A common thread at Webstock 2013 was the ripping to shreds of the newspaper and magazine industry and their failed attempts to embrace the web.
In a stark example of how badly wrong it's going, Webstock speaker Karen McGrane said that one of first responses to iPad by a publisher was "We’re about to usher in a golden age of PDFs on the iPad."
The conversation piqued my interest because my own career started off in the magazine industry. My degree thesis at broadcasting school involved building an e-zine (Global Groove, 1995) and I subsequently launched Tearaway Magazine onto the web space in 1998 (still going!).
Karen McGrane, who has led projects for the likes of the The New York Times, called for New Zealand web designers, developers and user experience professionals to step up and help resolve the publishing industry's crisis.
The trouble is, in New Zealand, the publishing industry isn't well paid (compared to IT), nor puts the designers in charge. I watch with interest the likes of The Listener and Unlimited switching to their digital offerings with their pay walls. Fair enough to make people pay - but I'm left wondering - where else is their content disseminated? I'm not seeing it on Digg, Flipboard, snippets embeded in blogs or anywhere else outside their gated community. I don't think that's a recipe for success.
"CMS is the enterprise software that user experience forgot."
Embroiled in the conversation about old-world publishing was content management systems and the fact that many of them are stuck in the 90s web page model with complex of form fields for content entry. She's right, they are horrible. "Every time your staff are fighting with the system, rather than creating great content, you are losing money" she said.
Create once publish everywhere
"Don't start with web or mobile, start with content" Karen implored. That's music to my ears and it makes perfect sense for information that will be disseminated across the internet.
And this directive is not exclusive to the news industry. Government should take note too - content decoupled from devices is the killer app for accessibility. Create content with the acceptance that it will end up being published on a myriad of different platforms.
The CMS and the future of online publishing have their fates intertwined. The CMS first needs to get better to help writers and editors craft structured content that can be consumed over an endless variety of web properties and devices. This is where designers and developers can contribute a lot of value.
And publishers need to find clever ways to disseminate content beyond their gated websites - make it easy for readers to find your stories - cut up your magazines and throw them to the winds of change.
IMAGE: Karen Eliot