I say again, let us pay. Make the process as easy as possible. Make it invisible and transparent. Make us register once and once only. Walls are not the way forward, but walls are not the same thing as payment, and without some form of payment, the press will not be here in five years’ time. (more…)

Rupert knows the ad model of publishing is doomed. Print and broadcast command the heftiest premiums, and both are at risk of price and volume erosion as consumers cut their ties to offline media. (more…)

The National Archives has developed guidance on the need for a digital preservation policy. It discusses the main success criteria for a policy and its relation to other policy areas.

Policy guidance | The National Archives.

It’s never been print vs. web – it’s attention vs. apathy. A bunch of people who care about the same thing is the most powerful, rare, and wonderful thing in the universe. It doesn’t matter how they find each other – web, print, a great disturbance in the force – it only matters that they find each other, and that they can do something with that shared attention to make the world a better place.

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1. Process Efficiency. Content developers are knowledge workers, and an efficiency goal is to create more time that can be spent on the important tasks associated with content creation. Using a CCMS to produce content supports efficient processes by reducing, and sometimes eliminating, rote tasks such as searching, cutting and pasting, checking for identical changes in multiple places, and repetitive set-ups for generating content output.

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So when I hear that Forbes.com, notorious den of high-pressure churnalism, has found religion, I’m not surprised that it’s no less calculating than what came before.

It’s not that I think this operation will fail; It’s that I’m afraid it will succeed. (more…)

Gruber is a great example of the new kind of one-man, self-publishing empire, made possible by the advent of free/cheap publishing tools, inexpensive web hosting, and advertisers that will pay for influence, and not just mass “reach.”

via Dan Frommer, REVEALED: Daring Fireball’s Impressive Traffic Stats | Business Insider.

In the never-ending quest to get page views, the choices writers and editors are making to attract eyeballs and drive traffic are creating a new breed of low-brow, gimmicky disposable content. At its best it adds little insight and at its worst amounts to a slimy bait-and-switch (catchy headline, nothing to say in the article).

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I think that FT.com managing director Rob Grimshaw sums it up best, and in a way that should make all news publishers pause and re-think.

“Where we’ve found inspiration is Internet retail, not publishing,” he told me last week. “We’re becoming a direct Internet retailer and we have to have expertise to do that. When you do that with publishing, it looks like a different business.”

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