This year's SIIA content forum in San Francisco is bigger than ever and has been offering some very meaty panels offering practical insights into how to improve publishing services. Catch up with the details of many of the panels on our events weblog. I was able to cover most of the panels, though I had a long telecon that kept me away from a couple of good panels Monday. A very worthwhile event, and once facilities issues were addressed, an excellent venue. I will summarize and analyze in next week's news analysis. Key posts include:

Transformation Through Technologies

Case Studies: Looking at Insourcing and Outsourcing Solutions

Rapid Deployment of Content Assets

Bob Merry , President and Publisher, Congressional Quarterly

Jeffrey Moore: The Rise of New Models for Innovation

Sales, Marketing and Distribution in a Fragmented Market

New Ad Models & Techniques for Web Content

Chris Anderson on The Long Tail of Time

Licensing Strategies, Distribution Strategies and Negotiations that Work

Search Workshop for Publishers

Secondary Licensing - Realizing the Full Value of Your Content

CEO Panel

Ed Keating Chaired the CEO panel, focusing on agility issues. Al Wasserberger, CEO Intellext, oftentimes it's listening carefully to the clients. Steve Fadem, CEO of Relegence, Russell Secker sitting in for Hoover's CEO Dwayne Spradlin. My apologies for missing some of the comments on this panel, I was fumbling a bit at the keyboard and losing some concentration.

Ed: Buy/build/partner, who do you include in the team? Russell: try to keep key pieces in house, but many things get outsourced. News was outsourced, they're not a news provider. Steve: Have to focus on core competencies, outsource whatever we can to get speed to market. Al: Have to walk a delicate balance, successful at outsourcing, don't want to be experts in everything.

Ed: What works for competitive advantage? Russell: Distribute customer feedback in distilled for to everyone, it's helpful that everyone sees it. Al: Friends of Watson, got loud and profane feedback in some instances but a lot of very useful feedback also.

Ed: How do you promote effective teamwork? Steve: Hard when you have people who are very innovative and to keep them focused on client needs. Have to keep people focused regularly. Russell: reviews are important, quarterly rewards and recognition. Need to communicate goals clearly, absent them teamwork falls apart. Al: Lucky that they do a lot of cool stuff, main issue of what's addressed and what's not. But if there's consensus and never conflict, that's a problem. People from many different backgrounds, help to get them on the same page is the goal.

Ed: If everyone has same information, takes us away from the information is power paradigm. Russell: It's key. Steve: Do it collectively as an organization, can't have people on different pages. Even more true in smaller organizations.

I have to pull the plug on this right now, it's a great panel but my horsepower is going downhill. It's been an excellent conference with great content, looking forward to the next go-around - hopefully with a little more down time between sessions so folks can network more efficiently.

Ed Colleran of Copyright Clearance Center chared a panel focusing on making money on content relicensing and reuse. Ed showed an SIIA estimate of $120 billion for core publishing, including STM, Legal journals, Newspapers, missed other points. Total reuse market between $.9 billion to $1.5 billion for paper, $150 to $291 million for digital. (COMMENT: This is CAPTURED market for reuse, largely from corporate markets, one assumes. Doesn't capture file sharing, etc.).

Richard Geiger of the San Francisco Chronicle noted relationship with CCC has lead to revenues, with an 11-year Web site with persistent URLs they have a popular site, higher proportionately than the newspaper in popularity. Admires other sites such as San Jose Mercury News, HotCocoa from Contra Costa Times also good. LA Times is another case where they should be beating them on the web, but they're more friendly, more open, doing better. With Yahoo News and Google News, they like the traffic, will take it. Have started podcasting, a good restaurant site, people migrate from their site to paper. Ed: When you're distributing content, what are the rights issues that you face? Used to send full feeds to most vendors, but when they hit the freelancer's suit they stopped. Don't send freelance stuff anymore.

Heather Mars, Dow Jones Licensing Services: Most implementations are highly customized, always leave door open for new negotiations. Have to review every customer agreement to ensure that anticipated displays are in line with their vendors' expectations. Routine monitoring of customer sites. Many customers appreciate that, they know that things won't get out of control. Also provide content via APIs. Clients are constantly changing, methods change also. Traditional publishers and aggregators may be excluded in some clients when their anticipated uses will be more aggressive than their publishers will tolerate. Focus of audits is ensuring that attributions are accurate. Terms of service hyperlinked, made clear that it's for personal use only and not for redistribution. Work with hundreds and thousands of customers, need to keep processes transparent.

Dawn Conway, LexisNexis: 500 publishers, 14,000 publishers. Most think of us as a research company, but recently acquiring acquiring, creating or aligning with companies that allow them to be a solutions company. Delivering total solutions, for litigators, reputation management, protecting copyright via CopyGuard. Using content through all of these redistribution tools, make sure to maximize revenues. Very protective of copyright, customers not allowed to redistribute content. If clients wants to distribute enterprise wide they have a product that can do this but all use must be accounted for. Packaged content such as alerts provides accounting for each article in that package.

Mike O'Donnell, DataDepth/iCopyright: Copyright symbol needs to be intelligent, knew that in order for copyright to be brought forward all content must be instantly licensable. People won't deal with forms, copy/paste used millions of times a day. iCopyright links for relicensing was not getting that many clicks, was on BOTTOM of articles. Top links - email to a friend - was on top and getting most of clicks. Publishers approached, they are getting to use email to a friend links and imbed contextual ads. Has gone nuts in just 60 days of use. It's ad-supported permissions. Uptick of 30 percent in sales. Launched user-focused site copyright resource center where people can learn about copyright and applicable legislation.

Ed: How do you promote the lawful reuse? Richard: Don't do a good job of it. Heather: many publishers don't like links out from their pages, want tight control. Dawn: clients come to them and ask them to help them to be copyright compliant. CopyGuard started off detecting plagiarism, worked with iParadigms, it's L/N plus five years of archived internet. Publishing customers said they wanted to use it to know where their own content was showing up.

Ed: Where's the revenue? Mike: Most still from paper products, eprints growing but print is still most revenues. Richard: Refer people to Scoop reprint service for prints, early adopter of CCC's online reprint service. Richard: Kids using NoodleBib to get copyright info for bibliographies.

Question: Creative Commons, any experience on the panel? Heather: Don't work with blogs, most publishers very traditional. Mike: users can choose iCopyright material from their interface.

Question: Licensing agreements getting more and more complex, any particular causes that should be there, others that won't work. Dawn: Indemnification not as important, it's the publisher's content. From the publisher's perspective, you're trying to understand where the content's going and where it's being used is key. At the same time, L/N needs flexibility to innovate with new ways to use content. If it's too difficult it means going to legal and it will be an administrative nightmare to go out to 2,000 publishers to get additional rights. Heather: I see contracts getting longer and longer, publishers want to define how content is used in many particulars. Dawn: We look at publishers as partners, if publishers are uncomfortable, long-term partnerships won't work if there are lots of terms. Heather: Treat vendors as partners.

Question: Beyond protection by copyright, how do content creators get more money through reuse? What about allowing users to reuse and push back publishers to revenues. Mike: Has to be made as easy as possible, also opportunities for print revenues in email approach.

Comment: Do we need new standards, new language? Dawn: What are publishers really trying to protect? Mike: The copyright symbol is the tool. Heather: Often get content from other aggregators, not that easy to deal with layers.

Comment: NYT Magazine article: no search, no copyright.

Our own Jean Bedord: Findability is a problem, Information Seeker - buyers are overwhelmed, they get irrelevant results. Search engines look at content differently than the human, its all about tags and metadata. Jean outlined a case project - focusing on the Web pages for the SIIA Content Forum pages. Initial examples shows "content forum" Google search results, not found. "SIIA" search results, not there. Jean shows the raw Web page, no metadata. A different conference page has much more metadata. Comes up in the top of Google search results. Search term comes up in page title, page address and summary. There are "basics gaps" that many publishers need to fill in.

Search originated with commercial database services, now services such as Factiva are moving over to commercial engines such as FAST: maintaining their own no longer offers commercial value. Searches require good content, indexing, ranking, query processing, and multiple link citations. Metadata is also key, especially in multimedia where tools such as ALT tags in HTML can define text that can act as metadata for non-text components. Different search engines have different specialties as well, so metadata may have to be tuned differently for different search engines. Rankings include alpha, chronological, popularity, algorithmic relevance - all of which adds up to "secret sauces" of ranking that are closely guarded formulas.

"White box" search dominates a la Google, but more sophisticated engine services play on more sophisticated metadata.

In Jean's teaching experience she discovers students that are just really starting to learn about how search really works. They do OK with mechanics, but not so well with semantics. On the SIIA home page, "events" is the taxonomy term on the site, but "conference" is the popular search term. Unexpected terminologies can also trip people up.


David Meerman Scott, Freshspot Marketing: Getting thousands or millions of search terms indexed is a challenge, yet marketing is increasingly a the key to success for publishers. David holds up a Dr. Scholl's shoe insert, also sells the same material in many different sizes and packages, generic versions and do-it-yourself cutout kit. This is what he believes that publishers should be doing, but few are doing it. The challenge is to get good terms on the "long tail" of content. One publishers has 45 million online pages to index - quite a challenge.

David recommends going to a "micro-content" strategy, getting premium content high on search terms, then capitalizing on that positioning.

Free content sells content: make the leap to offering something to have search engines drive content into the site. WSJ Online sold 700,000 print and online subscriptions at $79 and $39 a year, with lots of content exposed and indexed on their search engine.

Content markets content: Marketing 2.0 is thought leadership based, valuable, interesting and relevant. It's about understanding your buyers, participating in communities.

Blogging for publishers: Blog posts get great "Google juice," they know when it came out, lots make them, 1 in 5 at the conference blog. Joe Wikert of Wiley blogs. Charlene Li of Forrester returned $1m to Forrester based on her blog. Wikis do well also, Edmunds has a CarSpace Wiki, successful.

New Rules of PR: Old rules were press releases were for the press, new rules are that press releases drive online eyeballs to reach online buyers directly. Millions now read press releases directly online. The Concrete Network is a meat-and-potatoes site that does a press release a week, makes a high placement in Google News.

Search engine marketing via advertising: Unlike Dr. Scholl's publishers have a great asset for online marketing: content.

SEM for publishers: Create microcontent, keyword analysis is critical, don't be egotistical.

Keyword analysis and development: It's not about you, it's about your buyers. (COMMENT: We're going from a service economy to a servant economy.) Don't be egotistical, don't think about "business news," think about the content that your buyers want to get to.

Case studies: ECNext takes content from McGraw-Hill Construction, Wright, Freedonia on very specific terms.

Jeff Cutler noted that some aggregators are getting blacklisted in search engines, causes problems for the industry. Paul Gerbino of ThomasNet: needs to be a meeting of the minds between search engine industry and publishing industry. Pam Springer of ECNext, the "Big Daddy" Google search upgrade has changed the game, has penalized duplications. Paul: Big Daddy is not necessarily the issue, but more the placement of the content.

Very positive and constructive panel, my thanks to two great professionals (yes, that's log-rolling but they deserve it!)

Kind of a neat concept, a role play between publisher and an aggregator, the publisher played by Marcia Taylor of Business Wire, role of aggregator played by Larry Schwartz of Newstex (AK Role Play Marcia and Role Play Larry). Publisher tasked with getting a 25 percent royalty rate, at least a $25 minimum,limit distribution online. Aggregator Larry doesn't agree to minimums, of course has to have open redistribution rights. Randy Marcinko of Marcinko Enterprises sets the stage. Six weeks ago, Role Play Marcia approached Role Play Larry, came in with hard ball terms much higher than what they want/need. Role Play Larry played hard back. What now? New facts are added to the simulation and handed to the negotiators for the first time: publisher's budget is in bad shape, had two large cancellations with aggregators, your salary is based on your budget. Aggregator contacted competitor contacted the publisher's competitor and signed and loaded their content - publisher's content is much less mission critical. OOPS! Role Play Marcia proceeds to try to negotiate herself into a hole rather quickly. Role Play Larry tests various terms, most are pretty onerous, closed networks with subscription access. RPL shuts the door unless RPM can come up with something new. The negotiation failed. No definition of value proposition, no definition of business. No real negotiation, no real likely role for success.

Jonathan Hoy walked us through the DRIVE strategy. D- define strategy. What's your value proposition and how to you bring it to market? "Be careful what you ask for - you just might get it." Sell the deal internally first, so that you don't have to go back. Define your walk-away proposition.
R - Research. Understand their model, strengths, weaknesses, recent deals, industry trends, power of negotiation in hands of other party.

I - Identify basic needs and priorities in a negotiation. Learn what the other person wants, don't be afraid to ask and tell, understand if the other person can walk away from the deal

V - oVercoming obstacles (?) Build trust early, set a collegial, business-like tone, identify real or perceived desire for power (needs could be accommodated mutually), deal with the "person in the shed" and know if they're there, make sure that they're in the loop BEFORE the negotiation.

E - Establishing measures of success - Did you hit or miss your walk-away position, were both parties unsatisfied, did you work with the other party during the term.

Great tool! This is something that I can use on a regular basis.

Second role play. RPL is now a new vendor, tasked with satisfying RPM's needs as a publishers. RPL needs to license the content without a minimum, royalty rate not greater than 25 percent, needs redistribution. NEW FACTS: PRM has discovered that RPL is launching a new deal with Google, RPM has a plan to help RPL get a better deal with Google. RPL now has outlined a market segment that's non-competitive with RPM's sales, RPL's boss will be willing to offer 20 percent royalties in this sector. Results: a search for common terms ensues, cards are put on the table gradually, common needs are defined, comparative relationships exposed. RPM exposes hole card late in the game.

Randy notes that research is undersold, it pays to come in to a negotiation understanding your opposite's position. Also emphasized logging on to your potential licensee's site and see how content is treated there - learn what will work and what won't. Put yourself in your user's shoes as well as your partner's. Think of how can WE make more money; include your partner in your success.

Fun exercise, insightful, interactive, broke up the usual not-another-panel-please tedium.

Chis is focusing on the time aspect of the long tail today, using his quantitative analysis background. All of the trend indicators pointing towards networked markets, all of the data is there on the servers of Google and Yahoo, been there for ten years. No economists have really looked at that data yet. "The Long Tail" evolved from what that data point towards. Background blah blah, you know the curve, etc. Economic shape of the 21st century will be a power law (exponential), as opposed to a bell curve. With limited shelf space, look at the left of the curve. Unlimited shelf space, look at the right. In a straight line analysis, income goes down with audience. Film box office dropped off the line when they ran out of screens. Scarcity in distribution killed movie revenues. Power law stopped the long tail from expanding naturally. The missing pattern in the trend is the missing market that's lost to lack of distribution. Slide focusing on songs available at Wal-Mart versus online store Rhapsody with unlimited shelf space that includes Wal-Mart's inventory. Sum of the infinite long tail represents 40 percent of the market. Sales outside of bricks are approaching half of the market, therefore. Trends are pervasive in Chris' economic analysis. I love Chris' analysis because it's so fundamentally reality-based!

Some narrow sellers are ones with an inherently small audience, some are old items finding new audiences. Chris now paints the long tail model in a 3-D model with long tails in a time-dimensioned model extending off of the main long tail curve, a keenly important point. It does help to drive the point home, though, and will probably provide a more accurate economic model.

Graph of a hit album's decay, straight line function, as factored by it's relative ranking in the charts. Niche album decays, but more slowly, fitting the model overall but coming off a lower point in Chris' 3-D model. Tap the old and the niche, there's gold.Taxonomies can restrict in the physical world - only so many shelf space. Google brings it to your attention. DVD Station is a burner kiosk with an online database, search for it and burn it on the spot. Hits sole less at first in this service, the tail provided more. The tail is more accessible in the physical world (wonder what food costs in Star Trek with the machine that generates food on demand - wonder what the menu hit rate would be.) But NOW DVD Station makes all of the same revenues from the tail PLUS a proportion of revenues similar to physical outlets for the popular materials. Boom.

DVD retail economics work for Wal-Mart because aging inventory becomes a loss leader to sell newer goods, can lower prices gradually as inventory ages. A Blockbuster video store has fewer options, no alternative revenue sources from high-ticket items.

Blockbuster vs. Netflix: people like older movies better, it's passed the test of time. Recommendation engines have churned, it's probably pretty good, beyond the distortion of advertising that may make it difficult to understand it it's really good or not. Blockbuster hit machine offers highest cost with lowest chance of satisfaction versus Netflix which offers lowest cost and highest satisfaction.

Google's time machine: 66 percent of Google search traffic is to posts more than one month old. Good old pages accumulate more links. We see this in our own site, where we have certain key pages that have enormous traffic proportionately based on key link referrals. BY CONTRAST, blogs have 61 percent of traffic in < 1 month, but the tail is growing.

Print and archives: Cost of holding builds up over time, economics are fundamentally bad. Versus near-zero cost of storage for digital media. Six facilities being built for print on demand (see Lightning Source), many Amazon titles are done print on demand already! Cost of returns is huge in book industry, stores are afraid of running out, so they over-order and then return. Print on demand allows that to be avoided.

Old TV shows: $4-6 DVDs, old cartoons and westerns, significant demand. It's now a channel to tap archives effectively. Gaming industry: A "time machine" that allows older game players to be emulated on a new platform, support retro gaming community.

Book coming out in July: "The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More."

Funny dynamic in book market: books go out of print but they don't go out of print from a consumer market perspective, but secondary market doesn't pay authors. Festival exception for film rights clearance, few have gone through rights clearance, hope that distributors will do it for you. Clearing rights is the elephant in the room, the big block to the long tail. Long tail of ad-driven publishers, no ad sales force. New big thing, about scaling down. Google scales down to advertisers who wouldn't have advertised otherwise. WKRP example, TV show about a radio station, almost impossible to clear rights to copyrighted SONGS in show, hence no revenues from syndication. Everyone wants to live the "hit" life, yet some artists give away music for free on MySpace to build grass-roots support that will convert to revenues. Gift economy will co-exist with the commercial economy, one dominated by copyright, another by creative commons.

Chris shows a raw spreadsheet on abundant market versus scarcity market. The long tail vendors have a lower but FLATTER curve: more equal distribution of revenues overall.

Question: How does this impact how you're going to market your book? Chris: It's not all about the 80/20 rule, more about the 50/50 rule. For the book, open sourced the research, argued that it makes for a better book, beta testing works for sites, why not books? Gives peer review exposure, allows corrections and improvements. Instead of "short head" of editor have gone to "long tail" of peer review, 2,000 people have reviewed, extremely valuable contributions. (In essence the audience becomes authors).

Great stuff Chris, as ususal.

Ken Sonenclar, MD of DeSilva and Phillips, noted an earthquake in online ads, doubling in four years at min. Online ads are the only real strong growth area, someone is losing share, namely traditional media. Looking for dots to connect, Johnson & Johnson spent 24 million online, only 2 percent of ad spend, increasing online and moving away from TV, not attending TV buy meeting. Web 2.0 crowd doing just fine, making money by focusing on content and monetizing via ads.

Who's making money and how is focus of panel. Brett Brewer of Adknowledge, helps small and medium sized businesses to get bids outside of the search channel, advertisers bid on preset creative, creative always looks the same, bid to have their text associated with creative. Use behavioral targeting techniques. Company growing like a weed, did $13 mil last year, should double that this year.

Tom Bedecarre, AKQA, helps companies use digital media, focus on global brands. Richard Barker, Kitmondo is a classified lead generation business, gather classified ads primarily from B2B and distribute to B2b Web sites. Classifieds don't work oftentimes in B2B publications, most are rather empty? Most pubs were charging in advance, unattractive to advertisers more and more aware of performance related advertisers. Packaging verticals, provide it as ready-made content for publishers, monetize with cost-per-lead. International business, sell worldwide. Dave Hills of LookSmart, an ad network/search engine company, also a publisher in that they operate 180 vertical search engines (COMMENT: good to hear that they position search as publishing). Online will fragment, consumers are better with technology, though. Extremely noisy market, technology will meet consumer and find verticals that are very relevant to them. It's not a matter of if, just how. "Advertisers desperately want to talk to your audiences."


Ken: Are publishers getting a fair share of the $12-13 billion on the table?

Dave: Adoption rates of audiences are far faster than those of advertisers, see it in migration of ads to cable from broadcast TV. During the transition from one media to another, everyone's learning how to assimilate. Medium starts to gain, flattens out, as it flattens advertisers say gee, now I understand this medium, then they start putting money into it. Brett: J&J move mentioned by Ken is huge, a big statement not to attend TV spend meeting. Tom: Brilliant time to be a publisher, in UK people spend more time in front of a browser than TV, yet in US spend is 10X larger on TV than online. Spending billions where customers are not. Richard: From a Lo-fi perspective (classifieds), a voice of concern. How much effort do online publishers make to get in a dialog for their users. Not a market to rest on your laurels. On lead generation market built about understanding what your market wants and when they want it. How often do they gather data that may make a difference for their markets. Publishers have to work hard for advertisers. Don't leave money on table. Technology allows Richard to get closer to buyers/users.

Ken: What do we need to be proactive about? Dave: Infrastructure is in place, AdSense is there, etc., cobble together the best yield. Look at yield per thousand pages. Take advantage today, could be all self-serve today. If you have a highly finite and targeted audience, make a few sales calls. You want to own some of those passively acquired advertisers, make sure that you can work them up into more high-value campaigns. Figure out where you want to penetrate the market based on cost of sales. When ad technology and publishing technology and mindset come together, the lag goes away. Brett: Hard to get high CPM out of brands, better to be high in a small niche than low in a big niche.

Question: Have any verticals surprised you? Brett: Companies are lean and mean, less staff haggling about deals, Adknowledge uses pre-paid advertisers, no bad debt, only way the system can work. Dave: Don't disclose specific verticals, mom and pop search do better than finance channel, seem to be more female than male skewing, reasonably pleased with position. Broader point from a publisher perspective, you need to dominate your position wherever you are. Also relevant to have a different take on something, if you have a vibrant audience and tends to be a little bit different, you'll get a nibble. Against that, are you large enough to be relevant to a broad base of advertisers. After dot-com flu, had to make company smaller, then had to focus on being large enough to be relevant to an advertiser. If they can't afford to buy it reasonably, a problem. Maybe not a number one or number two position, but large enough to keep down cost of sales.

Question: Return on investment for advertisers. What is a good value. Tom: People are pushing lead generation dollars online, next major thing is how editorial content is compatible with brand, many brand advertisers afraid of MySpace, radioactive purchase right now. Editorial quality and CPM are key metrics. Dave: One model won't dominate. The more control the advertiser wants over placements the more that they should pay a premium. CPM banner advertising sticks for control-oriented advertisers, etc. Over 10,000 advertisers up and live and running at any point, but they have a lot of control over them. All the way down to publishers who know much more about audience than advertisers such as B2B market, conversions will cost more. Richard: Principally a lead generation platform, 10 percent of advertisers provide 90 percent of revenue, keen on conversions, becomes a relationship matter, work with the ten percent.

Question: Google, Yahoo experimenting with subscription/premium content, will they be more open to online model. Dave: Large portal will become less differentiated, like Cold War rhetoric. Underlying it is problems of complexity. If you need more information from the user to give them value, where's the service's value. Need easy to use infrastructure so that the advertisers as well as users appreciate the service, make it easy for them to find the eyeballs. Large advertisers can't leverage their position as well, they will always pay for a highly targeted audience with high ROI. Large portals become more insular with what they can afford to do with publishers.

Question from CQ: Selling access to people wanting to influence Congress. We're online because that's where the users are, we print because that's where the advertisers are. Selling very high CPMs, much higher in print, $50 vs. $1,500. Will advertisers become comfortable with moving up. Dave: Already seeing that, need to focus on more on print versus online and recognize that it took a long time to get to where you are in print, be prepared to invest in online. Tom: Media buyers can be lazy, easy to plug in metrics, but looking for additional places to invest takes effort, takes sales calls.

Ken: Are prices going up? Brett: Yes, but inventory is growing as well, more technologies available to optimize inventory, slows the growth. Higher CPM dollars growing somewhat more quickly.

Brett: We bet that we can get more for the clicks, believe in underlying technology.

Question: Impact of social media? Tom: Publishers don't want to come down from the mountain, some want people want to put up user content, but many are leery. Brett: Burger King deal with heavy.com, gave burger king crowns to people generating their own ads. 24 months ago never would have taken it on. Brands have to, brands forced to unleash brand and let users do what they want with it. Richard: B2B learning from users, motivations are different for contributions in B2B, different motivation. Giving them authoring rights, let them have an attachment to the content. Give a little, get a lot. Dave: Definition of user-generated content changing, user generated content that's a by-product of their own special interest. Social networking is not given just to large sites, small sites can do it, trying to get furl to grow, user-generated content doesn't have to be a huge original idea, learning about how to serve your audience better.

Ken: Free Craigslist, how do we deal with that? Richard: Craigslist is still narrowly focused, leaves a lot of scope for everyone else. Categories will remain the same on Craigslist.

Great panel, great insights - and some of the greatest opportunity for growth in publishing. Keep your eye on the audience as a contextualizer, not necessarily in the context of "social media" buzzworthy stuff but a lot of more basic things.

Greg Zorthian of FT; their content is largely the same around the world, online subs about 75,000 online, with typical subscription in $75 dollar range. There's not as much demand for online as for the newspaper in U.S., overseas markets moving faster for online. More push feeds, customized feeds. Expanding their footprint in many formats, requiring many new marketing and pricing strategies. They're good at bringing to the FT, once they're there the content has to sell itself, needs to be more than plain information.

Neil Ashe, CNET: reach 18 million people a day, 3 million video streams a day, more than Comcast. Have ZDnet, Tech Republic, others, in 13 countries, including gaming. "It is the content that matters, at the end of the day," appropriate for an era of consumer control. Views content as text, photos, audio, build environments in which audience controls it according to their tastes.
Do cross promotion on their various networks, ad supported and revenues from marketing partners. "The days of interruption advertising are gone."

Clayton Rose, Internet Broadcasting - owned by broadcasters, 13 million unique views, consortium of major broadcasters. Sees peaks and valleys, learning how to turn TV stations into digital content companies. How do you get people thinking digitally, not just one analog signal. Weatherplus.com competes with weather.com, tremendous amount of interest and change.

Tolman Geffs of JEGI moderates: How do you attract targeted audiences online to regional offerings? Clayton: views Yahoo and Google as partners, has a set up RSS feeds in conjunction with them to provide a roadmap for users to navigate to their content. Syndication technologies may account for 25 percent of revenues. For example, U.S. section of CNN.com, headlines get fed by them on realtime basis, work with their editors to promote local stories, work with both the technology and people side to get syndicators comfortable. Tolman: Which partnerships work, which don't? Clayton: Ones where you don't have leverage don't work. As they've grown, they have more leverage.

Clayton: Neil, what techniques have worked? Neil: search is the online navigation of choice, need to be search-optimized. Online users don't interact that often, a distributed marketplace, need significant sampling to build a large audience. Cross-promotion within networks seem to work best, marrying contextually valuable content with a user's experience. Content syndication also important, CNET.com has about 40 syndication relationships with ESPN, NY Times, etc. Some work better than others, portals don't distribute traffic across a portal, some sections are very small, different mindsets at an MSN, Yahoo or Google. No traffic, syndication fails. Not always where you'd expect it. On gaming site, 100 percent licensed to AOL for 3 years, traffic up every year. it's the experience that wraps around the content that accounts for success (NOTE: see our definition of content on Wikipedia - the experience is PART of the content).

Tolman: FT is small fish in big pond of online competitors, WSJ, etc. how do you compete? Greg: No aspirations to be a force, have a targeted audience, maybe 250,000 available in a 1-2 million universe. Happily others have ceded this market. At top end of pyramid, good for ad rates. Yes, nice to be 5 million, but not driven by that, have good CPMs. Sell three things, subscriptions, traffic and newspaper subscriptions. Have found that you need multiple touch points before they buy, need to touch at least five times before they buy. Don't assume you're not successful after first touch, need to keep on offering samples. Play with free formula to find right breakpoint. Use customer service operation quite a bit, call in to put paper on hold for holiday, will try to upgrade for online subscription, key method for U.S. sales. Tolman: five touches for a buy, how do you manage that? Track subs and conversions, requires patience, some fortitiude, accept lower CPMs on appearance. all part of lifetime value of clients. Lots of cross-referencing.

Tolman: Aggregation, new deals such as Topix and Moreover, leaders in aggregation bought. Aggregation is content, information about information is content. Neil: Web 3.0 is Web 2.0 married with content and scale. Clayton: Within a community, working on a community that can provide content, once users are invested, they come back again and again. Pictures, video, community forums, user content is very important. Greg: We've been in aggregation business forever. Great, but need to go beyond just news, need to look online, what's in the blogs. Add the FT "special sauce." Need a twist that will keep people coming back. Question for FT: managing generational changes. Greg: more of an immediate problem overseas, U.S. print audience is fine (COMMENT: print is a status symbol and appeals to many elite audiences who see it as much as a fashion accessory as much as anything else. Time is a luxury, and to have the time to read the FT is truly a luxury.).

Question: How do you compete with Web 2.0 content, how do you latch on to it. Clayton: In newsrooms, two schools of thought, some see it as the J-school discussion, other side is TV stations have always been about community (?), personally don't see user content as competitive, can help you grow in a particular geography. Neil: have user content on all sites, one of the largest photo sharing communities. Text, photos, video differ but quality still matters. SNL pirated videos are big, quality matters and is popular. Content quality will rise to the top, that will be the evolution of the phenomenon. Greg: Understand that community is important, haven't yet decided how they want to play with it. For blogs, waiting to see what impact they will have on products.

A good panel , showing best practices today from a number of important angles. Things have really progressed quite a bit in the past year, media companies understand engagement and being part of the conversation inherently, but as Neil points out there's a level of discomfort with not being able to control where the message is going. It's still a very distribution-centric business in an era in which distribution has been taken over in large part by the audience. Many have started to engage this issue, but it's early days.

Author Geoffrey Moore mapped out the march towards a services-oriented world from a product-oriented business and technology architecture, a transition that brings us to more orderly solutions but a very messy transition. Models like Google that are services-oriented are thriving like now, but things change, Geoffrey notes, so hang on. The "uber movement" Geofrey sees in technology is computing moving into the network, a long march that may take a decade or two in his mind. Major technology companies such as SAP are putting in big bets on services-oriented software architectures, but he sees the transition as inherently slow. On the Web side, though, with the "digitization of everything," the media model is becoming the dominant model for software. Google gives away what Microsoft sells, making it hard for Microsoft to change their company's DNA away from unit sales. It also hangs heavily on Microsoft's enterprise sales, which are more about content and solutions also. Content is also much less proprietary, expanding its media model into broader spaces. Geographical evolution is Geoffrey's third major evolution. The U.S. marketplace is no longer the center of global commerce, with "the economic torch crossing the Pacific," much in the same way that the torch was pass to America from Europe across the Atlantic in an earlier era. From the standpoint of world peace this is all good, as middle classes empowered by a consumer economy value stability - as does the economy that supports them. Software developers used to think that they were protected from these trends, but innovation is something that's earned, not a given. "We don't play away games well," Geoffrey notes, reminding us that the U.S. needs to expand its global outlook and to drop a culture of entitlement to respond to unentitled challengers.

In education and publishing there are great opportunities for innovation if they can get beyond senses of entitlement and become more entrepreneurial, Geoffrey notes. He sees entrepreneurialism's "I don't give a damn" attitude being able to outstrip public policy in fostering innovation. This is a familiar rant, but I am not sure that I agree wholeheartedly with this outlook. The open source movement in a certain way is about "the commons" being entitled to access to common resources. Perhaps it's individual entitlement that's threatened, where people come together to get what they want for themselves. Perhaps it's more the case that discriminatory entitlement that's threatened.

I am also not so sure about the public policy side of Geoffrey's argument. If one thinks of the Chinese economy you have very strong dictation of public policy that is fostering an entrepreneurial environment - in a formula that's perhaps not what many of us would want, but nevertheless offers clear guidelines. U.S. industrial policy at the current time lags in servicing the needs of entrepreneurs and innovators, favoring companies that have more to lose than to gain from innovation. Entrepreneurs do not have the leverage to lobby a political system that at the current time responds to less innovative voices. Public policy does not need to be intrusive but it needs to set a stage in which the rules of the game are truly in the interest of a healthy marketplace. Without those policies, innovation will go elsewhere - as will tomorrow's profits.

One good idea Geoffrey had was to go for differentiation rather than trying to be "best in class" - kind of a "long tail" for business. In other words, context brings you past many of the economies of scale and gets us back to a village-like economic exchange, a peer-to-peer economy.

Charlene Li of Forrester Research moderated a panel of leading technology companies offering solutions in online publishing that focus on personal knowledge management and user-generated media. Charlene noted that 12 percent of U.S. households are reading weblogs weekly, a huge leap in just a few years' time. It a population of leading thinkers, critics and the couch potatoes who consume the others' outputs. What are these technologies and why do they matter?

Marisa Levinson from SixApart focuses on blogging software, and she walked the audience through "old-fashioned" blogs with basic entries, comments and archived with a relatively crude presentation, and then more modern blogs, which have a far more sophisticated look that is more the output of a full-blown but relatively light content management system. SixApart works mostly with large enterprises that are trying to reach their markets and to empower internal staff to communicate more effectively using the highly decentralized capabilities of weblogs to develop content quickly with highly effective content management software based on open source software and widespread standards that requires very little babysitting. It allows companies to reach very finely defined niche markets in a way that wouldn't have been cost-effective before and to implement knowledge management internally to use weblogs' highly flexible standard structure to help content be created and communicated effectively to knowledge workers.

Bret Taylor of Google heads developer programs and interfaces with "mashups" using Google content from its mapping products and other key sources. Bret highlighted the housing maps .com. Bret notes that mashups are similar to other service-oriented architectures being deployed these days, but oriented towards relatively simple development tools such as Javascript that allow people with limited technology abilities to deploy powerful ideas quickly and effectively. Google Maps pedometer is a site that allows runners and hikers to give athletes exact mileage of planned routes to allow them to create strategies for various routes. Unlike other technologies Bret notes that mashups are tools for developers, not users, but new interfaces are coming from Silicon Valley startups to allow users to create their own value-add interfaces. Charlene shoehorned in to show a sight called delight.ning.com, an online site that allows users to design fairly sophisticated content, in this instance for shoe-lovers.

Ben Elowitz of Wetpaint demonstrated is a relatively new online tool that tries to combine the best of weblogs, wikis and collaborative tools to create powerful community publishing. Ben highlighted WikiFido, a live demo site that has many familiar tools such as a keyword cloud, and listings of online profiles, all powered by a highly friendly user interface that makes it much easier to input content than tag-oriented wiki editing tools. The wiki-like capabilities power pages such as "my dog is cuter than yours," attracting content from contributors to develop depth and interest. Tagging and classification is easy to implement, allowing the content to self-organize in the hands of its users and contributors. "'Easy' is hard," Ben notes, but it provides the appeal to build content quickly and to build conversations that go beyond the lone soapboxes of weblogs.

Josh Schachter, founder of del.icio.us, demonstrated the capabilities of his Yahoo-owned social bookmarking service, using his own personal bookmarks - listing others who have contributed similar tags. The core group using del.icio.us is still highly tech-oriented, but Josh noted that the breadth of topics has spread out quite a bit since the tool's introduction.

Kevin Rose, founder of the social tagging service Digg, provides what Kevin terms a social news service that allows users not only to post tags to news stories but also to promote popular content to the site's home page. Stories get posted to one's home page, which can be compiled into feeds from friends' home pages to understand what other people are "digging" at a given moment. Digg has helped to break news stories through a real-time interface that acts as a scrolling news reader of stories that people are bookmarking at a given moment. It's a little like a stock ticker in which you can tune into what is moving people's minds instead of markets. Kevin's Mac portable desktop is a very abstract heatmap of stories that are moving on Digg. A tool allows one to develop akin to Inxight's StarTree desktop tools to build visual representations of how's "digging" whom and to understand relationships of people using Digg. Kevin demoed an interface showing a cool way to trace users as they move from one story to another.


Charlene's question: how do these tools change things? Marisa noted that even basic things like feeds have changed things, allowing users to subscribe to and collect content quickly and effectively. Ben noted that these tools blow away what publishers have been trying to accomplish for years, allowing content to be discovered, shared and have market impact far more quickly and effectively than via traditional channels. It's a very different publishing paradigm, one that makes some publishers very uncomfortable by a quick show of hands in the audience. Josh notes that content is increasingly selected by peers rather than content producers, in effect creating their own publications with editorial input from themselves and people in their social and professional circles. Kevin that sites like Digg level the playing field, providing enormous boosts to traffic and to encourage writers to break away from established media channels. Josh noted that not allowing users to share important content is "insane," cutting out of important conversations. "There is a conversation out there regardless, you can guide a conversation and learn from it," Marisa noted. Bret noted that some publishers closed down some user feedback tools that opened up feedback without any filtering that they felt uncomfortable. By contrast, users in sites like Digg can help users to filter effectively. Marisa noted that the Washington Post, one of their clients, seems to be moving beyond the fear phase and learning how to interact. Charlene noted that media companies are moving away from content and channel exclusivity and moving towards aggregating audiences (quite true). She points out CNET as a good example, pointing users to good stories.

How do you generate revenue? SixApart charges for software, WetPaint is ad-driven, Digg gets 9 million eyeballs a day for its AdSense ads, Google gets ads, of course. Would Digg be willing to expose its APIs to publishers as well as users, but there are no real answers yet for good integration seen from these panelists. Ben points out that many publishers are still in fear mode, but are beginning to look at developing community around long-published content in the "long tail." How to get started? "Get started," Marisa quips in reply, saying it's not that hard and it's easy to progress rapidly. Publishers can implement progressively, she recommends, staying open with your audience and to start small to learn gradually as adoption builds. "It's not scary, and you're going to get a lot of reach for your company," she notes. Ben notes that small private experiments can succeed wildly and build interest; if they don't succeed, it's easy to walk away from them. "You need to be friendly," says Bret, "if you don't your competitors will."

Great stuff. It's interesting how easily the revenue questions is answered these days with social media. There's a lot of skepticism about revenues from the publishing community still, but in essence social media has made the Web a self-monetizing publishing community, requiring mostly genuine interest from enthusiasts to start the ball rolling. Certainly no publisher in the room is in danger from any of these services specifically, but lack of aggressiveness in embracing these technologies is going to lead readers elsewhere. Consider these tools the gateway to highly powerful contextualization tools for content that's generating new audiences for content that would otherwise go unharvested. Managing key issues such as how much content gets integrated into social tools is important, but consider "fair use" the cost of doing business with technology-empowered audiences that have created their own standards for content quality and relevance.

Randy Marcinko moderated a panel of companies supplying and using different kinds of outsourcing solutions. Peter Hause of Javien outlined how they help to implement content ecommerce solutions for publishers of many sizes, including major B2B publishing companies. With a development staff focused on many other product priorities, outsourcing ecommerce was an important path to getting publications on line effectively and reliably. Rigorous certifications required for PCI-card ID authorization systems also complicate the development path for ecommerce non-experts. As an example Peter outlined a major financial services company provided data on corporate earnings wanted to sell earnings call transcripts online and to co-brand payment screen with their distribution partners. The client was bought buy a company that specializes in corporate licensing of content, which then decided to apply the Javien ecommerce model with others of its divisions. So even in a company with thousands of software developers worldwide outsourcing to specialists can make sense for mission-critical applications. Looking into the technical details of the "fit" for outsourcing is essential, especially when companies get purchased and the buyer plans to migrate content from a then-legacy platform to a new environment. In this instance an outsourced solution with easily migrated interfaces can allow for a transition that will be relatively painless from both the clients' and the company's perspective.

Krish Menon of TheNewsMarket, the leading online provider of broadcast-quality corporate and government video footage, has lead teams seeking and providing outsourcing. While all of the design is done with an in-house team, all of their development is outsourced. After four years in a successful relationship with an outsourcing vendor they are adding a new vendor to provide both scale and diversity. A key learning: size matters, but it's about "right-sizing" development requirements to available teams. Large outsourcing companies may not want to take on relatively small projects and small teams may be overwhelmed. Building an outsourcing team that can expand and contract with variable development needs can be a challenge when it comes time to introduce new projects and processes that may change, putting pressure on product and process quality. This puts a premium on introducing new processes and new teams carefully and working in "chunks" so that teams can be integrated into processes and projects smoothly. Backups are also important to make sure that there is coverage across critical portions of the development cycle. Krish has come to appreciate many of the basic tools of corporate software development such as well-written requirements. "If you can develop a good spec, outsource it, and include IP protection from the beginning," so ownership of intellectual property is clear across the relationship.

Chandu Nair of Scope e-Knowledge Center, which has grown to a 400-person global staff, notes that what has seen a shift in outsourcing in publishing, similar to the shift experienced by sports apparel manufacturer Nike, which has outsourced all of its factories. For one of their multi-billion dollar clients, they started as "babes in the woods" from a marketing perspective, but after six months in starting with outsourcing they realized that it could be a difficult environment. Starting with a simple database enhancement they helped to increase the number of products that could be produced, they moved to being on annual contracts, but it could still be a very volatile environment, moving from a hundred or more people working on a project to a handful. This keeps a premium on communication both with the clients and their staffs to ensure that everyone feels warm and on board and focused on problem solving with manageable expectations. Many companies are not ready for outsourcing in terms of having the correct processes and measurements in place, especially when the client does not have a staff that's familiar with the technical challenges that an outsourcing company takes on. Chandu's key recommendation: "Scale matters but skill rules."

This was an interesting panel, though it's not clear that new solutions came to light. The key take-away I had from it is that outsourcing is a highly embedded process in publishing now: there doesn't appear to be much controversy about the whether, only when and how much is appropriate with the specific kind of checklists needed to ensure success. It dovetails nicely into the discussion from the earlier panel on buy/build decisions, but with more inherent potential challenges if the outsourcing partner is not well-focused on a specific range of solutions.

How does editorial fit into the product process? Well, what is editorial these days in the light of technology churning out valuable content and users now fitting into the fray? It varies with your product line, but there are common lessons to be learned. Gina Piarulli of J.J. Keller manages Prospera, an online resource that helps human resources professionals understand complex regulatory and compliance issues. This means working with very talented and specialized people focuses on these key requirements. Editorial staff participates in calls with clients in the early ideation phase and sometimes come up with products themselves. On a tactical level editorial moderates online client discussion boards to understand what they're saying, acting as a conduit for new ideas to the development team. Getting personalities to work together can be tricky, especially when working with extroverted sales and marketing personalities and more reserved editorial and development teams. But editorial fills important gaps in being able to support sales and marketing staffs when they can speak the "shop" language in detail with clients that may make up for personality differences. With an entire staff co-located, the communications between various times is high, keeping ideas flowing into the product effectively. Webcasts to clients are driven by their editorial staffs, which helps them to communicate to customers in a relatively low-key environment that lets them communicate their expertise effectively to clients.

Elizabeth Osder of Yahoo! News heads product development for search and local products, enabling tools that shape content from contributors into appealing online products. Editorial is involved from the very beginning of the product development process, testing ideas that may have merit and developing those that will be of most service (yes, good ideas for editorial do come from marketing, and vice versa). Brainstorming sessions are key, but offsites are a luxury that's not often undertaken in very tight development cycles. Whatever the process, the key thing is to have a process and to apply to it wherever possible. "You take seriously the development process, then see who comes up with ideas and has the passion to run with them." At some point, though, editorial needs to get out of the loop and let things happen. Focus groups for new products help to fill the knowledge gap with their mass audiences to help create compelling and engaging products, as does going through usage data from their interactive product. With development teams in Norway and Bangalore communications can be challenging, but engineers do come to California on a regular rotating basis to get them more familiar with how products are deployed in editorial and to address problems more effectively - and sometimes as small fixes with big payback that are apparent from hands-on experience. Keeping development from creating products that are too feature-rich can be a challenge, requiring them to challenge people to keep the low hanging fruit close and keep value high from the simplest solutions possible.

Dave Callaway, Editor in Chief of MarketWatch, spoke for the other side of the editorial equation. Dave runs and directs the coverage of 100 journalists globally publishing constantly throughout the day and working with technology, marketing and sales to develop products meaningful to users. If products don't sync with editorial's sometimes obscure rules of the road his job is to raise the flag, but more often he's in the role of selling good ideas to journalists that must adopt them. Editorial from his perspective should also be in the "pre-conception" phase, invested in a new product and process as soon as possible. Having development in another state tends to limit the opportunities for direct involvement, placing a focus on efficient interchanges. Driving development down to several people on the editorial team allows the process to be shared fairly and efficiently during the development lifecycle and drives buy-in into the team more effectively. Editorial is always on the watch for products that may threaten their credibility but also equally concerned that they help to develop products that help the company as a whole. Editorial communicates with their out-of-state development team regularly, including face time on at least annual visits to the development site. It can be an immersive program, but it doesn't take a huge investment - "two days and a few beers" can do it. One of the best product ideas that they had came from a developer exposed to this environment, providing stock quotes that updated within the body of the story page as people are reading stories relating to that stock. A few hours, huge payback.

Participation is the key to success with editorial, and these stories offer a number of effective routes to success. Whatever the process, getting the process collaborative requires a certain level of unified culture buy-in that's overhead that must be born - overhead that may be foreign to some companies, but it's part of the process of creating today's most valuable content.

The old "buy or build" debate still rages on, but there's little debate on needing both approaches in the right circumstances. Jonathan Clark, EVP of Technology of Elsevier, laid out the need for being able to keep your ears open. For a highly popular title on pathology they interviewed the users of the book to understand that they were really doing with their time and in what circumstances they were using the book. Most of the times they can make a diagnosis without using references, but when the do, it's time to hit the books. It's especially dicey when they have to do differential diagnosis and try to distinguish between similar tissue samples. Jonathan showed some photos of a typical work environment, in which the book is perched right next to the microscope at which they do the pathology evaluations - with a PC in the background not too far away, but not in the loop. From the field studies they began to do iterative development of workable, shippable software to get week-by-week feedback from users on new features. Jonathan's slide showed at least five iteration cycles, followed by ellipses (...) then going out to deployment and release. This implies significant iteration.

Customers were directly involved in workshops with product managers and developers to get to the bottom of what needed to be productized. The effort moved quickly from a product focus to a client focus to understand exactly what was the problem that clients needed to solve. Diagnosis being key, they went to software that made it far easier to view diagnostic information with various potential matches side-by-side to enable pathologists to choose more easily between possible diagnoses. The final product, PathConsult, was not so different from the paper mockup, which displayed side-by-side photos of tissue samples and "diagnostic pearls" text beneath them to understand quickly what may the right choice. It's an impressive process with impressive results, especially because the result was fairly sparse in fancy features but rich in the exact content in the most valuable context. Listening carefully to clients doesn't always mean big and ornery solutions.

Renny Ponvert, President of Hemscott, Inc., a VSS-backed company, detailed the keys to the rapid, Silicon Valley-like growth that his financial content company is enjoying in the middle of giant competitors such as Reuters, Bloomberg and Thomson. In their instance being able to make careful acquisitions of highly specialized financial software and outsourcing providers to help them lower costs for producing financial content. This is a key factor in the financial space, where small new entrepreneurial companies are able to take new ideas that they've learned in major banks and market them to other institutions.

Renny put up a slide comparing the returns and risk for organic, joint ventures and roll-ups. While roll-ups have high risk, they also have the highest and largest returns. Renny advises making roll-ups standard operating procedure, but it requires focusing on companies with sales of less than $20 million and sales growth in excess of ten percent, with EBITDA of less than 9x and TTM sales of less than 3x. In other words, "Buy straw hats in winter," Renny advises - that is, have capital that's ready to move at the right point in the business cycle. Joint ventures can be profitable also, if the right "prenups" are in place, and gives you a chance to try out the fit before moving to acquisition, but be prepared for surprises. Whichever the technique, Renny reminds us to "Buy the steak, not the sizzle," and to make sure that the troops in the middle management layers making things work are willing to stick out the transition to new ownership. Other key road hazard on the way to success: beware legacy I.T. systems.

Key profiles of firms: founder-lead firms that are running out of liquidity and are in the market for planning, companies with strong middle management, and companies with strong products and already a legacy of success. Before you do the deal make sure to think things through, get the large stake-holders signed on to making the post-deal environment a success, and then move quickly to give people a sense that things have moved on into a fairly certain environment.

Both approaches are valid for a wide variety of sectors, but in spite of what both panelists were laying out there are still some significant differences in how these lessons are applied sector to sector. In finance there is a strong legacy of young companies coming along with new ideas that make their way into the marketplace fairly rapidly based on relationships in a very small and oftentimes geographically compressed community. In the sciences the legacy of renegade content solutions providers is fairly limited to date, so the need to leverage existing legacy products more efficiently is more acute. Buy or build? Whichever the choice, be willing to do your homework thoroughly.

Bob's extensive background in Washington reporting served as useful background to launch into a discussion of "pamphleteers" in the American colonies and the early days of the U.S. As Bob outlined these characters were oftentimes very acidic in their observations of public figures in and out of politics. When one spread allegations of corruption about Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton due to odd financial transactions he unwittingly forced Hamilton to expose a romantic affair - which terminated his chances to run for the presidency quite firmly. It did gain the pamphleteer some notoriety, though - which helped to extend his career potenital beyond the inefficient presses of the time.

Fast forward to 1830, when far more efficient printing technology allowed much more real news to reach markets cost-effectively, in which environment Benjamin Day created the New York Sun, an oftentimes salacious paper which at undercut its competition's price by half, allowing it to reach mass markets previously untouched by news. The New York Herald followed it shortly, which went more highbrow and soon eclipsed even The Times of London in circulation. Papers were enormously partisan in that era, but gradually the concept of objective journalism evolved thanks to new technology - wire services. The pooled news made available via these services made appeal to broad markets without being restricted by partisan lines a priority, leading to much more objective concepts of impartial journalism a must. By the turn of the 20th century it objectivity was an objective tenet, part and parcel with an era of industrial goods.

In the 20th century mass-market magazines gained broad appeal with exposes of corruption previously relayed only in elite journals such as The Atlantic. But the real appeal of magazines came with journals such as The Saturday Evening Post, which used improved technologies to lower prices and color and upbeat stories that appealed to the consciousness of average Americans who believed in the Horatio Alger success story and the inherent goodness of the growing nation. Yet again, technology made the message possible, this time a glossy self-image that comforted the masses.

New 35-millimeter photo technology made insightful views of major figures and events more appealing in the emerging field of photojournalism, leading to Henry Luce's Life magazine in 1936. It was an enormous success, far beyond Luce's own estimates of demand. Demand went into the millions of copies as fast as he could print them - The Saturday Evening Post was eclipsed as America's magazine. Television eventually killed the general interest magazine business model, though newspapers have survived well into the Web era, only to see today's "pamphleteers" - webloggers - begin a new cycle of technical innovation. "The days of the general interest newspaper is gone," Bob noted, forcing print into high-end audiences and papers trying to focus on segmented audiences in their markets.

Web technology almost took Bob's CQ down but online publishing now represents more than 60 percent of their revenues, generated by a very efficient publishing system. It meant some cannibalization of their core print products, but enhancing their content has shored those up as well to create a modified business model that put emphasis on ad revenues. Revenues are growing at a 15 percent annual rate. "Change never ceases, particularly in the field of technology. It can crush everything in its way but it can be harnessed for success. If you don't, you die, and nobody will linger to lament your passing." Bob makes a persuasive case for the power of technology to transform publishing again and again, but perhaps the ability of individuals to publish globally adds a new angle this time around that publishers have yet to digest fully.