Recently in Publishing Category
Now, given that I'm a subscriber to The Atlantic, and that the discussion is actually pretty interesting, how could I resist? Find out why Murdoch still thinks print is worth investing in:
The article, in all its glory, can be found on The Atlantic site.
Tish of the Constant Observer shares her Seven Traits of Highly Effective Community Developers. I know some of ours might not be keen on number 3:
3. Must enjoy technology. These days, the tools of digital media are (or should be) easy to learn. Your community manager will understand -- and be able to adapt quickly to -- upgrades in tools. She or he also might suggest new tools, and will learn new tools pretty quickly.Meanwhile Howard Owens shares some tips for newspaper people new to community management. I like this one:
Participate. When a reader posts incorrect information, offer up a correction or clarification. When a reader posts an assertion that would benefit from factual support, ask for it. When someone makes a statement that reminds you of an interesting quote or event that didn't make your story, leave your own comment about it. Your participation not only makes the conversation more interesting, and keeps people coming back, it gives you credibility when it comes time to play cop.One day I'll figure out why that one is so hard for journalists. And then I'll become a consultant and make a fortune... :)
In 2004, about 40% of people visited a homepage and then drilled down to where they wanted to go and 60% use a deep link that took them directly to a page or destination inside a site. In 2008, said Dr Nielsen, only 25% of people travel via a homepage. The rest search and get straight there.
All that time you're lavishing on your web site's front page? Only a quarter of your visitors are using it. And that number is shrinking every day.
Social Media in Plain English from leelefever on Vimeo.
Now, that's a much more positive angle on the broadband industry than the UK is showing. Virgin's call for the BBC to contribute to the bandwidth costs of the successful iPlayer is just ludicrous. For one, the BBC is already paying its own supplier, and at the other end, the customer is already paying for the bandwidth. If the ISPs were genuinely committed to serving their customers, they'd have been following the rapid growth of audio and video streaming and downloading amongst their users, and putting plans in place to facilitate it. Penalising another company for being popular with their customers is just not the way forward.
This is an important debate for those of us in the media to keep a watch on. This fundamentally affects both the major future content delivery platform for our work - and our costs for accessing it.
1 & 2: Digital SLR Photography & EOS Magazine
Nicholas, the chap in charge of the technical side of our MT4 upgrade, emailed this story about the BBC's blog upgrade this morning. They've beaten us to Movable Type 4, probably helped by the cunning use of those good folks at Headshift.One of my colleagues mentioned this at the editors' conference we had last year, to something akin to a stunned silence. I don't get the impression that her point really sank in with many of the people present. And it's not like it's a new idea. People have been talking about the web's ability to explode conventional content structures for half a decade.
This is, and always was, an inevitable consequence of the structure of the web: the link. Any page can link to any other. And as the social internet has developed we have more and more ways of recommending links to others: e-mail, instant lessening, blogs, bookmarking sites, forums, Twitter, social networks and so on. And that was the point of the video I posted the other day - people aren't going to come and visit you in the same way they pick up and read a magazine, they're going to come to you via a link shared in any number of ways - or through that 800lb gorilla we know as "search",
Mr Arrington of that widely admir'd and provocative pamphlet Techcrunch has discoursed at length about the coming juggernaut of the blog publishers. There's big venture capital money heading in the direction of the most promising guys, and a whole new way of thinking to go with it. Quoth Arrington:
And writing good content is only half the battle. You have to figure out the complex, dynamic web of politics between bloggers and mainstream media before you post to know where to get support. And you'll need support in the form of links from other prominent bloggers. An early push can take a post and make it a headline on TechMeme, which leads to page views and notice by sponsors. But since blogging is almost by definition a conversation between bloggers, fights tend to break out over emotional issues. Cliques develop. Can you count on them to support you down the road?How are mainstream publishers reacting? They're trying to sponge free content off bloggers. Um, good luck with that guys.
So, what's happening here? We're in a transition phase.
The other day, Nick Sergeant was messing around with Yahoo! Pipes. He discovered that by ingesting content from one of our newspaper sites, and comparing those stories to the content in a specific story, he could automatically create related links to other stories on that site.And that's a really neat little trick for getting those handy little "related articles" links on the bottom of your posts. Now, doing this sort of thing on a commercial sitre is not without its risks. Relying on free web services can come back to bite you if those free services suddenly close up or change massively. And, as a non-paying customer, you get exactly the customer service you paid for.
Note: There are vendors who provide this service for thousands of dollars. Thanks for one smart developer playing around with the latest, cool open-network tools, GateHouse Media can now make it available on our sites for free.Big publishing companies tend to seek big publishing solutions. The problem is that the web favours small, agile solutions. Squaring that circle is a huge challenge, and one that's as much a social one as a technical one.
Nicely put.But at the end of the day the purpose is to serve the changing demands of our audience. I'm often asked the question: "But why are you bothering to doing that particular thing?"
The easy answer is because more and more people are reading, responding to, downloading, linking to or looking at "that thing" and therefore finding it of value.
So not a hard decision really.
PaidContent speculates about an RBI IPO:
And Davis isn't in any hurry to sell RBI either. "It's early days - we're ruling nothing in and nothing out". That includes an IPO for the unit. "We are very open and flexible on how we do this and also on timing."Journalism.co.uk highlights RBI chief executive Keith Jones' positive take on it:
In an internal memo to staff, Keith Jones, chief executive of RBI UK, said this was 'an exciting new era' for the publisher.
"Reed Business' senior management team are very confident in our company, as are all the RBI UK Board - so it's very much a case of business as usual," he said.
Of course, I can't claim to have done the heavy lifting on this. That was a combination of the publisher, Michael, over in Dublin, and Matt Carey and his team at Lift who did the hard work in building the Movable Type templates.
But this is certainly an interesting experiment for us, giving us the chance to build a really-well featured site swiftly and (relatively) cheaply, and give the staff a quick, efficient CMS to use to manage it. The real test, of course, will be how it performs over the next few weeks. Fingers crossed...

Shane Richmond has posted a description of the problems inherent in using an external hosting provider, providing something of a counter to my earlier post about the failings of self-hosting publishers.
In short, the company that the Telegraph worked with to build My Telegraph went under last year, and they've frantically been running around trying to bring it all in house. They have my sympathies…
However, the good news buried in Shane's post is that James Higgis and others from the team that worked on the initial launch have launched a new company, called Resident Digital, and their blog is already proving interesting reading. I've subscribed and am reading with interest…
There were a couple of interesting, but ill-attended talks yesterday before lunch, which I wanted to draw together.

June Cohen of the TED Conference made some interesting points about media, and in particular, about technology just drawing it back full circle.
"We think new media is new," she said. And it is. "But old media is astonishingly new in the whole of human history."
Using the clock metaphor for human existence, "old media" appears about two minutes to midnight.
"Before that, all media was social," she suggests. Without mass media to carry messages, people communicate on an individual or group basis, in the same place as each other. The mass media age has, against expectations, created an anti-social media. Media delivered from on high is new and "frankly, really horrible". TV has isolated us, Cohen suggested..
"US 50 year olds watch 40 hours of TV a week - that's a full time job".
However, this only matters if those pageviews are translating into revenue somehow…
Now, the BBC has a fondness for indulging in brand extension, and the latest of those is a new Countryfile Magazine. That's not very notable. They do that a lot. What is interesting is that they've launched it as a social media offering with a podcast, forums and (pseudo-)blogs. And all those offering were online before the mag was launched.
I think it's a good call. The social media element of the product is integral from the start, rather than pasted on later. It's not additional work on top of producing the magazine, but part of what the title is all about. It'll be interesting to see how it works. So far, the forum has only 41 registered users, but it's early days.
Now, I've seen members of RBI staff leave comments on our blogs without making explicit who they are, but this level of sock-puppetry is just a bad idea. If you get caught, credibility crumples…
- Editorial team (Business) - www.xperthr.co.uk
- Podcast - www.NewScientist.com/podcast
- Website (business) - www.personneltoday.com and www.xperthr.co.uk
- Website (consumer) - www.newscientist.com
The Online Journalism Blog is looking for volunteers to look at the AOP-nominated sites and post comments in a wiki.
This is dumb. Seriously dumb. The whole ethos of social media is built around the idea of when you link to something, it stays in the same place. Having a system that destroys that link is immediately undermining its usefulness.
Poor, poor show.
Update (2pm): It's just changed again, to video about a triple murder...
Update: It appears that the video has changed. I've written a post about the problems with shifting video content as a result.

Nice to see another guy charged with getting traditional magazines online dipping his toes into the blogging water...
Admittedly the article is about his very cute cats (right) and the cost of owning them, but this is Farmers Weekly, and the readership have more interest in the costs of owning animals than most. And, more to the point, Tim's offering his growing readership something extra, and treating them to something early.
Many of you are probably thinking "so what?". In an environment where the idea of publishing news on the web before print isn't yet 100% won, every step in this direction is significant.
And it gave me the rare chance to publish pictures of some cute cats...
I'm never slow to criticise Alexa, a site which provides web site ranking based on a toolbar that is only available to Internet Explorer users on a PC. Why, that's not going to distort the results at all, is it?
Fundamentally, I find the idea of people making decisions about their web sites based on the browsing habits of a small group of tech-savvy PC users just disturbing. Sure, you could argue that people who don't understand that there's an inherent problem with Alexa deserve everything they get. But it's usually the people who are making the transition to the web that fall into this traffic trap and end up making poor decisions based on poor information.
Well, they've finally addressed one of my major criticisms by releasing an Alexa toolbar for Firefox. The long climb back to being useful starts here...
Winning at New Media with 1980s cartoon heroes.
Brilliant.
(But I'm a little concerned at how much Dan knows about My Little Pony.)
Thanks to Kevin from Travolution for posting that.
Happy news in my work e-mail this morning: Reed Elsevier to exit the defence exhibitions sector
Reed Elsevier announced today that it is to exit the defence exhibitions sector. This portfolio of five shows is part of Reed Elsevier's global Business division and represents around 0.5% of group annual turnover.Sir Crispin Davis, Chief Executive Officer of Reed Elsevier, said :
"Our defence shows are quality businesses which have performed well in recent years. Nonetheless, it has become increasingly clear that growing numbers of important customers and authors have very real concerns about our involvement in the defence exhibitions business.
I wasn't always comfortable with that aspect of my employer's business. Soon, it won't be an issue.
To be fair, a trade press story popped up on the Press Gazette Twitter feed this morning
Centaur in 300k directory buy-up: Centaur has acquired the Creative Handbook from Reed Business Information for £300,000.The purchase of the annual directory for the creative services market is planned to complement Centaur's monthly magazine Creative Review and the weekly Design WeekPity it was one I had known about for a few days...
Update 22/2/07: If you're looking for information about Reed Elsevier's divestment of RBI, try:
RBI to be divested by Reed Elsevier
RBI for Sale: Coverage Continues