BtoB Media Business - May 2009 - (Page 23)

Production The challenge of saving it all As content distribution formats proliferate, production executives tackle digital archiving BY MARK J. MILLER PRESSING ISSUES Too many ad portals, IDEAlliance CEO says avid Steinhardt is president-CEO of the International Digital Enterprise Alliance (IDEAlliance), a not-for-profit group that focuses on IT issues in the publishing industry. Media Business: What has IDEAlliance been up to lately? Steinhardt: The whole notion of production and how it is defined within publishing companies has BIO drastically changed, so we’re trying to help DAVID STEINHARDT shape that. President-CEO, MB: How so? International Steinhardt: We Digital Enterprise Alliance have a group called (IDEAlliance) emedia21 that is meeting [in April] to discuss ad portals. There are too many out there now, and advertising agencies are starting to push back a little. They have fewer people also and don’t have the time to do things differently for a variety of portals. The idea isn’t to create one master ad portal but to help ease infrastructure and best practices. MB: How do you do that? Steinhardt: First you need to have the publishing community move as many ads as possible through the existing portals. The majors on the consumer side have pretty aggressive plans to move upwards of 90%, close to 100% of ads through their portals. Then you have the influence to engage the advertising agencies on their needs. MB: Seems simple enough. Steinhardt: Well, I’m not saying it’s the Wild West out there, but there are more ad portals now than the industry can financially support. Over the next two years, it’ll probably come down to two or three, and they’ll have to have a common framework. We’re trying to help define that. Additionally, the business model will have to bring on more capabilities in the ad portal, such as digital insertions, and ad placement and still more automation of —M.J.M. the process. PRODUCTION D I n a world of rapidly evolving methods for distributing content online—RSS, Facebook, e-newsletters, webinars, mobile alerts, etc.—the pressure is building on media production and manufacturing executives to ensure that nearly every bit of content is being archived. Of course, it can be difficult to archive everything. “You need to focus on your business requirements first and foremost,” said John Blanchard, VP-manufacturing at Reed Business Information. “Ideally, we’d like all content in all formats available to all participants in work flow—both internal and external. Experience tells us that’s not feasible.” Cost, legacy systems and differing processes from unit to unit are some of the reasons Reed can’t archive it all, Blanchard said. So the company mapped out a strategy in which the production department knows the types of content it is working with as well as who needs it and when. At IDG, a large percentage of editorial content—stories, slide shows, video and podcasts—is initially published on the Internet. “Our content is divorced from design/layout elements and lives in a database,” said Stephan Scherzer, exec VP-general manager of PC World and Macworld Online. All production teams—online and print—have access to the database, allowing them to republish the content. “As long as content appears as data and it is stored appropriately, the channel where you publish the content doesn’t matter,” Scherzer said. Jeremy Carlson, manager of digital prepress, digital imaging and media operations at Advanstar Communications, said the biggest challenge to archiving digital content is “finding a solution that’s dynamic enough to be easily integrated with both a publisher’s print and Web editorial/content systems.” He said that having a digital asset management (DAM) environment tied in with archives is an important step toward keeping the archives media-neutral. “Ideally, this archive/DAM could act as a media gateway and be integrated with a publisher’s print editorial system and Web CMS [content management system] so that the appropriate content can be exported with a click of a button or automated trigger to the format and channel desired,” Carlson said. Using metatags on all content is crucial to a good archive system. “An archive/DAM system should also have a database that can read and embed XMP metadata for rights management, keyword queries, usage and description/captioning,” Carlson said. IDG is careful about what third-party data to archive. If it is identified as being important enough, “it is entered into our database, categorized and tagged so that it can in turn be connected with related stories produced in-house,” Scherzer said. “That way, third-party content can add tremendous value to our own content.” Problems arise when publishers make articles central elements and build Web sites and production structures around them, Scherzer said. “You need to have a data-driven and datacentric model to be competitive with the large number of Web-only competitors,” he said. “All of them are very data-driven, and can aggregate and organize the content in a very flexible way.” Scherzer said it’s important to break up the content with a short life span—news, product first looks, most blog posts, etc.— and the content with a long life span. “From where we stand, the purpose of an archive is to enhance the shelf life, and thus the value, of the content we produce,” he said, which means divorcing content from its format and keeping in a database in an unformatted way as well as tagging, describing and categorizing content so that it can be reused in many different ways. Carlson recommended having an archive/DAM system with a Web-based interface so that outside offices, external licensees and freelancers can access the information. He also suggested using a third-party integrator that has experience with archiving. mediabusinessonline.com | May 2009 | Media Business | 23 http://www.mediabusinessonline.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of BtoB Media Business - May 2009

BtoB Media Business - May 2009
Contents
Upfront
Top Innovators
List Management
Sales & Marketing
M&A
Production
People
Audience Development
Benchmarks
Endnote

BtoB Media Business - May 2009