 |
|
|
Express Yourself: Major Business
Publishers Search for Winning Online Brands |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
8 August 2005 |
|
|
|
|
American Business Media's "B2B Meets..." events draw
top-drawer panelists to chat about key topics in the world
of business publishing. The most recent session was
supposed to be focused on the impact of weblogs and RSS on
business publishing, but much of the talk from the
blue-ribbon panelists was about how their editorial
operations are still focused on getting the basics of their
online brands right. The good news is that they are
succeeding in expressing their brands in many instances,
but it's with a recognition that they're used to creating a
product that's far different than what many born-on-the-Web
content brands are able to assemble. Seismic these changes
may be, but the shaking has hardly begun. |
|
The latest
installment of
American Business Media's "B2B Meets..." series of panels
on key trends impacting business publishers focused on the
impact of weblogs and RSS on their trade. It was held at the
headquarters of
Scholastic
Inc., a venue that fit well not so much because of the
presence of their juvenile lit superstars
Captain Underpants and
Clifford the Big Red Dog but because of its location in the
SoHo district of New York City. Once a hotbed of
avant-garde artists and upstart retailers SoHo's sky-high real
estate prices have pushed much of the bohemian element to the
fringes of this neighborhood to make room well-funded stores
and restaurants seeking panache and high-end revenues.
Similarly the major business publishers on the ABM panel have
been adapting their operations to the hot Web neighborhood to
enable themselves and their advertisers to "express their
brands digitally," as ABM President and CEO Gordon Hughes put
it.
The panelists from
Forbes,
BusinessWeek,
The Wall Street Journal Online and AdWeek's
AdFreak weblog, moderated by Forbes.com President Jim
Spanfeller, demonstrated that learning how to succeed online in
the presence of new content sources such as weblogs is not as
easy as throwing on the right togs to blend in with the
natives:
- Bill Grueskin, Managing Editor
of WSJ Online, has helped the Journal to try many innovative
ideas online within the parameters of their mostly
subscription-driven online model. Inviting webloggers to
publish within the subscription site to comment on key
currency trends invited comments from major figures, while
comments from a doctor on a health care story led to the
doctor contributing feature content. But like other news
organizations Grueskin faces the challenge of getting stories
out in a 24-hour news cycle in which people are not waiting
for day-old reporting. This places enormous pressure on
traditional journalists trained to polish a story into
something more than raw news. "If people aren't reading
journalism, why 'do' journalism?," Bill noted in expressing
the frustration of many in the trade trying to adapt to this
new environment.
- Kathy Rebello, Editor-in-Chief
of Business Week Online, has succeeded in creating an
editorial environment in which resources are assigned on a
cross-platform basis from the start of a story, allowing a
mix of contributions from online magazine and video editorial
staff as dictated by the needs of the story itself. This has
allowed BusinessWeek to be "BusinessWeek all week," as
Rebello puts it, churning out twenty to twenty-five stories a
day with elements of depth, analysis and insight supplemented
with AP wire stories in a lively interactive site. But some
of the staff get it more than others: tech writers, for
example, embrace the online-driven methods while others from
the more traditional business editorial staffs are still
adapting.
- Dan Bigman, Managing Editor of
Forbes.com, has applied lessons learned from The New York
Times' online presence to create a site that uses content
from its biweekly magazine and wire stories as well as its
own online staff's text and video contributions to create a
mixture of the latest news, analysis and commentary. In many
ways the new online environment is a perfect fit for Forbes'
blunt, contrarian style, attracting people to content that's
providing fresh analysis from a different point of view along
with substantial depth that makes "every page a home page."
Yet "Editing is still editing," Dan notes, and for magazine
editors used to having fact checkers and other luxuries of
longer publications cycles the "seismic" changes to the
newsroom are sometimes hard to absorb.
- Catharine Taylor, a
Contributing Editor for AdWeek, has the luxury of actually
knowing about blogging first-hand as a regular contributor to
of AdWeek's AdFreak weblog. Ad Freak is a straight-up
ad-supported weblog altogether separate from the AdWeek site,
with short and glib pieces on people and event affecting the
ad community and, unlike most business publications, lots of
links to Web-based sources ("There are almost no sites we'll
not link to - more links are better," Taylor notes). By
comparison, publication-driven sites tend to avoid outgoing
links. She struggles at times with weblogging technology, but
sees the greater struggle with, yes, writers used to the
prestige of print trying to adapt to the more low-key
presence of journalists online.
So in spite of leading talent and enormous resources putting
out quality content many of these publishers' editorial assets
are fast turning into liabilities in an online publishing
environment that shows no quarter to past concepts of
publishing. Dan Bigman likened the early state of changes in
today's online publishing environment to television in 1953; if
he'd added one more year he'd have come to the experiences
chronicled in the movie "My
Favorite Year." The movie features Peter O'Toole,
playing a has-been movie hero dredged up for a part in a
then-live TV show. Shocked by the concept of having to get his
part right in one take, O'Toole exclaims, "I'm not an actor,
I'm a movie star!" In many ways today's journalists in business
publishing are going through the same type of culture shock in
wrestling with how to express themselves in an instant and
conversational medium. Meanwhile their editors and producers
are trying to shape a product that fits both traditional
editorial values and the expectations of online readers and
viewers already trained by weblogs and search engines to find
and aggregate quality content from innumerable outlets with
ease.
All of these publishers have mastered some of the first
steps towards expressing online brands effectively, but the
pressures represented by weblogs and the delivery of XML
content to user devices via RSS and other channels are just
beginning to shape how this is done by both traditional and
non-traditional publishers. Most print-based publishers still
envision islands of proprietary online content rather than
content that's packaged to go to where the user wants it for
aggregation, sharing and consumption. There's room for both,
but born-on-the-Web content producers seem to be more adept at
expressing themselves in this more open exchange with users. It
turns out that this changing neighborhood may remain a lot more
diverse than the newcomers had anticipated.
-
John Blossom
To top of
page
 |
