The Modern Journalist

IDG: Transforming Print to Online

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The New York Times has a story about that traces how IDG, one of the largest tech news publishers, turned InfoWorld from a failing print magazine into a wildly profitable online-news operation.

There’s two things that stand out to me from this piece:

1. how incredibly “duh” much of what the IDG folks say, which is annoying because that’s how you know you have a good idea. When people tell you how obvious your answer is, you’ve generally hit on something good; and
2. how counter-intuitive some of their advice sounds (eg, the web allows you to follow exactly what your audience wants, but you shouldn’t just give your audience what it wants)

The biggest reason for success, though, is a management structure that was not only committed to making the online transition, but also made it clear to employees where there was a print and online components that the days of NOT working together were over.

Yet even CIO has adopted what its managers call an “online first” business model. Three years ago, the editorial staff was divided into three people who worked on the Web site only and the rest only on print. Today, there are no print and Web barriers. The total staff size, at 23, is one fewer than in 2005, but now most of them spend 80 percent of their time on the Web, while a handful of writers spend 80 percent of their time on the long centerpiece articles in the print magazine.

I don’t know if people truly understand how fiscally — and structurally — important it is for there to be one editorial team and vision. Reducing redundancy saves money, which is always a concern for businesses. However, making the commitment that the Web is as important as the print produce is structurally important as well since many print folks have some weird aversion to writing online. They act as if it’s a demotion.

At Technology Review (*flip alert*), we had the option of firing those people who wanted to simply write for one medium. In a modern world, it’s ridiculous to keep people around who believe their work is only necessary in one medium. The economics don’t scale — and if you do the transition correctly, the writers don’t write more, they write better for the medium that the story works best.

But everyone writes for the Web these days. “It’s only fair to people for their career development,” said Michael Friedenberg, the president of CIO. “How can you say to anyone, in this environment, that they can only write in print and not online?”

The only part of the story I disagree with — and I had this fight at Technology Review with my boss Jason — is the assessment that you can’t write in-depth stories online or that you must create chunks that people can easily digest (top 10 lists, for instance).

The web — like any other medium — can be used for whatever you want, as long as you do it well. I think we find that people don’t read long stories online not because they won’t, but because the stories aren’t written well.

But that’s an opinion for another time.