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E-mails from 1994

Publishing Turned Inside Out

Here's #2

My byline should be attached to the resume document (it was named kmcires.htm when I sent it with the first column), also, I had trouble getting the mail hotlink to work on column #1.

Cheers,

Kim

Publishing Turned Inside Out

by Kimberly Patch

When television burst onto the scene half a century ago it affected, but didn't kill, the other media of the times -- print, radio and movies.

Early on, radio producers mapped their shows directly onto the new media, and listeners saw radio personalities standing at their mikes doing a radio show. This grew old quickly as producers discovered better ways to exploit the new medium.

Hollywood, fearing people would stay home turned to their new tubes, experimented with 3-D pictures, briefly unleashed smells in the theaters, and permanently widened the silver screen.

Later, newspapers followed the soundbite mentality developed by television news by shortening news stories and adding more graphical elements and color.

These changes ranged from insignificant to good to ugly: Radio-on-television and movie theater odors didn't last, graphical elements in newspapers helped readers visualize information, but the trend toward shorter, catchier stories has oversimplified and polarized the news.

Online communications, with its lightning speed, global reach, very cheap distribution, multimedia elements, huge archives, sophisticated search capabilities and flexible billing, is poised to effect bigger changes than the last new medium to come along.

I want to stress that this column's purpose is to explore the ways I think online communications is likely to change the way information is published. Like any attempt to predict the future -- especially one with almost as many variables as a weather system -- it's nothing more or less than an exercise in possibilities.

With that cop-out, here's what I think online communications can do for publishing: There are two types of changes afoot -- the first in the media itself, the second in the business models behind the media.

Hard Copy Versus Online Information: No Contest

Just about anywhere a word is put to paper -- or the airwaves -- online publishing can provide supplemental information and alternative access to those words. In some cases, online information will provide a clear replacement, but in a majority of cases I see traditional media and online information living side by side for a long time to come.

For example, I don't think certain people will ever want to give up reading a section of good old fashioned newsprint while seated on the porcelain throne, and subway trains would become more dangerous places if we all wielded open laptops in one hand while hanging on with the other. But services like Newshound, which delivers custom-filtered news straight to your e-mail box, and the hundreds of newspapers on lists like the Online Newspapers Menu and NewsLink offer a wider range of stories, add graphical and audio elements, and enable instant reader feedback and interaction.

Likewise, you probably wouldn't want to read Shakespeare's Hamlet straight through on a computer screen -- especially if you'd first gone to the trouble to find a nice tree to read under. But if you want to quickly find out how many times Shakespeare penned the word fool, you can't beat the searching capabilities of the Shakespeare Homepage. The House of Usher home page goes a step further, supplementing Edgar Allan Poe's complete works with links to Film information, a PBS alert, Journal articles, and even a song you can FTP.

The same holds true for the airwaves. Check out how PBS and ESPN use their web pages, or look at and listen to the Internet Multicasting Service and NPR over the net.

The Business

The big potential changes in publishing, however, are just below the surface -- in the business end of things.

Traditional publishing models are built on two assumptions that are becoming less true as online communications take hold.

The first assumption means only large players can afford to publish and widely distribute content. In addition, subscription revenue is usually augmented by -- or in the case of controlled circulation trade magazines, replaced with -- revenue generated by advertisers.

The second assumption holds publishing a bit apart from its customers. As a journalist, I figure I earn my pay by digging up the stories readers would like to know about but don't have time to look into personally.

The 4th Estate Recast

There are two types of publishing models I think we'll see more of as these assumptions change.

First, more publications will emerge without advertising.

There are very few major publications available today that don't contain advertising -- Consumer Reports and Ms. Magazine are two notable exceptions.

The extremely low costs of publishing and distribution over the Internet, the flexibility of emerging billing mechanisms, and increasingly sophisticated publishing tools will allow more small groups of journalists -- or individuals -- to strike off on their own with very little start-up capital. It will be much easier for those who want to remain independent of advertising to do so.

Second, more publications will emerge without advertising as we know it.

As commerce begins taking place over the Internet, those running the marketplaces will try to attract independent editorial in order to generate traffic near those marketplaces.

Essentially, this is an advertising model, but the advertising/marketing/sales matter is *easily accessible from* rather than *interspersed randomly with* the editorial material. Most important, the advertising and editorial can remain truly independent because they no longer live under the same roof.

BIG DISCLAIMER: This is essentially what I'm doing here on the MCI pages. I'm an independent contractor with full editorial control and copyright of these columns.

Again, these are two of many emerging models. Check out GNN, InfoSeek, and Newshare for variations on the Internet publishing theme.

21st Century Book Publishing

Today, print often appears first in hard copy, then in electronic form. I think this is backwards.

Electronic publishing is the medium of the masses -- it wastes fewer trees, is more immediate, and is very efficient. Electronic publishing is also something an author could do independently -- especially given a central, organized electronic library.

This would also bode well for publishers, who could search cyberspace at their leisure for the kind of material they think people would want in hard copy.

Book distribution in general is poised for a change. Distribution is so costly now that publishers make booksellers destroy unsold paperbacks rather than send them back. Internet organizations could facilitate distributed print stations not only for existing books, but for custom anthologies.

Picture perusing a database of short fiction, finding 15 stories about fishing mishaps from around the world that you know your dad would love, adding your own introduction, and zapping it to a custom book binding center in his town -- all in time for fathers day.

Next: The Rules: How the US Government is setting the Online Stage

Previous: Online Communications: Starting to Show Teeth

Kimberly Patch (kcp@shore.net) is a freelance writer living in Boston.

Copyright 1995 Kimberly Patch. All rights reserved. Feel free to distribute this column electronically in its entirety. Commercial use is prohibited without my consent.