The newspaper industry has staked its future on failed legacy newspaper editorial systems that require “tremendous effort and patience“. GateHouse Media could not implement this old desktop software masquerading in the “cloud” because it required too much bandwidth. Seriously! What is this, 1996?

This legacy print CMS software is so ineffective, so destructive to digital innovation (not to mention legacy cost reduction), that newspaper executives are ready to take drastic measures — cut it off like a rotting limb. That’s what John Paton, CEO of Digital First media, is contemplating:

“[Digital has] got to move faster. I think it has to be more independent. It’s my job to figure out the encumbrances between the print assets and the digital assets. It’s my job to ensure that digital, if it’s going to be our future, is well funded and has as fast a path to success as possible.

I’m beginning to think that the very best way I can do that is to have it stand alone separate so that it can — unencumbered from the print piece — be able to do things we think it should do as a content company and as a sales company in the digital space.”

Paton isn’t talking about the print product itself that’s holding back digital. He’s talking about the software used to produce the print product, the same legacy print editorial system, which is putting DFM’s digital ambition and future at risk of failure.

Obsolete software and failed system architecture is one of the newspaper industry’s greatest “encumbrances,” a barrier to innovation, and ultimately a barrier to survival.

It’s not at all surprising that legacy print editorial systems in the “cloud” are failing, systemically, at every major news organization that has rolled them out. It’s not what they were designed to do.

And yet GateHouse is sticking with their legacy vendor. Why? Because they have invested millions of dollars and years (years!). But more significantly, they probably don’t know that there is an alternative.

But there is. A whole new paradigm for newsroom technology.

Forget the CMS. Stop searching for the grand unified CMS that does everything. It’s a unicorn. CMSs are designed to do one thing, e.g. produce a newspaper, a website, a blog, etc.

Publish2’s platform is a technology layer ABOVE the CMS. Publish2 commoditizes the CMS, and overcomes all of its limitations. Publish2 connects a newspaper’s old and new CMSs to work dynamically as if they were one.

Above all, Publish2 liberates newspapers from the CMSs that are holding them back, so they can create news digital products that drive new revenue while producing the print product more cost effectively.

True digital-first workflow, new sites, new apps, new revenue-driving products — it’s easy, not hard.

Ready for total CMS freedom? Get in touch.

Public Media has a vision to bring all of their content onto one common platform, to enable an open exchange and create a powerful network. At Publish2, we believe this is a really smart idea! So smart, in fact, that today we are announcing that any public media organization can use Publish2’s content platform to exchange content with any other public media organization for FREE.

Here are 4 reasons in addition to FREE why Publish2 is the ideal platform for public media organizations to exchange content.

1. Total CMS freedom

With Publish2’s platform, you can use *any* CMS — WordPress, Drupal, Ellington, anything you want. Publish2 seamlessly integrates with any CMS, with no custom development required. Everything is entirely turnkey and works out of the box because Publish2 “closes the API gap.” We can also deliver the same benefits to stations using hosted CMS solutions like Core Publisher and Bento.

Whatever CMS you chose to use, Publish2 can connect you with any other public media station, no matter what CMS they use.

2. Proven, trusted solution

Our platform is already used successfully by some of the largest public media stations. Publish2 is proven, scalable, reliable, and we have invested millions developing it over the last four years. We have a powerful rights management feature set that gives you complete control over your content.

3. No politics

Publish2 has no political agenda. We are an independent technology company, already trusted by many public media stations and uniquely positioned to help them survive and thrive. We’re on *your* side.

We don’t license content, we don’t sell content, we’re not going to use your content. We’re a pure technology solution. You can get all the benefits of creating a dynamic public media network without giving up your independence or your local focus.

4. Timing is EVERYTHING

The pace of change, technology evolution, and disruption in media is accelerating everyday. Six months is a LONG time. 18-24 months is a lifetime!

Public media, like all media companies, needs to be moving very quickly to evolve, build their digital businesses, develop new sources of revenue, and strengthen their local brands to ensure long-term survival. There is no time to waste!

There are huge benefits to public media in having a common platform for content exchange. If stations can have all those benefits TODAY, and at no cost, why wait?

—

Why are we offering our platform to public media for FREE?

We want to build a business helping public media stations build partnerships BEYOND public media.

Alongside our free content sharing service within public media, we have a paid service that enables stations to build local and regional partnerships outside of public media — newspapers, commercial broadcasters, online publishers, nonprofit news organizations, citizens, developers, anyone.

To survive in a digital world where consumers increasingly seek out national content direct from the source, public media stations must become *essential* to their local and regional markets. The most forward-thinking public media stations are pursuing this goal by creating local and regional networks that extend beyond public media.

And our current public media customers are successfully using our paid service to achieve this goal TODAY.

They are partnering with news organizations across their state to create a statewide news service that could rival AP, generate *new revenue*, and make the public media brand absolutely *essential* to the state, its citizens, and its entire media ecosystem. They are curating content from a wide range of local partners, from local non-profit news organizations to AOL’s Patch to statewide news organizations, which enables their brand to deliver much more *local* value and makes it essential to their local community.

We also want to build a business helping public media stations integrate their internal systems.

Do you have more than one site running on more than one CMS? Are you finding it very difficult to move content across your digital properties, or between digital and broadcast (e.g. when audio is uploaded digital first)? Are you struggling with the limitations of legacy systems?

Publish2 can seamlessly integrate all of your CMSs, to easily deploy content across all of your properties and products. So the same platform that connects CMSs *across* stations for effortless content sharing can also create similar connections *within* your station. This is made possible by our robust rights management layer, which supports a wide range of content distribution rules, from completely open to a limited group of partners to purely internal use.

Integrating disparate internal systems is a very big problem that a large number of public media stations have, and we can solve that problem TODAY.

—

Interested in learning more about Publish2’s free content platform for public media? Get in touch.

At Publish2, we’re working with some of the largest, most innovative and forward-looking public media organizations.  We’re helping them dramatically extend their reach and grow their membership through partnerships with newspapers and other local media. We’re helping them transform their newsroom workflow, with an emphasis on digital, without making huge investments in upgrading or replacing legacy systems.  Overall, we’re helping public media stations better achieve their mission while increasing revenue and reducing costs.

Through our work with these leaders in public media, we’ve been introduced to public media stations across the spectrum who are interested in how Publish2’s platform technology can help them survive and thrive in the digital age.

In these conversations with public media, we are often asked about Publish2’s capabilities in the context of NPR’s Digital Services. This is not at all surprising.  All NPR member stations are *required* to pay for NPR’s Digital Services through a mandatory fee.  If the needs of members stations were being fully met by Digital Services, we would likely not have any public media customers.  And we would not be seeing so much demand among public media for what Publish2 can help them achieve.  Why buy a service or license a technology if you’re already paying for one, albeit forcibly, that achieves your objectives?

So for the benefit of the public media community, we thought it would be help to explain how Publish2 can help stations achieve what NPR Digital Services cannot.

Anti-Competitive Digital Services

In a normal competitive context, we might position Publish2 as a powerful alternative to NPR’s Digital Services. But the mandatory Digital Services fee does not give NPR member stations the luxury of choosing the best-in-class technology, despite that clearly being to their benefit at a time of such dramatic technology-driven transformation in media. It’s clear to most media companies that their future depends on digital. What advantage is there in mortgaging away all control over the core technology platform that will carry you into the future?

In the face of anti-competitive practices and locked-in technology budgets, almost all of our work with public media has been funded by third-party grants. Think about that.  The largest public stations, who pay the most for NPR Digital Services, are forced to go outside the NPR system, to independent grant makers, in order to fund the technology innovation that is the key to their future.

To be clear, this isn’t about NPR (we love NPR and are avid listeners).  It’s about NPR Digital Services, which is a separate group based in Boston, far from NPR headquarters in DC, with “new people” who are not from the “old NPR” (to quote a key distinction made by a public media station digital team leader).  And this post is a public response to a great deal of anti-competitive activity that we’ve encountered behind the scenes, which we thought was the most appropriate way to respond because, after all, it is PUBLIC media.

That all being said, the simplest way to explain why we’ve seen so much demand among public media stations for our technology is that Publish2 effectively closes the NPR API Gap.

The API Gap

The “API gap”, as we like to call it, is not unique to NPR.  It’s based on the broad failure of APIs in the news industry, a problem that Publish2 was specifically designed to solve. The API gap exists because of a series of terribly flawed assumptions about newsrooms:

1. There is always a developer available to create entirely customized applications for an API.
2. That developer has time available for this custom development.
3. The newsroom can afford the FTE cost of having that developer spend time setting up and maintaining a custom application for an API.
4. The newsroom’s analogue editorial system (broadcast/print) and web CMS are sufficiently sophisticated and capable to that they can be integrated with the API, even given the time and attention of a capable developer.

In the vast majority of newsrooms, whether they be broadcast, newspapers, or even online media, none of the above is true.

The NPR API, like all APIs, assumes that all of the above is true for all members stations, and that it’s true for any news organizations that want to partner with member stations.

Make Life Easy for Newsrooms

Publish2’s solution to the API gap is to assume that there’s only one viable path to integrating with newsroom editorial systems and web CMS — work with what those systems can do out of the box, without any support from a developer or any customization.  This means supporting a huge range of delivery formats, some highly customized, some highly antiquated.  Publish2 supports any custom XML format, we support all of AP’s formats (including ANPA, the old satellite feed format), and we support FTP, to bridge the gap between the web and analogue editorial systems.  We support any and every system, from new and shiny to old and busted, that exist within newsrooms.

Publish2’s innovation is that we meet the newsroom’s requirements, instead of forcing them to meet our requirements, which is what an API demands. Life is hard enough for newsrooms. Our goal is to make it easier.

Publish2 closes the NPR API gap by working with the existing content import and export capabilities of member station CMSs.  We also make integration entirely turnkey for member station partners, such as newspapers in their region.

Use ANY Web CMS

NPR has recognized problem of their API gap. That gave birth to Core Publisher, NPR Digital Service’s web CMS offering for member stations. The unique feature of Core Publisher is that it is integrated with the NPR API, making it easier for member stations to use NPR content on their web sites. It also makes it easier for NPR to get member station content into the NPR API.

This is a reasonable approach, assuming that the member station doesn’t already have a web CMS that works well for them.  Or that they aren’t interested in choosing a web CMS based on competitive vendor review, as most news organizations do.  Or that they aren’t interested in customizing their CMS to meet their unique needs.

Publish2 offers member stations a different way to close the basic NPR API gap. With Publish2, member stations can use literally any web CMS, because Publish2 can integrate with any CMS, and our system is fully integrated with the NPR API.  So we can send and receive any NPR content, directly to and from any CMS, as required by member stations.

Build Local Networks

But Publish2 also goes beyond providing an alternative solution to the fundamental problem of how member stations can work with the NPR API.  Publish2 isn’t limited to public media content.  Our system handles content from wire services, like AP, and we can handle content from regional partners, increasingly a key focus for public media. Publish2 can enable stations to seamlessly share content and collaborate with newspapers and online local media.

This is critical, because increasingly public media stations see their future in local.  If consumers can access national content, like NPR’s, from anywhere in digital, e.g. npr.org, then public media stations need to focus on local as their core franchise.  (If you see a parallel between NPR’s relationship with local member stations and AP’s relationship with local newspapers, yes, you’re onto something).

Empowering local news networks is Publish2’s core franchise. That’s why we’re working with several of the Local Journalism Initiatives funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Publish2 also handles, for example, all content distribution for the Center for Investigative Reporting’s California Watch and Bay Citizen, to the largest news organizations in California.

But wait, there’s more…

Integrate Digital and Broadcast

Publish2’s platform technology isn’t just for digital, i.e. we’re not just a “digital service.” We can support broadcast as well, by integrating with any broadcast editorial system, such as iNEWS or ENPS, delivering NPR or any other content directly into wire queues, as many stations receive content from AP.  With Publish2, broadcast can build their own wire service, combining NPR, AP, local and regional partners, other national sources like ProPublica, literally any content.

And Publish2 can also go beyond empowering member stations with external content.  We can enable stations to integrate their web and broadcast systems, towards the increasingly important goal of integrating broadcast and digital workflows and operations.  Stories published first on the web can flow directly into the broadcast editorial system to be edited into scripts, like an internal wire service. Audio segments published first on the website can be transcoded and delivered as broadcast-ready files directly to the broadcast system.

Platform for the Entire News Industry

The key to Publish2 as a platform for public media stations is that it isn’t just a “public media platform” (haven’t heard that moniker in a while).  It’s a platform and network for the entire news industry.  NPR Digital Services is investing millions of dollars of member station fees to build a platform that Publish2 has had for years.  Some public media stations may think that’s the most efficient way to spend their money.  But we respectfully disagree with re-inventing the wheel.  And we know that many public media stations share that view.

“Local is huge, it’s the holy grail of the Internet.”
- Sheryl Sandberg, COO, Facebook, on first earnings call

Competing for the “holy grail of local online advertising” are: local newspapers, local TV stations, online-only new sites and… Facebook, Twitter, Google, AOL, and Yahoo.

Are all these companies really competing *directly* with each other for dominance in local? See for yourself:

“Our business is an advertising business, we don’t sell technology.”
- Dick Costolo, CEO, Twitter

“We are excited to offer small businesses the chance to create even more marketing success as advertisers on Twitter.”
- Twitter announcing new ad product for local businesses

“Google has repeatedly tried, and largely failed, to crack the market for local business advertising. As early as next month, the Internet company will try anew, as it trains its largest-ever assault… Central to the effort is Google+, the company’s social network, which it hopes consumers will use to interact with local businesses that now have special Web pages on the network.”
- Wall Street Journal

Marissa Mayer, the newly appointed CEO of Yahoo, was most recently the Vice President of Local, Maps, and Location Services at Google.

“One of the opportunities for Patch…is the ability for us on the commerce side to offer the people the ability to do listings and other things like that locally.” About 90% of Patch’s ad revenue comes from local ad deals, Mr. Armstrong said in the post-earnings interview
- Tim Armstrong, CEO of AOL

You can see where this is headed.

But who is best positioned to win this epic battle for dominance in local online advertising?

Before I answer that, let’s all agree on what will *not* win… display advertising. Display advertising is DEAD. The value of “content adjacent” display advertising is plummeting (ask any ad-supported content site). And it’s happening because the web has virtually unlimited content inventory (thanks, Facebook!). Content adjacent display ad inventory is worse than a commodity, it’s destroying value. Any local site betting its future on CPMs likely will not survive long-term.

But most local businesses have never wanted any part of display advertising. Which is why the vast majority of the $150 billion US local ad market is not online.

Nor is it going to be “daily deals” that claims the holy grail of local advertising. Helping businesses lose money by offering 50% off to deal seekers who will never come back because they’ve moved on to the next deal is not a sustainable business model. It’s value destruction. It won’t last.

So what advertising format can win local? Not search. Google has struggled with local (see above).

The online ad format most likely to win local is… social media. The “social media post” — the short update format pioneered by Facebook and Twitter — is the ascendent information format for the web and digital media. And it has all the qualities you need to win local:

SIMPLE

Type your promotion in a box, upload a photo, post, and you’re done. Nothing could be simpler than a social media post. Just about everyone has posted an update on Facebook or Twitter for personal use, and certainly everyone has seen one — it’s universally recognized. A social media post is communication reduced to its simplest, most immediate form.

Social media posts are as simple as… classified ads, the ultimate cash cow of analogue media.

REAL-TIME

Social media is the web-native format for real-time information. The “social stream” — a simple, reverse chronological list of social media posts, as you see on Facebook and Twitter — is an incredibly efficient way to deliver advertising as real-time information.

INFORMATION

And social media posts are indeed information, with immediate utility, just like… classifieds.

In fact, the social media format *is* classified advertising reborn for the social web and digital media.

SOCIAL

Social media posts as a form of advertising makes ads inherently social. Along with the content of the ad, each businesses has a profile image, an identity, a presence, a way to connect directly with customers. For a consumer, it’s just like walking into a local shop and talking to the proprietor.

Social media posts can easily be shared by consumers among their friends and family, increasing reach and conveying peer validation through “word of mouth.”

SELF-SERVE

Google proved that nothing scales in online advertising like self-serve. The key to local advertising is the long tail… hundreds of thousands of businesses. Self-serve is the only model that will scale.

The key to self-serve for the long tail of non-tech-savvy local businesses is *simplicity*. Search advertising hit a wall in local because, while it is self serve, it’s not at all simple.

Any business is capable of typing a promotion into a box. A social media post is the perfect self-serve format because of its simplicity, and because business owners have already done it as individuals on Facebook and Twitter.

The ad buying model must also be dead simple. What could be simpler than pay per post?

MOBILE

Social media streams are ideally suited for mobile consumption. Mobile, with its limited space, is even worse than the web for content adjacent advertising (which is hurting Facebook among others). Social media posts also lend themselves to location metadata, as Foursquare has pioneered.

But despite all the advantages of social media posts as a format for advertising, social networks have a fundamental problem as an advertising medium for local businesses. If all the merchant does is post to their existing followers, which is how social media was designed, they can’t do the one thing that every local business wants…

Reach new customers

Businesses can’t reach new customers by posting to their existing followers on Facebook and Twitter. Not for free. Not acting like consumers updating their friends.

LOCAL AUDIENCE

What’s missing is what has always been at the very core of the media business… audience, i.e. reaching new customers.

A critical factor in who wins the holy grail of local online advertising is local audience.

Where are the new customers for my business?

That’s what every local business wants to know. Whoever can connect businesses with new customers in their local market, whoever has the *local audience* and has a strong connection to that audience, has the advantage in the race for the holy grail.

And that is why there will be an epic battle for the local online advertising holy grail:

• Local news sites (newspapers, TV, online-only) have local audience.
• AOL’s Patch has local audience.
• Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Yahoo, using geo-targeting, have huge local audiences.

Nobody is talking publicly about, for example, Facebook competing with local newspapers, or Twitter competing with local TV stations. But it’s happening. And if local players want to win, they need to act. Now.

Do any of these competitors have an inherent advantage? That gets to the remaining elements of the holy grail. If the social media post is the advertising format, what is the right context?

CONTEXT

For traditional media, having display ads in the context of high-value content has not halted the precipitous decline of CPMs. Facebook and Twitter have a very different problem with context — a personal social context is the worst place for advertising. The last place consumers want to see advertising is within or adjacent to their personal social space.

That’s why it’s so hard for businesses to get followers on Facebook and Twitter, beyond their most devoted customers. People don’t want commerce filling up in their social stream. The brand promise of social media is *personal* social interaction.

To address this issue, and to seek the holy grail of local advertising, Facebook and Twitter have both launched advertising formats targeted at local businesses — Promoted Stories and Promoted Tweets. These ad products enable local businesses to reach *new customers* on Facebook and Twitter. They are leveraging their huge national audience to geo-target users at the local level.

So businesses that value the native social media context of Facebook and Twitter can reach new customers by buying advertising on those media properties. Google and Yahoo can do the same with geo-targeted ad products, as Google plans to do with Google+ as the social media format.

Facebook and Twitter have the advantage of an ad context where social media is the native content format. And businesses have been introduced to the social media post as a form of promotion through their use of Facebook and Twitter.

All the ad dollars from local businesses that go to Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Yahoo *won’t* go to other media properties with local audiences.

But those other local players? What about the websites and digital products published by local newspapers, TV stations, and web-native publishers? Can they leverage the social media format to compete for the local advertising holy grail?

Yes, because they have the advantage of context, brand, and a local sales force.

STANDALONE DESTINATION

What if consumers could get, *all in one place*, the social media equivalent of classifieds — local businesses’ posting social media promotions to a standalone destination, where consumers can seek out and browse a social stream for local promotions by category?

That’s exactly what local media can create to compete with Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, etc. They can leverage their strong brands, their connections with businesses in the community, and their local sales force to create this destination for social media commerce.

This standalone destination could not only provide unique value for consumers (getting social media commerce all in one place without having to follow hundreds of businesses), it could also provide unique value for local businesses.

Local businesses may prefer to reach consumers when they are *looking for* promotions from businesses in a standalone destination. When they are looking for where to eat, drink, go out on a Saturday night. When they are looking for real estate open houses, new cars, or shopping for fall clothing.

Social media promotions in a classifieds-like standalone destination could have a distinct advantage in competing for the holy grail of local online advertising.

Instead of helping local businesses advertise on Facebook and Twitter, local news sites could *own* the social media advertising destination on their own site.

And a standalone destination could be the key to scaling local advertising by harnessing the most powerful force that motivates local businesses… competition.

COMPETITION

The big innovation that drove the growth of search advertising was creating a competitive marketplace — bidding for the top ad spot, and being able to see what your competitors are doing. There’s arguably no space more competitive than local. Local businesses are fiercely competitive, e.g. bars during Happy Hour on a Friday.

The holy grail of online local advertising is harnessing that inherent competition among local businesses and using it to drive advertising volume and ad spending. Competition drives network effects, which is how everything on the web scales.

A standalone destination could create that context for competition, because local businesses can easily see what their competitors are posting, which can motivate them to post in order to push competitors down the social stream.

To sum it up, let’s look at the attributes of the local online advertising holy grail from the most important perspective — local businesses:

• Simple: I understand how to advertise and how it works.
• Real-time: I need new customers in my store… now.
• Information: I want to tell new customers about my products and services, my promotions, offers, and announcements.
• Social: I want to connect directly with my customers, like when they are in my store.
• Self-Serve: I need to do it myself because I can’t afford to pay someone else.
• Mobile: I can take a picture on my phone and use it to advertise. Like Instagram for local advertising.
• Local Audience: Where can I reach new customers?
• Context: Where do I want my ads to appear? Are consumers paying attention to my promotions?
• Standalone Destination: I want to be where consumers are going to look for local promotions.
• Competition: If I see my competitors are doing it, I need to do it.

We designed BreakingPromos to go after the local online advertising holy grail by leveraging every one of these critical success factors. BreakingPromos transforms social media into a hugely valuable consumer destination for real-time promotions from local businesses.

How will you compete for the holy grail of local? BreakingPromos can help you win.

We’re excited to announce that local businesses can now use their Facebook accounts to log into BreakingPromos and reach new customers on local news sites while simultaneously reaching their followers on Facebook.

The goal of Publish2’s BreakingPromos is getting *every* local business to advertise online by making it as easy as posting to social media, the one form of online promotion that local businesses have figured out how to do on their own. So a business that is already posting to Facebook can now reach *new customers* through BreakingPromos, which they can’t do by posting to their existing followers.

The first release of BreakingPromos only supported Twitter. With the addition of Facebook, we’re making the BreakingPromos self-serve model easier for many more businesses in your market. What could be easier than logging in with an existing Facebook account and doing what you’re already doing on Facebook? And what could be more valuable to businesses than reaching *new customers* on your news site with the same Facebook promotions?

So businesses get more advertising value for the same effort, and local news sites can better monetize their greatest asset — audience, AKA new customers.

When a business with a Facebook page wants to advertise on your site, all they need to do in the BreakingPromos widget is:

1. Click Sign in with Facebook:



2. Select the business page they want to use:



And that’s it! They’re ready to post:



Creating a BreakingPromos account (1 step!) and purchasing BreakingPromos for your site (via Amazon with existing credit card info) could literally not be simpler. (Click here for an overview of BreakingPromos.)

Every post in the BreakingPromos widget is automatically sent to the business’ Facebook page. So there is no extra effort, at all, for the businesses using Facebook. Consumers can log into the BreakingPromos widget with their Facebook accounts and Like businesses’ posts and their profiles, so they get all the social media value.

With BreakingPromos, *every* business in your market with a Facebook account can advertise on your site by doing exactly what they already do on Facebook.

And that should be your goal — *every* business in your market should be reaching new customers on your site at the same time they are reaching existing customers on Facebook. It’s a no-brainer!

The value of BreakingPromos for everyone involved is clear and powerful:

• Businesses: Reach new customers with the same Facebook posts they are already doing
• Consumers: See Facebook posts from local businesses, by category, all in one place, without having to Like hundreds of businesses
• Local news site: Monetize online audience and co-opt Facebook’s value by creating a consumer destination for businesses’ Facebook promotions

Ready to start generating more revenue from your online audience and the Facebook tidal wave? We can get you set up in a day. It’s pure revenue share, no setup fees or upfront costs.

Be the first mover (and winner-take-all) in your market. Get in touch at contact@publish2.com

Today, less than 10% of local businesses advertise online. But what if you could get almost 100% of local merchants to advertise online?

That’s the holy grail that everyone is focused on. Local media companies (newspapers, TV stations, web-native startups). Google, Facebook, Twitter, AOL, Yahoo. Everyone.

Why? Because local business advertising is the biggest “white space” opportunity on the Internet — the vast majority of the $100 billion/year in local advertising (US alone) is currently not spent online… but eventually will be. Question is, where will it go?

Today, Publish2 is announcing a new ad product aimed at the local online advertising holy grail.  But before we introduce it, I want to explain our unique approach to solving the BIG problem that thus far no one has been able to solve.

There are three main reasons why the vast majority of local businesses don’t advertise online:

1. Ineffective
2. Too complicated/confusing
3. Too expensive

To fully understand these barriers, we need to look at it from the perspective of local businesses:

Display ads are ineffective (consumers ignore and never click), too expensive (despite plummeting CPMs), and too confusing to buy.

Search advertising is too complicated, and requires PhD-level sophistication to convert site traffic to customers.

Groupon-style daily deals are in decline as too many local businesses have failed to convert 50% discount seekers into repeat customers, and have been left with a bad taste.

Social media – Facebook and Twitter — can help businesses communicate with existing customers. But social media fails local businesses because they can’t use it for their most important goal — getting new customers.

But social media is the key.  Posting on Twitter and Facebook solves the simplicity problem — nothing could be easier, and more widely familiar to a local business owner, than tweeting or updating your status on Facebook.

If you look at local businesses on Twitter and Facebook, you’ll actually see huge consumer value — offers, discounts, photos of new merchandise — all being posted in real time.

The problem for consumers is that they are not going to follow/like 100s of local businesses to keep up with what local businesses have to offer.  They may keep up with a few of their favorites.  But if you’re looking locally for, for example –

• Happy hour deals
• Clothing sales
• Homes for sale
• Deals on new cars

– there is no one place that consumers can go to see local businesses post, in real time, the kind of simple promotions that they post on Twitter and Facebook.

So local businesses have a simple way to promote their business in the form of social media updates.  What they are missing is a way to reach new customers. What they need is audience, ideally one that is already aggregated into one place.

So let’s see, who still has the largest local online audience, that is still growing (for now)?

News organizations have the local online audience, which they have completely failed to monetize the way they did in print with classifieds.  But what if they could return to that lost business model? What if they could actually “reclaim” that business from Craiglist? What if they could monetize their still dominant local audience by becoming THE consumer destination for real-time offers, deals, and product info from local businesses, the way they were in print.

Our new product — BreakingPromos: The Real-Time Marketplace — is for anyone who wants to monetize local audiences as scalably and profitably as newspapers once did with classifieds, whether that be newspapers themselves, or someone else who gets there first.

BreakingPromos solves the intersection of the local merchant, consumer, and local media company problems:

The simplicity of BreakingPromos speaks for itself, so this is what it looks like (currently mocked up, using real product, for the news org Bakersfield Californian, which will go live as our first partner in the next couple of weeks):

Your first reaction may/should be, this looks like Twitter, and that’s exactly the point.  If you know how to post on Twitter or Facebook, you know how to advertise with BreakingPromos.

All local businesses have to do — right here in this widget, embedded on Bakersfield Californian’s site — is type a promotion into the box, add a photo that they took in their store with a phone, and BOOM, they have advertised with the simplest form of advertising anywhere on the web.

BreakingPromos are automatically posted to Twitter (and soon Facebook, Google+, etc).  But the advertising happens right here, right on the news site’s page.  Everything is powered by Publish2’s technology and content platform (since this is a content-driven ad format — more on that in minute).

So all BreakingPromos become Tweets, Facebook updates, etc.  But only posts submitted in this widget/page appear here as BreakingPromos because:

1. Local businesses can see what all their competitors are doing
2. All the consumers are here, to see in real time, all in one place:

• Happy hour deals
• Sales on new spring fashions
• Real estate open houses

etc.

Consumers can login (e.g. with their Twitter and/or Facebook credentials) to the same widget/page to Retweet, Favorite, Like, etc. and to email the offer to themselves to bring into the store.

The ROI for local merchants is that simple.  Consumers see the BreakingPromo and bring it into the store, on their mobile phones. When loaded on a phone, this widget will become a mobile app.  And the implications of BreakingPromos for mobile advertising are huge!

Imagine local businesses taking a picture of their product on their phones, and then typing in a quick BreakingPromo, and BOOM they’ve advertised right there via their phones. In short, we think BreakingPromos will be for local advertisers what Instagram was for consumers!

Imagine consumers out on a Friday after work, on their phones, browsing BreakingPromos from local bars and restaurants, who are all competing in real time for their businesses.  Or real estate agents and buyers out on Sunday afternoon looking for open houses.

With BreakingPromos, there’s no need to “follow and/or friend” 100s of local businesses to keep up with their offers. There’s now ONE place you can go to, whenever you want, to find out what’s happening in real time.

We’ve now combined Bakersfield Californian’s dominant online audience with the simplest form of advertising that any local business can do, into a hugely valuable consumer destination — a real-time marketplace.

The purchase is handled by Amazon Payments (like Kickstarter, etc.), which nearly everyone in the market is already signed up for.

Let me be clear about this — we are not selling Tweets, or Facebook posts, etc.  The local business is buying BreakingPromos directly from the site where the widget appears, i.e. they are buying audience to reach new customers.  Merchants are buying access to the BreakingPromos real-time marketplace that the local site has created by leveraging their audience.  The tweet or the Facebook update is just the format for the ad.  It’s the simplicity of that format that makes it accessible to any local business. But we’re not pulling any value from Twitter and Facebook. We are pushing it. As such, we aim to become a valuable participant within Twitter and Facebook’s third-party ecosystem.

Publish2 takes a revenue share cut for facilitating BreakingPromos purchase transactions between the local business and the local news site.  Amazon handles the transaction automatically.  The ad format and the purchasing model are so simple, that everyone can make money while they sleep. Local sites don’t need to allocate any back office FTEs.  They simply set up an Amazon Payment accounts through Publish2’s back end.

With such a low price point, the key to making money is volume.  For that, we tap into the deeply competitive nature of local businesses:

• Bars and restaurants competing for customers at Happy Hours
• Clothing stores competing with sales
• Real estate agents competing for home buyers
• Auto dealers competing for car buyers

Any merchant can come to the BreakingPromos page and see, in real time, what their competition is doing.  All new BreakingPromos are posted to the top of the Category, pushing older ones down.  After a fixed time frame (e.g. 24 hours), they will disappear from the widget entirely.

It’s easy to see the game mechanics that can kick in here.  You see your competitor at the top of your category, so you post a BreakingPromo to push them down.  If your BreakingPromo gets pushed down too far, you have to post another one.  Think Zynga and AdWords/AdSense, i.e. millions/billions of dollars in revenue generated a dollar (or even pennies) at time through addictive gaming behavior and market dynamics.

“We think BreakingPromos will work well on multiple levels,” said Logan Molen, SVP & COO at the Bakersfield Californian. “It’s a simple but effective way to deliver a stream of interesting content to our network of local websites, it can generate revenue from customers that previously couldn’t afford our products and it exposes local businesses to new customers. That’s a lot of win-win.”

You’re probably wondering now how we’re going to solve the chicken/egg problem of driving enough consumer attention to the BreakingPromos destination page to drive the local business posting activity that will draw more consumers, and create the virtuous cycle that drives scale.

Our answer is the Ticker:

Like the Meebo Bar, the BreakingPromos Tickers floats above the site (so you can scroll the page freely behind it), appearing at the bottom of every page.  Formatted like a cable news ticker, our ticker streams the consumer value the local businesses are posting, giving merchants incredibly valuable exposure for such a low price point.

The ticker has one overarching goal — drive consumers to the BreakingPromos real-time marketplace destination page on the news site.  When you click on a BreakingPromo in the ticker it takes you not only to the category, but also opens the specific BreakingPromo, so the consumer can immediately Retweet, Favorite, Email (Like, +1, etc.)

The final element of the business model is Publish2’s role in the transaction between the local merchant and the local news site.  It’s a simple revenue share, where the customers of Publish2’s other products (HTML5 tablet app, web-to-print workflow, content distribution, etc.) have a distinct advantage:

• If you’re a customer of Publish2’s other products, you keep 70% of BreakingPromos revenue
• Everyone else keeps 50% of BreakingPromos revenue

But even if you’re not a customer of Publish2’s other products, there are no upfront set up fees or anything like that, it’s pure revenue share, just like AdSense.  But as Laura Sellers-Early, Director of Digital Audience at East Oregonian Publishing Co (another early adopter of BreakingPromos), so eloquently put it:

“We are really excited about this. This may be the next Google AdSense, but we control the money. Nice!”

Any of the hundreds of local media companies already set up in Publish2 can implement BreakingPromos in a matter of hours.  Anyone new to Publish2 can be up and running in a day or so.  Ultimately, it’s as easy as implementing AdSense (i.e. just requires figuring out strategy for placement, categories, etc.).

Let me explain further the role that the Publish2’s platform plays in creating BreakingPromos, in concert with social media platform APIs.

We are leveraging the Twitter API (and soon Facebook and Google+) to enable easy login and dead simple account creation for local businesses, and to “simul-post” BreakingPromos to Twitter (Facebook, Google+, etc).  Consumers can Retweet, Favorite, and reply to BreakingPromos right in the widget.  They can also follow merchants via the profile:

We believe BreakingPromos has a lot to contribute to the Twitter developer ecosystem — in fact, we choose to integrate with Twitter first in part because we greatly respect what Twitter CEO Dick Costolo has done to foster a healthy developer ecosystem.

In fact, if you think of Promoted Tweets as Twitter’s equivalent of Google AdWords, i.e. monetizing Twitter’s own audience on its properties, BreakingPromos is like AdSense for Twitter, by enabling local news sites to monetize their audiences with the simple but extremely powerful social media format.

That being said, all the heavy lifting for the BreakingPromos product is handled by the Publish2 content platform, which we’ve spent 4 years and nearly $6 million developing.  The widgets, categories, and all the posting, tracking, and commerce around BreakingPromos is all powered by the Publish2 application and database.  We’re storing BreakingPromos in our database, then sending to Twitter (and Facebook, Google+, etc.).

A few examples of how we’ve leveraged the Publish2 platform:

1. Widget Creator

Creating a widget is a snap with our widget creator. It’s entirely self-serve, easily configurable:

2. Custom Categories

News organizations (or anyone with local audience), can define the categories in the widget to match the local market.  Large markets could create a widget for each neighborhood (e.g. Santa Monica in LA). You can create a widget for niche sites, e.g. moms, pets, sports, and categorize for those verticals.   You can start with one category, restaurants for example, and target those businesses to build up activity.  Create a General category to catch other activity, and spin up new categories as activity reaches critical mass.

3. Advertiser Tracking

Publish2 will provide detailed tracking of advertisers in each widget, segmenting businesses by category.  Local sites will be able to plan and optimize their strategy for targeting merchants.

4. Facilitating Amazon Transaction

Setting up an Amazon Payment account for a local news site to receive payments from businesses buying BreakingPromos is also entirely self-serve.

The advertiser account and BreakingPromos purchase pages that you see above appearing seamlessly in the widget are all Publish2 application pages.  The accounting for BreakingPromos, how many purchased, how many remaining, etc., is all handled by Publish2.

Here’s the other key advantage of the Publish2 platform at the center of the BreakingPromos real-time marketplace.

If BreakingPromos is adopted across 100s (or 1000s) of local sites, we see a huge opportunity to leverage data and market feedback to optimize the model, the same way that Google optimized AdWords/AdSense.

For that reason, we need to establish a baseline of consistency across all sites using BreakingPromos.  So we are making three elements requirements:

1. Publish2 controls the pricing
2. Use of the Ticker
3. Use of the BreakingPromos brand

We will work with local sites to optimize the pricing, but we want pricing decisions to be based on data-driven optimization, not arbitrary local decisions.  With our revenue share model, our incentives are perfectly aligned with local sites.

It’s easy to imagine premium pricing models:

- Premium rates for bar/restaurants to post BreakingPromos 3-6pm on Fridays (happy hour), or the real estate category 2-4pm on Sundays (open houses) — essentially, dayparting

- Premium to appear in the ticker, across every page of the local site.

We’re requiring the ticker because we believe it is the best way to harness a local site’s existing audience to quickly scale a huge local audience for BreakingPromos.

We’re requiring the BreakingPromos brand because we want to establish consistent consumer product recognition across markets.  If I live in DC and travel to LA, I know I can find BreakingPromos in LA, same as I have in DC.

Which gets to the question of where consumers will seek BreakingPromos in each market. For that, we believe this is a first-in, winner-take-all opportunity.  Once a local site achieves a critical mass of local business activity and consumer engagement, it will be very difficult for a competing site to break in.  As such, we are eager to work with whichever player in each market wants to move first to capitalize on this opportunity.

If you made it this far, I hope this means you’re as excited about BreakingPromos as we are. Look for announcements of our first live implementations across the next few weeks.

Interested in a live demo of BreakingPromos?  Drop us a line: contact@publish2.com

​”You can’t fix what you won’t admit is wrong.” says Digital First Media CEO John Paton of the newspaper industry. That much needed tough love applies to the newspaper industry’s struggle with legacy editorial systems. (The title of this post is inspired by the title of of a recent talk by Paton.)

Newspaper executives have been sold on content hub solutions by the “old dogs” of news industry technology — the print editorial system vendors — whose “new tricks” are failing because they are implementing clouds solutions with desktop software architecture.

​Executives at news companies are beginning to realize, to their dismay, that although these print editorial system vendors have slick brochures, their cloud content hub solutions are mostly “smoke and mirrors” (to quote an executive).

News executives bought into these print-CMSs-in-cloud-clothing because neither they nor their IT executives have little basis to understand why the desktop editorial software they have used for so many years can’t simply be put into the cloud. Creating a dynamic network across newsrooms requires an entirely different software architecture, which legacy editorial system vendors could only create by completely rewriting their software from scratch… which none of them has done.

​The first step for news executives to admitting that they have a serious technology problem is understanding why the technology they have is wrong. News executives previously didn’t have to understand much about technology, but as Silicon Valley has driven the convergence of media and technology at an accelerating rate, all media companies must be as savvy about technology as they are about content.

​A simple way to understand why legacy editorial system vendors can’t deliver cloud content solutions is to draw an analogy to office productivity software. Imagine if Microsoft took the desktop version of Office — Word, Excel, PowerPoint — and put it on server. Would that be the equivalent of Google Apps, a web application designed from the core to enable collaboration in the cloud?

Of course not. In fact, Microsoft, with its massive development resources, only released a cloud version of Office last year — that’s how hard it is and how long it takes to re-architect desktop software for the cloud. Yet legacy print CMS vendors have been selling cloud content hubs for years — how much re-architecting do you think they did?

Based on what we’ve heard about the struggles that news companies have had with these legacy print CMS content hubs — even just keeping them from crashing constantly — not very much re-architecting at all.

Content management in the cloud, connecting disparate systems, workflows, content formats and types, is a complex problem — one that is too often beyond software not originally designed to solve it.

To make matters worse, implementing a single CMS that promises to do everything has proven to be a disastrous decision. But the alternative — a network that connects legacy and new systems with a flexible cloud-native architecture — was not a solution the old dogs could deliver.

As Paton said, “I meant what I said earlier when I used the word struggle.”

News companies have invested millions of dollars in “crappy” hacked technology with fundamentally bad architecture. How hard do you think it is for news executive to admit that they have a fundamental problem?

Very.

But to quote Paton again:

“We ignore this at the risk of killing our business but worse we ignore it when the solution to our future is sitting under our noses if… we would only let go of the past and embrace the future.”

Couldn’t have said it better. The news industry needs Paton-like truth telling about their core content technology. And the solutions are right under the industry’s nose — content platforms architected from the ground up to bring the news industry into the cloud, to create dynamic networks that turn siloed newsrooms into a fully integrated news operation.

Unfortunately, the politics of bad technology decisions have left some of the largest news company scrambling to overcome the failings of “smoke and mirrors” products. But even these problems can be overcome with properly architected technology — not by abandoning failed platforms, but by filling in the gaps.

The news industry is beginning to embrace Jon Paton’s tough message about what’s broken and how to fix it. Hopefully, they will soon begin to embrace his message as it applies to broken content management technology.

The news industry’s digital transformation is being thwarted and outright threatened by legacy editorial and content management systems that were not designed to build a bridge from old to new.  Here are seven ways that legacy CMSs are hurting the news industry:

1. Creating content in a print editorial system is NOT digital-first
Many print editorial system vendors have convinced newsrooms that creating content in a front-end system and then “sending” it to the web counts as digital-first. These same newsrooms have used web-native blog software like WordPress to create true-digital first workflows where reporters publish on the web first and continuously update stories.  Excellent workflow tools (e.g. Edit Flow, NYT’s Integrated Content Editor) have been developed for platforms like WordPress that make it truly viable to publish everything digital-first by using a blog or web CMS as the newsroom’s primary CMS.

But this web-first content has no way to make it back into the editorial system for the print workflow… other than copying and pasting, or forcing reporters and editors to recreate these stories. That’s a huge disincentive to being digital-first! It’s telling that most newsrooms still think of this as “reverse publishing” — you can imagine the gears of the legacy editorial system grinding as you try to force it into reverse, but it gets stuck in neutral!

Newsrooms that create content in a print editorial system remain anchored to print-first workflows, and that puts digital products and digital revenue last.

2. No way to efficiently share content or create integrated workflows across newsrooms
Legacy editorial systems, which were designed as siloed desktop software that runs in each newsroom, have hacked an ostensible “content hub” layer on top of their outdated software architecture and sold it to news companies on the promise of internal content sharing.  These print editorial systems masquerading as hub solutions have not only proven notoriously unstable (see 7 below), they have failed to enable any kind of viable workflow for sharing content across newsrooms.

Giving every newsroom access to every other newsroom’s content via a shared database is not a workflow!  Imagine an individual newsroom, or a national desk, rooting through piles of local content to find stories of broader interest.  It’s like stealing from your sibling’s room — it’s a recipe for strife and frustration.

News companies are all focused on transforming from holding companies for local news orgs into fully integrated media companies that can leverage all of their content in new digital products.  Given the strategic importance of integrating newsroom operations, the failure of these print editorial system pseudo-hubs is particularly distressing.

3. Can’t create distinctive apps and mobile products when powered by a web CMS
There is a huge opportunity for news orgs to create apps that are highly differentiated from their websites, to support both a subscription model and premium advertising.  But how is that possible when all that news orgs have to power apps are the feeds from their website?  If content doesn’t go into the web CMS, then it doesn’t go into the app. Forget creating a content package distinct from the website, or curating content from new local and national sources.

For years, news orgs were criticized for “shoveling” print content onto the web. Now legacy CMSs are forcing them to re-shovel content into apps and mobile.

4. Can’t curate new content sources outside the newsroom
Apps like Flipboard and Pulse are seeing huge consumer adoption by aggregating content from top news sources and presenting it in innovative tablet user interfaces. Can news orgs compete? Not if their app is powered by their web CMS!

Outside of commodity wire content, news orgs have no way to aggregate content from new local and national sources because they have no way to get it into their CMS, and so no way to get it into their apps. Local news brands could create compelling new products by combining their original local content with a network of local and national content partners. In fact, they could use new content sources to enhance their print product in parallel.

Unfortunately, their editorial systems assumed that all they would ever use is commodity wire content. FAIL.

5. Downsized newsrooms are drowning in inefficient workflows (copy/paste/email/reformat)
Everyday, we hear about workflows based on copying and pasting from one legacy editorial system or CMS to another, or emailing content from one newsroom to another.  How can you ask newsrooms to do more with less and then ask them to spend hours a day hacking their way around deficiencies in their legacy content management systems? Newsrooms are so beaten down with these hacked workflows that it never even occurs to them that there could be a better way, that content management technology can actually create efficiencies instead of headaches.

6. Can’t integrate with partners and distribution channels
Want to share content with regional partners. Open up that legacy CMS, copy, paste, email. Want to use content from regional partners. Open up your inbox, open the email, copy, paste. Lather, rinse, repeat. Want to distribute content to a new channel or platform? Create an IT project to produce a custom feed — if you’re lucky! With a legacy editorial system, connecting with external partners is as efficient as a game of phone tag.

7. Content hubs built with legacy print editorial systems have been a disaster
Can you imagine in an age of agile cloud software an implementation plan that is slated to take 12-18 months?  That’s how long most news companies have had to budget to roll out print editorial system pseudo-hubs.  It’s desktop software, so if you have 50 newsrooms with thousands of people, that’s a lot of installations!  Hard to imagine in the age of the cloud.  Also hard to imagine that news companies should be in the business of maintaining servers that are more reliable than Amazon Web Services, or maintaining software code that has been hacked to do something it was never designed to do.

So it’s no surprise that these print CMS pseudo-hub implementations have produced notorious failures.  We know of implementations at some of the largest news companies that constantly crash, have horrible 15-year-old Windows desktop user interfaces, and rather than create efficiencies have turned into black hole time sinks.

We Feel Your Pain — There’s a Better Way!
We designed Publish2 for newsrooms to overcome all of these limitations and more, without actually changing any of these legacy editorial systems or spending a dime on upgrading them. When we implement Publish2, we ask the newsroom to imagine their dream digital-first workflows, what would be optimally efficient, and what they never thought possible with their legacy CMS. And then we make it happen, like magic.

Publish2 can:

1. Deliver digital-first content into print CMS wire queues — the newsroom can go digital-first by turning digital content into an internal wire service for print. Newsrooms are free to adopt any blog or web CMS without worrying about integrating with legacy editorial system.
2. Enable seamless sharing of content across newsrooms (including newspapers and broadcast TV) by connecting legacy editorial systems.  No need to purchase expensivee upgrades or spend 12-18 months consolidating on a legacy system that won’t deliver any efficiencies.
3. Power apps and mobile sites that are highly differentiated from desktop websites, with distinct original content and content curated from a network of partners.
4. Enable local and national content partnerships, to create new local products with curated content that engages consumers better than the best Silicon Valley news aggregator startups.
5. Eliminate all copy/pasting/emailing/reformatting from newsroom workflows. Enough is enough!
6. Enable seamless content sharing and distribution. No need to create an API and deploy development resources that you don’t have. With Publish2, you can connect with any partner or platform — it just works.
7. Provide a reliable, scalable, efficient software-as-a-service to enable news orgs’ digital transformation.  That’s all we do.  And that’s why we’re really good at it.

We’re excited to announce the upcoming launch of Publish2 News App, a white label HTML5 tablet app for publishers. We’re following the path blazed by the Financial Times’s HTML5 app, with all the benefits of bypassing app stores: cross-platform, publisher control of user data, no need to share revenue, always the most up-to-date version.

Unlike other app solutions that require publishers to use the app maker’s ad network and share revenue, Publish2′s News App is based on a simple software-as-a-service license fee. For a reasonable fixed annual cost, publishers get all of the upside from monetizing their app.

Publishers Control Monetization

Speaking of monetization, Publish2′s News App is optimized for high CPM video advertising, and not just for video content — News App can monetize text and photos with video ads. We see a huge opportunity with the immersive engagement of tablet apps to monetize text and photo content better than on the desktop web. We will support all third-party ad servers and ad networks, giving publishers full control over ad monetization and without taking a share of the revenue. (We will of couse support display ads as well.)

The same principle of publisher control applies to paid subscriptions. Publish2 News App will integrate with third-party paid subscription services, giving publishers full control over whether and how to charge for their app, making it easy to align with their existing paid content strategy.

User Experience Consumers Will Pay For

Our goal is to help publishers create an app that consumers will pay for by creating a highly engaging user interface for news consumption. Since the iPad appeared, numerous tablet app aggregators have launched, focused on innovating news consumption to create user experiences worth paying for. Publish2 News App enables every publisher to compete with the user experience innovations of these tablet app aggregators, so that they can retain full control of the consumer relationship, but without incurring high development costs.

Speaking of aggregation, our News App is powered entirely by Publish2 feeds. That means publishers can create an even better user experience by complementing their own original content with content curated from a network of new content sources: sister publications, regional partners, alternative newswires, local blogs, local businesses, and more.

As to white labeling, publishers will be able to fully customize the app’s look and feel, to match the color pallet, typography, and design of their publication.  Publishers will also have full control over the app’s consumer-facing delivery — the app can be hosted on the publisher’s servers or on a dedicated cloud hosting account.  As with all software-as-a-service, Publish2 will maintain and update the app code, so publishers and their readers will always have the most up-to-date version.

Here are the highlights of Publish2 News App in brief:

Cross-platform HTML5 app that creates an experience fully equivalent to that of a native code appWhite label solution can be customized to match publisher’s colors, fonts, and design aesthetic 

Hosted software-as-a-service always has the most current app code, no need for users to download updates

App powered entirely by Publish2 feeds, combining publisher’s content with content curated from Publish2′s network

App user experience optimized for displaying high CPM video ads, for both text and photo content

Publishers have full control over user data (in contrast to Apple’s iTunes app store)

App will integrate with third-party paid subscription services

Simple, annual software-as-a-service license fee avoids the need to share subscription or advertising revenue

Here is a live demo of the Publish2 HTML5 Tablet App for Publishers.

How many times today did someone in your newsroom copy and paste content from one system to another? Or move content by logging into multiple systems or emailing files around to editors?

How much time did your newsroom staff waste today overcoming the inefficiencies of your internal systems, redoing work that had already been done, or chasing after content from partner or sister newsrooms?

Think about the real cost of inefficiency in your newsroom. If you added up all those wasted hours every day, across a year, what would they amount to? What could your newsroom afford if it wasn’t paying for that inefficiency? Depending on the size and number of newsrooms, that wasted time could add up to hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars per year.

With the staff reductions of recent years, newsrooms simply can’t afford to waste time. It’s a top of mind issue across all the newsrooms we talk to.

Everyday we hear stories of workflows accomplished through tedious copying and pasting. Reporters enter breaking news stories into the web CMS, where they create headlines, subheads, breakouts, and info boxes, and then editors have to start all over from scratch in the print editorial system. Or web producers labor to manually recreate on the web what editors have already spent hours of the day creating for print.

Every newsroom has to update their website throughout the day, publish content into new tablet apps, engage with their community in social media, and still put out the paper. The problem is that these workflows are fundamentally separate, rather than being an integrated daily news operation.

We also hear over and over that partner and sister newsrooms are emailing content back and forth, calling each other up to chase after copy. There are so many high value content sources that editors can tap into outside of the newsroom, but it costs them hours to go out and fetch it, rather than have the content come to them as the traditional newswire has always done.

These are hours that reporters and editors could be spending on creating original content. How much more content could your newsroom have produced today if editors and reports hadn’t wasted so much time with inefficient workflows?

The newsroom has always prided itself on efficiency, because nothing less than the most efficient operation could get a newspaper to press everyday. But the staff reductions, the demands of the web and other digital platforms, and the ad hoc nature of new content partnerships have taken a huge toll on newsroom efficiency.

That’s why Publish2 has been focused on solving newsroom inefficiency by addressing one of the key root causes: disconnected systems.

Simply by syncing a newsroom’s existing print editorial system and web CMS, we can save newsrooms hours a day in lost productivity. By connecting the newsroom’s publishing systems, then, to those of sister newsrooms, content sharing partners, and alternative news sources, we eliminate emailing content back and forth, more rounds of copying and pasting, ad hoc phone calls in search of content and permission, and yet more copying and pasting from third-party websites.

With all publishing systems connected through Publish2, all content gets created once and is then synced across all systems, within your newsroom and across newsrooms.

Suddenly the time savings starts to be measured in FTEs.

Think about how your newsroom could redeploy that staff time. What new products could your newsroom create? What new revenue opportunities would you be better positioned to pursue, especially if the gains in efficiency come from an integrated content workflow?

Every newsrooms should make it a top priority to remove all copy and pasting and emailing from their workflow and enable content, both internal and external, to flow efficiently across all platforms. That’s a critical step in transforming the newsroom into an agile organization positioned for growth.