Flipping Your Publishing Model
If you are struggling to gather compelling articles for your e-newsletter or print magazine on a regular basis, here’s a case study about one association that has turned the tables on content creation. Flipping your publishing model means hosting a place online for ongoing content generation – like an association blog – and pulling the best information into your print or e-newsletter.
- Let’s talk a little bit about the concept of "flipping your publishing model". I published a book last year with my partner Lindy called Open Community. In the book, we talk about how one of the big changes brought about by social media is that now, everyone is a publisher. The publishing industry has been dramatically changed, as all of you, as association publications people, know more than most. New media is all about speed - information has to be fast, easy to share on social networks, and it has to be conversational.
Associations used to be all about finding and publishing content from experts, from members, doing research and publishing the results, publishing journals and doing peer review... But now, anyone can start a blog and publish their own stuff. Not only that, but anyone can build a substantial following.
So what are your options?
1) you can publish better, faster, more.
2) you can curate what your members publish.
Most associations will find a balance between the two options.
Flipping your publishing model is a method for doing this.I’m going to assume your process is to:
- source authors for articles on particular topics
- give them deadlines, probably several months out
- chase them when they miss deadlines
- go through rounds of editing
- layout and design
- publish.
- then maybe publish online.
There’s presumably a pretty long lag time between the content creation and publishing.
There’s also a period of time in between issues with no content being published.
Flipping your publishing model means that instead of looking for brand new content every month, you take the best of what’s already out there and repurpose it for your newsletter. Maybe it’s your association blog posts that have the most comments or were shared the most; maybe it’s even a hot discussion inside your private or public online community spaces.
How to do it:
Have your magazine editor act as a community manager and content curator–recruiting experts to write on hot and emerging topics. (They’re already doing this, right?)
Publish the incoming articles immediately and cheaply to the web on a daily schedule.
Use analytics and social components like rating and commenting to vet the content. (Your magazine editor can still play a strong role in choosing the best content, too.)
Then publish the magazine as an artifact of the best digital content that’s been published during a specific period of time.This model serves two types of members better than the current model
–the hyper-connected who want the current content as it happens, and don’t want to wait for (or even receive) the print version; and
- the less connected who just want the best stuff out there, don’t want to have to go hunting for it, and love having the magazine in their hand.
And then there’s the fact that a steady stream of content is better optimized for the web and better for keeping your association at the top of Google searches.
But let’s see what this really looks like in action.Here's Andrew Kantor, web editor for the Virginia Association of Realtors.
