So Look Who's a Publisher Now

Content marketing guru Joe Pulizzi joined me on a webcast I hosted for Nstein in early month on a burgeoning marketing sector: content marketing aka custom publishing. The webcast was part of the monthly Double-Down on Digital series Nstein is offering this Spring on how publishers can tap into new revenue streams -- providing they have an agile digital content supply chain.

Content marketing is a subject that fits this blog so perfectly as it answers the question of "so just who is a publisher?" The answer is: anyone. Anyone with a story to tell and a means to tell a story. Case in point, the uproarious viral video series by JetBlue targeted at corporate big wigs whose wings have been - ahem -- clipped. The series is clever, timely and positions the company beautifully.

More conventionally, brand advertisers rely on print for custom -- which has now extended to newsletters and the Web. Some do it up big, like Proctor & Gamble's teen site Being Girl. The site is loaded with frank, age-appropriate content geared to girls entering puberty and through their teens. Launched in 2000, the site receives more than 3 million monthly visitors from around the globe and is customized for 44 different countries.

I spoke with Bob Arnold, the global being girl digital marketing manager for BeingGirl, and asked him about the site, his audience and the content. Arnold said the site seemed like a natural fit, given the company's depth of knowledge on FemCare. The entire site is produced in-house by P&G staffers and the "editor-in-chief" role seems to fall on the shoulders of Iris Pregger, PhD in women's health studies. She and her team scope and write the age-appropriate content for girl. Indeed Pregger has a column "Ask Iris" that Arnold says "receives a couple hundred questions a week."

The articles are informative, although obviously tilted toward product. I asked Arnold how hard it was to navigate the balance of information versus corporate stewarship. "For us, we wanted to make sure we provided a value -- and shape business behind that," he said. "If you make consumers first, ultimately they will reward you." The real eye-opener for Arnold, who does not portend to be a publisher, was that this market was so under-served. The other issue was dealing with a seemingly day-to-day morph of his audience. "In this day and age [teens] attitudes and tastes change rapidly, and it challenging to keep up with that," he said.

BeingGirl's success doesn't surprise Pulizzi who sharpened his teeth in custom publishing when he was head of that division at Penton Media. His mission was to corral the advertisers who wanted to communicate directly with its customers through entertaining or informative content and bring them into the Penton Content Supply Chain.

According to Pulizzi, most companies don't take the P&G route of creating this content inhouse. "They really don't want to be pubishers, they don't have the will, the expertise or the knowledge," he explained. Advertisers are looking for help, and publishers are uniquely positioned to provide it. "At Penton, we were really good at telling a story and we wanted to grab a slice of that content marketing pie," he explained. At Penton custom publishing brought in about 20 percent of annual revenues. "Advertisers are going to get this done -- the question is who will get they turn to?"

Rocky Mountain Low

The decision by the E.W. Scripps company to close the Rocky Mountain News on February 26 -- a month shy of its 150th birthday was more evidence of a vastly troubled industry. The mourning in Denver for the favorite voices that were silenced, was the exact way I felt in 1982 when Cowles Media stopped the presses on the Buffalo Courier-Express. (That paper resulted from the union of the Buffalo Courier and Buffalo Express, whose vast archives extended back to 1828, and whose ownership included a guy by the name of Samuel Clemons, aka Mark Twain.)

1982, you might recall, is the year that economists harken back to, usually in the context of "the worst economy since 1982." Some numbers:

• Median houses: $83,000
  
• a gallon of milk: $2.24
• a gallon of gas: $1.30

Whether 2009 will win the dubious distinction of surpassing 1982 as worst year, there is no doubt that the perfect storm of a bad economy and changing technologies kills businesses and hastens transformations. What changing technology impacted newspapers in 1982? Hot metal typesetting (truly the very first movable type!) to phototypesetting -- also known as "hot-type" versus "cold-type." The cold type process eliminated the need for a skilled set of laborers who deftly created lines of copy for press. Adapting to the technology required negotiating with unions, investing in technology and dealing with the criticisms that phototype was a generation less than hot-type. (There would often be a blurriness that drove readers nuts.)

The other technological change that impacted the C-E was, believe it or not, television. The evening news on TV had seriously eroded evening newspapers, causing many of them to move into the morning slot -- such as the C-E's competitor, the Berkshire Hathaway-owned Buffalo (Evening) News. A decade of plant closings and subsequent exodus from the Buffalo area saw the population plummet and advertising shrink. Sound familiar to today's woes? The C-E had actually invested in cold-type but hadn't been able to implement it because of union constraints. And suddenly the voices of syndicated Chicago columnist Mike Royko and New Jersey's Jim Bishop were eliminated from the Buffalo news diet. Over the next decade many two newspaper towns shrank to one. Denver dodged that bullet for yet another decade before succumbing last month.

This traipse down memory lane is not to belittle the sorrows of newspapers today. Rather it is to show natural evolutions that occur following every technical advancement. Savvy papers moved from evening editions to morning, and savvier ones realized that they could use those presses they reserved for news to print commercially for others. Still the savviest will be those who follow the upgrade path available to them, and while it won't be easy, it is still a more graceful morph than, say, the horse and buggy to a car.

Yes, the models have to change, and yes the infrastructures have to change, and yes union contracts will have to be rewritten. But there is an upgrade path. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, all but out of the pulp business, is seriously talking about going all digital. It wouldn't surprise me if Hearst migrates its San Francisco Chronicle into web only as well. ImpreMedia's Hoy New York went all digital in January. The Detroit papers are both ceasing home delivery save for Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays. They are evolving: losing their tales that are heavy to transport.

The next step is modifiying the notion of church and state. Notice I didn't suggest eliminating church and state, but modifying it. There is room for a little integration, a little cooperation. And how about democratizing news -- so that not just reporters determine what is news worthy. Perhaps the model will be to open up the gates for users to assist as field researchers, while a writer/editor follows up and fact checks. We all trust readers during catastrophes -- why not create a process for readers to assist in the newsgathering process? HuffingtonPost is popular for its voices -- and the voices it aggregates.

The Rocky Mountain low being felt right now will not be just an isolated event in the news industry. And we will look back at this time as a transformative one, as going all digital will not be a last-ditch gasp at life -- but a viable alternative. The voices that ceased in the '80s when the presses were stopped, were not silenced with the shuttering of the RMN, but have morphed into Inside the Rockies and I Want My Rocky, two new sites by former writers. No doubt the ownership and business model may change. So while yes, in 2009, just like in 1982, some organizations will be hastened to die, some will hang on, others will adapt -- and some pure-plays will be borne. "Without failure, the culture of risk fades. Without risk, creativity withers," says NYT Columnist Roger Cohen who points out that churn is the American way.

Or to paraphrase Mark Twain, the rumors of the death of newspapers is greatly exaggerated.

The Role of Newspapers? Be Relevant.

The role of the newspaper.

It's the Topic of the decade. As print flutters between being obsolete or merely deeply wounded, it struggles for relevancy in a world gone hyper-electronic. The days of delivering the news to a waking world at 6:30 am or to greet weary workers as they arrive home are long gone. The web and mobile phones changed all that a decade ago, but an obdurate industry and no less than four wallet-breaking "technical advancements" (cold-type, color printing, pagination, and the web) in the past four decades, has pushed the industry to its knees.

A Google search on "Future of Newspapers" presented 99,500 results. An even more pessimistic query of "end of newspaper" yielded 26,200. And if we think it is tough today, what will it be like a decade from now, when today's children, tethered to iPods and Xbox Live, do not have memory of newspaper's days as "Messenger-in-Chief?"

It was with this in mind that I approached my son's middle school English teacher to pass out a questionnaire I had created with his 6th grade students. He graciously agreed. The questionnaire had its failings and was in no-way scientific, although I have identified ways to improve it and would like to repeat it in a broader socio-economic context. In the meantime, it did provide a hint at what tomorrow's consumer of news might do.

I must admit that I went into this with a presumption that most kids would not even have seen a newspaper, let alone read one. I was wrong. Eight percent said that they had never read one -- and another eight percent said that they had read one once. Still 59% read a newspaper once in a while and 22% said they read them all the time.

I also asked kids to provide the definition of a newspaper. The answers ranged from the mostly obvious "like a big book with lots of articles in it," to the truly insightful: "a carrier for advertising" and, even, "a primitive form of t.v. that has channels that differ from each region."

But I wonder if, after the last couple weeks, their perception of newspapers changed. You see the middle school is Clarence Middle, the same Clarence where Flight 3407 plummeted into a house killing 50 -- five from our tiny hamlet. Clarence is a rural outpost of Buffalo, and while our population has grown considerably in the last decade, it really is quite removed both geographically (20 miles) and socio-economically from the rest of the area. So despite having moved here from the New York/New Jersey region over four years ago, I still didn't embrace the Buffalo News as my hometown paper.

My consumption of the News consisted of -- front page, op-ed and sports, with about a once a week check of the "Northern Suburbs" to see if the stringer for our area had filed anything. That changed on February 12th, when practically the entire 180-member News staff suddenly found Clarence, and I found my local paper. The coverage of the event was thorough -- and superb. The reporters not only covered the tragedy, but they captured the psyche of the residents here -- that we are essentially a commuter town. Many of my neighbors, like my husband and me, travel by air on a weekly basis. We all held our collective breaths as we waited for identification of victims -- with plaintive texts to friends -- "where are you?" or in some cases just, "hello?"

The reporters did, as they were supposed to. They told the stories of the victims in moving detail, and began to unearth a controversy that maybe flying the popular regional propjets into icy (shocking) Buffalo -- is not so safe after all. In fact, today, at 12:37 the News updated the front page to let residents know that a counter-demonstration was coalescing at the crossroads of the accident site -- to drown out some imbeciles hellbent on using today's memorial services to promote their poisonous agenda.

The News' TV Critic Jeff Simon was right when he said that the online News finally had come of age. He also pointed out the pitfalls of trying to be newsbreaking and accurate -- early reports said it was a US Air flight -- not a Continental one, while other media were reporting it was a twin-seater versus a commercial airliner. Accuracy, speed and thoroughness are sometimes at odds. And not to negate the contribution of the three local broadcast stations -- they did a fine job on the breaking news -- but they couldn't sustain the indepth coverage for the ensuing days when we, like addicts, hungered for more.

Juxtaposed to this essential coverage was the ad-hoc city that sprung up at the local library -- when more than 40 satellite news teams from all over descended. It was silliness watching news team after news team in their makeshift outdoor studios: lights, anchor and camera crew, all reporting the same thing -- a mile from the scene. As I was asked repeatedly, "where can we go buy sandwiches," I realized how irrelevant they were. They weren't local, they didn't understand the area, nor did they comprehend the concern of the residents, nor the fears of kids like my 10-year old who immediately grasped: "this could have been our house. It could have been you or daddy."

And while the industry and executives go neurotic over whether or not newspapers are still relevant, the answer is in their question. If they have to ask, then they are not. Choosing to load up editorial with wire copy, to report the same stuff as everyone else, is no different than the 40 news crews that took a camera shot of an empty road. Gutting a news room is insane and a clear path to irrelevancy. Your editorial is not only the hook into your community -- they are your marketers. They are the public faces to your constituents that remind us to pick up the paper.

Clearly, you can't build a business plan around having a tragedy in your community -- but the lesson should be that people will read what is impactful to them. When you have trained me not to read the local news more than once a week -- because you can't update more than that -- you start falling into that bucket of irrelevance. And if you really don't know what makes your newspaper relevant, I have a newsflash: ask a 6th grader.

Doubling Down on Doubling Down

Double Down on Digital. It's a mantra we are playing out at Nstein with our four-part webinar series that advises media companies on how to play the odds with digital -- for lucrative payouts. And whether it be coincidence, alliteration or we've done a helluva job getting the message out there -- everyone seems to be working "double down" into conversations. NYT technology writer Chris Lohr quipped at SIIA's Information Industry Summit last month, that the Times was doubling down -- selling off the building to invest in digital.

And disgraced financier now turned digital-everything-pundit Henry Blodget was heard to say "doubling down" quite a few times at the DealMakers Summit hosted by DeSilva & Phillips, which then prompted subsequent speakers to pepper their talks with the betting phrase; (to mix a metaphor.)

So alliteration aside, why is this metaphor so popular -- and how is it apropos?

In Blackjack, one doubles the bet with one card down when one has a favorable advantage over the House (usually a 10 or an 11). The payout is high and a knowledgeable play can mitigate (but never eliminate) risk.

Scribes use double down when scoffing at individuals who have dug themselves a hole (and seemingly keep digging to get out of it). In German, the military phrase flucht nach vorn translates to keep moving forward -- ostensibly despite the danger, and however doomed the mission seems. It is a strategy to salvage but the odds are not great.

Speaking of the homonym selvage, research turned up that one doubles down the edge of a hem - to give it strength and keep it from unraveling.

For a metaphor to work it must be non-literal -- and yet provide a resemblance to the situation at hand. In this case, we have doubled down on the non-literal references. With media owners shmushed between shareholders and bankers each demanding that their investments be shored up, they need to strategically double down, while mitigating risks, to help their companies salvage their fraying edges -- and keep their empires from unraveling.

Note to CEOs & Publishers: Choosing a CMS

I've been building and buying CMS' since 1995 -- and have seen the good, the bad, and the truly hideous. The number one reason people won't work with technology is because it is too difficult to use. They have their day jobs -- and interpreting the screens and workflow that are foreign to them ... well, people just won't do it. And they don't. And the technology is a big fat expensive failure.

The problem with a CMS is that CEOs don't understand that they are not merely a "getting-stuff-onto-the-web tool." The "S" in CMS stands for System -- not product. That system is supposed to unite the world of creating, collaborating, collecting and channeling content. The mentality that it is merely something that gets content onto the web is the reason so many sites are, well, anemic. And, frankly, the reason so many balance sheets are sickly. Traffic doesn't stick (nor return) to sites that don't anticipate readers needs.

Instead of being a seamless solution into the entire workflow, the CMS tends to be an ad hoc interruption into an already stressful day. It would be like having two homes, and having to carry everything you need from one home to the next. Pretty soon you buy duplicates of everything just to keep yourself sane. Your wallet is lighter, right? Or, you start focusing on one abode more than the other. Now the other is lacking. See how this doesn't work out?

It's also the reason why the pure-plays, the companies that are solely online are driving the innovations in the industry. They have created, from scratch, an entire digital content supply chain, without having to worry about the turf wars surrounding the various bastions in the traditional world. No, they have built a digital infrastructure that allows the ebb, flow and sharing of digital content. They don't necessarily have it all figured out -- but they aren't being anchored by a century old legacy system.

The challenge for CEOs who grew up on the traditional business side, is that they never worked the "Fry Station." In McDonalds, to move up the management ladder, a person has to work every role: cashier, fry station and cook the burgers. That notion of working your way up through every department holds true in most industries. That is what made you a great CEO. You worked the Fry Station.

However, for many, digital entered into our professional lives at the mid or late point of our careers. We are managing -- and now relying on something -- we just don't understand. And as such, we rely on others to guide us. That may or may not be a good move. So here are my guidelines for purchasing a CMS:

1. Work the Fry Station. Ignorance is no excuse for not obeying the law -- and its no excuse for managing your company. You can start out by creating a blog if you are too embarrassed to ask an underling to show you how to work the current CMS. But roll up your sleeves and get going. Create a post. Create it in Word and try to paste it into your blog. Try and update from your Blackberry. Create some tags. Change your mind. This little lesson will be priceless.
   
2. Trust ... but Verify. You hired a CTO to manage -- but does he or she have an agenda? CTOs are human too. Some like to build things so that they can have a bigger development staff. You have to ask yourself -- which business are you in, the software development business -- or not. Because let me tell you, building and maintaining a CMS is a fulltime job. As soon as it is built, it is obsolete and needs to be improved upon. Is that the expertise you really want to invest and cultivate?
3. Examine the Workflow. As I said before, the word CMS is a real misnomer, since it suggests a single product, instead of systemic approach to the 4Cs: creating, collaborating, collecting and channeling content. Look at each of these steps in the supply chain, and develop a system that works across the entire company. If you update here -- will it update there (automatically) -- or does someone have to remember to "move it to the other house."
   
4. Align CMS with Business Goals. In case I haven't been clear, a true CMS should not merely shovel stuff onto the web. List what you want to accomplish business wise: (hints: optimize operations, lower production costs, monetize assets) and align your system to your goals. This means taking a very hard look at Point 3 above.
5. Align CMS with Department Needs. A good CMS should touch EVERY department in your company, and across silos. Editorial will be an obvious benefactor of the 4Cs, as research, creation, collaboration and production should be seamless and make their lives easier. But Marketing should find that the CMS will be search engine friendly and allow ease in email marketing. Sales should notice that it is now easy to create new products and get them to market faster. IT should find that it is no longer dinged for every change that needs to happen on the web. Accounting should see operations cost decline and revenues increase.
6. Cut Your Losses. I get it. You spent a ton of money on your current system, but it's not answering your business needs. Go back to the two home metaphor: you can't get your money back, but you can stop spending resources on duplications. As my father loves to say, a loss today is cheaper than one tomorrow.
   
7. Build for the Future. You have no idea what the next great application will be. Who would have thought Twitter would take off? Or that so many viewers would flock to the CNN/Facebook collaboration during the inauguration. A system that does not allow "hooks" into new technologies -- or doesn't allow it without 9 months of labor -- just will not pass muster in a world where nimble is number 1.

But the biggest takeaway on all this is you can't manage what you don't know; you have to work the Fry Station. Who knows, you might enjoy it!

Time to Face the Music

I'm taking a break from writing on the fate of print for a while, because frankly, I've run out of words to describe "dismal, bleak, futile." Best give poor Thesaurus -- and publishers -- a break. (Mein Gott! With what their futures hold we best just pass out razor blades to the poor blokes and let them be done. Ooh, very bad joke: What's black and white and red all over ...)

In any event, let's focus on another victim of this century's Creative Destruction. That was the incongruous concept made popular by 20th Century Economist Joseph Schumpeter who trumpeted that innovation is the force that sustains long-term economic growth. The downside, he admitted, is that some established companies that enjoyed some degree of monopoly power might find their values … diminished.

The Internet surely would have been Schumpeter’s idea of a Creative Destructor, as it – and its offspring of innovations have impacted every conceivable sector: retail, music, media and business information, to name but a few. All of these industries have found that shifting from a physical world (CDs, stores and print products) to a digital one has been made so much more complicated by the likes of Google, MSN, Yahoo and user-generated sites like YouTube, P2P downloading, FaceBook and Flickr. Listen to music executives bemoan the sharing of music – and you might forget that the industry has grown to $130B!

The challenge has been, ahem, to the middle men. The Internet formed a conduit between the creator of music and the consumers bypassing the Big Four Labels. Their Sturm und Drang regarding 21st Century musical rationalism would be amusing and if not for the draconian measures they have taken to ensure their monopoly. In case you missed it, what with the tanking of the newspaper industry, the Titanic voyage of the finanical industry, and the intense pressure on all of us to jumpstart the economy by doing massive holiday shopping, the RIAA decided, last month, to end its reign of terror on 13-year olds. Yes, it has decided that it would partner with the ISPs to go after music pirates. More on that when I parse through the legal language.

In the meantime, what does this mean to the music industry? Well, probably that some of the overpaid suits at the Big Four will now be let go, as less self-important people are needed to support the dying medium of CDs, which really, if you think about it is nothing more than a container. This unbundling of content, selling the parts for less than the whole, but where the sum of them exceeds it, is playing quite favorably with kids. Decontainerizing and unbundling content has meant new life for old tunes. Because for all the hand-wringing the music industry has never been healthier!

Yes, yes, sales of CDs are down -- but that doesn't mean interest in music is down. The problem is, the measurement metric has become obsolete. It would be as if we measured interest in transportation by the number of people who owned horses. The demand is, as in print, to put the content into a mutable format so that it can be available in any container an individual wanted (and to figure out how to charge for that service). Music itself has never been more ubiquitous. From iPods, to ringtones, to the music in online games -- music is vivacissimo!

The numbers are astounding: More than 45 billion downloads (albeit 95 percent illegal, still 45 billion!!). Last year's concert sales actually rose! At a time when the average ticket price was over $65. Too, how else to explain the interest in a 25-year old heavy metal band? AC/DC, which warrants its own channel on Sirius XM Radio, is one of my 10-year old's favorite bands. I know, because my 10-year old flicks to that channel in our car. And it hit me, that Guitar Hero introduced this classic metal band to a whole new generation.

Yes, the inustry is challenged: the measurement metric is obsolete, the business model is evolving, and sartorial executives can network with outplaced bankers. But clearly, the band plays on.

Publisher Push-Back & Other Relationship Tips

Opened up a missive in InfoCommerce's newsletter this morning. Russell Perkins has been warning publishers for some time that they have acted like lemmings in embracing business models that shift the burden of risk from advertisers to publishers. First advertisers insisted they would only pay if people clicked through to the ad site (never mind how hideous or uncompelling the ad creative might be; and then they said, well we'll pay if a bonafide lead generates, to finally, here let me throw you a little spiff for doing all the heavy lifting while Harvey on the phone bank closes the sale.

The pay-per-click model (PPC) was started by a small firm Goto.com which was rolled up into Overture (Yahoo). But the model really came alive when, a year later, Google launched AdWords in 1999. Suddenly bidding for traffic was all the rage. And it is a wonderful model for search engines, but a very risky one for publishers, who are developing sites with meaningful content around which to place ads. The risk to advertisers for this model is nil: spend a few dollars to get traffic to their sites in exchange for potential sales? why the PPC model turned out to be both advertising and the limousine to get buyers to them!

In fact, advertisers were so empowered by this model that they started demanding that the publisher not receive anything unless a sale was made - and within a time period of 30-90 days before the site's cookie expired (or was vacuumed away). I mentioned the PPC conundrum to Jean-Philippe Gauthier when he was Vice President of Gesca Digital the online arm for Quebec's leading business site CyberPresse. He told me how a leading insurance wanted banner ads on a PPC model. Gauthier agreed -- on one condition: that the banner did not name the insurer.

Of course the insurer was upset, because it turns out branding is valuable afterall! This advertiser didn't want to pay for it, but when it was off the table, suddenly there was a change of heart.

Perkins urges Publishers to start pushing back like Gauthier did, and to remind ourselves that if we are hell-bent on doing lead generation, we do so at a substantial increase than mere dollars per lead. Put the burden of risk of doing business back on the advertisers, he chides. Further, he even suggests some sort of monthly subscription fee to be considered for the leads.

That's the approach that we took with Pure Contemporary: to create a lead generation program based on manufacturers getting a little skin in the game by allowing them to create a virtual catalog for a fee. Each page is search engine optimized, and leads are forwarded to the advertiser. We are not unique in doing this, many publishers in the database directory space like Thomasnet and GlobalSpec have branded themselves as marketing resources, not just mere publishers. Yes, it is a bit more of a consultative sell, but that is how we as online information providers add value to the advertiser-publisher relationship.

It really isn't about keeping score as to whom has more risk, it's about creating a win-win. Because frankly, without that, one of you is out of business, and that isn't good for any relationship.