This story is different than usual—more personal than technical.
In my many years of working with and advising publishers on how they should produce their content, one of the things I talked about early on and in the last century (OK, I’m dating myself now!) was the concept of CREATE ONCE, PUBLISH MANY.
For many years, most publishers’ focus had been print-centric, with the print story representing the beginning and end of the creative and editorial process around content. Content creators thought only within those boundaries and within that short life cycle, and not about how the content might continue to thrive over the long term.
At TFP, we’ve been asked on many occasions to bring in technology to help fix problems, generate more revenue, and position publishers for the future within the boundaries of that print-centric process. I remember telling publishers, “You’re looking at this in the wrong way—you need to think about the content as the goal and not the end result in a publishing process.” At the time, they looked at me like I had two heads and really didn’t understand what I meant. Nevertheless, I didn’t give up. I came up with concepts such as the “content conveyor belt” as an analogy for bringing content through a magazine editorial process with the understanding that more content life existed beyond that process. (Funny how that has emerged as the name of a new feature in this week’s digital-friendly release of InDesign CS6). While the magazine brought in immediate revenues, the content—the ability to capture it, organize it, and further monetize it—truly represented the crown jewels for publishers.
Obviously, that trend eventually caught on, as we all now more fully understand how important the effective use, storage, and reusability of content is to a publisher’s bottom line. Publishers have adopted this from a vision and business perspective—and that feels like a great leap forward. I was personally pleased to hear that phrase expressed as a core strategy at more than one publishing organization this week—wow, we are really getting there! However, the next big challenge is to shift publishing culture, organizational structures, and processes to an integrated and more symbiotic state, and to break away from the silos and kingdoms that exist around specific content channels at major publishers. Organizing content technically and systematically is just the beginning. Now we need to evolve our work methods—the way we live and breathe content within our organizations, and the way it’s used and consumed—to develop a new organizational approach.
In upcoming blog posts, we’ll be profiling some top publishers that have seen the light and made this leap. But we’d also like to hear from those of you who are trying to make the leap in organizations that haven’t. What do you see as the challenges and barriers to shifting your organization? Do you see the future of content differently based on your role and where you sit? Please share your thoughts with us, and if you’d like us to share your success story here, please get in touch!
Are we there yet? Stay tuned; we’ll tell you more…
Posted by: Margot Knorr Mancini
