"COPE is really a combination of several other closely related sub-philosophies, including: Build content management systems (CMS), not web publishing tools (WPT), separate content from display, ensure content modularity, ensure content portability."

"I like this model, because one big weakness of long-form narrative journalism is that it has failed to embrace everything the web is capable of. Writers get commissioned to write X thousand words on Y; they then hand in a document written in Microsoft Word, which goes through a few rounds of editing before getting laid out to a greater or lesser degree. (Ben Hammersley is really good at diagnosing this problem and suggesting how to begin solving it.) I’m optimistic that Matter’s editing process will help its stories be much richer than most of what we’re seeing today." More from Mims on Matter's business plan: http://slipr.com/2012/02/24/how-longform-science-magazine-matter-will-become-a-sustainable-business/

Platform used by Matter to manage a crowdsourced editorial board.

"You can no longer equate your digital publication or presence with your website. It’s just one iteration of it. And that is a real sea-change in digital publishing."

"It will take time for the economic weight of those users to affect the organizational form of the paper, but slowly slowly, form follows funding. For the moment at least, the most promising experiment in user support means forgoing mass in favor of passion; this may be the year where we see how papers figure out how to reward the people most committed to their long-term survival."

"It’s time content people of all stripes recognized the WYSIWYG editor for what it really is: not a convenient shortcut, but a dangerous obstacle placed between you and the actual content. Because content on the web is going to be marked up one way or another: you either take control of it or you cede it to the software, but you can’t avoid it. WYSIWYG editors are fine for amateurs, but if you are an editor, or copywriter, or journalist, or any number of the kinds of people who work with content on the web, you cannot afford to be an amateur."

"Holiday is a testament to the fact that some things still manage to get lost in an age when almost everything is archived, or at least mentioned, online. As far as I can tell, no one seems to care much about the legacy of Holiday, and no archive exists. By now I own some forty copies of the magazine. I may be the archive."

"In about 30 minutes of searching, using only Google and eWhois, I was able to discover the identities of seven of the anonymous or pseudonymous bloggers, and in two cases, their employers."

"For instance, I’ve started to think that most books are too long, and I now hesitate before buying the next big one. When shopping for books, I’ve suddenly become acutely sensitive to the opportunity costs of reading any one of them. If your book is 600 pages long, you are demanding more of my time than I feel free to give. And if I could accomplish the same change in my view of the world by reading a 60-page version of your argument, why didn’t you just publish a book this length instead?"

An open source CMS for news organization available June 2011. Include member and subscription management, multiple device support.

"Increasingly, the motivations of writers and the motivations of the businesses they work for are at odds with each other. Journalists, enabled by the web, are increasingly defining success according to exposure, and news organizations are increasingly defining success according to the limitation of exposure."

"Nonfiction storytelling for the digital age."

"It’s bordering on obstinate to think that something you care so much about can be salvaged by doing more or less the same thing that has failed magazines so consistently until now: continuing to ignore the fundamentals of digital user experience design and how they diverge from analog print design."

"But the web is not just some kind of magic all-absorbing meta-medium. It's its own thing. And like other media it has a question that it answers better than any other. That question is: Why wasn't I consulted?"

Kevin Rose's new project.

"And those who aren’t subscribers, well if they’re not willing to buy in for the actual magazine at like practically nothing a year, why would they pay for their iPad edition, which actually, in the case of Vanity Fair, costs $4.99 for the first issue? I mean, on the same web page that announces their $4.99 iPad app, up top they’re trumpeting their 'ONLY $1 an issue' subscription rate. How is that even happening?"

"Like it or not, WikiLeaks is fundamentally a journalistic entity, and as such it deserves our protection."

One writer: "Despite this, I got a shockingly enthusiastic response. It included an incisive commentary and suggested changes for a next draft -- a draft that, incredibly, this dude was willing to read whenever it came along. A few meetings over beers, three revisions and nine months later, I had a novel that clocked in at a sleek 290 pages but retained the language, weirdness and tone that imbued the original draft with whatever shadow of promise my agent saw in it. And we had come to a point where we could begin to shop it around. I doubt I could’ve honed the book as mercilessly as I did without my agent’s input."

"This is largely intuition here, but people just don't seem to use the Internet that way anymore [going to the homepage of a site]. If they are the type of person who goes to a predetermined set of sites, they already have their list. And if they do frequent new sites and publications, they get there through social media. Relative to even a few years ago, it seems harder to capture dedicated readers beyond very small niches." (Similar phenomenon happening in social network development.)

"Before I do that, though, my idea in a nutshell is this: book, magazine and newspaper publishing is unduly governed by the physical containers we have used for centuries to transmit information. Those containers define content in two dimensions, necessarily ignoring that which cannot or does not fit. Worse, the process of filling the container strips out context – the critical admixture of tagged content, research, footnoted links, sources, audio and video background, even good old title-level metadata – that is a luxury in the physical world, but a critical asset in digital ones. In our evolving, networked world – the world of “books in browsers” – we are no longer selling content, or at least not content alone. We compete on context. I propose today that the current workflow hierarchy – container first, limiting content and context – is already outdated. To compete digitally, we must start with context and preserve its connection to content."

"Though there are a handful of online organization tools, there simply isn’t anything designed specifically for the editorial process. But a less formal editorial structure doesn’t necessarily mean it’s less thorough. Even a two-person team for a young site like Sicha and Balk are able to copyedit and fact- and plagiarism-check. For an online publication, the editorial process has to be improvised, even invented."

"I'm curious to see how this experiment pans out. I hope that this is a new niche for us writers. By pure coincidence, Amazon has just launched a new kind of product called 'Kindle Singles' that is exactly what I and other writers have been thinking about recently. I don't know how the experiment will evolve in the future, but there's one thing I do know: I for one won't be doing it alone. Books are still a communal effort, from creation to sharing."

"Reading the 15th and 16th side by side, I don't get the sense that in 2003 the people at University of Chicago Press were going to go into this future without a fight. There's a kind of haughty disdain and sniffy tolerance in the preface of the 15th for things digital that doesn't appear in the 16th, as if there was a mass exodus in the intervening years. The new CMoS is refreshing that way." Also of interest, how reading online has affected the organization of print material. Note reviewer's use of "navigable" in discussing TOC.

It's not rational; it's emotional attachment. "In the online world of free, people need a damned good reason to fork over their money. It had better solve a problem, bring consistent delight, or otherwise earn devotion. A small but devoted audience can be worth more than a big, uncommitted one. How many people love their local newspaper?"

Yes.

"Books, like newspapers, are an essentially middle-class phenomenon whose market is the self-improving professional. As a bourgeois medium, books and their authors depend on the cash nexus."

"People often think that editors are there to read things and tell people 'no.' Saying 'no' is a tiny part of the job. Editors are first and foremost there to ship the product without getting sued. They order the raw materials -- words, sounds, images -- mill them to approved tolerances, and ship. No one wrote a book called Editors: Get Real and Ship or suggested that publishers use agile; they don't live in a "culture" of shipping, any more than we live in a culture of breathing. It's just that not shipping would kill the organism."

"What is important is that these print version be quality — good covers, excellent paper, binding that doesn’t fall apart. Handmade, one-of-a-kind, original, limited edition, personal. The shift to digital reading is taking place rapidly, and there will be a point in the not-too-distant future where we stop thinking either/or and embrace either/and."

"She was certainly not the first person I’d heard this from. I hear this almost everywhere I go where there are people talking about social media, and I feel that it is time that I rise up against it. In fact, I did, right there and then. I grabbed the microphone from her grasp and said, 'I am not a brand' ... Some people don’t get it. They don’t get that the internet is a conversation."

Dan Kennedy responds to Michael Hirschorn. "Unless news organisations withdraw their content from the open web, their free websites will continue to draw an exponentially larger audience than their paid apps."

"If this trend succeeds, it could not only save newspapers and magazines, but usher in a new golden age for them. It could also be a boon for citizen journalism, which is now practiced largely by those who can afford to do it without pay."

A simple mnemonic for rapid development.

"The book beat has been gutted primarily by cultural forces, not economic ones, and the most implacable of those forces lies within rather than outside the newsroom. It is not iPads or the Internet but the anti-intellectual ethos of newspapers themselves."

"Everyone knows that Google is killing the news business. Few people know how hard Google is trying to bring it back to life, or why the company now considers journalism’s survival crucial to its own prospects."

"The all-knowing aggregation of weekly events has become outmoded. Life, Saturday Review, and Collier’s Weekly have expired; Newsweek, Time, and U.S. News and World Report are mortally adrift, dinosaurs in the age before the meteor. What has arisen in their place is a breed of daily, Web-only news sites, updated by the hour and minute, full of logorrheic opinion and cannibalized reporting. Huffington Post, the Daily Beast, Gawker, Politico, these are our Newsweek, our Time, our Life -- for better and worse."

The trend everywhere. "Recently, though, we’ve noticed that the symptoms of this revolution have changed. The blog as a form has begun to be overtaken by social media like Twitter and Facebook. News of the poetry world now travels fastest and furthest through Twitter ... with the information often picked up from news aggregator sites rather than discursive blogs."

"You get my point: e-books as ancillary products for a newsmedia are something worth considering. Not now, but within a couple of years as the worldwide installed base of reading devices reaches tens of millions. At this point, at any media company version 2.0, e-books will be part of the standard toolkit."

"Different mediums have different strengths. The web is just better than paper at delivering time-sensitive news. It’s idiotic to pretend otherwise. And paper is still good at things the web is not, especially in getting people to actually pay for it. The solution is to use each medium for what it’s good at."

"A reader asking for a full-content RSS feed is a reader who wants to pay more attention to what you publish. There have to be ways to thrive financially from that."

"If you care about the future of books, you need to understand the Google Book Settlement." Hits all the major points.

"The iPad doesn't run Flash. If your website uses Flash, it won't play well on the iPad. Turns out, a lot of people want their sites to look pretty on the iPad. So the internet's already starting to look different." (More: http://newteevee.com/2010/03/28/brightcove-targets-ipad-with-html5-support/ Pushback: http://valleywag.gawker.com/5502300/publishers-push-back-against-steve-jobs-anti+flash-propaganda)

"... we need to be able to talk about the money thing. Not just how we get paid, but how this whole 'Day Two Problem' world gets funded." Four ways to pay for content (no mention of syndication). Part 1, content is expensive: http://incisive.nu/2010/content-is-not-free/

"If you wanted to do a print run of brochures, you’d have to make a business case for it. The same should apply to web content."

"Flying back to New York from Texas, it dawned on me that devotees of SXSWi never hated publishing or wanted us to roll over and die: They just wanted us to repurpose."

"Every syndication dollar earned is another dollar that doesn’t have to be wrung out of highly competitive advertising markets. Importantly, the syndication dollars derive from what journalism organizations do best: create high-quality content." So much more appealing a model.

Deep thinking about the future of the Internet from David Gelernter.

How the physical and digital will coexist. "Goodbye, disposable books. Hello, new canvases."

"Content strategy engagements are the very beginning of a much larger process. And if you don’t commit to the much larger process, you will not keep up in the new world for much longer."

Key point: "... we must first stop demonizing aggregation." Learn from what online start-ups/aggregators are doing to help re-invent the newsroom. "The specific model that you employ will be as unique as the particular community that you [cover]."

CJR surveys 665 magazines about web site practices. Selected findings: "Magazine Web sites are most likely to be profitable when budget decisions are made by the publisher or an independent Web editor." (In other words, when sites are overseen by people without a vested interest in maintaining print dominance.) "Despite the fact that two-thirds of respondents’ staff are expected to work on the Web at least some of the time, only 26 percent of those staffers were hired with Web experience." (That's just depressing.) Much handwringing about "traditional standards" in decline on web sites, but it seems a fundamental error to assume print practices are best practices online.

"... social media has made the problem [a lack of content strategy] more obvious (and more public) than ever before."

"... the key is not going to be to create distinct destinations organized around topics, but to find ways in which content can be surfaced in context, regardless of where it resides." Danah Boyd on production, consumption, and flow in the networked era.

"The case for editorial strategy thinking and execution in user experience design." (Presentation slides.)

Mentions MagCloud, Printcasting.

"There is still an opportunity for publishers here. But instead of relying on Apple to save them, publishers will have to step up and create their own apps, for their own content."

"Almost poignantly, newspaper reporters have stepped up their game, too -- and not just because the old-school media executives Apple has been partnering with are such helpless gossips and NDA violators. 'The New York Times company … is developing a version of its newspaper for the tablet, according to a person briefed on the effort,' the Times recently reported about the Times. For bloggers, reporting about Apple is great sport, but for the inky set, it's existential. (See: Carr, David.) It's really no wonder we've been witnessing such dogged journalism about Apple's tablet, a product journalists hope will be the salvation of journalism -- and journalists."

"... an Apple device that leverages the power of the iTunes store, that makes it easy to buy and read digital content, that opens up for participation from all kinds of publishers, that puts books and magazines on the same level as movies and TV … it could be the missing piece of the puzzle."

"Demand-side networks selling reach against target could challenge TV to the benefit of buyers and sellers alike."

"Email newsletters may not be sexy, but they are profitable, work well, and provide a ton of value to their readers."

"This flourishing ecosystem of startups is just one sign that scientific publishing is moving from being a production industry to a technology industry. A second sign of this move is that the nature of information is changing."

"I went through a period of publishing for free, and then a period of being insulted that people wanted my work for free, and then back into a period of writing for free."

"I write for free because there seems to me to be no meaningful relationship between whether a publication pays me and whether it’s worthwhile for me to write for them." Etc.

"Here's the problem with Wired: They think print matters."

"Simple, pragmatic advice on the business of creativity." My model! "DBR is a quick-to-market publication, with a focus on speed and agility over high production value or glossy spreads. This means our blog is a rapidly-deployed version of Wordpress, our layout is fast-and-dirty, and there are no pictures. As our revenues increase, so will the publication grow both in substance and in style; there are plenty of publications that deal with the art side ... it’s time we got down to the business side."

See Johnson WSJ article. Related.

"There is great promise and opportunity in the digital-books revolution. The question is: Will we recognize the book itself when that revolution has run its course?" I both fear Johnson's conclusions and suspect he is right.

"Curation is the new role of media professionals. Separating the wheat from the chaff, assigning editorial weight, and -- most importantly -- giving folks who don't want to spend their lives looking for an editorial needle in a haystack a high-quality collection of content that is contextual and coherent." Feeling validated in an argument I've been making for a while.

"These technology companies understand something basic: it’s all about the end user. They do crazy little things like open up their APIs to allow other businesses to add their own innovations, create better ways to use data, combine efforts rather than zealously guarding doors that would be better left wide open." Talking publishing, but could be talking racing.

Mark Cuban wants to know. I'd say yes, and that the real question concerns fair use.

On-demand magazine printing.

"The Kindle 2 ... tells us that printed books, the most important artifacts of human civilization, are going to join newspapers and magazines on the road to obsolescence."

Frustration at the "New Think for Old Publishers" panel at SXSW: "I’m so sorry, but it must be said. The future of publishing is already happening. People are doing it and they’re doing it really well."

More on the "New Think for Old Publishers" panel flop: "The publishers on the panel simply had nothing to say. There was literally nothing for the audience to listen to."

How DRM Drives Readers Mad.

"Businesses don't survive in the long term because old people persist in old behaviors; they survive because young people renew old behaviors, and all the behaviors young people are renewing cluster around reading, while they are adopting almost none of the behaviors tied to cherishing physical containers, whether for the written word or anything else."

"Social networking is not a magic new concept. If anything, it’s a return to basics."

Also, who's going to pay for the news? Includes video of the speech.

"First, the market and the internet don't care if you make money. That's important to say. You have no right to make money ..."

"If news orgs like the NYT, Washington Post, and hundreds of newspaper sites start linking to news and other content around the web in a big way ... they can completely disrupt the balance of power." Read in conjunction with Nick Carr's post on the centripetal web (http://is.gd/4pFV), points way of web publishing future, just as dominated by big media as so-called old media.

"Readers have become writers and the people formerly know as the audience are flourishing as content producers, expert sharers and self-guided consumers." About the media, but not only the media. The point applies across content/data businesses.