During Hurricane Sandy this week I doubt I was the only east coast reader concerned about how I would read when the electricity went out. My Kindle and iPad were charged but I knew the iPad wouldn't last long if faced with days of lost power. My trusty Kindle would serve me well but my aggregated news on Flipboard would be missed. Power outage gave me a glimmer of hope that I could catch up on some long-form journalism in its print form (New Yorker) and plan my holiday menu (Bon Appetit). I chuckled thinking how my friend who is adamant about reading print only was not wasting mental energy on this internal discussion. Powered with candles and print, he was prepared for a lovely time. 

At a time when major publishers are selecting "digital only" as a solution to plummenting subscriptions and ad sales, the devil is in the details. Electric outages are an obvious problem and real concern if your business delivers exclusively to digital products. There's also the issue of ad revenue in the digital sphere compared with print. Data from PricewaterhouseCoopers illustrate that ad revenue from digital products will double from 2011 to 2016 and print will experience small growth. But the dollar value from print ads eclipses digital:

Now combine competition into this story. Looking at Newsweek's decision to go digital only in 2013 is somewhat shortsighted when you consider all the online competition competing for smaller digital advertising dollars. 

Digital only is not the golden ticket....yet. Publishers (media, trade, educational, STM, legal) still need a strong print presence both for the obvious reasons (national electric power grid, customer demographics) and the other obvious reasons (ad revenue, customer demographics!).

We've been conducting a year-long survey with publishers and media organizations to assess digital revenue metrics along with technology adoption decisions. So far, the majority of our respondents indicate that digital revenue is exceeding print revenue. 

Does this mean these publishers are creating more digital products than print products? That answer is still to be determined. We also ask publishers to indicate all the outputs expected to be a focus in the future. At the moment both print and ebooks are tied with 88.9% of respondents indicating that print and digital books are important. Web products have a slight increase at 91.1%.

Our big takeaway from the preliminary results to the 2012 publishers' survey do indicate something we've maintained for years. No matter your revenue streams from published products, a single-source multi-channel publishing process is key to satisfying customers along with the bottom line.

As you're cleaning up from the hurricane and recharging your electronic devices think about how your organization is setting itself up and share your input. We'll reveal all the results to this survey in an upcoming webinar in December. 

Let us know the devilish details that your organization faces.

Epson America offers an extensive array of award-winning image capture and image output products for the consumer, photographic, business, and graphic arts markets. Epson chose DocZone DITA, a SaaS-based XML component content management system designed for technical documentation teams, to move themselves from unstructured content to structured content for publication in multiple output types, author content at topic level instead of document level, store the content in a CMS for easy reuse and change tracking, and much more.

Join us on November 8th, 2012 at 2pm EST to ask any questions you may have as well as to learn about Epson America and how their workflow has changed due to using DocZone.

Webinar: Wednesday, October 24, 2012

1:00 PM - 2:00 PM EDT

The premise of all publishing organizations is to provide quality content in a format that customers desire. Ask any copy editor about house style and you can anticipate a lengthy and thoughtful response. Authors too expect nothing but perfection when transforming intellectual property into a print or digital product. So how do successful publishing organizations blend automation into workflows without sacrificing quality? In this webinar, we’ll reveal some interesting truths around quality control and provide tips that you can bring back to your office.

Join panelists Mike Edson and John Corkery from the DETI Group.

Register here

The American Society for Training & Development (ASTD) is the world’s largest association dedicated to workplace learning and development professionals. ASTD’s members come from more than 100 countries and connect locally in more than 125 U.S. chapters and with more than 20 international partners. Members work in thousands of organizations of all sizes, in government, as independent consultants, and suppliers.

On an annual basis, ASTD publishes approximately 20 books, 150 monthly newsletters, a monthly and a quarterly magazine as well as 5 research reports in addition to numerous conferences. While a member organization, ASTD is also a niche market publisher. ASTD needed to find a better way to publish and provide content to its members.

ASTD hired RSI Content Solutions to provide both a content management platform as well as a digital publishing strategy that would bring content to the market in a timely manner. RSuite CMS provided an enterprise metadata framework that allowed ASTD end users the ability to find content based on standardized metadata fields as opposed to using text search applications as they did in the past.

Business Goal:
• Find a better way to publish and provide content to its members.

Results:
• Ability to build new businesses beyond just publishing.
• Can now apply metadata tools to tag documents in a highly contextualized manner.
• Tagged more than 2,000 chapters of books and 2,000 magazine articles drastically reducing production.

"RSuite provides to me and to my organization, a really strong core. That means I can really, really quickly iterate and make very fast changes that are going to drive the value within my organization"

--Anthony Allen, Director of Digital Media, American Society for Training & Development

A couple years ago there was an article from wsj.com under the Cubical Culture section that struck a chord with me: “Management to IT: We don’t like you either.” As evidenced by the title, the inherent conflict between IT and management is never ending. And even though the article was published 5 years ago, we still see the conflict arise in many publishing and media organizations.

Management today at many companies expect more out of IT organizations than in previous years. It's no longer acceptable to request an 18- to 24-month project life cycle and not show a return on investment quickly. If IT continues to do these types of things, they will render themselves useless and out of a job. The old days of “we can build it better than any product on the market” is long gone.

For publishers I have seen a shift over the past 5 years related to this build-vs-buy mindset. If your IT organization is still touting that they can do it better, cheaper, faster by building a critical system (e.g., CMS) from scratch… run, run away as fast as you can. Given the wealth of tool sets available and the openness of many products on the market, why would an organization ever take the build-it-from-scratch approach? I'm genuinely interested in this and welcome your dialogue in the comments section.

I’m not biased when I make these statements. I’ve seen a renewed interest by publishers to license a product and show a return on investment quickly. This has been our mantra since day one with RSuite CMS. Our goal was to make a highly configurable CMS that can manage any content and be operational in a short period of time (under 12 weeks) to meet core requirements. Yes, there will be some organizations that require 12-month projects to migrate from one system to the next, but overall the trend has been implementing a new system, even for larger projects, in a much shorter time frame. The only way IT will be able to handle this shortened timeline is to license a software product that meets 70% of their core requirements pretty much out of the box such as RSuite CMS.

I can certainly understand why IT organizations at publishers want to build their own CMS. First, it’s fun to build software. Second, it gives more of a feeling of accomplishment than integrating third-party software. Finally, a programmer can have a job for life just making endless changes to the software (ok, that was a cheap shot).

Management today needs to understand that IT does have value and IT needs to understand that management has the right to ask questions. Reducing the stress between these organizations is critical to publishers making the right technology choices and implementing new systems on time and within budget.

Let us show you how RSuite CMS satifies management's desire to demonstrate ROI on CMS investment and IT's desire to play with cool technology.

Since the story broke early this morning, newsfeeds, blogs, and web sites are buzzing with the news that Newsweek will go digital only on December 31, 2012.

Tina Brown, editor in chief, explained "We are transitioning Newsweek, not saying goodbye to it," Brown said. "We remain committed to Newsweek and to the journalism that it represents. This decision is not about the quality of the brand or the journalism -- that is as powerful as ever. It is about the challenging economics of print publishing and distribution."

Brown cites a Pew Research Center report that found 39% of Americans get news from an online source. And indeed that percentage will increase in the coming years. Transitioning the organization now to digital only will help secure the foundation Newsweek laid in 1933 when the publication began.

RSI Content Solutions has been recognized by the Philadelphia Business Journal as a best place to work in the Philadelphia region. This is the 8^th time the company has received this recognition from its staff and the Philadelphia Business Journal.

The Philadelphia Business Journal’s Best Place to Work program receives hundreds of entries each year and only ten companies in each of five categories are recognized.  Each company is evaluated on overall benefits and creative employee programs. Results from an extensive employee survey are calculated to determine recognition and ranking.

“Co-founder Lisa Bos and I made a commitment to our employees and our clients when we started this company,” stated Barry Bealer, president and CEO at RSI Content Solutions.  “We wanted to offer a stimulating and rewarding work environment that would parlay into outstanding publishing solution software for our customers. Recognition like this leads me to believe we are on the right path.”

The Philadelphia Business Journal's research partner, Wichita, Kansas-based Quantum Market Research tabulated the results of thousands of online surveys completed by employees to establish the rank order. Common themes among top companies focused on work-life balance; respect and caring for employees; recognition of accomplishments; feeling empowered; good teamwork and commitment to community.

To learn more about RSI Content Solutions, please visit www.rsicms.com.

RSI Content Solutions and Data Conversion Laboratory are collecting input on the state of technology adoption and digital revenue metrics from publishing and media organizations. We want to understand and analyze how publishers are approaching the digital landscape to benefit customers and recognize increased revenue from multi-channel publishing. We've created a quick survey to gather input and will share the results of this survey at our November webinar. Additionally, everyone who takes the survey is entered in a drawing for a $100 American Express gift card. The winner of the drawing will be announced here on this blog.

Here's what you need to do to take part:

• Complete publishers' survey

• Register for our webinar to see the survey results on November 14th

Going to Frankfurt Book Fair? Wunderbar!

RSuite CMS is a content management system for publishers to create, manage, transform, and deliver a digital future. Visit our publishing technologists in Frankfurt and see how RSuite 4.0, powered by MarkLogic, provides a publishing solution to manage the entire life cycle of your content.

We invite you and your colleagues to join us along with our partner MarkLogic in Hall 4.2 | Stand K429. Learn how some of the world's leading publishers are harnessing the power of RSuite CMS to achieve a multi-channel digital publishing solution.

Join us for a Drinks Reception on Wednesday 10 Oct at 16:30 at our stand.

If you are unable to attend but would like to discuss how RSuite CMS will help your organisation, please contact Sarah Silveri at tel: +1 610 276 1375. Click here to visit RSuite CMS at Hall 4.2 | Stand K429

“RSuite CMS combined with the DITA for Publishers framework is helping us achieve the holy grail of single-source publishing: XML content automatically delivered to InDesign and to multiple ebook delivery formats. The transformations from structured content to designed content have been seamless, allowing our staff to focus on content and product development.”

“We see RSuite as a key technology that will allow us to implement industrial strength content management, including version control and automated content distribution, to best support our digital publishing program.”

“Our editorial process was labor intensive, and the problem couldn't be fixed by adding more people. With RSuite CMS, we get our product in the hands of customers faster, which makes us competitive with the bigger publishers with deeper pockets.”