Content needs to be free to succeed! Not as in gratis, but free to travel everywhere the users are. That’s the essence of a very interesting report from Razorfish.
The report offers valuable advice to media companies.
Razorfish just published the report: Nimble: A report on publishing in the digital age. If you are in the media industry, I really recommend that you download and read this report.
It goes to the essence of some of the challenges facing the media when transferring to the digital age.
Here is a summary of the report as well as some reflections. The most essential point they make is: Content needs to be free! Not free as in gratis, but free to travel everywhere the users are. Content has to be social – and it has to be mobile.
This means that content must be released from the limitations of specific publishings platforms, such as the newspaper pages or time slots on a television program.
And it must be flexible. Content must be formatted in such a way that it can be easily distributed across a number of different digital platforms and repackaged in numerous ways.
Sounds easy?
For sure it is not.
It all has to do with metadata.
Says Razorfish in the report: The more structure you put into content the freer it will becomes!
I think this is essential for the future success of media companies. And it is grossly undervalued by most editors! In my experience most editors in media companies are concentrated on a specific publishing channel. They are either newspaper editors or web editors. Rarely they have their focus primarily on the content and how it can be distributed to all available distribution channels.
That means they strongly undervalue the importance of metadata. They have vey little thought of the structure of content.
This is also how most media companies are organized: Almost all editors in the management groups have channel responsibilities rather than content responsibilities. Their task is to make sure content performs well in a specific publishing platform. Quite often no-one in the editorial management team is specifically responsible for how content is structured and managed across all platforms.
But a main point of Razorfish is that content should not be structured according to how it will look on a newspaper page, but according to tags that express the meaning and function of each element in a content item.
As Nic Newman, future media controller of BBC, says: “You cannot afford to create a piece of content for anyone platform. Instead of crafting a website, you have to put more effor into crafting the description of an asset and the different bits of an asset, so they can be reused more effectively, so they can deliver more value.
“ Become a content distributor”, is the advice of Razorfish. They recommend all media companies to study available semantic publishing tools and rich data services to be able to play this role in the future. Semantics is becoming a key to succeed in the tough competition.
- Also on BetaTales: Web 3.0: Understanding the semantic web
I couldn’t agree more with this report. As I have written on this blog before: Content without metadata has no value.
In order to succeed, media companies need to put the content at the center of their operation, not the individual publishing channels. Newspaper companies must change to become content companies. That transformation is much harder that it may seem at first glance.
Here are some of the slides that I produced for a presentation I was going to give about the same topic at the conference of Society of News Design:
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