everlastingNow

i continue to tell our clients about the irony of the publishing industry. a need couldn’t be any more distinct in the market right now. we all need to be behaving more like publishing organizations, from the individual level all the way up through corporate. it’s all a matter of becoming more responsive and engaged in the conversation your audience may be wanting to have with you.

i have to publish more often and in order to do so i have to setup an editorial calendar of sorts for myself. i have had to align myself with great minds… from which can come great thoughts… through which i can share my own thinking with you.

in the same way, corporations need to be communicating as if they were nimble sentient beings… not cold hulking monoliths that ring hollow when you approach. shifting their behavior is even harder while the requirements on them are very much similar to what they are on the individual… set up an editorial calendar, align yourself with smart people–if not reporters. and get the message out! once out, respond!

guess who does this better than anyone (or any other company) on earth right now. publishers. guess who’s at a painful inflection point right now. publishers. guess why. because greedy business people with upside-down business models bought them up and forced them to perform to standards that make no logical publishing sense. under advertising models that were hyper-inflated and are presented now as if the plummet is a fall from the norm. it’s not. it’s a fall to normalcy. now they’re forced to go through the gyrations of laying people off, becoming for economically ‘efficient’ and the like… all because their ownership structures didn’t allow them to change in the meaningful ways they needed to when they needed to.

moreover, the rest of us need them desperately right now. we need these people to be teaching us how to operate more efficiently in a publishing-driven world.

the old stories about bloggers coming for their ground, undermining their credibility are all bunk. there was never any threat to quality. meanwhile, we’re forced to see the world through the cracked lens of a panicked machine that is fighting for its own life… while it tries to reflect back to us the changes we are going through and what they mean. yay for us… we get further polarizing behavior amongst fox, msnbc, and al jazeera. organizations turning news into reality-show-style entertainment instead the inquisitive real reporting we need. but, before i go too far, let’s not glorify the days of old. any publisher has an agenda. let’s just publish those agendas in the same way any other corporation would.

meanwhile, let’s free up these brilliant publishing minds to do what they do best… and welcome them into our corporate structures as heads of Customer Experience or Corporate Conversation. whatever it is, companies are being asked to do more with less and the answer is right under our noses… in a business that is oddly damaged, but not because it’s systemically flawed. it’s broken because financial engineers screwed it up.

a couple very insightful articles on the same came through yesterday from AdAge. the first, It’s Not Newspapers in Peril; It’s Their Owners is right up the middle of this issue. the second is a bit deeper, but points up an entirely new business model as yet to be implemented but likely to be figured out soon. Making the Case for Micropayments in News is an insightful interview with a former Time editor who is at the center of a lot of these decisions. he even admits some missteps in the early days of his online publishing efforts. regardless, we work with our own clients who struggle with monetizing their highly valued content (gating strategies, subscription models, and micropayments among a handful of compelling new models all under exploration).

the gist of it all is that providing value is still valued. removing the advertising structure that has fueled and biased the models we have to-date is gut-wrenching but also enlightening. who better to get us through than those who have been in the middle of the storm for thirty years but who didn’t drink the financial koolaid of the past 10?