In the smaller doses of power that Hurricane Irene rations out in the midst of her ferocity, I’m at Technology for Publishing™ headquarters mulling over this week in publishing entwined with mother nature’s wrath.
Members of the TFP team were scattered up and down the east coast this week, and each of us experienced the events through the eye’s of the various publishers we were working with and some of us from the epicenter itself and OBX.
But as we look at the mediawaves, it’s a reminder of how much publishing has shifted into the real time model that we’ve been prospecting about for so many years. Real time publishing is here to stay but the definitions and bounds of “publishing” are now shifting and changing on a daily basis.
In Cambridge, MA, the mild ripples of the earthquake in Harvard Business Review’s arsenal building felt like the construction workers next door were working just a bit too hard as we were focused on trying to get their first issue on a new content system out the door.
In DC, at Nat Geo, the quake felt more like a freight train barreling down the long narrow halls of the editorial building. The various intensive editorial meetings dispersed quickly – reconvening in the streets below to start brainstorming the pertinent content acquired over 100+ years to educate and inform about this newest event. This is already reflected in their web and mobile sites, and tweets @NatGeo, but it most certainly will also affect the daily review of deeper, pertinent content that’s lined up for the Magazine and Tablet editions.
Some of our high-profile blogging friends at Atlantic Media defied evacuation orders to keep the news and tweets coming. And if you follow the social network posts across many others, you’ll see they were not too far behind. The broad resources at Rodale, always focused on our health and safety, shared worthy reminders of how to keep our world safe and in perspective.
Publishing has shifted to a space where we want access to and have come to expect many forms of content, short, long, broad and deep, immediate and follow-up. At the same time, technology and content consumption methods continue to shift and change at lightning speeds (pun intended). [How did you consume content this week?]
The thinking and planning we’ve (TFP and the publishing community) put into how to prepare content for that in these past years, poises all publishers to be able to move and adjust quickly, but have we done enough to really deliver our message in the most effective form for our consumers when we need to? Those that have done the work, are clearly standing on steadier ground.
Based on what we’re seeing, there’s still more work to do, and there will always be. We need to look out, be prepared for what we expect to come, but also for the unexpected. We never quite know when the world will shift beneath our feet, and the sands of our shores will shift yet again. We need to look out, be prepared for big change, and have our content ready for wherever our publishing objectives of the day will take us.
As I wrap up my thoughts on this post, both power and Internet are down, so I’ve switched from laptop to iPad on 3G as I hit the “publish” button. It’s a whole new publishing world out there.
Wishing all our colleagues and friends safety as we enter a new day and new publishing week.
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PS: This week gave all of us time to stop and pause. Share how your view of publishing shifted this week!
Posted by: Margot Knorr Mancini
