Publish Web First, Print Second

So many publishing companies still do it backwards. They create content for their magazine, assemble it once a month, ship it to the printer, then convert it to HTML and dump 20-30 articles on their web site in one fell swoop. At least it’s better than some publishers who amazingly still don’t put their content online, but it’s still not the best way to maximize your print and online opportunities.

There’s a reason print magazines are called periodicals. They only come out monthly, weekly, etc. But online has no such constraints. New information can … and is expected to be … put up on a continual basis. So what do we do? Whip our editors harder, demand they create content for our magazines and expect them to also put up daily content on our web sites without increasing staff size and expense?

It won’t work, but I believe there’s a much simpler solution.

Take a product tabloid that I worked with. Their editors received hundreds of new product announcements every month. As they came in, the editors kept the ones that were worthwhile in a FileMaker Pro database. Once a month, they’d pick the best ones, edit them, put them into the magazine, and ship it out the door. The magazine content was then converted to HTML and put onto the web site. Doesn’t seem like such a bad process, but think about it from the reader’s perspective. For 30 days, nothing showed up on the web site. Then all of a sudden 40-50 new products magically appeared at one time. It was too much to take in at once and many of the “new products” were now weeks if not months old.

The solution was to simply flip the model around. Now as new products come in, they are immediately filtered, edited and posted to the web site. Then, once a month, the editors take the best of all the new products from the web site that month, compile them into the print magazine, and send it out to their print subscribers. Results? The web site now has 5-15 new products every day, readers (and advertisers) love the immediacy of information, the publication’s web traffic has tripled, and the editors have no more work than they used to have. Win-win. By the way, because of the continuous publishing model on their web site, they were able to easily add a robust RSS feed and email newsletter. The RSS is updated automatically as new products are added to the web site, and their email newsletter automatically pulls out the past week’s new products into a digest-style newsletter and send it out to email subscribes. No manual intervention necessary by the editors … all automated. Readers get to choose how they want their information:

1. Come to the web site if you want the content right now.
2. Monitor the RSS feed in your favorite reader or in My Yahoo / iGoogle.
3. Get a weekly digest of all the new content via email.
4. Get a monthly filtered view via print.

The publication makes money by selling the audience of each channel and has grown total revenues significantly.

But why stop there? Why should we wait to publish our columnists, feature articles, etc. once a month in our print magazine? Instead, let’s schedule these to publish continually throughout the month on our web site. Let’s spread our columnists out, one or two per week. Let’s spread our feature articles out … one per week, or even each feature broken up into a couple parts published one per week. Let’s publish new products, news, etc. as it happens throughout the month. Then, once a month, let’s assemble all of that content into our print magazine and ship it out.

This is exactly how the online-only sites go about it. They don’t limit themselves to the constraints of a print publishing schedule. And neither should we! Publish your content first online on a daily basis, then assemble your print magazine according to your frequency. Your readers will love the choice, your web traffic will grow, you’ll develop your online revenues, people who still want print will still get what they want, and we won’t have to double the workload of our editors to make it happen.