Print Publishing News & Articles

Thanks to the iPad and other tablet devices, the publishing industry has been able to survive, even thrive. Of course in doing so, they’ve had to transform themselves away from print and toward electronic models. A recent study from Outsell’s Gilbane Group examined the ways in which the book publishing industry has evolved technologically over the past few years.

A few weeks ago Ben Elowitz, co-founder and CEO of Wetpaint, a platform for social websites, addressed the issue of quality in published content in two parts. First he went through the checklist of what traditionally made content great: credential, correctness, objectivity and craftsmanship and dismantled each one of them.

The announcement that WoodWing (news, site) has extended its enterprise content publishing platform with Brand Station web-to-print publishing extension underlines the Dutch-based provider’s move from collaboration tools to pushing the boundaries of its v6.0 publishing platform.

Brand Station focuses primarily on ensuring brand and site consistency across published material by establishing unshakable templates that will not be moved.

Previously, we reported about Mediaspectrum’s (news, site) web-based content management platforms that have been widely used by the world’s newspaper publishers. This week, Mediaspectrum launched an update to ContentWatch, the editorial web platform for web and print publishers alike. ContentWatch 2.0 features new capabilities, including semantic search.

While we sat about ruminating over how print media is emulating the Web, Newsweek was busy redesigning its magazine to give readers something different.

And instead of inserting snappy sound bytes and intriguing blog-like entries, Newsweek bets that readers want to read more, not less.

Usually I write about how traditional print publications are adapting to the Web. But what about the Web’s impact on the design of print publications?

Let’s face it, attention spans are short. Web designers and bloggers alike know this. They design in a user-friendly format and write no more than 500 words.

But if you’re a print magazine with pages to fill, how to do keep your readers well-informed without overwhelming their hurried, distracted eyes?

The main U.S. newspaper auditing group, Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC), has announced that it will now include newspapers’ print, online and combined readership figures in its biannual reports, citing that “the numbers are a key factor in negotiations on newspaper advertising rates between newspapers and marketers.”