Wired deputy editor Ben Hammersley joined the ranks of speakers at Thinking Digital this afternoon that have called time on the traditional publishing model.
“[The premise that…] people won’t pay for content is a myth propagated by big media. The reality is that people won’t pay for their media anymore,” he said.
Hammersley said that consumers will pay for quality, crafted content pertinent to their personal interests.
“Content publishers need to stop chasing numbers and pursue quality, elegance and craftsmanship instead. Digital is enabling interesting stuff to be made [and distributed] at low cost to small audiences,” he added.
Russell Davies and Ben Terrett from the Really Interesting Group may have cracked the means for content producers in the digital environment to publish their work in a physical newspaper format.
The duo is behind the Things Our Friends Have Written On The Internet 2008 project, a beautifully designer newspaper of content drawn from around their digital networks. The publication was so admired that it has inspired a Flickr group.
Davies and Terrett have now raised funding from Channel 4’s seed fund 4iP to develop a tool to enable anyone make the transition from content on screen to a printed format.
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Publishing models are certainly changing and there are a lot of possibilities out there. Digital media enables good quality, rapidly produced, flexible and insightful analysis to be published almost as quickly as journalistic pieces these days.
As ever though, content is king, as hackneyed a cliche as location, location, location but used so often only because it is so true. Eventually, in order to produce the very best research/analysis/journalism, money has to flow to the producer of the content from somewhere along the value chain. My belief is that publishing models which give content to readers free at the point of receipt will be the most attractive to readers of content in digital media. We are all getting used to the fact we can read the paper online for free, or we can download white papers. As students we were all able to just download and print scholarly articles freely (because our departments were paying the subscriptions) and to ensure a ready flow of good quality information. That, I think, has to be the mode of delivery to ensure the best uptake of published matter. We are all used to getting something for nothing, and whilst paid for pieces will always have a place, broader acceptance and uptake of research will only be possible by generating content in a business model which is capable of sustaining itself as a free to air publication.
[...] using emerging blog-to-publishing tools such as Tabbliod or being developed by the team behind the Things Our Friends Wrote On The Internet 2008 [...]
[...] Speed Communications – Wadds’ PR Blog The duo is behind the Things Our Friends Have Written On The Internet 2008 project, a beautifully designer newspaper of content drawn from around their digital networks. The publication was so admired that it has inspired a Flickr group. [...]