Publishing

Tuesday, February 09, 2010

Forrester’s blogging policy misses the IP point

Warning: Long post follows.

Readers of this blog and listeners to my podcast, “For Immediate Release,” know thast I focus primarily on the impact of online media on organizational communications. As a blogger and a podcaster with an audience, companies routinely reach out to me with their news and information in the hopes that I’ll find their content interesting enough to share. It’s only about 9:30 a.m. here in the Bay Area and I’ve already received about a dozen such pitches today via email.

Forrester Research is one of the organizations that engages in such outreach—and, candidly, it’s one of the few organizations whose content actually is of enough interest for me to share it with my community. When Forrester issues a report that deals with social media and communications, Forrester graciously offers me a copy of the report. These reports sell for hundreds of dollars or more, and as an independent consultant, I couldn’t possibly justify the cost of purchasing one. Because Forrester shares its intellectual property with me at no cost, I’m able to opine on the research and share the findings I believe are most significant.

All of which I do on my own blog and my own podcast. As a result, readers and listeners learn about the research who otherwise may never have known it existed. Some may become Forrester customers. Which is exactly why Forrester engages in such outreach: Its IP is only worth as much as people are willing to spend on it. The more people who pay for it, the more it’s worth.

Which is why I’m so completely dumbfounded at Forrester’s much-discussed analyst blogging policy. The company is confining its analysts to blogs that reside on Forrester’s own platform for posts about research. The reason, according to Forrester and several of its analysts, has everything to do with intellectual property (IP). In a recent post, Forrester VP Josh Bernoff (for whom I have enormous respect and admiration) explained:

What people need to understand is that Forrester is an intellectual property company, and the opinions of our analysts are our product. Blogging is an extension of the other work we do—doing research, writing reports, working with clients, and giving speeches, for example.

...for Forrester, it serves our clients better to be able to get to all our blogs from one place, and to know the opinions of analysts that they see are part of the other opinions they read in our reports, in press quotes, and in everywhere else we talk.

The revelation of the policy has ignited controversy with opponents and proponents lining up with their various arguments. But for me, the underlying IP argument is perplexing. Consider this comment from Dana Baxter, left to the SageCircle blog that first reported on the policy and kicked off the whole debate:

I regularly read Bruce Tempkin’s blog “Customer Experience Matters” and it’s one of the best blogs I’ve run across. He seems to regularly refer back to Forrester. I didn’t even know that Forrester had research in customer experience until I read his blog. I know I’m not a client of Forrester, so they aren’t making money from me, but I’ve been trying to make the case based on his work. But if they’re shutting down his blog, then I don’t really want to read what Forrester has to say.

This is the key issue. When analysts have their own blogs with dedicated followings, their discussion of the research with which they’re involved can reach people the official Forrester blogs won’t reach. (If you think that’s not true, go back and read Dana’s comment again.) And if keeping the IP on the Forrester site is so all-fired important, why share it with the likes of me so I can report the same IP on my blog and podcast?

(Of course, after reading this post, maybe they’ll stop sharing their IP with me.)

I’m not the only one making this observation. Writing on GigaOm, Mathew Ingram says:

In his blog post, Bernoff defended the new policy as a necessary step, saying Forrester is “an intellectual property company, and the opinions of analysts are our product.” But a strong analyst who connects with readers and builds a following, wherever that following might occur, is a benefit to the company they work for, even if he or she eventually leaves to pursue other opportunities. That is the nature of a web-based business—something the research industry is becoming, whether it likes it or not.

Trying to confine analysts and control the access they have to readers through the web is not only wrongheaded (in our view) but ultimately futile. Strong analysts who are treated in this way will leave anyway, thus defeating the purpose. We believe that social media tools can be used both to build personal brands and to benefit the overall corporate brand, and that is what we encourage.

Why not aggregate content?

The IP distinction is one that Forrester’s proponents raise repeatedly in the debate. The notion seems to suggest that analysts who write about their work on their own blogs are somehow sapping Forrester of its IP. Maybe I’m just dense, but I don’t see how, particularly if those blogs link back to Forrester, bringing the company to the attention of new prospects.

Other companies with bloggers don’t compare because, Bernoff argues, their products aren’t about IP. I would argue that Microsoft and IBM are entirely about IP. Both companies encourage their employees to blog wherever they like. The companies link to those blogs on a page that links to all of the company’s bloggers. (Here are links to Microsoft’s and IBM’s employee blog directories.)

Thomas Nelson Publishers goes one better, pulling the content from each of its employee bloggers into a chronological display of the most recent posts from company bloggers. Admittedly, these posts don’t deal with IP at anywhere near Forrester’s level, but it seems a logical solution, one Tac Anderson suggested in a comment to a post about the policy by Cliff Condon, Forrester’s VP in charge of the company’s social media efforts. Condon replied that too few Forrester analysts are blogging to justify such an effort. ” I feel it’s up to Forrester to help more analysts start blogging by providing them a platform for doing it (rather than creating it on their own).”

In fact, Condon never even mentions IP in his post, asserting instead that the policy is designed to give Forrester analysts a tool designed to get them more involved in social media, to provide each analyst with a personal blog and to make it easier for Forrester clients.

I have no argument with these goals. After all, Hill & Knowlton provides a platform for its counselors to use for blogging. The difference, though, is that Hill & Knowlton doesn’t require its staff to use the platform. Many of the PR agency’s staff maintain their own blogs; their posts are aggregated on the same platform along with original posts.

Is it about control?

Forrester’s representatives argue that the policy isn’t about wielding control over what analyst bloggers write. In fact, they argue, analysts are being encouraged to stretch with their blogs.

Still, one defender of Forrester’s policy—Edison Research Strategy and Marketing VP Tom Webster—thinks control may well have something to do with it, pointing to a post former Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang wrote on his Web Strategy blog that required a follow-up apology. Writes Webster:

This could have (and maybe did) hurt Forrester right in the wallet. It’s not my intent to rehash that particular incident, but let’s all agree it was a significant black eye for the company and indeed the analyst industry as a whole. Forrester can afford to lose an analyst here and there -– but they can’t afford incidents like this.

(Webster, by the way, is a terrific dinner companion.)

I’m inclined to take Forrester’s word for it that the policy isn’t designed to keep a tight rein on its bloggers. After all, a well-communicated policy—like the one Hill & Knowlton implemented—would prevent virtually all such mistakes.

A policy would also preclude analysts from giving away more of Forrester’s IP than they should. But on this point, it’s worth looking at an article appearing in the March 2010 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, “Management Secrets of the Grateful Dead, and a quote from lyricist John Perry Barlow:

What people today are beginning to realize is what became obvious to us back then—the important correlation is the one between familiarity and value, not scarcity and value. Adam Smith taught that the scarcer you make something, the more valuable it becomes. In the physical world, that works beautifully. But we couldn’t regulate (taping at) our shows, and you can’t online. The Internet doesn’t behave that way. But here’s the thing: if I give my song away to 20 people, and they give it to 20 people, pretty soon everybody knows me, and my value as a creator is dramatically enhanced. That was the value proposition with the Dead.

Yep, that’s intellectual property Barlow’s talking about.

So I’m still befuddled about this notion of lost IP. I still don’t grasp how an analyst blogging about the research he’s engaged in on his own blog, informed by Forrester’s blogging guidelines, represents a tangible loss to Forrester. Do they not grasp what Barlow does? Are they less savvy about social media than they’ve been claiming they are?

The Altimeter equation

Most of the speculation by those aghast at the policy suggest its origins rest with The Altimeter Group, founded by former Forrester vice president Charlene Li; Owyang and Ray Wang are both partners who joined Li and Altimeter after leaving Forrester. In his SageCircle post, strategist Carter Lusher writes:

Forrester CEO George Colony is well aware of that savvy analysts can build their personal brands via their positions as Forrester analysts amplified by social media (see the post on “Altimeter Envy”). As a consequence, a Forrester policy that tries to restrict analysts’ personally-branded research blogs works to reduce the possibility that the analysts will build a valuable personal brand leading to their departure.

I’d be more inclined to call this “The Scoble Effect.” Uberblogger Robert Scoble built his audience and his personal brand while blogging about Microsoft on his personal blog. He became Microsoft’s de facto spokesperson, its voice in the social media space. When he left Microsoft, he took that brand with him to each of his subsequent ventures. No single Microsoft blogger has been able to capture the share of attention that Scoble enjoyed, while Scoble ceretainly benefitted from the personal brand he had built based on Microsoft’s IP.

(Side question: If Scoble had been forced to blog on a dedicated Microsoft platform, would the company have deleted that blog upon his departure? One high-tech company—I can’t recall which—was called out in the blogosphere for doing just that and had to reinstate the posts in the face of accusations of altering history.)

I’m not inside the heads of Forrester’s leaders, so I can’t say how much of a factor the fear of losing analysts who build strong personal brands played in the decision. I’d be disappointed if it was a major consideration, since it seems petty and mean-spirited. In his post on the kerfuffle, C. Edward Brice cited David Armano’s brandividuals, “people who represent your brand and their own, balancing the two may be something we see more of, not less as companies and brands try to figure out how to engage on a web that’s become increasingly social and personal.” Brice, senior vice president of worldwide marketing for Lumension Security, writes, “Basically today when you hire someone you bring their on-line social network into your company, and when they leave they take it with them.”

And if you already had a blog?

One of those defending the policy is new Forrester analyst Augie Ray, who will abandon his “Experience: The Blog” in order to comply with the Forrester policy. Ray isn’t thrilled with dropping the blog that has accounted for so much time and energy.

But I also understand Forrester’s reasons for the changes.  There are obvious benefits to the company of aggregating intellectual property on Forrester.com, including Search Engine relevance and creating a marketing platform that demonstrates the breadth and depth of analysts’ brainpower and coverage.

I appreciate Ray’s measured response, but I think it misses the point. He has developed a following on his blog and not all of them will necessarily follow him to the Forrester platform. That represents a considerable number of people Forrester won’t reach with its message, limiting the exposure to prospective new paying customers.

Consider Scott Monty, who brought his considerable following with him to his job managing Ford Motor Company’s social media efforts. He has used the blog effectively as a means of telling Ford’s story to a large audience than he could reach if he had been forced to scuttle his blog and start anew on a dedicated Ford platform.

The value of Scott’s Ford-focused posts still accrues to Ford (even as he continues to build his personal brand), just as the value of a Forrester analyst’s post on her own blog would still accrue to Forrester. Sure, it can also serve to build the blogger’s own brand, but even Forrester’s Bernoff admits that his brand has been built just fine without his own blog. So what’s the difference?

From a personal perspective, had Joe Jaffe told me that I’d have to give up my blog and podcast before joining crayon, I would have declined the offer. While a lot of prospective Forrester analysts may agree to drop their blogs in order to work there, it’s impossible to know how many may never apply in the first place knowing what the policy is. Some have argued that nobody would pass on the job to salvage their blog, but if I would, I’m probably not alone.

Did Forrester conduct a cost-benefit analysis?

I wonder if the powers that be at Forrester engaged in a cost-benefit analysis. What is it truly costing in terms of lost IP? (To reiterate, I can’t figure out where they’d lose a single nickel.) What is the cost if an analyst builds a personal brand and then leaves, taking her blog with her? (You’d also have to factor in how many of those analysts would have left anyway.) And what is the benefit of the expanded reach of Forrester’s messages and stories, the same reach that leads marketers to offer the IP free of charge to people like me?

I may have just answered my own question. If a cost-benefit analysis had been done, I can’t believe it would have led Forrester to adopt this policy.

So why, then? It’s either a provincial and wrong-minded understanding of IP or a knee-jerk reaction to the Altimeter Group situation.

Either way, it’s a mistake.

It’s also Forrester’s call, not mine. The company produces terrific research and I hope this all works out for them and their analysts in the long run.

Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Some perspective on magazine closings

Much has been made of the statistics cited in a press release issued December 14 by MediaFinder. According to the release, 275 new magazines were launched while 428 folded. These numbers were presented as further evidence of print’s inevitable demise.

There’s no question that the Net is having a profound impact on the publishing business. Many of the major titles that shuttered print production shifted to online-only models.

But context is a valuable thing. It’s worth noting that far more magazines perished in years long before the digitization of media began. It’s also worth nothing that those were all recession years: 1992, 1993, 2000 and 2001. In fact, in 2000-2001, 1,802 magazines went out of business, a 22.1 percent drop.

In case anyone missed it, 2008 and 2009 were recession years, too. That’s a factor that needs to be considered when analyzing the failures of those 428 magazines. According to Ulrich’s Periodical Directory, magazines closed at an average 80 percent higher rate in recession years than in the year before. Ulrich’s showed 54 magazine closings in 2008. (Ulrich’s, which tracks U.S. and Canadian magazines, doesn’t sync up with the MediaFinder numbers, by the way, but MediaFinder noted that 525 magazines folded in 2008, which makes 2009 a better year than the one before.)

The reason for these failures has more to do with advertising than reader defection. In a recession, companies scale back the advertising that is the lifeblood of magazine publishing. In the advertising and marketing world, we’ve been talking about any number of studies that report company plans to scale back their spending in order to conserve money.

For those who think circulation is that big a factor, consider that 2008 saw only a .4 percent decline in total circulation from the previous year, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. Total 2008 circulation was virtually even with the number of subscribers in 1990, the year the ABC began tracking such numbers. (2009 numbers aren’t available yet.)

Magazine publishing has always been a precarious business, but the fact that 275 print magazines were born in 2009 speaks to some optimism about the future of the business.

So yes, magazines are having to examine their models as more and more content moves online. But to suggest a single year’s statistics are proof that print is on its way out is a knee-jerk reaction—a hopeful one among the print-is-dead crowd—that fails to examine all the facts.

Speaking of facts, the Magazine Publishers of America produced this video; the citations for each fact appear on the MPA’s site:

Friday, July 17, 2009

The ethics of publishing stolen material

IABC President Julie Freeman TechCrunch’s decision to publish internal documents stolen from Twitter, “Was it appropriate to publish stolen documents?  Even if the information obtained was accurate?  Was it ethical?  Does the public have the right to know how Twitter (or any company) plans to make its money and when?  Does how information is obtained affect whether it should be published?”

I’ve decided to post my answer here.

I was struck by one of Robert Scoble‘s remarks on FriendFeed, part of a lengthy discussion on the controversy. In response to the argument that nothing in the Twitter documents seemed to rise to the level of “public interest” that would justify their publication, Robert wrote, “I went to journalism school and we were taught to publish information, even stuff that was gotten through questionable means, and not hold back when it comes across our desk.”

I went to journalism school, too, though admittedly many years earlier than Robert. But I don’t remember ever being taught to publish whatever crossed my desk. Given how long it’s been, though, since I sat in a journalism ethics class, I decided to throw the question to a friend who is the chair of the journalism school at a reputable university. (I haven’t heard back from him with permission to cite him, but will update this post when he returns, assuming he gives me the go-ahead.)

I presented the situation in generic terms: “A reporter finds a package on his desk. He opens it and finds it contains documents that were clearly and unquestionably stolen from the source. Their exposure does not serve the public interest (unlike, say, The Pentagon Papers or the Brown & Williamson documentation whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand turned over to 60 Minutes).”

Here’s what I heard back:

• First, the editor would have to verify the contents and try to figure out who delivered it, where they got it from, and so on.
• Most reporters would try to find another source to corroborate the information.
• A reporter or editor would have to evaluate the news value vs. the privacy and potential harm issues.

This response dovetails nicely with my own recollection of journalism ethics from my days in journalism school (1972-1976). It’s also inconsistent with Robert’s “publish stuff” approach and the quote TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington offered as justification: ““News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising” (attributed to newspaper magnate Lord Northcliffe, although there’s no evidence he actually said it).

I’ve seen dozens of definitions of news and most of them convey the same fundamentals: News is information or an event that is current, involves some kind of change from the way things are, and has an impact on a group of people. While the communication of such stories may piss some people off, that’s not the criteria for deciding what gets covered. Rather, it’s something journalists shouldn’t let influence them when deciding whether to go to press with a story.

As near as I can tell, nothing in the Twitter documents published by TechCrunch rises to the level of “public interest.” It was published because it was titillating and would draw traffic.

Given that there is probably no legal liability for publishing these documents, you have to ask yourself who would be most inclined to publish stolen content the release of which does not serve the public interest. It reminds me of ethics discussions we had when I worked for a global consulting firm. If somebody handed you a proposal stolen from a competitor for a client you were bidding on, would you use it to improve your own chances of winning the work? Answer: No, we’d return it to the company from which it was stolen. (On the other hand, if someone from the competing firm happened to leave a copy lying around, that’s another story.)

Pepsi embodied the highest ethical standards when they refused to accept a formula stolen from Coca-Cola and offered to them for a price, opting instead to turn the material back over to Coke and the thief to the police.

My friend, the journalism school chair, did suggest that “Murdoch would definitely publish (the documents).” He’s speaking of Rupert, of course, whose News Corp. owns such bastions of journalism as The Sun and News of the World, two of the most brazen London tabloids.

Nowhere in Michael Arrington’s many, many words devoted to the Twitter documents did he indicate that he tried to find an alternate legitimate source for the information, corroborate it or engage in any of the other practices ethical journalists are expected to embrace. Perhaps Rupert Murdoch should consider acquiring TechCrunch, since they would seem to be birds of a feather.

One has to wonder how Arrington would have reacted if the confidential internal documents in question had been stolen from TechCrunch and published by Mashable or ReadWriteWeb (not to suggest that either of these sites would publish stolen documents). Somehow I suspect he would have been a little less cavalier about the ethical breech.

Thursday, June 18, 2009

Serendipity: A strength of print

I was thumbing through my Sunday newspaper earlier this week when I came upon a full-page feature that, despite the dullness of the topic and my own lack of interest in government finance, drew me in. “State Budget 101” featured a cartoon professor walking you through a plain-English explanation of the key issues underlying California’s budget crisis with simple-to-understand charts and graphs. Here’s what it looked like:

It struck me, as I dug into the feature, that this is the kind of thing that newspapers should be doing. Enough innovative, useful material like this could entice a lot of people back to reading the daily dead-tree version of the news.

The same information can, of course, be found online. In fact, this same feature is available on the Web in an interactive format:

But here’s the main difference between a print newspaper and an online feature:

I would never, ever, click a link to “California Budget 101: Making sense of the state’s financial meltdown.”

My eyes would skip right past it as my brain subconsciously noted that it has something to do with budgets and finance, not my strong suit nor a focus of interest. But when I turned the page and saw the feature there, all in one place with its appealing graphics and a promise of simplifying something complex, I paid attention.

That’s serendipitous discovery of content.

As I noted a few weeks back, rather than introducing more and more compelling content like this, most newspapers have grown timid. Turning a page means finding more AP and Reuters coverage of stories you’ve already read on some news site because you learned about it on Twitter. With that kind of content, it’s no wonder people are abandoning newspapers.

But turning a page and seeing something you didn’t expect, something you never would have looked for, but that makes you go “wow,” that’s a capability that newspaper publishers need to exploit. And as long as I continue to find content like that in the Bay Area News Group’s newspapers, I’ll keep subscribing. (Incidentally, this is also a strength to be leveraged in internal communications, helping to simplify complex issues for employees that they would never click to view on the intranet.)

One suggestion, though. While the interactive, online version of the feature included a PDF of the print version, there was no link to the interactive page in the newspaper. Tighter integration between print and online will only bolster print’s value.

Thursday, May 28, 2009

Bold predictions on just plain hubris?

Fuat Kircaali, the founder and CEO of

Sys-Con Media, has been outlandish in his predictions for the success of his latest venture, a self-publishing site called Ulitzer. (That’s “Pulitzer” without the “P.” Get it?)

How great does Kircaali think the prospects are for the site? “Within the next five years, Time Magazine, the Harvard Business Review, Scientific American, Conde Nast Traveler, and Wikipedia will be replaced by Ulitzer.”

The toppling of Wikipedia is inevitable, Kircaali maintains, just as Facebook overtook MySpace’s lead. In fact, in another post Kircaali claims Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn will all be proven useless before the end of this year; Kircaali believes they’ll never “pass the stage of mass spam tools.” More on that other post in a bit.

If ever I wished I were a bookie…

The site has so far attracted about 7,000 authors and about a million articles, far short of Wikipedia, but then again it has only been around since it launched in beta on March 29. Still, according to Alexa, Ulitzer has attracted a whopping .0025% of the global Internet population, with only a 470% growth curve since the site launched.

Once you’re approved as an author, you can launch a magazine, a subject-based portal, or a new topic category, then populate these with any of those million articles in the Ulitzer database. You can also import your own blog feed to add your posts to the mix. You earn money through Google ads and there are editors for each Ulitzer site providing some kind of editorial control.

From a PR perspective, there’s also a “News Desk” where you can post press releases and other content on behalf of your company or client. This content then gets distributed into revelant topics. Presumably, this works as Google juice, since the item will appear in multiple places on Ulitzer. As you’ll see in a minute, Kircaali believes the only PR agencies that will survive are those that will publish client content this way.

The launch hasn’t been without controversy. Kircaali felt compelled to write a post defending Ulitzer against claims that articles had to be removed for copyright violation (Kircaali asserts none were) and that only four authors have asked to have their profile pages turned off (there were allegations, apparently, that a lot of authors wanted to back out but couldn’t).

Kircaali’s more recent post offers the provocative headline, “Is the PR business extinct? Yes.”

The post is as preposterous as a lot of Kircaali’s other assertions. For example, he suggests that 70% of today’s PR agencies won’t survive the “fast approaching media avalanche” because 90% of today’s PR firms are still in business because the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission does not allow companies to communicate material information on websites.

I’d pay real money to know where Kircaali gets his statistic. I could have sworn all those agencies were out there helping organizations build and maintain positive relationships with constituent publics. How silly of me.

Further, Kircaali says there are only three kinds of agencies. Those using Ulitzer every day as a channel for their clients’ news, those who are using Ulitzer to publish bylined articles and tapping into its syndication features (these are the agencies, of course, that will survive), and those who are “horrified by the idea that their clients may actually find out about (Ulitzer).” Those must be the doomed 70%.

But wait. There’s more. Kircaali asserts—in bold face, no less—that “the companies with the largest number of professional bloggers will win:”

Tomorrow’s (and I mean tomorrow, not the next decade) marketing game will be played onprofessional corporate blogging platforms. The companies with the largest number of well-read and respected corporate bloggers will win the marketing and propaganda games. Larger companies will need larger armies of corporate bloggers. the new job description of “professional corporate blogger” will be a very popular one.

To be or not to be, that is the question for the PR firms that will hit the wall at this stage. The ones who are equipped to provide those services whose job description are not yet defined will be tomorrow’s brave new PR companies.

Kircaali doesn’t see actual employees doing real work who engage their communities through social media channels including blogs. No, he sees companies hiring people who will just blog.

I have to admit the Ulitzer model looks interesting (with a design that looks dangerously similar to ZD’s online prescence), although nowhere does it provide encyclopedic listings, leading me to wonder how Kircaali envisions Ulitzer driving Wikipedia to an early digital grave. As for Kircaali, I’ll be monitoring him closely, waiting for more brash and unsuportable predictions to lighten up my day.

Monday, May 04, 2009

The serendipity of the package

The “print is dead” meme is based on a couple simple assumptions. First, the digital world can do anything print can do, only better. And second, the economics of print—from turning trees into pulp into paper, then managing the distribution channels—just won’t cut it.

The evidence supporting the meme just keeps pouring in, like word today that The New York Times Company plans to shut down The Boston Globe (only to offer a reprieve shortly after the announcement). Layoffs and spending cuts haven’t produced the savings required to keep the paper afloat, so the Times announced it plans to shutter the paper in 60 days after failing to win concessions from the Newspaper Guild.

A lot of people predict the death of the newspaper industry. Steve Rubel has gone so far as to predict the death in the next decade of all tangible media.

As regular readers know, I have a $100 bet with Jose Leal that, in 2018, I’ll be able to buy a newspaper from a rack on the street.

The terms of the bet include nothing about what newspaper I’ll be able to buy. I never asserted it would be a newspaper publishing today. It could well be that somebody starts a print newspaper that captures the public’s attention and imagination after the one-time juggernauts of journalism have faded from the scene.

Ultimately, though, there’s nothing wrong with print. In fact, the best way to revitalize the print business is to recognize print’s strengths over online delivery and be bold in executing them.

The real power of print is in the package.

For all the astounding content on the Web, a hyperlink-mediated environment can actually discourage the serendipitous discovery of content. Consider a visit to a news aggregation site. Your eyes skim over the hyperlinked headlines, but you click only on the items that interest you. While you may have absorbed some information from the headlines you dismissed, you’ll never see the additional links to content that might have been compelling on the pages you opted not to view.

Print, on the other hand, can be the source of endless serendipity, when done well. Turning a page should be an adventure: You have no idea what you’ll find, such as a design that delights you, a photo that wows you, a story that captivates you—none of which you would have searched for or clicked to. Quality printing also provides benefits you can’t get on-screen.

Sadly, as print media retrenches, publishers have gone exactly the opposite direction, embracing timidity instead of boldness. I can’t remember the last time the design of a newspaper page struck me as enticing and the stories are the same ones I read everywhere else, AP and Reuters filler that’s just as easily found in 10,000 online sites, not to mention other newspapers.

Whether the publishers of any surviving newspapers figure this out remains to be seen, but somebody will embrace the idea of the serendipity of the package. Once readers can’t wait to flip through an issue to see what unexpected delights they’ll discover, advertisers will follow. At that point, the fact that putting ink onto paper is an expensive proposition will be incidental—people will pay for products in which they find value.

I’m not suggesting, by the way, that print can regain its market share over digital content, only that print will find a place. But I recall talking to a communicator whose company had dispensed with print, taking its internal communications online. Only rarely—when she needed to make sure something stood out from the rest of the company’s communications—did she produce a printed publication for distribution to employees. When such a publication landed on employees’ desks, their response was, “Wow, it’s in print. It must be important.”

Like I say, it’s all in how well content producers understand the importance of the package.

Sunday, April 12, 2009

Upcoming rock tour leads to evolution of print

Print’s not dead. Regardless of what the digital purists say, there are plenty of uses for print. As I’ve noted before, I don’t foresee the complete migration from print to digital for graphic novels and comic books, baseball cards, direct mail pieces, or the brochures they give you when you walk into Disneyland or that you find in racks in front of tourist attractions. I even think you’ll still find paper newspapers 10 years from now and beyond.

Print is evolving, however, and nothing characterizes that evolution quite like print-on-demand (POD). There is no shortage of dunderheads out there who think POD is a new synonym for vanity press, but the two have little in common. Vanity presses did large press runs for wannabe authors who couldn’t find a publisher, while POD lets anyone produce just the number of copies they want, when they want them, of just about anything. The possibilities are unlimited.

Take, for example, the deal that Blurb just inked with The Dead, the current iteration of the The Grateful Dead, featuring all four surviving members of the iconic Bay Area jam band along with a couple friends to fill in the gaps.

The Dead is touring this spring, and the band will produce a book of photography for each of the tour’s 17 stops. The photography will be provided by longtime Grateful Dead photography Jay Blakesberg. And fans will be able to replace the cover image with their own photo. Each book will be available within 72 hours of the end of the show.

Blurb developed the Personal Cover option just for this offering, although undoubtedly it will be extended to other products down the road.

From the press release:

“The band wanted to enable the Dead Heads to visually experience the show in a totally new way,” said Jay Blakesberg, photographer for the upcoming DEAD tour. “Extending the concert experience via personalized, professional-quality photography books, available within days following each show, is unlike any band merchandising I’ve ever seen. The speed of Blurb’s publishing platform meant we could create books with unique content for every tour stop. By also allowing fans to add their own magic to the cover, The DEAD are once again breaking the rules with this awesome new technology!”

“Working with The DEAD presents an exciting opportunity for Blurb to help a band create a new, cool type of merchandise item,” said Robin Goldberg, SVP of Marketing and Business Development, Blurb. “This partnership was attractive to The DEAD and to Blurb because we’ve been able to allow Dead Heads to work with licensed content but still add their own personal touch to each book.”

Since I’ll be at the show in Mountain View on May 14, I’ll just have to bring a camera so I can personalize a cover and order my own copy. It’ll most likely sit on my coffee table, where a digital version could never replace the tactile pleasure of flipping through a book of high-end printed images on high-quality paper.

Now, put on your thinking cap. For your company or clients, to what uses could this kind of near-instant printing, with the personalized touch, be put? The company holiday party? Images from trade shows or product launches? What ideas pop into your mind?