I’d popped into the show the previous day as I’d not been along before and I couldn’t believe how many of the presenters , exhibitors and delegates were talking about Digital Editions/E-zines/Interactive magazines.  Not that I don’t think they have a place in the digital landscape but the prevalence of the pageturning technologies was overwhelming.

What was equally shocking was that nobody was talking about web content management, the CMS and search vendors were conspicuously absent so I was a bit nervous about how my presentation would be received.

My argument was that the discussion about whether an on-line version of the magazine is better than an interactive pageturner is missing the point.

In the next five years, the publishing industry faces changes as profound as those that have transformed the music business.  Digital content is expensive to create and print publishers need to look beyond creating a digital version of the print magazine and fully embrace the web if they are to have any chance of survival.

Simply applying the magazine paradigm to screen based content doesn’t work.  On-line, we scan and search for snippets of information.  Off line we relax and consume larger volumes of content at our leisure.  The two experiences are completely different.

The question I posed is whether the publishers are adopting pageturning technologies because the users are crying out for it, or because it’s an easy option for the publishers?

There are some great examples of the E-zine working well.  Virgin Media has a version of it’s monthly TV guide in this format.  You can watch trailers of films, interact with games and it’s very entertaining.  Whilst you could do most of that in a website, the format is perfect for two reasons: -

• There is no long term intrinsic value in the content, at the end of each month, the current edition is redundant
• Virgin Media have an enormous database of broadband customers to “push” the content to

It’s not cheap to produce though as you have to keep creating expensive flash and video content for each edition.  The format takes a lot of effort to create quality results time after time and, like physical magazines, content delivered by email is consumed once (if you are lucky) and then put in the bin.  For most publishers, it doesn’t represent a good return on your content investment.

The alternative to this technology is a scary new world.  Everything changes.  You lose control over how the end user views the content.  They could be using a PC or a Mac, Explorer or Firefox or even using an iPhone or a tablet.  Design and content are separated at birth, sites are templated out and content fed into them afterwards.  Editorial have to learn new skills, it’s not just about the words any more, they need to understand SEO, driving traffic, social media and analytics.

High quality web content however maximises the value of your content investment by benefiting from the “long tail” of search users.  Content is consumed many times and provides value over the long term.  The web is about connecting content and sharing it.  Locking your content away in a flash based “microsite” doesn’t lend itself to the social aspects of the web.

My rallying cry to the audience was to think long and hard about deploying the technology just because they could and embrace the wider world of web content management.  It’s a pretty mature market now and the pioneers have already made the big, costly mistakes so stand on their shoulders and look beyond just digitising the magazine.

For print publishers, there’s very good reason for this pessimism. In the US, always a marker for what is to come in the UK, newspapers are already going under. Traditional publishers who happily gave away their content (and ad inventory) for free when the web first came along are now finding that on-line revenues are not making up for the decline in print advertising dollars.

This is being replicated in the UK where we’re even seeing the traditional publishers cutting back on digital costs in order to keep the business alive in the short term, by focussing on what they know best – print.

The problem is that the print cash cow is dying. Ad and recruitment revenues have been decimated by the current climate.

In these hard times, advertisers have been forced into trying alternatives and have found that they work. On-line advertising has been relatively unscathed so far because print dollars have been switched on-line. Recruitment has been moved to on-line job boards. Neither of these necessarily has the same impact as a full page colour spread or half page job ad in a magazine, but they are measurable and work. A big chunk of that money will never find it’s way back into print even when when conditions improve.

Even the publishers that have well established web properties, and the pureplay on-line businesses, are finding that the fiercely defended CPM model, the staple revenue generator for the last ten years is coming under pressure. Adwords has made measurability a given now and when times are tough, CPC and CPA rule.

So is publishing dying? Is it the end of quality content, news and investigative journalism? All of these things have been predicted and more.

There are interesting parallels with another publishing business – the music industry. Like the newspapers, for a long time the big record labels were able to control the creation and distribution of content, exploiting their position as the volume distributers in order to make revenue. Of course, lots of people benefitted, bands were signed up and paid advances, songwriters got their royalties but the main beneficiary was the music industry itself.

But then, as is now happening to print publishers, the distribution rules changed. It should have been obvious. Digital recording initially meant that CD’s could be copied and the music industry furiously ranted about IPR and pursued the pirates through the courts. But bigger problems were to come. Digital downloads, Napster, and most of all Apples iPod changed the rules forever. Amazingly throughout the majority of the period when this was happening, the music industry adopted a stubborn, head in the sand attitude to the situation.

Perhaps even more puzzling is that the publishing industry, having lived through (and reported on) what happened to the music business, has thus far largely adopted the same tactics. In the words of Jim Collins, they are not confronting the “brutal facts”.

The common thread to this, the thing that changed, was the distribution method. History of course shows us that this has always been the case, it’s happened with many industries. In the transport industry, canals were replaced by trains which were then replaced by roads. In communications, the letter was replaced by the telegraph, then the telephone and now, for a lot of us, email has become our main communication method None of the previous industries died completely (there are still people tapping morse code out there) but they lost their position as the primary distribution method.

Did this change kill music? Not at all. Most would argue that music has never been in better shape. Look around and commuters, runners, people lazing in the park are all listening to music on their iPods. Not only that, they are finding new music through Apple’s Genius, niche internet radio stations and services such as LastFM and Spotify.

As a band, it’s never been easier to get exposure by promoting your songs on MySpace, iTunes and Youtube and make money directly from downloads. Unlike the artists in the 60’s and 70’s, performing live is now profitable so bands are playing concerts and festivals that are sold out every weekend.

Music is alive and well and while it’s not RIP the music business, the power has shifted away from “the industry” and to the people that create the music and those that want to hear it.

What can the publishing industry learn from all this? I think a lot and my next post will focus on how we might adopt some of the new models and provides some predictions…

The event was held at the Royal Society of Arts and it was interesting to see such a wide range of different types of publishers in the room.  There were conventional content publishers, both magazine and on-line, but there were also charities, universities, the RSA themselves and several companies who publish to employees via their intranets.

Social networks and publishing are converging

I believe we’re now seeing a big convergence of platform functionality between the social networking sites and traditional publishers.  After starting out as a pure social network, Facebook is introducing more and more ways for users to upload and share content.  It started out with the wall and now includes groups, photo uploads and many others.  LinkedIn is doing similar things with groups and discussions.

Social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn start from the premise that you already know the people and are therefore going to be interested in the content they are creating.  It’s like going to the pub with your mates and having a gossip.

Publishers understand their audiences

Publishers on the other hand come at social networking from a completely different perspective.  Publishers audiences are bound by a common interest.  Whether that’s the arts, technology, sewing or pregnancy, they consume the publishers content because they are interested in the subject matter.

Some groups are only interested in a transient way, pregnancy communities are, by definition, constantly changing.  Others are more permanent, if you are an Arsenal supporter then it’s for life!  The common theme though is that the community is drawn together by the content and consists of people that share a common interest but don’t necessarily know each other (at first).  It’s much more like a club than a pub.

CMS is evolving

The underlying concepts for social networking (and the requisite technology platform) though are the same.  It’s about connecting people to content and then back to people again to form connections and community.

Squiz along with some of the more enlightened CMS developers are now building this functionality into the CMS platforms and the launch was very well received.  Publishers seem finally to be getting to grips with the concepts and now have the tools to allow them to engage properly with their audiences.

Culture is the key

The biggest barrier is no longer the technology, it’s the culture and willingness to “let go” of the traditional one way broadcast model of publishing and start listening to what the audience have to say.

It takes time to create vibrant communities.  Publishers have to take responsibility for creating the right environment and nurturing the firestarters that will generate the user content.  You can’t just bolt community on to the side of your existing publishing business, culturally or technically.  You have to integrate it into the fabric of your organisation.

Content will always provide a “centre of gravity” for communities that pure social networks will find hard to replicate.  That gives publishers a big opportunity to provide the platform for their communities to engage with them and each other.

Once the photographs start coming through I’ll be posting proof that we were all there, in the meantime, here’s what early morning in central London looks like to Byte Nighters.

It’s not too late to donate even though the event is over so if you’re still interested in boosting the total further then simply click through to the Compound Media justgiving page.

It’s the IT industry coming together to help combat youth homelessness and we’re once again proud to be the largest single fundraising event for Action for Children who recently re-branded from NCH.

It’s still not too late to join us if you want to take part in a great evening, alternatively, you could just sponsor me to be cold and wet for one night of the year.

Great to be recognised at the digital awards, the one everyone wants to win.  We’re up against some prestigious competition in The Guardian, IPC, Channel 4 and Hearst digital but who knows after last years victory for ZDNet?

Whatever the outcome, it’s always a great night out and a chance to catch up with all the gossip in the on-line publishing world.

Well, how surprised were we last night when at the APA Creative Awards, the new Your family site beat the likes of Tesco and BA to the “Best landing page” award?

Very! that;s how…

Only a few weeks after launching the site, we’ve already won our first award which is great news and bodes well for the future.

The Redwood team were all very excited and much champagne was consumed with the added bonus that the NSPCC team were in attendance too to see the victory. The party went on until late and it’s fair to say that the office is quite subdued today although everyone is admiring the nice shiny trophy.

It’s a really clever mix of “Heat” styling but full of very high quality parenting advice all backed up by a team of experts at NSPCC. It’s a crowded market but the high level of trust endowed by the NSPCC brand should see us carve out a niche in the sector. We’ve got articles, videos, product reviews and loads of suggestions for family days out now that the summer is here.

Needless to say there are a large number of people to say thanks to for making my fist major site build a success. All the editorial and account management team at Redwood who write the content, NSPCC for the opportunity to do the project and the guys at Squiz who built the site on their open source MySource Matrix CMS.

In building the site we’ve invested heavily in the platform and hosting so that now we’re able to provide a fully hosted, enterprise level CMS. This is ideal for smaller publishers who want to get on-line without the expense of software licensing and hardware purchase. Look out for a further announcement about the launch of the “Compound Enterprise Platform” soon.

In the meantime, if your kids won’t eat their tea tonight or go to bed on time without a tantrum, take a look at www.yourfamily.org.uk and see where you’re going wrong…

This is the first in a series of posts reflecting on some of the key learnings from a recent project to take an established print publication on-line. I had originally started penning a long article about what we’d learned but quickly realised that it lends itself nicely to shorter, more focussed pieces so here is the first: -

Taking your print publication on-line is a scary business. I know, I’ve just been through the process, hence the lack of recent activity on the blogging front.

For the average print publisher, moving on-line is daunting. The digital community has created a brave new world, where the natives speak a different language. To the uninitiated, this makes almost impossible to determine who knows what they are talking about, and who are the equivalent of dodgy second hand car salesmen.

Should you embrace video? what about user generated content, social networking, widgets, Web 2.0 and all the other buzzwords that get bandied around in the press and amongst the knowledgeable bloggers?

One safe route for print publishers venturing on-line would be to look to one of the digital agencies to guide them through the maze. After all, the agencies are at the forefront of the on-line world and should be best placed to advise on design, architecture and strategy.

However, having worked on a number of projects now with the agency community, I think that far from them being able to provide all the answers, the publishers actually know a lot more than they realise. The best projects are those where the two sides listen to each other and respect their specialist knowledge.

Lesson 1 – It’s a combination of the digital marketers knowledge of the landscape combined with the publishers understanding of their content and audience that creates the “magic soup”

The most amazing thing of all is that with the dedication of the board, sponsors and NCH, the costs of staging the event worked out at less than 10% of the total.

Byte Night Local contributed around £40,000 with satellite events in Reading and Essex and we’ll be pushing hard to expand on this next year.

A big thanks to all the teams involved and we’re already looking forward to next year’s event so be sure to put the 3rd October in your diary now