Offline versus online publishing

E-business does not change the basis of business but it does change the practice of doing business. In particular online brings ubiquity of access, the potential for additional depth and richness, increased ‘speed to user’, and, of course, personalization. Online publishing is still about delivering content and information of value to a target set of users. Much of what the dot com bust has taught is that there are in fact very few new business models that work, just old ones done in different ways. But I wonder whether in fact online and ‘traditional’ publishing are not, after all, quite different things? It seems to me that there are shifts in where the value lies at very least. Following some thoughts on offline versus online publishing in this context…

Of course it depends on the kind of publication and target user you are talking about, but on the whole offline publishing is about a series of efforts to produce single, static outputs. And I believe, from a consumer’s point of view, there is something very valuable in the sheer physicality of a print publication that online has not yet come close to replacing. Whether it is the newspaper on the train, the Sunday papers at home, a magazine, or a book, an important part of the consumption experience is the physical grappling with the thing itself. There is some truth in the Post Office’s campaign around the joy of receiving a physical letter rather than an e-mail. Print publications are the ‘lean back’ experience – that wonderfully uncompromising linearity that demands so much less of our brains than an ‘interactive’ experience. The value here is in part the content itself, but it is also in the ritual and physicality of how we consume a print publication.

With online publishing, however, I believe the value proposition is very different. Whereas print publications are static and fixed, a single ‘instance’ or snapshot representing one single configuration of content, the real value of online content is the way that it can be searched, packaged, tailored and reused – the way that it does not exist until requested by a user and can then dynamically assemble itself to be exactly what the user requires. Online publishing is about creating a system for production not a particular product. The ability to configure is more valuable than any one configuration. As we are confronted with increasing tidal waves of information and content, the more valuable it becomes to be able to get exactly the right information at the right time in the right format on the right device. And I think people will pay for this.

From the online publisher’s point of view, as more and more content becomes available for use and reuse, the quality of the structure of content and the quality of its metadata will become enormously more important. Success increasingly hinges on the ability to tag, index, store, search, access, retrieve, use and reuse content. In the cases of commodity content, it is likely that the metadata, those parts which the end user does not experience directly but which are crucial for milking the value of the content, will become more valuable than the content itself.

Let us say that you run a leisure and entertainment portal carrying all sorts of information and listings. There is a limited WAP version of your site and you are planning an interactive TV version too. One section of your portal is a directory of restaurants. Within that section users can browse and search the directory various ways: by location of the restaurant, by type of cuisine, by price range and so on. Each restaurant listings has address details, reservation phone numbers, a photo, a description and a critic’s review. There is a summary version of the critic’s review text that users can read before clicking in to see the full details. On the WAP site, there needs to be a version of the review which is shorter than 160 characters to fit on the screen. For TV you want an even shorter version.

Imagine you have two potential suppliers of restaurant review content. One provides great reviews but you would have to structure all the content in order to serve it up in the forms you want. The other provides mediocre reviews but beautifully structured content, with all the necessary metadata, that you know you can integrate, manipulate and maintain with ease. Which one do you go with? Obviously the choice will depend on all sorts of factors, not least price and the degree to which the quality of restaurant reviews is important to your brand or competitive proposition. However, the point is that the actual content itself is no longer the only thing of value. The structure of the content and the quality of the metadata are fast becoming extremely valuable assets.

I’m not convinced that many ‘traditional’ publishers understand these differences between offline and online publishing. In many cases they do not need to and will continue to do very well sticking to print publishing. However, I think others would do well to understand the differences between creating a dynamic system of content assets (online publishing) versus working towards a single static output. In print publishing there is a direct connection between the collection and publication of content: a magazine works towards collecting content to be published in a particular issue, for example. This means print publishers generally haven’t dealt with the abstractions of metadata, content objects, repositories, content packaging and reuse, personalization and so on, that are crucial to online publishing. They just aren’t those kinds of people and don’t work in that kind of way.

Yet I am convinced that for online publishing individual works are being subsumed by wider information webs and the way content is consumed is increasingly not linked to the way it is created. A content author may not know in what format, on what device, or in what context, his or her content will appear. Nor may the online publishers – they just set the rules and provide a framework and then the consumers drive the rest, finding exactly what they want, on demand. And this experience is very different for the user: it requires focused attention and interaction unlike reading the Sunday papers. It is more like work than pleasure. It is of a different value. It is the richness, speed, breadth and relevance to the task in hand of the content that is attractive. I believe that is why those making most money out of online content are those who can provide paid-for access to valuable and deep databases of content that support work-related enquiries. Yes it is good to have news online and yes that can be very powerful when there is a disaster but just news is still only a series of content ‘instances’ just like the print version, which I might as well stick with for its comfortable physicality.

But that’s just my thoughts for today… What do you think?

Hi Geoff

Hopefully I didn't give the impression that I thought any one channel was 'better' than any other as I agree entirely with you - each is good at different things and offers users a different experience. My point was more that they *are* quite different and the skills and thinking and implementation required for each are quite different - rare is the publisher who really understands both online and offline and can optimise the mix of the two to satisfy the user and make money.

Although I too subscribe to the multi-channel, multi-platform, multi-device, "create once, publish on any device" model, which can be facilitated by a content management system (CMS), there are a few caveats I would draw to attention:

1. A CMS can make it pretty easy to distribute and publish a piece of content to iTV, Web, PDAs, phone and, indeed, print. However, I don't believe people think hard enough about the content itself and the degree of tailoring it needs to work for each of those channels and deliver the appropriate user experience. It is not just a matter of making a few tweaks and tagging the content for the channel it is to be distributed on. To work really well you usually have to create an entirely new content object.

Yes, the CMS certainly makes the multi-channel approach easier to manage and there are certainly efficiencies over having many separate systems for each channel, but having 4 channels instead of 1 still pretty much quadruples your editorial costs.

2. Depending on the print publication itself I'm not convinced that a CMS can easily replace a print production system. If you are talking about user manuals or any kind of print document that can be very consistent and not use over complex formatting, layouts or graphical design then sure a CMS will do the job. The end users are probably not so bothered about how it looks anyway.

But if you are talking about a publication such as a magazine which is highly designed (using something like Quark) then I've yet to see a CMS that can do that, or at least one that is actually sensibly suited to it. The templates that CMSs typically work with and which are at the heart of content reuse and multi-channel publishing don't work where pages need to be individually designed. You could create a highly complex template for each (trying to do curved text margins with an overlayed semi-transparent image using a template would be interesting...) but there'd be little point as you probably couldn't reuse it. There has to be a trade off between ease of content reuse / multi-channel publishing and flexibility.

That said, a CMS could sensibly be used as the central content repository which then feeds into the print production system i.e. it manages assets such as imagery, text and so on (for all channels) but it does not do the publishing bit for print.

Given these points I don't think all publishers should blindly go for the multi-channel approach. The key determinant is whether their users actually want to consume their content across multiple channels (and if so, which elements of that content and in what way) and whether there is a return on investment to be made. It may just be that in some cases publishers are best off sticking to what they know best and keeping the channels silo-ed...