What’s Next for Publishing – pay attention to the end-user
What’s next for publishers is being dictated by the end-users (used to be readers), much more so than ever before. In the news business, the editor of your local paper did the filtering, selection and slant…hoping to execute such that they were able to keep the most people satisfied most of the time. This can apply to any publishing…it’s just more acute in the news biz with their biz model being the first to die (classified lost to Craig’s List) and their reputation sullied by political slant.
Business models will sort themselves out over time (while producing a few publishing tombstones), but what publishers really have to figure out is that the user is in control and they are informed and smart. To succeed publishers will have to meet each user’s specific needs, and not pursue an average-user strategy.
Getting the right content to the right person at the right time in the right context are the criteria, always have been, it’s just that paper-based mediums won’t suffice anymore.
Publishers need to master aggregation, multimedia, interactivity, deep and shallow options simultaneously, custom filtering by user, multiple perspective (vs. slant) and any/all electronic delivery mechanisms.
Other than that, it’s easy.
