generated media machine that's being created today? This is a great unanswered question that society as a whole must address, but it has notable implications for the content industry as well. When the growth in printed consumer magazines revolves around a handful of celebrity titles clustered around grocery store cash registers, it becomes more difficult to create and market a broad array of intellectual property that can service well-educated minds. Weblogs allow ideas to be exchanged with incredible efficiency, but without an educated population the potential growth of the content marketplace will be limited - or continue to move towards least-common-denominator materials that will tend to be sensational and incendiary. Mass media do not help this trend as it tries to get more dispersed audiences to collect in ever-shrinking pools of attention.

Terry hit most all of the right notes that the content industry must address, but it's not clear that long-established U.S. media companies are going to be able to continue to take on a global leadership position in addressing those issues. New models for managing intellectual property are evolving, and his expected but sour note on Google's book search program that views Google serving Google and not users when it caches scanned copyrighted works in their search engines falls short of moving beyond models of IP management that assume that the user doesn't know best what to do with what it reads. Terry packages that need to as ensuring that a framework of trust and confidentiality of customers, and it's a good point: publishers do need to be more responsible for packaging their IP in forms that ensure that they are getting bona-fide content and services.

But the true challenge for content producers is to do this in a way that can maximize the value of content as it passes into the hands of individuals that can add value to that content. Note that nobody seems to be complaining about other forms of caching intellectual property such as Alexa Web Crawl that are more clearly focused on repurposing IP outside of the scope of publishers' control: the issue is not the techniques being employed by Google but the strength and independence of this potent competitor for content revenues. There are indeed "a world of opportunities" as Terry noted in the conclusion of his address, but it is indeed a very large world that publishers will be hard-pressed to manage using old models of distribution management. The great news is that an industry leader like Terry McGraw gets the full breadth and depth of the big picture. Now comes the hard part: moving publishing towards more nuanced positions in a user-centric publishing environment that trades some level of traditional control for far greater value and profits.