The May / June issue of InPublishing magazine was published last week. (Not yet on our free mailing list? Register here.) Here are some of my takeaways from it, one from each article:
- Our failure: The workings of the free market have been better at holding Donald Trump to account than the mainstream media. (H/t John Sweeney, interviewed by Ray Snoddy)
- Our opportunity: Publishing has a powerful role to play in countering the flood of low-quality “AI slop” that risks eroding both trust and creativity. (H/t Alastair Lewis)
- Print sustainability: Deep supply chain engagement and making the most environmentally friendly choices at each stage of the manufacturing and distribution process is necessary if publishers are to significantly reduce their magazines’ total carbon footprint. (H/t Jo Beattie)
- Data transformation projects: Realise value early; avoid the big unveil. Don’t beaver away in the corner, creating a big monolithic structure that won’t see the light of day until the go-live date. Show progress early, get people working on it and seeing the benefits. (H/t Tom Lake / Will Bailey; article sponsored by 67 Bricks)
- Paywalls: When deciding on the right paywall approach for your title, bear in mind the need to keep the shop windows open, to allow people to check out your content. (H/t David Higgerson, interviewed by Steve Dyson)
- Experiential’s role: If you’re a big-ticket brand like cars, you can’t attract someone to buy a car just by sending them an email or placing an ad, they’ve got to experience it. (H/t Rob Hunt, interviewed by Ciar Byrne)
- Adding value to conference sessions: emap is using an AI agent to produce live key takeaways summaries and showing them on screen at the end of the session. With large numbers of attendees reaching for phones to take pictures, they know it’s proving popular. (H/t Robin Booth)
- Pulling back the curtain: “Sometimes, AI gets written about in this almost magical way, as if it’s inexplicable. Our job as journalists is to strip away the mystification and ask all the mundane questions we’d ask of any other powerful system.” (H/t Niamh McIntyre in Alan Geere’article)
- Community building: Focus on founding members – getting the right people in from the start is really important. They can play a vital part in nurturing, developing and managing the community. (H/t Venessa Paech in Phil Clark’s article)
- Appeal of print: For readers, it’s the fact that it’s a curated and finite amount of content. For advertisers, it’s the ability to deploy high impact display advertising. (H/t Janet White / Steven Renders; article sponsored by Roularta Printing)
- Publishers’ task in an AI world: “To retain our importance and visibility, we need to build stronger emotional connections with our readers, so that our take on the world is important to them and one they want to hear.” (H/t Carl Myers)
- Journalism under threat: “A far-right, populist, autocratic wave is taking the world by storm and breaking all the rules, and journalists, as in every authoritarian regime or dictatorship, no matter its ideological foundations, are labelled as enemies.” (H/t Carlos Dada)
- Using AI for interviews: AI can be used for research, for transcribing, for summarising, for selecting pull quotes, but never, ever, for original writing. Esquire Singapore please note… (H/t Dickon Ross)
- Cause for hope: Despite the rupturing of the media ecosystem, the industry still holds durable assets that are becoming more valuable in a chaotic environment: trust, brand, community, editorial judgement and first-party relationships. (H/t Jim Bilton)
If you want to read the full issue, then please register here. Once you’ve completed your registration, you’ll be provided with a link to the digital edition.
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