Digital Magazine and Newspaper Editions: Best Practice Cases
Nstein
Content Infrastructure and Digital
Publishing
Although many publishers use digital editions as exact or near-
exact replicas of their print editions, a growing number are
using them as a means of repurposing content dynamically and
adding rich media to their publications. At present, digital-
edition vendors are doing most of the work of producing such enhanced digital
editions: publishers hand them the content, and they do the rest.
This may work for some publications that only produce occasional content that is
exclusive to their digital editions or that have few production resources devoted to
digital editions. But as both users and advertisers become more accustomed to digital
editions, the bar of functionality will be raised; they will both come to expect more
dynamic content, more rich media, and more personalization. In other words, the line
between digital editions and Web sites will become blurrier and blurrier.
When this happens, it will be more important than ever for publishers to have a content
infrastructure with the scalability to support multiple dynamic digital products. Among
other things, this will require the use of XML to accommodate different ways of
displaying content; demands for search and personalization will require the ability to
generate a sufficient amount of high-quality, consistent metadata with minimal manual
effort; and publishers will need tools to support multiple workflows with as much
automation as possible in content assembly and production.
The first wave of attempts to build enterprise-wide digital asset management (DAM)
systems, roughly ten years ago, ended with only a few success stories. The reasons for
this included the relative lack of ROI justifications that could be defined and the
difficulty of getting multiple independent operating units to agree on requirements. As
a result, many larger publishers now find themselves with large numbers of small
department- or workgroup-level content management systems, which they have
installed over the last several years to meet near-term needs.
Currently, digital editions are an important driver for scalable and flexible content
infrastructure, along with complex Web site management, syndication feeds, and so on.
In addition, the movement of large publishers from public to private equity ownership
has made it easier to justify investment in content infrastructure without having to
meet the short-term ROI requirements that Wall Street analysts insist on. This has all
led to a recent resurgence of interest in enterprise-level content management.
Publishers are adopting three content infrastructure technologies in particular:
pervasive XML, DAM, and automated metadata creation, also known as text mining.
Although these three technologies have been available for some time as separate
components or tools, recent technologies are bringing them all together — and
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