Issue 3 - January 2009
Publishing in 2009: Are You Ready for the Challenge?
By Stéphane Malagnac
If You're Rethinking Your Business Model, Investing in Dynamic Publishing Might be the Smartest Move You Make this Year.
There's nothing quite like an approaching recession to prompt corporate managers to rethink their strategies and move ahead with some clever investments. In this respect, dynamic publishing is increasingly perceived as one of the most effective answers to today's editorial challenges.
Say goodbye to linear publishing workflows. We spoke with publishers and experts from both the press and the corporate publishing fields to learn about their needs, understand their strategies, and assess the benefits they expect from their upcoming changes. What was interesting is that there seems to be a general convergence toward the idea of dynamic publishing, which is defined as the automated assembly of customised documents with graphic-rich layouts for multiple mediums, including print, the Web, and mobile and electronic devices.
Indeed, in a newspaper and magazine publishing industry that has been cautious with IT investments for a number of years, there now seems to be an unexpected change of perception and a growing consensus that investing now in a streamlined publishing process and enhanced information quality is probably the best way – if not the only way – of making ends meet through the current economic downturn.
Belgian press powerhouse Roularta Media Group (700 million € of turnover in 2008) is a perfect illustration of this trend. The group publishes 98 magazines and 70 free local papers in Belgium and France. Roularta also manages 143 Web sites and is involved in radio and television through a joint venture with De Persgroep. For the past two years, Roularta's IT staff has been working on an ambitious project called "Newsroom". The project's purpose is to allow all editorial teams in the group to share information and assets (including text articles, photos, and videos) on a group-wide scale.
"All of our publications have their own existing editorial-workflow production tools," said Erwin Danis, Roularta's pre-media director. "What we want to do is provide a larger system, sitting above the existing infrastructure, that will allow every reporter to be informed in real time of what other news teams across the group are currently working on and be able to share the information."
Ultimately, the idea is to allow journalists to search across the archives of all of the group's publications. In other words, the Newsroom project should help Roularta dramatically increase the business the company can generate from a given amount of information. The project is still at an early stage, and no technology has yet been selected for the project's backbone. But the IT staff is consulting with several vendors and expects to be up and running with the right technology and a functional system by the end of 2009.
Adapting to Changing News-consumption Patterns
But is it really the right time to make such an investment?
"The current economic situation has led us to reduce our global investment envelope, but we have made the strategic decision to maintain our budget for the Newsroom project" said Danis. "This project will allow us to create innovative news products – for the Web and any other channel – a lot faster and a lot more effectively than today. It will also reduce the cost of creating and producing our publications. It will allow us to limit the number of news teams covering a given event and help optimise the information flow. With such a tool, we can adapt to today's news-consumption formats in a profitable way. If you look at the bigger picture, it's really a question of survival."
For
Andreas Pfeiffer, one of Europe's most influential consultants for the publishing
industry, Roularta's situation is a pretty good case study of the issues
most publishers are now facing.
"In recent years, news publications have attracted an increasingly sophisticated readership, demanding an enhanced treatment of information," said Pfeiffer. "The challenge for news publishers is to imagine new ways of providing information and explore new publishing formats in a cost effective way. Here, flexibility is the key to success".
Indeed, creating the right interaction among a media company's print publications, Web sites, and television ventures is essential. In this respect, Andreas Pfeiffer sees a growing interest in dynamic-publishing systems and solutions that will enable real cross-media strategies in an industry that is increasingly aware that a technology overhaul is long overdue.
"Over the past 10 years, news publishers have been stacking layers of technology to address emerging publishing channels (Web, mobile, etc.) with limited interoperability," said Pfeiffer. "This [model] will not be sustainable in the long run."
Indeed, moving away from individual systems that produce printed, Web, and mobile content, and migrating to a truly integrated cross-media publishing solution that is capable of addressing all existing and future channels (fed from a centralised content repository) seems like the best option for publishers who wish to leverage their editorial assets in the most effective way.
Corporate Publishing is on the Rise
In comparison to the press publishing market, in which editorial workflow systems have been in use for a number of years, the corporate publishing market is only just starting to consider dynamic publishing as a way to optimise its document flow. French systems integrator Stepnet Ingénierie (3 million € of turnover in 2008) has seen a growing interest in corporate dynamic-publishing systems for about a year and a half.
"Companies
are looking for ways to streamline their relationship with their suppliers
(ad agencies, Web agencies, freelance artists, and printers) through the
use of a client-server-based tool," said Jean-Paul Rigal, Stepnet's
CEO. "They want to save time and eliminate errors in the publishing
process. They also want to enhance the way they communicate with their dealers
or customers by producing increasingly compelling and localised publications.
At the same time, they want to increase their publishing pace. Finally,
they want to cut down on costs."
Rigal said he sees that many companies are now aware of what dynamic publishing can do for them and are already thinking up their strategies. Asked whether the economic slowdown will have an effect on this emerging business, Rigal showed no sign of concern:
"The crisis, on the contrary, is stimulating the market. A dynamic-publishing system will typically allow a company to increase its publishing flow while cutting the overall budget by 10 to 30%. With a return on investment of less than three years, it's a move companies are willing to make"
Today, Stepnet's references in corporate dynamic publishing include Lafarge, Cardiff, and Crédit Agricole.
"The way the market is developing, if we speak again in a year, we will have 20 more such references to add to the list," said Rigal.
Selecting the Right Technology
Although media companies and corporate publishers might have identified their needs and started organising their dynamic-publishing strategies, the issues of selecting the right products and solutions, remain for many of these organisations. Indeed, many companies are concerned that existing "off-the-shelf" editorial and publishing workflow products might not meet their particular needs. They are also concerned that they might end up being locked into proprietary technology.
"One must accept the idea that an advertising agency or a printing company is just one part of a chain process, where everyone must work along standards and promote interactivity among systems," said Frank Beinhold, CEO of Serviceplan (130 million € of turnover in 2008), Germany's largest combined advertising and printing agency. "For all our investments, we make sure we select products that will connect using standard formats and innovative technologies, such as XML, SOA, Java, or PDF."
In a context in which systems need to evolve rapidly and cope with emerging publishing channels and changing organisational models, IT managers are increasingly looking for product offerings provided by vendors who demonstrate a clear commitment to using open standards. Such products will allow organisations to build a system that fits their needs exactly with the addition of third-party modules and interacts with the existing systems that they wish to keep as part of a larger solution.
It is only through an adequate selection of technologies that tomorrow's publishers will reap the full benefit of what dynamic publishing has to offer.
