Really Strategies Blog

"Journalism is the act. Newspapers are the artifact."

The past week was flush with conversation (ie, Tweets and blog comments) about Clay Shirky's rousing blog post Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable.

Read it. Read it in its entirety.

One comment on the post from Mark Bertils that won't leave my head is "Journalism is the act. Newspapers are the artifact."

I make a habit of looking up known definitions in the dictionary (and I do mean digital not the heavy tome I have here at my desk) because I find additional thought-provoking but commonly-known information. While reading the definitions of newspaper and newsprint I am reminded that the essence of the newspaper business is timeliness. Why were evening editions so popular in the 1950s and early 60s? For the same reasons that Twitter and RSS newsfeeds are so popular now. Timeliness.

I do lament the demise of print and I don't like seeing my Google news alerts on this topic competing with my spam folder in terms of volume. But I am heartened by the fact that journalism, reporting, writing, editing, authoring, these beautiful professions whose fundamental job is the exchange of thoughts from one mind to another, are not going away.

Twitter, Facebook, and one dumb juror

A court case that has been all over local media recently around our home base here in the Philadelphia area is the corruption trial of former state senator Vince Fumo.  This trial has been going on for five months and the jury is in deliberations over Fumo's guilt or innocence.  Apparently one of the jurors has been tweeting and posting comments on his Facebook page.  Article on Philly.com here.  While the substance of the messages appear to not jeopardize the outcome of the trial, I have to ask one question - is this juror that stupid that in this day he thought he would not be caught?  I've only been a juror once but it was made very clear by the judge that we could not speak to anyone about the trial until after the trial was over.  Posting comments on Facebook and tweeting about the event is clearly a violation of the jury rules regardless of the intent or actual substance of the information.

Maybe I am old fashion, but I still don't get why people have to tweet about everything they are doing.  Are they that insecure with themselves that they have to shout to the world "look at me, I'm standing here doing nothing, aren't I great?"  Reminds me very much of the ass (excuse me, donkey) in Shrek that is jumping up and down yelling "pick me, pick me".  Maybe that is the problem with Twitter, too many donkeys jumping at the same time vying for attention.

For our sake in Philadelphia, let's hope the donkey (or ass) who has been posting comments to his Facebook account and tweeting about the jury deliberations on the Fumo trail has not caused a mistrial due to his vane actions of keeping his "friends" up to date.

"Barbarians at the gate?" NFAIS Conference

I was highly interested with the title of the upcoming 51st Annual NFAIS Conference.  Quoting from the brochure: "Barbarians at the gate?  The impact of digital natives and emerging technologies on the future of information services"  Essentially the gist of the subsequent write-up is that those who were born in the digital era and have almost exclusively known digital communications, are getting ready to storm the world and start driving the information technology revolution from inside companies and organizations (presumably the way they have with consumer communications). 

How perfect.  This is what all of us in the publishing technology community have been waiting for and have started to see out there in the last few years.  It means that it is less and less important for the publishing technology revolution to be driven by the visionary technical whizzes.  Less problematic to convincing companies to adopt more and more advanced digital workflows and systems.  As the 'digital natives' come into their own, demand for better systems is beginning to drive things.  What a great thing to happen in publishing technology!  Of course this process proceeds differently in different publishing verticals, with more scientifically oriented (e.g. technical) companies already there.  But now we can expect the non-science oriented publishing to come aboard. Magazine and book publishers should be coming around, and goodness knows, we have been waiting for this moment in educational publishing - the slowest of publishing verticals to change. 

Marjorie Scardino at SIIA: Doom and Gloom - or not?

"Education will be THE force that drives economic and political determination around the world."

Marjorie Scardino, CEO of Pearson, opened the SIIA Information Industry Summit yesterday by highlighting our opportunity to teach tomorrow's workforce "21st century skills". 

What are 21st century skills?  (Marjorie referenced a report from the Partnership for 21st Century Skills)

• manage information
• communicate effectively
• work flexibly and in groups
• deal with complex issues
• exercise imagination

When discussing more of the hard skills, Marjorie focused on critical thinking, math, and science. 

What are your thoughts?  What should we be developing in ourselves and teaching our children?

Why a CMS? why now?

Maybe you've got a gut feeling that it's time to buy a content management system.  Maybe you've  gotten a demo of one and gotten general buy-in from the team.  Now it's time to justify it financially. 

The first thing to keep in mind is that a CMS is a tool.  It is a tool that serves two purposes, so there are two angles that can be taken for justification.

First, and easiest, if most mundane, a CMS serves to wring out non-creative tasks from content development.  Think about how much time is wasted in content production: routing, tracking, moving, backing up, converting from one format to another, cutting and pasting, rekeying, etc., etc.  All of this takes time and an efficient publishing operation will reduce this work to a minimum by using a contemporary CMS so that more resources can be put into making the best content available.  If you produce a lot of content, then these numbers may surprise you once you pull them together. 

Ordinarily, publishers won't want to rock the boat with this stuff, it just causes angst and is hard for management to relate to hot topics in expanding market presence, competing with other publishing organizations, etc.  However, many publishers are feeling angst anyway, and have no choice at this point.  Profitability is a serious issue as is well known.  But more compelling, publishers are now feeling the weight of these non-productive tasks now that electronic distribution of content has expanded so dramatically - and along with it, manual production tasks.  Content must be agile, and this won't happen if production staff or offshore vendors have to touch every piece, every time.

Second, and much, much more interesting, a good CMS can put some forms of content distribution in reach that were never in reach before. In this sense, a CMS can be part of a new initiative to compete in the publishing market. For example, a traditional publisher may want to slice and dice their content to form specialized publications for niche customer segments.  A licensee might be willing to pay for certain topics of content, if it can be delivered in usable form.  In many cases, this was never seriously considered because it was never financially possible before - there would have been too much manual and editorial labor in finding and organizing appropirate content, and producing it in appropriate forms.  But today, with a native XML CMS like RSuite, this is financially possible.  And the first publishers to execute well will be able to create specialized demand and win customers.

Maybe you pay for your new CMS through ordinary savings, but take advantage of it by using it to develop new publication types.  Whatever your strategy, the technology is here, is now, and for the new generation of systems, particularly RSuite CMS installed on a Mark Logic repository, the technology actually works well enough to be cost effective.  We know this because our customers are starting to report savings and interesting new revenue stories to us.  All we can say, then, is: go for it!

Achieving automation: InDesign/InCopy to XML

InDesign and InCopy are built for desktop publishing - giving great power to design and editorial.  This is all great news.  However, it makes exporting XML rather tricky - particularly the development of fully automated XML exports.  Sure you can capture XML coming out of these applications, but can you really push that XML into your CMS without having text processing look at it? 

We've looked at this over many projects and the key issue is, of course, the discipline required by each group in the process.  If they don't follow the rules, then their content might not match what your CMS is looking for.  A deck must be labeled as a deck somehow.  Likewise, a B-Head or run-in head must be labeled appropriately. There are also customer or genre specific structures and metadata that must be maintained - with paragraph or character styles (or one of several other techniques).

The point is that you can't look over everyone's shoulder.  Styling and other structure related errors are bound to creep into your content on occasion.   If you only want to accept well structured XML, then you need the capability to automatically identify errors and only ingest acceptable documents.

While you can create scripts to QC the content during production, this poses a scripting update problem every time you want to change your format structure (every time you do a redesign, perhaps).  And while scripting is extremely powerful in CS2 & CS3, it is pretty low level stuff and time consuming to produce anything complicated.  It is also problematic if you don't have a specialist on staff.  Better to write scripts once and move QC somewhere else.

So what to do?  One solution is a Schema (or DTD) validation technique that allows this QC operation to proceed during an automated export.  The Schema will be more restrictive than just looking at Adobe structures - it will overlay structures specific to your content.  And while updating a schema requires some technical knowhow, it is more straight forward and much faster than updating scripting of any kind.  The reason, of course, is that this is what Schemas are meant to do well.

Using a Schema to validate InDesign/InCopy content can detect a surprising number of human errors with styling and other structuring techniques.  Not all errors, but it can do a solid job if your content is moderately complex.  Content flows into an interim format and is validated before being transformed into its final form in your CMS.  This means that valid content can be fully automated from InDesign to the CMS.  Invalid documents can be automatically siphoned off for review and correction by production.  Users can then be retrained if necessary.

Beats checking every exported document ad nauseum, doesn't it?  Especially at 2am.

The big content system integration II

I've modified the 'big' diagram from the first post on this topic to show a circular content flow - now called editorial flow. 

Please find it here: Download the_system_ii.pdf. 

The diagram is still more conceptual than technical.  Of course at some point this thinking needs to be specialized for the particular publishing vertical, product needs, and company needs.

A few thoughts:

1. Shows content editing flowing in a circle.  Enter at any point and proceed downstream. That is, start  developing a print article or publication and complete it, then proceed to develop it into a web article or publication.  Or visa versa.

2. Prior to entering a print or web editorial workflow there is a content adding, packaging, editing phase, where it is assumed that a web interface will allow review of content sources and collection into the initial manuscript for the subsequent print or web editorial workflow.  This might, for example, allow enhancement of an article - with a new sidebar, for example, as it proceeds downstream. 

3. Implies content reuse if the circle keeps flowing.  The circle can also stop at any point if needs are met.  Some publishers might stop at having a print and web output (in any order), some might stop with either a print or web output, some might keep the cycle going indefinitely, building a large content repository over time (e.g. educational publishers).  The diagram also implies content maintained as XML rather than being imported and exported from editorial/workflow tools.   

4. It has a central repository built of two fundamental parts - XML and binary content (images, etc.).  Work done in page layout tools/editorial tools/workflow tools is transitory (though might be archived).  The purpose of the repository would be to accurately manage 'content' of published products and to also provide a starting point for initial manuscript creation for the next stage in the cycle.

5. Upon completion of the web or print cycle, a number of XML enabled exports are possible along with the main article/publication produced.   This is a requirement of some publishers, and certainly there for the taking, if content is accurately managed as XML.

Well, readers, what do you think?  Does it match your thinking?  Should we keep going with this?

Print, television, and online news

I had an interesting conversation about online news last week with Derek Chezzi, senior editor for news at Yahoo! Canada. The conversation happened to take place last Monday, the day of the Virginia Tech shootings.

Derek described the coverage approach of online news falling somewhere between print and television. 

In the print news world, with a daily summary of the news captured in print, reporting accurate facts is very important.  Print is, well, printed.  Forever.  However, in television, with the constant and ongoing coverage of news, the accuracy of the facts are somewhat less important at any given moment in time.  Television can report on hearsay more easily than print and can more easily correct itself.  In the early hours of last Monday, there were various and widely different reports on how many students were killed at Virginia Tech.  Television can make statements and quickly correct itself if wrong.   It is TV and people are more forgiving.   It is ephemeral.  Whereas print is more constant.  (Think about the 2000 presidential elections covered in television vs. the famous Dewey defeats Truman headline that lives in infamy).

So where is online news in this spectrum?  It's constant and ongoing, like TV, but it is also printed (yes, on screen, but you read the words, so it "feels" more like print).  According to Derek, this places it somewhere in between.  Online news needs to get the information out, but needs to be a bit more cautious than television reporting.  People still tend to give more credence to what they read in print (whether it is on paper or on a computer monitor).  There is some subliminal understanding that it needs to be accurate and it lives on.

I never really thought of comparing the major news media before - print, TV, and online - like this.  But I think Derek's analysis is an interesting and accurate one.

Print death watch

A small handful of publishers made recent announcements on their decisions to cease publishing in print and move to sole digital content delivery.

The most notable is, of course, InfoWorld's cessation of print this month. 

We are merely embracing a more efficient delivery mechanism --the Web -- at InfoWorld.com. You can still get all the news coverage, reviews, analysis, opinion, and commentary that InfoWorld is known for. You'll just have to access it in a browser (or RSS reader) -- something more than a million of you already do every month.

We also heard Time's announcement that it will discontinue the LIFE newspaper supplement, but still look to build online product offerings under the LIFE brand.

(New York, NY March 26, 2007) – Time Inc. announced today that it will close LIFE magazine, but the company will continue to develop LIFE online and operate the brand's other successful businesses. The issue dated April 20, 2007 will be the magazine's last.

(A quick side note, in the interesting blog world, I read this on Bill Trippe's blog, who linked to PaidContent.org, which linked to a news release on Poytner Online). 

On a much smaller scale, but with a touch of irony, earlier this year the oldest newspaper in the world stopped print publishing.

The world's oldest paper still in circulation has dropped its paper edition and now exists only in cyberspace.  The newspaper, founded in 1645 by Sweden's Queen Kristina, became a Web-only publication on Jan. 1. It's a fate, many ink-stained writers and readers fear, that may await many of the world's most venerable journals.

And in a completely different world, although they still churn out their journal in print, 

The American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) is considering discontinuing the print version of its journal Molecular Biology of the Cell (MBC). We welcome comments from the library community about the value of print journals and the adequacy of LOCKSS, Portico, and PubMed Central as archives of electronic journals.  We are also curious about whether librarians would be interested in a print-on-demand option for obtaining archival print copies if regular print subscriptions were discontinued.

This was posted by ASCB's director of publications to the Yale University Library's Liblicense-L discussion list.  The post prompted a flurry of responses.

So we've heard the demise of print for years and we are probably still a far way off from seeing this on a grand scale, but I imagine we could see more announcements this year.

For anyone who's interested, I'll be collecting stories related to the demise of print on my del.icio.us links at:  http://del.icio.us/estevenson/demiseofprint

And one final note: I wonder what percentage of InfoWorld.com visitors print out the articles to read?

Page composition for the times

For some time now, I’ve been playing with the hypothesis that we may be in some stage of a revolution in print publishing that could be equivalent to the desktop publishing revolution 20 years ago. 

Clearly there is an acceleration of demand for content on the Internet that is in the process of reshaping the media world – including the dramatically growing popularity of blogging, podcasting, and so on, along with the increasing demand for online versions of traditional print content such as magazines, newspapers, reference materials, textbooks, and so on.  What does this mean for print content?  It seems safe to say that it is in the process of slowly weakening its value.

But meanwhile, in some places competition has taken print content to the edge of the possible – a trend that tends to increase its value.  School textbooks in the US, for example, have become tremendously appealing visually, and the trend toward state and district level customization is also working to increase its value.  Furthermore, print manufacturing technology continues to meet these demands: note the foil holograms on some covers these days, as well as new manufacturing technologies like Xerox’s iGen3 – which can help improve the cost effectiveness of manufacturing and distribution of short run customized print.  But does this occasional trend toward increasing the value of print content offset the weakening trend of the Internet technologies?   Or is it simply the logical conclusion and swan song of the desktop publishing revolution?

As new generations of internet users grow up, the digital natives now in our colleges, and internet technologies proliferate, it seems hard to imagine that print will retain its edge in the end.

Current best practices for simultaneous print and web publishing are for print to be developed first and then pushed to the web through the use of XML.  This reflects today’s valuing of print content as being greater than web content.  It now seems more and more likely that within a few years we may see a long-time industry prediction come true: the development of web content first, that is then pushed to print.  The point where this happens may be when a majority of publishing customers find more value in online content than print content.  An article in the January 21, 2006 edition of the Economist suggests that investors may also be seeing this trend, as big media company stock has been in decline even with solid earnings.  (Note also in this edition of the Economist some very interesting articles on management of knowledge workers).

This slow transition is a challenging time for print publishers of any kind.  While the changes to business models are difficult, there are also plenty of challenges within print editorial and production.  For forward thinking print development groups, it may be wise to begin transforming their practices and cultures now.  Developers of composition tools, such as Adobe and Quark will need to accelerate their work in supporting XML and other technologies, such as workflow management systems, will need to mature more quickly in order to help publishers effectively manage costs during print’s slow decline.

Customization in some segments has the effect of increasing the overall content production effort to reach the same audience.  Aside from the obvious cost pressure to increase composition staff (managed in many cases by moving production offshore), customization puts additional pressure on production management resources – whether retained or outsourced along with composition.  Management of page composition using long established practices and tools can break down with the additional stress of growing customization, which adds further cost pressures.  It is clear that composition-related tools (and staff) need to be increasingly savvy in process management to succeed with the complexities of print customization.

So does this mean that the freewheeling, page-is-king days of desktop publishing are being replaced by continual improvement process exercises and cost conscious days of a post desktop publishing era?  Is this a revolution in the works?  Whether revolution is the right word or not, change does seem to be either happening or on the horizon.