One of my favourite hobby horses about media and the transition to digital is asking companies, institutions, etc: What are you for? That is, while we’ve built certain structures around how we do things, it seems the old how becomes the focus of business, rather than the what or why. Answer, What are you for? … and it gets easier to answer what direction to go given the new tools of the digital age.
That all sounds garbled (it’s early in the morning), but Andrew Savikas has a wonderful essay at TOC about content providers really being in the service business:
…What you’re selling as an artist (or an author, or a publisher for that matter) is not content. What you sell is providing something that the customer/reader/fan wants. That may be entertainment, it may be information, it may be a souvenir of an event or of who they were at a particular moment in their life (Kelly describes something similar as his eight “qualities that can’t be copied”: Immediacy, Personalization, Interpretation, Authenticity, Accessibility, Embodiment, Patronage, and Findability). Note that that list doesn’t include “content.” The thing that most publishers (and authors) spend most of their time fretting about (making it, selling it, distributing it, “protecting” it) isn’t the thing that their customers are actually buying. [more...]
Read it all, it’s excellent.
