AOP Conference News

Yes, I went to the AOP Conference yesterday.

No, I didn't blog it live.

Why not?

1. This conference for online publishers was very coy about the fact that there was a free WIFI access code available; the only visible options seemed quite expensive. I could have put it on my expenses but I was feeling churlish in return.
   
2. This conference for online publishers had a very slow WiFi.
   
3. This conference for online publishers did not have power sockets at the tables so I could only use my laptop until the batteries ran out. Then I stopped taking e-notes and scrawled.
4. This conference for online publishers didn't have an awful lot to blog about. And certainly nothing urgent.
   
5. Lots of other people were blogging it quite adequately without my input:

• Patrick Smith: Clay Shirky tells AOP conference: ‘don’t believe in the myth of quality’
• PaidContent: Links to coverage
• Dan Leahul at Brand Republic
• Adam, of course
• and my boss's boss.
  

I generally find conferences overwhelming so have a practice of making myself come away with a few take-home points of things I am going to actually do as a result:

1. Add Wikipedia to the list of subjects of our community outreach programme. Our experts should be contributing to Wikipedia and we should get to know the people who are the key Wikipedia contributors in our business areas.
2. Encourage more regular, scheduled video offerings in our markets (as opposed to ad-hoc ones)
3. Assess potential video offerings in terms of VideoJug's breakdown: Life skills, Immediate need, Special interest, Personal issues, Weird and Wonderful, Expert Advice.
4. Identifying Passion Points - we've been doing it wrong. Ask our research team to come up with a better way of doing it.

The HRSpace Photo Poll

PersonnelToday.com and XpertHR recently launched their new community space aimed at HR professionals.

HRSpace is already building very nicely but while they the team are at the CIPD conference in Harrogate they wanted to take the opportunity to draw attention to it through something a bit different.

The result - a "photo poll". They're asking people to jot down the HR priority for the next 12 months on a card and have their photo taken with it.

Simple but effective on so many levels - real people, a smattering of text, easy to do and quite engaging.

View the slideshow of responses so far here.

Online tools for journalists

We had a meeting this morning to come up with a plan for helping each of our websites to move forward in whatever direction they want.

One of the proposals was for us to "give ourselves" to anyone who wanted us to help them make use of online tools in their journalism.

Happily there have been quite a few posts on the subject recently such as this one and this one to keep me up to date.

But every time I read of someone raving about something I've not heard of before, something inside me wants to cry out, "Stop! Please stop creating new social media tools! Please." I can't keep up. Never heard of dipity before, for example. Please don't make me get my head around any more.

Maybe I need a holiday. Oh, hang on, I just had one.

Oh dear.

"here is life after print — in fact, a better life after print"

A fascinating - and heartening - article in the New York Times about US technology publisher IDG.

The journey beyond print is uncertain and perilous, but the experience of I.D.G., the world’s largest publisher of technology newspapers and magazines, suggests that it can be done. A privately held company, whose magazines include Computerworld, InfoWorld, PC World, Macworld and CIO, it appears to have made a profitable migration to the Internet, with revenue from online ads now surpassing print revenue.

Last year they switched off one of their print editions to create an online-only title:

The biggest single step in the company’s online shift came on April 2, 2007, when the last print edition of InfoWorld appeared and it became a Web-only publication. InfoWorld, a weekly, started out as Intelligent Machines Journal in 1978; I.D.G. bought it a year later, and it has long been one of the company’s flagship magazines.

There were nervous months after the switch as the company awaited the reaction from advertisers and readers, but before long InfoWorld’s Web audience was growing and its business improved. Today, I.D.G. says, the InfoWorld Web site is generating ad revenue of $1.6 million a month with operating profit margins of 37 percent. A year earlier, when it had both print and online versions, InfoWorld had a slight operating loss on monthly revenue of $1.5 million.

The founder and chairman of I.D.G. says: “The excellent thing, and good news, for publishers is that there is life after print — in fact, a better life after print,”

Worth reading the article in full.

The role of the features editor in a digital world

When we talk about the digital journalist it is most often in the context of news reporting (because statistically most of our staff journalists are news people.

But in the back of my mind I often wonder where to begin in describing the role of the features editor in an online context.

Well, here is a good place to start. It's a Reuters online "feature" called "Bearing Witness" to mark five years of the war in Iraq.

It features a timeline, maps, photography and so on and while it's not unflawed (does the whole thing have to be in Flash? How irritating!) it's an excellent illustration of what a good online feature looks like (i.e. not 1,500 words with a few links thrown in).