Thursday, 22 November 2007

If you read one thing about new media publishing....

dhpic.jpgDon't try to reinvent the web | Media | The Guardian:

Magazine people spend most of their time deciding what to leave out of their magazines. They are trying to fashion a balanced package to slot into a very particular context, the newsstand. The web, on the other hand, is about bottomless inventory. It's also about the users and not editors. The former group are always stranger and more diverse than the latter group ever give them credit for. The most you can do on the web is provide a place where they like to gather. You're the hosts and it's your place but you don't really make the rules. You seek to steer the behaviour but in the end this will actually be decided by the people. If you've developed a site where your staff are providing more than 5% of the material then that's not a site at all. It's advertising. And it's probably unsustainable.

As a manifesto for an offline/online publishing strategy, Hepworth's is very, very hard to beat.

Categories:  Media Business

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