Monday, February 1, 2010
Parenting and Digital Publishing
Wendy Zingher, VP Sales & Marketing
This has been a busy week for me, and I’ve decided it’s time I buckled down and started the Texterity blog I’ve been meaning to for months now. As an introductory post, I’ll take the liberty of being a bit personal. It’s been a busy and revelatory week for all of us in digital publishing. Texterity was hot on eReaders back in the early 2000’s and when they failed to appear, digital publishing on laptops and desktops was and remains good business, for us and for our publishers. So, as the first real eReader to matter to our magazine market was unveiled this week, it was a week full of thinking, planning, and excitement. I must confess, though, after the excitement of the Apple announcement, I was completely drained. My husband was out of town all week, so I was holding down the home fort. I got home that evening, made dinner, took care of my littlest one and put him to bed, and then took out my laptop for routine catchup. An hour or so passed.
And that’s when I was faced with bad parenting example #27. (You can buy me a drink if you want to hear about any of the other 26 examples). My two teenagers trooped in and said, “Mom, you really should have watched the State of the Union. It was really good.” That’s when I a) thought ‘what kind of civic involvement am I promoting by missing the State of the Union?‘ and b) sort of pondered that there’s something akin to parenting in what we do here in our business.
We’ve been raising this child called a “digital edition.” It’s been a great kid, but it’s growing up, and you can’t ignore that. Suddenly, there is a confluence of interest in truly transforming the content and the magazine experience. I could liken it to that period where a child enters adolescence, and suddenly worlds of possibilities appear, and with them, many pitfalls. It might have some really awkward moments! But here we are, at the threshold of adolescence, and it’s important to try new things, learn by doing, and build this new world together. I’m in a company that provides platforms and services for publishers at large scale, and those platforms need to work. Publishers also need to find value in reaching their audience in new ways, and when I mean value, I mean something that, either directly or indirectly, helps keep the lights on.
We’ll be guiding this child of ours to adolescence on the iPhone, the iPad, and a host of other mobile devices. We’ll be sticking with our “family values” of creating this experience for readers which respects the publisher’s connection with their audience, and doesn’t try to create an intermediary brand. There’s lots of passion and drive on our internal team, and we’ll be doing some wicked cool stuff. There’s lots of support from our publishing community. From a solid foundation, we’ll build something that will stand on it’s own. For me, that’s what I most fervently hope for as a parent as well. It’s looking like we’ll be having a lot of fun doing it!
This has been a busy week for me, and I’ve decided it’s time I buckled down and started the Texterity blog I’ve been meaning to for months now. As an introductory post, I’ll take the liberty of being a bit personal. It’s been a busy and revelatory week for all of us in digital publishing. Texterity was hot on eReaders back in the early 2000’s and when they failed to appear, digital publishing on laptops and desktops was and remains good business, for us and for our publishers. So, as the first real eReader to matter to our magazine market was unveiled this week, it was a week full of thinking, planning, and excitement. I must confess, though, after the excitement of the Apple announcement, I was completely drained. My husband was out of town all week, so I was holding down the home fort. I got home that evening, made dinner, took care of my littlest one and put him to bed, and then took out my laptop for routine catchup. An hour or so passed.
And that’s when I was faced with bad parenting example #27. (You can buy me a drink if you want to hear about any of the other 26 examples). My two teenagers trooped in and said, “Mom, you really should have watched the State of the Union. It was really good.” That’s when I a) thought ‘what kind of civic involvement am I promoting by missing the State of the Union?‘ and b) sort of pondered that there’s something akin to parenting in what we do here in our business.
We’ve been raising this child called a “digital edition.” It’s been a great kid, but it’s growing up, and you can’t ignore that. Suddenly, there is a confluence of interest in truly transforming the content and the magazine experience. I could liken it to that period where a child enters adolescence, and suddenly worlds of possibilities appear, and with them, many pitfalls. It might have some really awkward moments! But here we are, at the threshold of adolescence, and it’s important to try new things, learn by doing, and build this new world together. I’m in a company that provides platforms and services for publishers at large scale, and those platforms need to work. Publishers also need to find value in reaching their audience in new ways, and when I mean value, I mean something that, either directly or indirectly, helps keep the lights on.
We’ll be guiding this child of ours to adolescence on the iPhone, the iPad, and a host of other mobile devices. We’ll be sticking with our “family values” of creating this experience for readers which respects the publisher’s connection with their audience, and doesn’t try to create an intermediary brand. There’s lots of passion and drive on our internal team, and we’ll be doing some wicked cool stuff. There’s lots of support from our publishing community. From a solid foundation, we’ll build something that will stand on it’s own. For me, that’s what I most fervently hope for as a parent as well. It’s looking like we’ll be having a lot of fun doing it!
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