Book Production: Assembly Line to Ecosystem
Mathew Ingram pointed to Jeff Jarvis today. The sky is not falling. Stories (like this one from Adage) have the calculus all wrong — news rooms are here to stay, the news assembly line is going to change. He says…
But in this new ecology, I think newsrooms will need to be organized around topics or tags or stories because the notion of a section is as out of date as the Dewey Decimal System (hat tip to David Weinberger).
Jeff uses the future tense in his post, but the new ecosystem is here. Dan Hill is leaving Monocle Magazine and reading about how he and Monocle’s brain trust conceived the offering on monocle.com, I couldn’t help but notice how often Dan mentions how their process is so fundamental to success. Dan’s article made me excited to be in the content business again.
So how can book publishers learn from these two examples? I think the obvious lesson is to stop using the web as a marketing platform. Harder said then done — monocle’s system only works for their bespoke brand — but still applicable. The less obvious lesson is re-engineer your production process before it is too late. Yesterday, I advocated adding a little “social” to the book production process. After reading Dan’s post, I am now thinking changing the production process in any more inclusive way would be a good step , even if it doesn’t work.
Thanks to Jason Kottke for the link.
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