publishing

1989 was a revolutionary year. From Berlin, Warsaw and Prague to Tiananmen Square and South Africa, the world order was completely overturned. Yet probably the most consequential event happened in a quiet lab in Lausanne, Switzerland.

If you want to produce content, you need to think like a publisher. After all, content isn’t an extension of marketing, it’s an extension of publishing. I constantly stress that point to my consulting clients and in articles like this one in Harvard Business Review.

When asked about what makes a great ad, advertising legend Leo Burnett advised, “Make it simple. Make it memorable. Make it inviting to look at. Make it fun to read.” He wanted his work to cut through, because as he also said, “If you don’t get noticed, you don’t have anything.”

It’s not clear whether The New York Times Innovation Report was leaked on purpose or not, but it is an astounding document nonetheless. It is impressively honest, insightful and soul searching. Perhaps most importantly, it shows true digital literacy.

In 2010 Pepsi pulled its Super Bowl ads and invested $20 million into its Refresh project, which employed crowdsourcing to support good causes. It was an astounding social media success, with more than 87 million votes cast.

The media business is not seeing the light at the end of the tunnel yet. When people asked me about my magazine and the economics of that, they were saying why I am in publishing business. Well, that is not my core business, just a hobby. It has been almost three years since the first publication of MISC and readership is growing nicely. We're now in 28 countries and we have have the digital version. I am getting a lot of positive feedback from readers from all over the world. Perhaps I should make the next issue the thickest one. This is the first cover that was shot in Milan. And the next cover will be shot in Shanghai. 

Maria Popova once joked that it seemed as though we'd "reached a cultural point at which every time someone uses the word 'curation' in reference to content and publishing, an actual museum curator kills a kitten".

Last month I wrote a post questioning why, in the context of exponential growth in the number of companies creating APIs across many sectors, so few publishers were opening up their data and content (at least in part) in this way. The question is applicable to just about every area of publishing that is making the transition from legacy print processes, practices and approaches to those more associated with digital.