With the launch of Kaiser Health News, the Kaiser Family Foundation now offers newspapers and bloggers a free, editorially independent source of high-quality, in-depth reporting on health issues. To the publications industry, it could be a peek at the future of content creation and distribution.

Health policy wonk and Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein writes that the Kaiser Health News model “cleaves content production from distribution.” For Klein, this resembles the wire service model that Agence France-Presse pioneered in 1835 and AP and Reuters follow to this day. But without “the artificial strictures that the wire services place on themselves (short, dry, etc).”

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Conference season begins in spring, and two in particular will interest publications and Web content managers:

A Knowledge Sharing Summit for Online Professionals
May 5 – 7 in Philadelphia

J Boye, the conference organizer, says participants will consist of: Read the rest of this entry »

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Potential donors know what they want to see on the Website of a worthy cause. Yet fewer than half of nonprofits put that information on their home pages.

Those are among the key findings of a recent study by usability guru Jakob Nielsen. If he is right, nonprofits leave a huge amount of money on the table. Today, they receive about 10 percent of their donations online, a figure destined to balloon to over 50 percent by 2020, by Nielsen’s estimate.

Nielsen paired similar nonprofits’ sites and observed how users interacted with each of them as they decided which should receive their donations.  Those observations revealed that by far the most important factor in users’ decisions was whether or not the organization offered a clear explanation of its mission, goals, objectives, and work prominently on its home page.

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Are social media like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn causing a revolution in business development? At his blog conversation marketing, internet marketer Ian Lurie waded in to the discussion with a provocative post that caused, in the author’s words, a bit of a kerfuffle. Excerpted with permission.

Before we all get swept up in the hype around social this and media that, it pays to step back, take a deep breath, and get some perspective:

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Disappearing newspapers give rise to anguished discussions about impacts on the democratic process — who will keep an eye on the shysters at city hall, who will speak for the disenfranchised?

Business is different. Even massive dislocations get taken in stride. Unlike the newspaper industry, B2B consultants figure that as long as there are Bs needing to talk to other Bs, there will be B2B publishing. The question is simply what will it look like?

Not like today, according to publishing consultant Paul Conley. Giant print B2B publishers are mired in debt, and Websites aren’t selling enough ads. And so, polishing his crystal ball in a newsletter article for the American Society of Business Publications Editors, Conley predicts that when the dust settles in 2010, we’ll see that five B2B journalistic entities have moved up the ladder to dominate the market: Read the rest of this entry »

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One of the reasons I love my job is the different kinds of people I have the opportunity to interact with. Over the past year, I’ve met with entrepreneurs, thought leaders, agency executives, top marketers, social media gurus, publishing veterans, authors and others—all with particular insights and challenges about how to sell more, do more and be more.

If 2008 was the year social media went mainstream, 2009 should be the year of content marketing, the corporation as media company, the brand as publisher and broadcaster. Why? Because everyone of those incredibly intelligent people I met with, in some way or another, told me that the difference for brands who make it versus those that don’t will be relevance. How can we, as brands, be relevant to our customers? How can we create and develop real relationships with them? How do we engage?

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What better time to introduce a new product or service than when people really care about value? Like now, for instance.

This is the point that Andrew Razeghi makes in his article “Innovating Through Recession.” Razeghi, who teaches at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern, asserts that innovations are not only more necessary and valuable during a downturn, but also easier and cheaper to manage than at other times. Some notable examples:

• In February 1930, just months after the great stock market crash, Henry Luce launched Fortune magazine. Over the next seven years, subscribers rose from 30,000 to 460,000. Fortune succeeded, Razeghi says, because it “made a uniquely important contribution to its customers’ lives” with articles they could find nowhere else.
• Miracle Whip, introduced by Kraft at the 1933 World’s Fair, gave consumers a scintillating alternative to mayonnaise at a time when limited family income often meant tedious meals.
• Applying the same basic principle to women’s cosmetics, Charles Revson and his colleagues introduced a glossy line of nail polish in shades never seen before.

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As a former newspaper journalist, I’m delighted whenever I see new media spring up where the now-depleted daily press once held a monopoly.

We assist clients in putting out state newsletters, so we’ve been enjoying the healthy crop of websites devoted to state legislative news. For example, no fewer than three websites put out state legislative news. Each is a little different:

• The National Conference of State Legislatures website is explicitly for insiders—legislators and staffs.
• Stateline.org, published by the Pew Center on the States, is for the rest of us.
• And Statenet serves subscribers who need to know details about any piece of state legislation in the U.S. As opposed to the first two, which are do-it-yourself, this custom news service is kind of like hiring a personal shopper.

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A hazard of home decorating is being asked by a spouse to pick a favorite from 30 shades of white.

Similar difficulties emerge when researching requirements—or even definitions—for green (environment-friendly) publishing and having to understand subtle differences among suppliers, service providers, and certifications. In this context, the risk is worse than picking the wrong wall shade, it’s thinking and claiming that you’re green when you’re not—and perhaps even being accused of “greenwashing”.

A recent meeting of the Society of National Association Publishers featured a panel discussion of “Trends in Green Publishing” which addressed both business and societal/environmental issues. Derek Smith of Derek Smith & Associates noted that paper production is the leading consumer of forestry products and water and the third-largest energy user. He described how rapid world-wide deforestation increases global warming and loss of biodiversity.

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If any of your colleagues are less than 100 percent enthusiastic about your Web projects, here is how to light a fire under them:

Share the latest findings of the Digital Future Project (PDF), conducted for the past seven years by the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California.

Start with this:

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