Is content really king?

That's been a concept that has been in and out of vogue ever since the internet showed up to the party. For awhile, distribution was king, then software was king, then networks, then hardware, etc.
Although the whole revolution has not played out, my guess is that the content will prove out to be king.
As Murdoch decides to put all his entities behind a pay wall, that issue will play out and the best content will win, wherever you can get it.

How could printing be necessary -- today?

Many people wonder in this day and age why printing even matters. Isn't everything going to be digital? they ask.
Here is an apocryphal story. A 10 year old girl who would never read anything on paper, according to her father, spent hours one December morning researching where the best place would be to cut down a live christmas tree When she had finally picked out the best spot, she printed the website home page, and then she printed directions to the site.
The point is this: People print what is important.
Perhaps it's in our DNA. I make the analogy to painting. More than 150 years after the invention of photography, putting paint on canvas is still believed to be the most effective way to illustrate reality. Certainly the most valuable, as paintings regularly fetch prices way beyond their relative value before the invention of photography.
That's why printing is so important.

Can you get your IM exactly right?

No.
In fact the individuated media algorithm has yet to be written. We all know that content keeps growing exponentially. As of 2009, Google indexes millions of websites of content. However search is still stuck in 2000, vintage Google, which delivers a hierarchy of headlines and first sentences based on who knows what. It's the search that must be refined. And will.

Will individuated content be hard to find?

Au contraire.
Easy. Easy. Easy.
For instance all the popular magazine articles are expected to be found on one online newsstand. Consolidation has always been the name of the game online. Technology news: Tabbloid.com. Media news: Newsandtech.com. World news: Cnn.com or Yahoo.com or Msnbc.com ro drudgereport.com or huffingtonpost.com.
And that will be true of all content someday -- or it won't be content. All content will be available digitally online. There already is too much to pick from. Not too little. The tools to parse and search all that content from an individual's point of view are becoming more and more sophisticated.

Why is traditional media and advertising broken?

There are many explanations. But the simplest is that there is simply now a better mousetrap: social media. All of us have always weighed the opinions of our friends and neighbors over any media critic or advertising spieler. Now our friends and neighbors have a way of speaking to us -- of characterizing for us -- everything from the war on the other side of the world to, yes, the grill we are thinking about purchasing. Here is a wonderful blog that clearly points out the value of social media in the traditional field of retail research/advice, which, in a simple twist of fate, becomes individuated news: http://www.accrisoft.com/index.php?cid=103167&src=blog&srctype=detail&refno=9&category=Economy&curlid=717

So what was the Pony Express news?

Slow. To say the least.
Not as slow as the boats from England to America at the turn of the 19th century.
Anyway, the telegraph was invented and although at first no one knew what to send through the lines, the Civil War changed all that. Send news of battles. So suddenly people in Massachusetts could find out almost immediately what happened in a skirmish in say far-off Virginia. Especially the names of those dead and wounded.
Overnight, news began to be published using the telegraphed, Morse coded stories.
In the West, the pony express was still the primary source of news and information, but only until the late 1800s when the lines arrived.
No one relied on horses after there were telegraph poles.

Can Individuated Media count with ABC?

You betcha.
Scott Hanson, SVP electronic & centralized audit services, has endorsed Individuated News home printed reports as unique editions of newspapers, which means that the reports count the same as paid, delivered and verified numbers of the daily newspaper.
Here is a transcript of the letter dated Oct. 30, 2009: "Right now, you do not need to do anything differently, we would qualify the Individuated News as a Unique Edition of the Denver Post."
So newspapers can grow their topline circulation with Indivduated News products. That's great news.

Can you dig digg?

One way to create individuated news is to be the recipient of a group of peers' work.
In other words, if a news consumer can so completely identify with a group of people, then their choices of news would automatically become the news consumer's choice of news.
That's the theory behind digg.com. Thousands of digg fans vote every day on the best stories posted each day by you know who -- those very thousands of fans.
That's a fundamentally different scenario than someone describing his interests, that lead to search predicated content.

Is VDP a big business

You betcha.
And a growing business.
Every time you get a bill from American Express or Master Card or the city water utility its VDP.

Getting to know VDP

What is VDP and what should a publisher know about it?
VDP stands for variable data printing and every publisher should know that it is the key to individuated news.
You can't have an individuated print publication without it.
But be aware that VDP describes a $200 home printer as well as a $5 million digital press such as the ones Oce and Hewlett Packerd and IBM have developed. And everything in between.
In fact surprisingly both the home printer and the big digital presses work off the same technology, inkjet printing.
VDP simply means every printed page can be different. The paper rolls through the "press" and instead of receiving the same pattern of images over and over again, the pattern is different every time.
So far the concept has only been used sparingly.
The Washington Times varied the pages of its national weekly for about 50 subscribers using OCE presses in Boca Raton in 2008.
And a German startup called Syntops partnered with the Swiss Post in 2008 to deliver newspapers that had a combination of pages chosen individually by 500 recipients.
So crude first steps have been taken.

What's a publisher to do?

With such media fragmentation a publisher must adapt and see the opportunity in the revolution.
Is it possible to truly publish one-to-one. Yes. Let's look at direct mail first, where the last decade has shown that a personalized message can double response rates from 1 percent to 2 percent. But you need to ask yourself: Is that the best I can do? Or can I do even better than direct mail.
In most American markets the money spent on direct mail passed the money spent in newspapers in 2001 and since then the gap has widened. In 2001 the newspaper was a $42 billion business and so was the direct mail business. By 2004 the direct mail business had grown to be a $60 billion business and the newspaper business was a $46 billion. You get the picture.
So if newspapers could learn to personalize they might begin to reduce that gap, perhaps in a major way.

Publishers, admit the waters around you have grown

Let me quote: "The average consumer or business decision-maker is bombarded with 1,500 marketing messages a day. Throughout all our waking hours, we are pounded by a rapid drumbeat from a wide array of competing channels -- direct mail, print, e-mail, television, radio, Web, telephone, text messaging, the list grows every day. Consider that the typical household in the U.S picks up 82.4 television channels, chooses from among 17,300 magazines titles, has access to 4.4 billion pages indexed by Google. (Individualized Media Essentials, by Roger Kimbel and Jim Hackett).
The truth is we are inundated by that invisible professional group of media brokers who make a living deciding what we will learn every day.
And we're all fed up. And we know we are being duped. And we've begun to find ways around. Facebook gives us information about the world filtered through our friends, just as Digg.com and other social networking sites like Twitter.
My prediction is that these "news sites" will accelerate in number. And they will be the tools by which traditional, breaking news is replaced by self-chosen, individuated news. And mass media advertising morphs into individuated advertising.
Oh for a while, a long while perhaps, there still will be five or six or seven or eight stories a day that people will believe define that day in history. Yahoo and MSN and the Drudge report and many other popular web sites are continuing that ruse into the digital age, a carryover from the information age.
But eventually everyone will know and realize and be comfortable with the fact that there are a trillion stories a day that for a trillion different people are THE news of the day.
For instance, I always enjoy tracking the so-called one reason for the swings of the DOW each day, as one of the best examples of the outright lies of mainstream media.

What has happened to the news?

I have been in the news business my whole career. I have seen technology change everything about the business, except the actual nature of news, until now.
News now is different because it's chosen by the receiver not the giver. We've dubbed it individuated news.
I'd like to make this prediction.
Individuated news will do to traditional news what telegraph news did to pony express news in the 1850s -- make it obsolete. Not immediately, eventually.
What is individuated news? News you choose because it's important to you. It's the opposite of breaking news, which is news professionals deem important to you and push at you.
And, by the way, I predict individuated advertising will replace mass media advertising. Of course, individuated advertising is advertising that's chosen by you because it is important to you. It's the opposite of mass media advertising which is chosen by brokers for you.
What are individuated news and individuated advertising collectively? Individuated media.
That's what we will explore now: the essentials of individuated media.