Journalists should engage in conversation

When i first started this blog around the end of 2006,so many of the tags were to do with citizen journalism and user generated content.

The words seem to have fallen in to disuse in recent times sometimes maybe unfairly.

Kellie Maddox reports on the comments of the Editorial Development Director at RBI, a big B2B magazine and website publisher in the UK,Karl Schneider.

The benefits of UGC – aside from the obvious financial benefits of UGC (lots of content at little cost), Karl emphasised how important ‘community’ engagement around a website is in the production of UGC. He also pointed out that there was no set model of UGC that would work for users across the board – depending on the publication/topic, different groups respond differently when engaging with media products. He said, in order to understand users’ motivation to produce content, we should identify common threads e.g. why do users respond to that? In what way do they respond?

Ht-Suw Charman-Anderson

Doing more with less in the B2B sector

Are B2B magazines lagging behind their customer colleagues when it comes to digital media?

Well the answers yes if you believe the survey by the American Society of Business Publications Editors (ASBPE).

They found that 80 per cent of respondents in the sector complained of a lack of training in the tools and techniques of digital media.

While b2b editors are working without much, if any, training for the digital world, their workload increasingly involves online publishing. The survey found that 38% of editors spend at least half of their time now working on digital content, and even more (62%) feel that spending more time on digital would benefit their publications.

Ht-Martin Stabe

Emap puts up the paywalls

Staying with the paywall issue,Paid Content is reporting that B2B magazine publisher Emap will convert all its websites from free to pay-for, starting in the next few weeks.

CEO David Gilbertson told us in an interview that all websites in the Inform division (19 business magazines including Construction News, Retail Week and Drapers) will stop giving away free news and instead start bundling web access in with subscription packages. There’s no exact timeframe, though the process has been one year in the making

reports Patrick Smith.adding that

“We’re shifting the balance of the marketing message from, ‘this is a magazine and it has a website’ to ‘this is an information brand that delivers content across a range of media”, says Gilbertson, adding that alerting services, emails, data services and mobile apps will also come with the paid strategy

.

The first magazine to go behind the wall will be retail week in two weeks time

Tomorrow's cleaning goes live

Just a mention for a former student colleague at UCLAN who has gone through the experience of launching her first online magazine as editor.

Charlotte Taylor's Tomorrow's cleaning went live this week and promises that it is

the future of our cleaning industry - providing exclusive content and the latest news, advice and products,

I for one wish Charlotte all the best with the new venture.

Innovation is how B2B's will rid out the recession

B2B magazine publishers and editors, if they hope to ride out the storm, must be just as creative as their newspaper colleagues, maybe more so. When the recession recedes, though it is largely accepted that there will not be a certain return to the previous status quo, the B2B sector is more likely to return in ruder health than newspapers.

writes Roy Greenslade at his weekly Evening Standard column today

A sector that may well have ridden one prong of the attack on the media through online is suffering from the second,the recession and the consequent drop in advertising.

And according to Roy,innovation is the way forward as

It is facile to say that it is a simple matter for them because they all have captive audiences. They still need to ensure that they serve those readers well with appropriate editorial.

Some positives for the magazine sector

Over at Paul Bradshaw's online journalism blog there is a guest post from Alex Lockwood who reports on a very upbeat "What happens to magazines conference in London."

You could call 2008 the Year of the Niche title as people look to do things at home, cheaply, or the things they love most during the economic downturn.

says Alex before giving six industry examples of how the sector can be positive:

1. Andrew Davies of idiomag, the music content personalisation site, emphasized the possibilities for each unique user building their own magazine of content through companies, like his, using software sophisticated enough to be ultra-niche; and the advertising opportunities that provided were unrivalled for consumer relationships.

2. Mike Soutar, founder of Shortlist Media and “pioneers” in quality free magazine content, was confident that print magazines had found a model (brand-to-hand distribution and outsourced costs, keeping magazine teams very small) that would mean print magazines could continue to be there where a screen wasn’t.

3. Sarah Clegg, chief executive of John Menzies Digital and provider of magazinesondemand.co.uk, delivering digital editions of top brands, believed they had passed the tipping point and, critically, persuaded publishers that they couldn’t charge their normal cover price for a digital magazine that had no transport, printing and retail costs attached to it.

4. Ashley Norris of Shiny saw a future of 20-30 blogs in a network doing the work–and replacing–the work of 2-3 magazines, and brokering creative sponsorship between brands and social media as central to the business model for producing great experiences online.

5. Simon Wear of Future, perhaps the most positive and persuasive, believed that his magazine company would be growing as they had a) remembered they weren’t software companies, and also b) had remembered how to write really strong, probing news around their niche interest sectors, which translates well online, and meant their nice-to-have content had found its way back to need-to-have status.

6. Finally, the most hopeful and most sceptical at the same time, Louise White of Incisive said their b2b titles were not magazines any more, but information providers that found their way into their audiences’ work flow–”platform agnostic” content that was as important to be on someone’s Blackberry than online or in print.

Of all the comments perhaps Louise's is the most potent in the current climate-information providers that found their way into their audiences' work flow is a very good description of the role of the B2b magazine.

Ad revenues falling at B2B's

Some worrying news for the B2B market coming out of America where according to B2B Media business

B-to-b magazine advertising revenue declined 7.3% last year, according to the latest Business Information Network data compiled for American Business Media. Revenue fell more precipitously as the year progressed, dropping 13.1% in the fourth quarter.

Advertising pages have fallen away at a much quicker rate than revenue says the report with other media platforms dclining at less of a rate

Why read Press Gazette when you can read John Slattery

Having just finished a work placement at a B2B magazine,I was interested in reading Neil Thackray’s Business Media Blog.(Ht-Martin Stabe)

He discusses the future for the B2B sector and he says that besides the budgetary constraints that practically all B2B's are experiencing
the growth of the Internet has had two pernicious effects on the future editorial viability of business magazines.

1.First the news, the lifeblood of a weekly mag, is available 24/7 and immediately.

2.As journalists get laid off, there will be more and more lone writers. They are often pretty good too.

And here is an interesting point that he makes

Read the Press Gazette web site and then read Jon Slattery (a former PG long term staffer). Which is better?

A very good example.Personally I tend to read John Slattery more than I read the Press Gazette site,it used to be one of my first point of calls but no longer is.

Decisions to be taken if going down the route of a web only strategy

By closely monitoring properties with diminishing returns, publishers can evaluate and even try multiple turn-around strategies for maintaining the print product against attempting the migration to a 100% Web-based business. It's important to choose the leap to the Web instead of it being the only option.

Prescott Shribles looks at the criteria that should be considered when deciding whether to take that decision to publish online only.

He lists four

1.Content management-

the editorial team will need to become experts at writing for the Web, search engine optimization, Web traffic analysis, and community building. It's not just about writing articles we think people will like.

2.the change in workflow patterns-

The transition from a "close"-based workflow to dynamic publishing model has implications for editorial, marketing, and sales. Many will struggle with how to create deadlines without the print product.

3.sales strategy-

Focus on charging premiums for targeting and segmentation. Don't chase the buzz of the next cool thing (social networks, vertical search, video). You can create a product that happens to be on that list, but make sure it has real value behind it.

4.the timeframe-Give your team time to acquire the skills it needs before pushing the web-only red button.

B2B rules the magazine online sector

Given that magazines are my major topic next year I was interested to read Paul Conley's comment about the B2B sector in magazines.

Paul considers that the web has given an edge to the sector

As the Web has grown, altering forever the business and art of publishing, B2B has sometimes taken the lead.
We are far ahead of our peers in the newspaper, TV and consumer magazine world in some areas. Other times we languish far behind

According to Paul,

In two areas in particular, B2B has shown the way to the future:
1. No other area of journalism does a better job of producing (and selling) data on the Web.
2. No other area of journalism is doing a better job of moving to Web-only -- eliminating inefficient print pubs to cut costs while preserving brands online.