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- Vanity Fair Is Stuck in a World of Formats - (by @baekdal)
One article that came into my stream yesterday was a story over TechCrunch about how Vanity Fair could only send them an advanced copy via fax. It illustrated Vanity Fair's format-first nondigital workflow, one that is shared with many traditional media companies.
Many years ago, I was working for a company that helped fashion companies to become digital. At one big fashion company (the second largest in the nation), we encountered this strange kind of print centric workflow.
The designers would design the new clothes digitally, and then print it out. These prints would then be put into a folder and send it to the construction department. Here they would scan each one back into the computer to add instructions (basically an arrow pointing to a sleeve with a text box saying it should be x inches long), and then they would print it out again. They would then go over to the fax machine and fax it to China. The people in China would then respond by email, but every time they needed new instructions, the fashion company would again print out the page and fax it.
I asked them, "why don't you just email it?", and they looked at me as if I was completely insane. They told me, very firmly, that it was impossible because the people in China couldn't receive it. Apparently Chinese companies (the ones who communicated via email without any problems) weren't as advanced as western companies who were still using fax machines and communicating across departments by printing and scanning documents.
We never managed to solve the fax issue. Their wrong perception of the capabilities of chinese companies was simply too strong. But we did manage to solve the print-scan-print workflow ...after some grueling fights with their IT department who insisted that each department mustn't have access to each others files. IT had apparently never heard about this thing called team work.
When I hear that Vanity Fair can only do fax, I think back to this experience. Vanity Fair must still have a print centric workflow within the organization. The Vanity Fair publicist was most likely given a printed copy of next month's magazine, and it is the printed pages from this magazine that he is now faxing to other media companies.
He cannot send a PDF to TechCrunch because he doesn't have access to any of the files, nor does he have the influence to tell the graphic department to make one for him (different bosses, different editors, and different organizational units).
Neither can he scan it and send a PDF, as TechCrunch suggest, because with a print centric workflow the fax machine is probably not even connected to the network.
What we are likely seeing is a company that work digitally (they created the page in InDesign and the publicist emailed TechCrunch), but their internal communication is still analog between organizational silos.
They have updated the tools they use, but they have never changed how they work with them.
We have to ask, why do they even have this workflow to begin with? Not just at Vanity Fair but also in so many other media companies. The answer is that it's a format first workflow. They are still defining their output based on the layout of the page over the actual words.
Faxing is archaic, but even PDF is just another print format. Why didn't the publicist just copy/paste the story directly into the email itself? Or if you where truly digital, the article would already be in the CMS and all they needed to do was to send TechCrunch a private link.
One example is how my friends over at Interaction-Design.org recently sent me a link when they wanted to give me (and my readers) an advanced copy of an book. It's not hard to do because the article is already in the CMS. It's just an article set to be private, instead of public.
In a digital first workflow, you don't define your output by its format. You put the story first, and you assume that the story will appear different depending on where people read it. An article looks different in newsreaders from how it looks on your site, in an app, in a newsletter and on any other platform.
With a digital first workflow, you become format-less. You turn the story itself into the format, and not the boxes and graphics around it.
Vanity Fair, while a great magazine, is still a print company ...even when they do digital. Their iPad app is a format first app, designed around a print mentality and a print workflow. They define what they do by the visual outcome of the box it is in.
And this is not just a problem at Vanity Fair, it's a problem with pretty much all traditional media companies. They have updated their tools, but not how they work with them.
Get rid of the format first mentality, because it's what you do in print. In the digital world, the differentiating factor is not the box, but how you appeal to people in a multi-sourced world. Think Flipboard. How would you get people to add you as a source there? It's the story and how well you tell it that defines you. The pictures and graphics should not surround the story as graphical elements. It should be an integrated part of the story itself.
And get rid of that fax machine. There simply isn't any reason why any company still have one. You can come up with all kinds of excuses, but the fact is that companies who don't have one work just fine. It's keeping you in the past. Throw it out - today!
And while you are at it, get rid of most of your printers too. Only people who produce print should have on in their office (and that means no printers in the office where your editors and journalists work).
A digital-first media company starts with a digital-only internal workflow.
Переслать - Retina Displays are Tricky For Publishers - (by @baekdal)
As we all know, Apple's Retina displays are now in all their devices. It's in the iPhone, in the iPad, and now also in laptops with the Retina display version of the MacBook Pro. This is very exciting for me as a user, but as a publisher it's a bit problematic.
A while back I tweeted I had no plans for updating the graphics on my site to support Retina displays, but as more devices feature high-res screens I might not have a choice anymore.
For the people who already have a Retina display, the result is downright ugly. Just look at the text vs image quality in this screenshots. Compare the text in the article with the text in the graph. That's a big difference.
There are three very big problems with Retina displays for publishers:
- Technical
- Speed
- Cost
Technical implementation
The technical implementation is complicated, and you can find a ton of articles about it. Here is one by Scott Hanselman. I won't go into the details of the technical side of it (see the link), but the problem is that Retina displays work by doubling the pixel density. If you define a box being 100px, it is actually displayed at 200px.
This is incredibly annoying and it's the wrong way to solve the problem. It's like building a car with horses in front of it. Please let us, as publishers, define if something should be upscaled or not.
If I'm going to support Retina displays, I want to do it natively and not as an upscaled version of the old way of doing things. In the old days we lived by the pixel, but in the Retina world that 'model' no longer makes sense. Instead, with Retina displays it makes much more sense to render things like we did with print - using centimeters or inches.
As long as we are confined to pixels, we have this nightmare of having to figure out what kind of text size 14px is on different devices with different screens. It made sense back when everyone had 14" screens, but in today's world with 7", 9.4", 10", 13", 15", 17", 24", 30", and 60" screens, pixels make no sense whatsoever. And combined with Retina displays, where the pixel are suddenly doubled but not in relation to the screen size, it's just a mess.
It's great that we are solving the problem with low screen resolution, but the way we are solving it technically is a workaround in the wrong direction.
In print, everything makes sense. You know that 5 cm is exactly 5 cm no matter how big a paper it is printed on. It doesn't matter what the ppi is, it will be exactly 5 cm. If we could then combine the print way of doing things, with a responsive design using media queries, then we have a real winner.
Wait-a-minute, you say, using centimeters and inches online is crap because it makes things blurry, and you are right...if you look at it on old screens. But that was because the displays of the past were 72ppi and as such you had to make your graphics pixel perfect.
We now have print quality screens and, as such, we also have print quality measurements. The pixel perfect layout is now working against us (it's a limitation of the poor quality of the past). We need to move away from it. Let us set our design free by giving us the means to define our graphics and pictures at a consistent size across devices - in centimeters and inches.
Speed
The next problem is speed. Retina displays have four times the pixels, meaning every picture has to be four times as big.
This is a bit of a problem because we all know how disastrous an effect a slow loading web page has on conversions. A few examples:
- For every 100ms increase in load time of Amazon.com decreased sales by 1% (Kohavi and Longbotham 2007).
- Google discovered that a change from loading a 10-result page in 0.4 seconds to a 30-result page loading in 0.9 seconds decreased traffic and ad revenues by 20% (Linden 2006).
- Google found that an extra 500ms in loading time resulted in 20% drop in traffic.
- Yahoo found that a 400ms slower page would see 5-9% more people leave before the page finished loading.
Arguably these studies are all more than 5 years old, but I haven't seen any indication that things have changed. In fact, one might say that because of slow mobile connections, speed is even more important today than what it was in 2007.
What kind of speed difference are we looking at? Well, I compared six of my articles with and without Retina optimized graphics and photos.
The average size of a Plus article today is around 5 to 6 megabytes, because I use many illustrations to tell my stories. Meaning with Retina optimized graphics, the average size will be around 14 megabytes...per article!
Imagine having to download that on your iPad over a 3G connection? It would take about 4 minutes. That is a long time to wait. With 4G things do get a lot better, because then it only takes 1 minute and 40 seconds.
It's not exactly speedy.
I can do a number thing to fix this. I can optimize the pictures to much greater degree than in the past, because imperfections in the picture quality, which were clearly visible on low-res screens, cannot be seen at high-res.
Secondly, since browsers render the page before they load the images, people can start reading the article before it has finished loaded. I just have to make sure I don't have anything in place that prevent it - like javascript calls at the end of the page that aren't loading asynchronously.
If we instead compare some of the other sites out there, we see the same pattern:
The New York Times, using Retina optimized photos, will be 4MB just for the front page. Pinterest is even worse. Using Retina optimized graphics, the front page is 10MB in size!
Cost
The cost is of course a much bigger problem. It can have an impact on you in two different ways.
First is the cost of lost traffic. Remember the study showing Yahoo lost 5% of it's traffic when the page loaded 400ms slower? Here we are talking about a page loading several seconds (even minutes) slower.
I don't know exactly how bad this would be, but I'm not sure I want to test it. It's scary!
Then we have cost in bandwidth. For small sites you might say that it doesn't matter because your hosting provider offers you unlimited bandwidth. But if you are a big publisher, or worse a startup, you are probably hosting your image files in the cloud - and thus, you pay per gigabyte.
I am hosting this site on a Rackspace cloud server, and my bandwidth cost is fairly low - around $18 per month. With Retina optimized graphics the cost would instead be $62 per month. It's not going to break the bank, but still.
But if you are a big publisher like the New York Times, we are talking about a huge increase in bandwidth costs. Worse yet is when you are a startup like Pinterest ...or what about Flickr? Imagine Flickr's bandwidth cost when they start to use Retina optimized photos by default. The standard size of a Flickr image will increase from around 375kb to 1.4mb.
That's a lot of bandwidth just to show one image.
Another thing is the storage cost. For big publishers, you will need a lot of space to store images four times their current size.
Of course, there is also the cost to my readers. For instance, with AT&T you have a monthly limit of 5GB, and AT&T claims that 1GB is the same as 5,700 web pages.
Well, not if you are on this site ...and especially not using Retina optimized graphics. If I optimized all my articles, you would reach 1GB after just 73 articles.
The ISPs simply aren't ready for Retina displays yet. We don't have the speed, nor the bandwidth to use it freely.
The future is in high-resolution
I absolutely love the idea of the high-resolution world of Retina display. I used to work with marketing people, and they didn't like digital because it was low resolution. I have stopped counting how many times I have heard graphic designers claiming it was better to print something out (in 300 dpi) than to look at it on a screen in 72 dpi.
And they where right. In the past, digital screen quality sucked compared to print. But now, with Retina quality displays, digital and print is the same thing. There is no longer any graphic reason to stay with print. That means we can move faster into the digital world, and it means we can optimize our workflows because we no longer need a printer for proofing.
It's brilliant!
The problem is just that the implementation of Retina displays sucks. I don't like pixel doubling. I want the real thing so that I can create the best of the best. For instance, all the graphics (except the first screenshot) in this article are in Retina quality. Each picture is 1404 pixels wide!
This site is already optimized for Retina displays. I just don't use it yet :)
The pictures look extremely nice on a retina display, but it was not so fun making them. The tools we have are still defined by pixels, so I had to create a picture four times the size than what it was displayed at.
Here is what that looked like:
On the left, you see the size I made the graph in, and on the right you see the size of the graph inside this article. It's not a very usable way to work.
Give me centimeters or inches. Pixels don't work in a high-resolution multisize screen environment. I want to be able to create the graphics in the same size it is displayed at - regardless of the ppi it is outputted in later.
I suspect this will come at some point in the future, but the problem is that because Apple is now pixel doubling everything on the web by default, it's probably going to take a long time before we get the real thing. We are forced into a backward compatibility mode.
And in time we will also all have 4G. But until then, with 3G connections limited to 5GB per month, Retina optimized web sites is not possible.
As a publisher I'm stuck between the need to give people Retina quality graphics (and thus a better reading experience), and the need to keep the site as fast as possible - especially on smartphones and tablets.
For now, I'm opting for speed, but as smartphone and tablet usage increase (it's already at 40% on this site), I soon might be forced to update the graphics and thus make the site slower.
...oh and if you happened to read this article in an RSS reader, the huge Retina sized pictures probably messed up the page.
Переслать - The Merging Markets of Journalists, Publishers, Agencies, and Brands - (by @baekdal)
Marketing used to do two things: Advertising and PR. Agencies came up with ideas, Newspapers were "the bringers of news", Authors wrote stories, publishers distributed them, and book stores sold them.
Each group were living in a very carefully confined media silo, and back then it made sense to target each one individually. This is why a site like Adage is targeting marketing professionals and why a site like Nieman Journalism Lab targets journalists - they used to be two completely different markets.
But if you are a regular reader of this site, you might have noticed that I mix them together. One day I write about the future of books, the next what promoted posts on Facebook means, followed by a report on newspapers and their paywalls.
Wouldn't it be better if I divided them up into sections and allowed you to subscribe just the kind of media focus you need?
The answer is no, because this site is not about what media used to be. It's about the shift in media and what it will be like in the future. This is the purpose of Baekdal Plus, and this purpose is reflected in how this site works and how it is organized.
One of the biggest shifts is that the old media silos are crumbling. They are being replaced by a single shared media silo, in which we have a very scattered form of media.
Take authors. In the past, their role was to write - and nothing else. The publisher's role was then to use their distribution networks to get the book into the book store as well as planning national marketing campaigns (for popular authors), and the book shops role was to influence and connect directly with the reader.
The Author was a worker, the publishers were B2B, and the shop was B2C. But then came Twitter, Facebook and Google+, as well as the direct world of the internet and the new world of self-publishing.
Now, if an author wants to sell his book, she first has to connect directly with her audience! That means she has to think of herself as an influencer. The author has to be a brand, and she has to think and act like brand.
The story itself is also changing. Back in the old days, a book was limited by the cost of distribution and the patterns of print, meaning each book had to be passive, linear, and about 400 pages long. It is a limitation that no longer exists. As an author, you need to consider if a passive linear book is the best way to do it ...or maybe it is better to write a shorter book, followed by an exciting podcast series, each 20 minutes long and offered to people via a subscription.
Brands are facing the same shift. They too have to think differently. In the past, they created a product and then tried to influence the media to 'spread the word' - usually by buying advertisements in magazines or sending out press realizes to journalists.
Now, brands also have to connect directly with their customers, and that means they have to think of how communicate with them. Nobody wants to read a press release. You have to give them a story in a way that makes people connect with you. How do you do that in the best way? The answer is by using the skill and tactics as a journalist.
You have to be the media, and if you create a great story you might also want consider turning into a long-form story, meaning you are also becoming an author.
If you, as brand, sell kitchen utensils, you might want to consider making an app about cooking, with new editions being sold via in-app purchases. That means you as a brand are no longer just a brand, you are also a magazine, an author and an app developer.
Newspapers and magazines also face exactly the same shift. They can no longer just be the bringer of news, since the people they brought it for are now doing it directly. Newspapers have to realign their business and become creators. They have to focus their business on their ability to create unique stories, analysis and perspective. This means you have to create a product that people wants to buy, and that means you have to think of yourself as a brand.
But sometimes that product is best sold as an edited summary of a world event, published in the form of a book. Which makes a newspaper an author and a publisher, selling a product as a brand.
You see how it the different roles of media are all merging into one? The old media silos are crumbling, and in their place is a new world of media that isn't defined by a 'role'.
This is why Baekdal Plus, for instance, is not defined by a specific media role, and why I'm not presenting my analysis as something specifically for just one group - because in the future there won't be one.
You have to embrace the new connected media world. You mix the best elements of the old world, eliminate the intermediaries, and use the result to connect directly with your audience.
As a journalist, you have to be the creator (the author), and you have to connect directly with you reader and think like a brand while doing your own publishing.
As an author, you also have to be the publisher and connect directly with your readers. That means you have to think like a brand, but also not limit you stories to books. If you want to be really successful, you also have to create a story around your books.
As a brand, you have to stop thinking in terms of press releases and advertising that exists to help spread you message through intermediaries. You have to spread your message directly, which means you have to be the one who creates the stories that the journalists' used to make for you. You have to be the media, and not just confine yourself to being a brand.
And agencies have to change too. In the past, their role was to help brands influence people through advertising. That meant they were idea factories, and the fancier the idea the better. But now, agencies need to help brands establish that direct connection. Their role is to understand how people connect through authentic stories. They have to think more like creators and journalists and to a much lesser degree as idea makers.
I wrote much more about this in my book, "The Shift, from print to digital and beyond."
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