Things sure have come a long way since the news rooms of the old days! Over 500 publications went out of business last year, and an additional 100 in 2009.
Not surprising, have you picked up a magazine lately? They’re pretty thin on the ads…
An unfortunate consequence of the global economic recession is many conventional businesses have to change the way they operate. some for the better. The Big Three automotive companies are making hybrid cars with better gas mileage, and now publishers are looking for ways to distribute content digitally. Ironic that tight finances have been the catalyst for changes that benefit the environment within the same industries who lobbied against them for years.
The Guardian announced they are releasing a new API called Open-Platform that will enable people to build applications to distribute and license their content. See Forrester Analyst Jeremiah Owyang’s Web Strategy post for discussion of the possibilities for developers, who first turned me on to the story.
The broader implication I think is that as publishers struggle to monetize their content, and the internet becomes saturated with data, marketing spam, and frivolous chit chat, the monetary incentives decrease to create quality content and increase proportionally to your ability to organize existing content and make sense of the clutter. Online search has increasingly become less useful when there is a need to find particular, relevant information surrounding best practices, specialized fields, because keyword phrases don’t always work.
It will be interesting to see how developers respond to the Guardian, and to see what the future holds for the publishing industry in the future.
