Here’s a nice video clip of Gordon Crovitz, former publisher of The Wall Street Journal, talking about some of the peculiarities of the newspaper business and branding.
I’ve seen Gordon speak several times and think he’s a fascinating speaker. We’re trying to get him to speak at our Digital Publishing Summit this Fall/Winter. Hopefully, we’ll succeed. Meantime, here’s a little tidbit.
Posted in Newspaper, Publishing, Publishing and Printing
As part of my company’s focus on the media industry, I sit on a few industry groups where I have the opportunity to spend quality time with senior media and publishing industry executives.
Like any CEO, I have a natural tendency to believe that my company is, if not totally counter-cyclical, at least somewhat immune to the effects of the economic downturn. I’ve heard enough CEOs make the claim (cf: this query), often where it’s ostensibly absurd, that I should ask myself if I don’t have a case of CEO denial. Am I arguing something akin to the rise in bedbugs is good for the hotel industry or not?
So when a recent publishing executive group I sit on started to discuss the economic downturn, I turned up my defenses to make sure I didn’t have my happy ears on.
But executive after executive said that they believed the downturn is accelerating the digital publishing transformation. Not because I said it. Not because, as a technology supplier that helps companies transition, I want it to be true. But because about a dozen senior folks from many different publishing sectors said it.
Why?
Now that I see the picture, it’s clear: after roughly a decade of fence-setting, the downturn is forcing publishers of all ilks to move. The downturn is accelerating the transition to digital publishing. And that’s not happy ears.
I’m happy to announce the availability of a white paper on which we worked with information industry veteran Bill Rosenblatt of Giant Steps Media that analyzes the effects of the Google settlement with publishers, and identifies new opportunities that result from it.
From the introduction:
The first part of this white paper describes the Settlement Agreement in the litigation, including the Book Rights Registry, the initial set of business models that Google and publishers will implement, and the set of business models that the Settlement Agreement contemplates in the future.
The second part discusses the future opportunities for publishers, particularly those that depend on publishers’ ability to build XML-based content architectures and make content available in structured formats with standardized metadata. It then discusses the capabilities that will be necessary for publishers to adopt in order to take advantage of these opportunities, including systems, tools, processes, and standards adoption where appropriate. Of course, a growing number of publishers are already starting to adopt these capabilities.
From the start of the second section:
The future business models contemplated in Section 4.7 of the Settlement Agreement differ qualitatively from the way that Google currently works with publishers – mainly in that they include several opportunities that require the availability of content in structural rather than page-oriented formats.
I believe the agreement enables Google to challenge Amazon in the sale of online books (and importantly, derivatives thereof) and therefore that publishers need to think of Google not as only a discoverability channel, but also a distribution channel — and ergo be ready to distribute their content in the way(s) that Google asks.
To me, this unsurprisingly suggests the need to store content in a centralized XML repository whereby it can quickly be repurposed, reformatted, and/or otherwise sliced-and-diced to enable experimentation about new and different ways to sell it.
John Kreisa from Mark Logic presented on the settlement with Bill Rosenblatt at last week’s O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference and here is an article in Publisher’s Weekly about the panel. The slides that they presented are below:
Bill Rosenblatt has blogged about the white paper and about the settlement itself on his Copyright and Technology blog.
You can download the white paper via the Mark Logic site (and be asked to provide some information) here. Or you can use the back door and download the paper directly via the Giant Steps site, here.
Posted in Amazon SimpleDB, Giant Steps, Google, Google Settlement, Mark Logic, Publishing, XML
Come to a webinar next week that Mark Logic is sponsoring entitled Gilbane’s Top 5 Predictions for Publishers in 2009 featuring speaker Steve Paxhia, lead analyst with The Gilbane Group.
Steve will discuss trends from his upcoming report, entitled “Digital Platforms and Technologies for Book Publishers: Implementations Beyond eBook,” where he identifies five important trends that are changing the landscape for information providers:
Learn more about these trends and find out if your company has the tools, processes, and attitudes required to exploit them in an uncertain market. All attendees will receive a copy of the completed research report from Gilbane.
For more information and/or to register, go here. Steve’s a great speaker. I’m sure you find the webinar a great use of an hour.
Posted in Mark Logic, Publishing, Publishing 2.0
Dave Kellogg is Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Service Cloud at Salesforce.com. From 2004 to 2010, I was CEO at unstructured information leader MarkLogic, taking the company from zero to $80M in run-rate revenues.
Before that, I was CMO at Business Objects as we grew from 250 to over 4,500 people and $30M in revenues to over $1B. Prior to that, I was VP of Marketing at Versant, where we executed a chasm-crossing strategy that resulted in a successful IPO. I started my career in both technical and marketing positions at Ingres.In addition, I sat on the board of big data analytics provider Aster Data until its successful sale to Teradata for $325M. I also do some angel investing and advise the chief executives of several startups.
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