Whatever Happened to Cross-Media Publishing?
When the Internet and the Web exploded across the publishing world in the early to mid-1990s, “cross-media publishing” and “media-independent publishing” came to represent the publishing industry’s vision of nirvana.
I credit the popularity of the cross-media concept to a guy named Jeff Martin. In the early `90s he was an executive in Apple’s publishing marketing group. His efforts (and those of some of his colleagues) led to the establishment of an industry group, called the Worldwide Publishing Consortium (WWPC), announced by Apple CEO Michael Spindler at Seybold San Francisco in October 1993. The Seybold Reports explained that the WWPC “was created to address the issues of open-system publishing and cross-media communications and to foster better communication among users, developers and suppliers.” This is the first time I could find the term “cross-media” used in a Seybold Report to describe something other than authoring to print and CD-ROM only.
At Seybold San Francisco in September, 1996, Jeff Martin worked at Apple to sponsor a “Masters of Media” display, which included a station showing “Future Cross-Media Authoring.”
At Seybold San Francisco in September 1998, Seybold Publications launched its Vision Awards, “which recognized products or people who have helped to move the publishing industry forward in the areas of print, Internet and media-independent publishing.” (The term “media-independent publishing” is generally used interchangeably with “cross-media publishing.” While working at Seybold, we had many debates about which term was more accurate or more appropriate. Today, I find 3,850 links on Google to “media-independent publishing,” and 30,900 links to “cross-media publishing”. I guess cross-media publishing it is.)
Reviewing Adobe’s first release of InDesign, in March 1999, the Seybold Report noted that “the hard problems today are workflow automation and media-independent publishing.”
I was working with Seybold Seminars at the time, and checking Seybold’s past seminars transcripts site, I see that in fall 1997 we offered a whole track called media-independent publishing, featuring sessions like “Publishing in Multiple Media: Moving Toward Media Agility” and “Developing Multi-user Editorial Systems for Print and Online.”
By 1999, we had toned down our focus on the topic, because we found that every session made the same point: We should be working cross-media, but the tools and the workflows aren’t there yet.
And here we are in the fall of 2003. Where is cross-media today? Certainly newspapers and magazines easily repurpose articles from print to the Web. Many catalogs use the same text for print and online. But the majority of what we find in print today does not appear on the Web; and very little of what’s on the Web today ever makes it to print. What went wrong?
Web Publishing and Web Authoring. I think now that the dream of cross-media grew out of the print community’s sense of betrayal by the Web. After all our years of building a publishing craft, and even going to great lengths to digitize and automate that craft, here was the Web upstart quickly usurping our hold on graphic communication. We authors, designers, printers, and publishers knew how best to communicate, how to assemble words and images into the most effective formats to inform and persuade. Who were these computer geeks who thought they knew better? It was also print people who evangelized cross-media publishing; never the Web geeks.
As of June 2003, the top seven global Web properties as measured by unique audience by Nielsen/NetRatings are Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Microsoft, Google, eBay, and Amazon. These sites are all search engines, portals, software, entertainment, and e-commerce sites, with little or no connection to the world of print (arguably AOL has the strongest link, although its “media convergence strategy” is now widely viewed as an expensive and unraveling failure).
What works best on the Web, we’re learning, is very different from what works (or worked) in print. It’s not that print has no role on the Web, it’s just that its role is relatively minor. We’re slowly learning to appreciate the uniqueness of the Web as a communication medium.
I’ve been reviewing articles about how to write for the Web (that I’ve found on the Web), trying to understand what makes Web writing different from print writing.
Jakob Nielsen, who I think is the finest writer on Web usability, back in October 1997 wrote a piece called ” How Users Read on the Web.”
The piece begins: “They don’t. People rarely read Web pages word by word; instead, they scan the page, picking out individual words and sentences. In a recent study John Morkes and I found that 79 percent of our test users always scanned any new page they came across; only 16 percent read word-by-word.”
As a result, he writes, Web pages demand a very different approach from the author than print, including: “one idea per paragraph (users will skip over any additional ideas if they are not caught by the first few words in the paragraph), the inverted pyramid style, starting with the conclusion, and half the word count (or less) than conventional writing.”
No wonder cross-media publishing has never caught on. No one can truly write for cross-media publication. The Web and print are two very different media: We were wrong to think that the twain should meet.
Thad McIlroy is an electronic publishing consultant and analyst based at Arcadia House in San Francisco. He is the former program manager for Seybold Seminars.
This article was last modified on January 18, 2023
This article was first published on October 17, 2003
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