Publishing technology trends in 2010

Review of article by Bruce Jensen on Folio Magazine's website

Just finished reading a 'trends' article that Bruce Jensen wrote for Folio Magazine. The article is entitled Four Magazine Tech Trends for 2010 and Beyond. I think there's a few other things that publishers should be concerning themselves with in 2010.

The first is Semantics -- continuing to enrich their content based on the relevant taxonomies to their readership. That readership can be enthusiasts, business-to-business, academic disciplines and so on. Publishers spent a good deal of time enriching their content in 2009 for 'discoverability' on the major search engines, and that is going to continue. However, the smart publishers are going to continue to look for ways to further enrich content so that interrelated concepts and 'entities' can be serendipitously presented to a reader based on his/her context.

The second trend that publishers will continue to press forward in is offsite access to content. This is an extension of the multi-channel publishing trend that Bruce elaborated on in his article. People aren't just looking for content on their various devices, but want to also discover that content in other platforms than those presented by the publisher. While much effort has been expended with feeds to Twitter, Facebook, Social Median or other social media platforms, this is just the tip of the iceberg. At a certain point, the publisher is going to think of presenting content as a 'beacon' from their central 'public-facing' repository out to any other repository.

I'm not suggesting that content would always be freely accessed -- more likely it will be instanced in a sample ('copy taste') form and the full version could be purchased through the usual channels. Obviously the book publishers are quite concerned with the commodification of book content in the age where ereadership is ramping up. However, the demand and the technology is there, so this isn't a good time for book publishers to stick their heads in the sand in the manner that the music studios did just a short decade ago.

Third, the consumer is going to look for ways that content can follow them across media. That's hard to do in print, but if you're reading your NY Times online in the morning then jump on the commuter train, you'll want to bookmark where you were in your favorite article so you can pick that right up on your mobile device. Likewise with your favorite ebook, which you might be reading on multiple devices. You'll want to tag that and come back to it, not necessarily on the same device. The technology is already out there, it just should become more standardized and broadly expected in '10.

Posted at 06:43 pm by Joseph Bachana

Great ideas

Submitted by Seth Gottlieb (not verified) on Thu, 01/07/2010 - 10:30.

Hi Joe,
I was surprised to see how vapid Bruce's article was. I was tempted to look back at the prior three annual editions of this "trends" article and compare. My suspicion is that they are identical other than the date.
I really like your contribution to the conversation and agree with your ideas. The cross device mobility reminded me of that "football on different monitors" AT&T commercial where people had an uninterrupted experience of the game as they moved to different devices. I wish I had the link. I think services like "Instapaper" are a start but there is so much opportunity for improvement.
Another trend that I see is that magazines will continue to wrestle with monetization. I think we are years away from a solution that gives the industry a much needed re-invention. Either holes in the advertising based revenue model will be patched up or someone (maybe publishers, maybe not) will invent some effective way to monetize an audience (paid content or some other idea). Your enrichment and portability ideas will help increase the value to the consumer. The trick will be how to convert that value into revenue.
Great article and I hope the conversation continues.

re: Ideas

Submitted by jbachana on Thu, 01/07/2010 - 11:17.

Thanks for the post, Seth. I've been thinking a lot about how some of my customers in publishing are making a lot of money -- well, making UP for some of the revenue they lost from ad sales lineage going down.

One such way has been by aggregating data through portals to their customer base. Take a look at what they've done at The Deal, for instance. They all but have forsaken their print publication, yet they've built a pretty cool database tool that brings together M&A deal content, both from their in-house analysts as well as from outside in the community. They seem to be doing very well financially with a subscription-based model for their customers.

Likewise with American Lawyer Media (Incisive), who has been selling aggregated court opinions/rulings data for a few years now. This is all in public domain, but apparently law firms are willing to pay for the application/portal access that ALM has created since its convenient and is built with the UX needs of the lawyer in mind.

Yet another customer of mine is Jobson Publishing, which has been packaging valuable content for its affiliate B2B customers for some time now using an application we built called "Panorama." They, like the other two cases I mentioned above, still have plenty of print publications. However, the steady money seems to be coming from these portal applications that are making it easy to aggregate content and present it (or deliver it) to their customers in the form and manner that the customer needs it.

While Bruce's article may have been somewhat simplistic, he did evoke the need for multi-channel technologies, which are indeed what make all of this possible. However, in the case of all three of these publishers and many more that are doing this, they paid very careful attention to semantic enrichment of content against the relevant taxonomies of their industry(ies). It ain't cheap to do that! However, they all got a headstart, mainly because they saw the falling ad revenues a few years back and responded. Those publishers that didn't -- well, we know the story.

I've got other thoughts on how the enthusiast media publishers can make money -- different from the B2B model but with some analogous technology needs -- will try to post a new blog next week on it if I don't get sucked back into the work vortex.

Thanks again for the input, Seth.

More Blogs From Author:

January 06, 2010

Review of article by Bruce Jensen on Folio Magazine's website