One night in...Dettelbach?

PCS’s Marketing Officer Matt Cole recalls an epic road trip with some unexpected hospitality...

Dettelbach. I imagine there aren't many people who have heard of this place, let alone know where it is or even visited! Well, I certainly fell into that category, and would still be in there had it not been for IFRA Expo 2011 in Vienna.

As you will now know, we made our first return to IFRA Expo in 6 years in October, and I am delighted to say it was a great success for us. It seems such a distant memory now, but let me take you back to October 5th at 06:00 in the Express & Star garage. Myself, Martin Rees (one of our Editorial Application Specialists) and James Birch (one of our IT Support Technicians) were about to embark on an approximate 2,136 mile round trip to not only get ourselves to the Reed Messe in Vienna for the show, but to get the PCS stand there too and back again, all in one piece! No pressure then...

Some of you will have seen our Twitter feed around the time of the show, which provided updates of our journey via pictures of the different countries and places we were heading through, albeit it with some poor camera work from yours truly. Go and take a look at www.twitter.com/pcsltd1

On that very same Thursday, around 10pm and approximately 683 miles into the journey which now saw us well into Germany, and after our first experiences of the Eurotunnel, steak and chips at a Belgian service station, and listening to arguably one of Europe’s greatest radio stations in Nostalgie, we decided it was time to find a bed for the night.

Jane, our trusty sat-nav and hotel spotter, did not disappoint, in the end anyway. We headed for the nearest hotel she could locate, so off the autobahn we went (which was an experience in itself when its dark and raining), which suddenly put us in German ‘niemandsland’. We weren’t convinced we were being taken to the right place; it certainly didn’t look like it anyway. No street lighting anywhere, the odd row of houses here and there, strange road layouts, fields upon fields in the distance layered with mist… we knew Halloween was on its way but surely it hadn’t arrived yet?

However we did literally see light at the end of the tunnel – bright lights coming from what the sat-nav informed was our destination. Who were we to doubt modern day technology; it was in fact a hotel.

We were doing so well, right up until the point where we were told there were no rooms. But it was very convenient that not only were we were speaking with the hotel manager, he actually owned another hotel in the nearest town five minutes away and it actually had a room to accommodate all three of us! Better yet, he even offered to drive us there because our van was too big to fit down the side streets and leave the van at the hotel’s secure car park (the story of how we nearly gave the team back home heart attacks can be saved for another time), and pick us up in the morning.

To this day, we still aren’t sure exactly what the name of the hotel manager was, in fact we still didn’t know exactly what the area was which we drive through to reach this point, but it wasn’t long into our very short journey to hotel number two where we had to ask the inevitable of “where are we?”. Of which came the response, “Dettelbach”.

It was clear that the scenery of the journey from hotel A to B certainly differed to what we experienced whilst trying to find what was our first port of call; tight narrow streets (our taxi man wasn’t lying), compacted buildings with incredible architecture, certainly looked a lot more like civilisation.

It’s a shame we didn’t get to stay longer, especially after we were able to see Dettelbach in all its glory in the daylight the following morning, the hotel even had its own cake shop; it really was a true taste of Germany. If memory serves me correctly, Martin described it as being like the village from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, if that at all helps paint a picture for you.

If you happen to be trekking across Germany and need to place to stay for the night, go and head for Dettelbach and the am Bach hotel, and tell the manager that the three Brits with the van say Guten Tag and Danke Schöne…

Ladies to the fore...

It seems like ages ago that we committed to exhibiting at Ifra Expo in Vienna, but it suddenly came home to us this week how close we are to the event.

And whether it’s in organisation, creativity or liaison, it’s a case of ladies to the fore as things begin to come together.

That’s been emphasised today as our formidable events manager, Michelle (the one in the middle), brought the team together for a trial run on building the stand for the first time since Publishing Expo at the start of the year. We’ve had plenty of planning meetings, but to start pulling things out of boxes and putting them together again literally makes everything more tangible.

The stand was designed by our Graphic Artist, Rachel (that's her on the left), to be flexible enough to fit into a number of configurations. Our location at Ifra – stand A651 – is big enough to accommodate the whole thing. It has three demonstration pods, a front desk and plenty of space to mingle.

It’s also flexible enough to allow us to customise it for whichever event we’re attending. Hence, for Ifra, we’re tipping a nod to our hosts and potential visitors by internationalising some of our marketing messages.

That’s meant a lot of work for Rachel in preparing new multi-lingual brochures with help from our friends at UKTI and one of our international suppliers. We’ve also broadened our overall marketing strapline to ‘Create Anywhere...Publish Everywhere’, which sums up our belief in providing solutions that break down boundaries and increase possibilities for any organisation that publishes information, whether that be in print or on digital channels.

For Ifra we’re planning to unleash our by-now not-so-secret-weapon, Rita (yes, the one on the right), a German intern from near Frankfurt who joined us a couple of weeks ago and is already starting to make an impact on broadening our horizons.

The other day she sat the exhibition team down in the PCS boardroom for a brief language workshop. She’s followed it up by turning the lesson into a video we can use for reference. As you can imagine one, shall we say ‘firm but fair’, German watching a group of self-conscious Brits in one room mangling her language was interesting to say the least. Still, I think we made excellent progress and Rita’s actually too polite to laugh out loud.

At the moment there’s a group of us walking around PCS muttering German phrases to ourselves in various English accents. It’s confusing everyone else in the office but at least Rita’s amused.

Rita’s also become part of the marketing team’s effort to build awareness of an event we’re running for an invited audience at the British Embassy early evening on Tuesday, October 11.  She’s been making some follow-up calls to invitees. The benefits of having a native-speaker making that kind of personal contact is obvious.

All three will be with us on the stand at Ifra, so if you’re there, come and say ‘hello’. Or ‘guten tag’ as we like to say at PCS.

A Life Changing Experience...

University – it’s a life-changing experience they say. What they don’t tell you is how quickly that happens.

We’ve just exported No 1 Daughter to Dundee where she’s going to learn how to be a brain surgeon. No, really, she is. I think her other choice was rocket scientist...

Now she’s always been a sensible kid, pretty down to earth and capable of looking after herself, but this is a bit different.

Our baby – and she’ll hate me saying that , so it’s worth repeating – is leaving home for the first time and disappearing not only to another town, but to another country. And not the one 50 miles to the west, the one hundreds of miles to the north. Somewhere near the Arctic Circle.

She couldn’t have gone much further if she’d tried and her other choice was Brighton, which isn’t exactly close, either.

So we loaded up those items of her worldly possessions that would fit in our pretty robust and spacious four-by-four (ie: not half enough) and with a stoic Mum providing added support, headed for bonny Scotland. And there, we delivered one precious daughter to her digs. Our young adult ‘little one’. Home. Alone.

Perhaps surprisingly from No 1 Daughter, who sometimes gives the impression that she’s way too strong and cynical for that kind of nonsense, there were real tears when it came time for us to leave.

 And the more she cried, the more anxious her Mum became. But at times like that, you have to ‘Big Up’ and ‘Be Dad’ so it at least looks like you’re still nominally head of the house despite all the evidence to the contrary. We had to go.

Two minutes down the road, Mum wanted to phone to see if No 1 Daughter was ok. Stern Dad had a plan. Leave it two hours, I said. That way, we’ll be too far gone to turn round and she’ll get a chance to settle in.

We abandoned the kid and drove south with the sound of our baby’s fitful sobbing ringing in our ears. Cruel Mum. Heartless Dad.

All right, it wasn’t that bad, but you get the point.

The clock ticked by to one hour, 59 minutes and a few seconds. Cruel Mum is on the phone. Poor Baby. Is it really awful?

“Sorry, speak up” says poor Baby. “I’m in the uni bar. I’ve met four new friends already and we’re drinking shots... They’re dead cheap... It’s great...”

Apparently it was great until gone three in the morning. It was Saturday night, after all. For the teenager, the action was just as it would normally be. Only the venue was different.

No such fun for Miserable Mum and Disheartened Dad. For us it was a long trip home, the first of many ‘oldies’ nights in and one daughter fewer in a significantly quieter house. So that’s what they mean by a university being a life-changing experience. It’s not theirs, though. It’s ours...

Here's to the 'older heads'

There’s something about the pace of change in an industry like ours that would make you think most of the people in it are, or at least seem to be, on the ‘young and thrusting’ side.

After all, as a company we’re less than 40 years old, so the opportunities for people to have built a long career are relatively few compared with other parts of the organisation that have been in business for well over a century in some cases.

We have our fair share of young guns on the books for sure, particularly among our support staff. In fact we’ve just taken on another apprentice developer, a young accountant in our administrative office and we’ve also welcomed a student from Germany who’ll be with us as an intern for a year.

It still doesn’t mean we put the ‘oldies’ out to pasture once they hit 30... Thirty-one, maybe.

I’m joking, but even so it maybe shouldn’t have surprised me as much as it seemed to this week when we were asked to put together some information about three of our employees who are each celebrating – or at least I’d like to think they’re celebrating – at least 25 years service with PCS.

It’s a tradition in our parent Claverley Group that long-serving employees are recognised with the presentation of a gift and a mock-up newspaper front page with a picture and a short biography of them in pride of place.

Our latest trio includes two 25s in gentlemen by the name of Howard Lane and Derek Gardner and a 35 in Steve Whitbread. Derek’s a member of our management information team while Howard and Steve are front-line coders who are still working their magic among the nuts and bolts of some innovative new products after all this time.

A statto and two code jockeys – it doesn’t sound very rock and roll, does it? But every organisation needs their Steves, their Dereks and their Howards. They help to shape the way a company like ours develops and put a piece of their experience and know-how into everything we do.

I suppose, too, it’s part of the nature of the IT business that it keeps the brain young even if the knees start to go after a while.

There’s always something new around the next corner and it’s the experience and knowledge of our respected ‘elders’ if I can give them that tag, and their willingness to keep meeting those challenges that helps to channel the enthusiasm of those of us who follow in their footsteps.

Anytime, Anyplace, Anywhere

Social media’s a great way of stirring the pot on ideas, which, I suppose is exactly why we’re here.

The other day, Wan-Ifra retweeted a link to an article by the noted media commentator and Guardian blogger, Roy Greenslade, who was himself passing on some information from another respected media figure, Peter Sands.

Peter used to be the editor of one of my former local newspapers, The Northern Echo, who has also been a director of training for the Press Association, Britain’s national news agency. He’s also been involved in redesigning newspapers and I’m pretty sure he’s done some work with our colleagues at the MNA from time to time.

Anyway, that’s where Peter comes from, but what prompted Roy Greenslade’s blog comment and the subsequent Wan-Ifra retweet, was Peter talking about newspaper subs being able to work from anywhere.

Peter had made the comments first in his blog (http://sandsmediaservices.blogspot.com/) on Friday, August 19 when he was talking about some work he’d done for the Irish Examiner while on holiday and about the fact that pages for the Evening Herald in Dublin were being produced from Castres in the south of France.

In his piece, Peter says: Subs don't all have to be in the same room, the same building, the same town or even the same country... which is why all the fuss in regional newspapers about moving production sites from one city to another struck me as nonsense.

“In future I reckon all newspapers will be produced this way. Who needs complicated management systems?”

He adds: “Bedroom subs armed with a computer, a set of stylesheets, the right fonts, broadband, a piece of software (doesn't matter if it's Quark or InDesign) and Distiller will be contracted to do so many pages per day to deadline.”

I’d say ‘amen’ to most of what Peter says, because I know a Midlands-based publishing software developer who  has a system that allows subs to do just that. It was designed that way. It’s not that complicated either, just smart.

We’ve created it at PCS. It’s called Knowledge and we’ll be showing it at Ifra Expo in Vienna from October the 10^th to the 12^th. If you’re going and you fancy a demo, get in touch with my PA, Michelle McClure at mmcclure@presscomputers.com to arrange a slot.

Me, Myself and UKTI

I’m just back from a break in scorching Spain, but the work never stops here, so this week’s blog comes from our Marketing Officer, Matt Cole, who’s been looking to spread the PCS message far and wide...

Over the past few months we’ve been working closely with UK Trade and Investment, a government department that encourages businesses in this country to get into overseas markets and so far, I have to say, the experience has been nothing but positive.

We came to UKTI almost by accident, having heard about an event in Coventry where members of various British consulates in the USA came over to pitch their services to businesses from across the West Midlands.

The States has been on our radar for a while, so it was a case of ‘nothing ventured’ and possibly much to gain.

At Coventry we met the Vice Consul in charge of the ICT sector in the Big Apple, Patricia Young, and we set out on a process we hope will reap dividends not only in the USA, but more lately has given us contacts in Europe, too.

Next up was an event hosted by Coventry Chamber of Commerce near Leamington that further explained the UKTI export offer, starting with a kind of ‘exporting for dummies’ which they call Passport to Export, followed by services such as OMIS – the Overseas Markets Introduction Service, where UKTI will report back to you on specific requests for information about potential markets – and the Export Markets Research Scheme, or EMRS which offers grants to go into a potential market and do the research yourself.

In fact there’s a whole bunch of UKTI acronyms to get your head around, but currently we’re on one that doesn’t seem to have one - Passport to Export - which is being delivered by UKTI Black Country and our dedicated – that’s not just to say he works hard, but that he works hard for us – International Trade Adviser, Terry Wood.

Our introduction day at the Black Country Chamber of Commerce was interesting because it put us in touch with companies pretty much in the same boat, like ceramics producers The Big Tomato Company and their boss Gloria Daniel as well as soft furniture manufacturer Soul Living run by Amarjeet Mahey.

They’re a little way off browser-based publishing software for print and digital, but the exporting process is pretty similar.

From then on we’ve pretty much been in constant touch with Terry in particular and UKTI in general with regular catch-ups as well as further visits to the Explore Export event at Coventry City’s Ricoh Arena which put us in contact with commercial officers from around the world – including Miles Fisher in Vienna, for instance – and a Doing Business with Germany seminar in faraway Guildford.

We’ve also had further conference calls with the UKTI team in New York and with one of their contacts, Bob Schukai (@iammobilebob) from Thomson Reuters and we’re now well down the track  towards one OMIS looking at the American market and another concentrating on Europe.

There are costs involved. Passport to Export was £500 for instance, but you get that money back towards the cost of an OMIS if you head that way and if you go on to something like EMRS, there’s matched funding available.

Obviously, we’re still very much in the process and looking forward to seeing where it takes us, almost literally, but so far I’d have to say, we’d recommend it. We’ll keep you in touch with how it’s going. And if you have any questions on the experience, get in touch with me at mcole@presscomputers.com .

If you’re a UK business interested in exporting, you can get more information from your local chamber of commerce or from the UKTI at http://www.ukti.gov.uk.

Hoping to make a Mark in Vienna

There’s nothing like a challenge – and that’s what we’ve set our new Business Development Manager before he’s even had a chance to really get his feet under the desk.

Mark Wilkinson’s joined us from Microsoft’s Authorised Refurbisher programme, where he worked as a partner manager in the EMEA market.

Mark’s focus will be on improving relationships with magazine groups and among corporate, catalogue and educational publishers, in Europe as well as in the UK. So, hopefully, one of the first tasks we’ve set him should be right up his street.

He brings with him a solid background of building and developing customer partnerships for a major corporation, in the UK, Europe and beyond and we think Mark’s experience will help us to take our products to new markets and new geographies.

Exciting times ahead!

So, where to start? Well, this week we’ve booked our place at Ifra Expo in Vienna in October. It will be the first time PCS has been back to Europe’s major publishing technology event in around six years and we’re going with plenty to say for ourselves.

We launched our ground-breaking digital content management and publishing system, Knowledge, at one of the UK’s biggest shows, Publishing Expo, in 2010 and we were back there earlier this year, but Ifra Expo is on a much bigger scale.

We’re looking to present Knowledge to a wider market because we feel the time’s right to make a bit of noise in the company of some of the biggest names in the business in Vienna.

We’ll be on Stand A651 at the Reed Messe in Vienna and we’ll be taking bookings for demos very shortly!

We’ll have some interesting and innovative things to show and maybe a couple of surprises up our sleeve – and over the next few weeks we’ll let you know how it’s all coming together.

Logistically, taking the stand and the crew across Europe is in a different ball park to a quick tootle down the M40, so there’s a lot to do in the meantime – and frighteningly, there are only around 50 working days to go until we pack up the van.

You can follow our progress on Twitter - @pcsltd1- and on LinkedIn as well as via the blog.

The great payment model debate...

While publishers are still searching for a consensus on charging for digital content, there are some encouraging signs for those who have already taken the decision to put content behind a paywall.

A few months ago we helped Britain’s biggest-selling evening paper, the Express & Star and its sister publication the Shropshire Star, put some of its content behind a paywall, using our digital content management and publishing system, Knowledge, which manages content production for print, web, tablet and smart phone.

The Times  and Sunday Times recently announced that it was up to 100,000 paying customers on their websites and other major news organisations are heading down the paid-for route.

What counts here in revenue terms, of course, is whether the sites are making as much from subscribers as they were from advertising when they were free to view.

The suggestion is they are – more in fact – and the numbers are growing steadily month on month.

Others are not so keen on charging for content, online at least – but they’re reaping rewards in other ways. The Mail Online is reported to have topped more than 77miillion unique browsers in May, making it by far the biggest UK publisher online and possibly pushing the BBC into second place at home and challenging the New York Times worldwide.

Figures for the Guardian, Telegraph and Independent were all up for the same period, too.

The Mail does charge a subscription for its iPad app after an initial trial period and the numbers seem to be holding up there, too.

As yet, though, nobody really seems to have settled on a definitive payment model with publishers still exploring a range of revenue opportunities, from joint print and digital subscriptions to digital only to part free/part paid-for.

Another unknown is the likely effect of news sales aggregators like Zinio and the forthcoming Apple Newsstand one-stop-shop, which will perform a role not unlike a high street newsagent in offering a number of titles under one digital roof, as it were.

Although this sort of arrangement should make subscription easier for the subscriber, it will still mean publishers conceding a fair slice of their revenue to Apple.

The arrival of the Financial Times’s HTML5-based digital publication presents an opportunity for publishers to try pushing their own model particularly if it was allied to the sort of digital subscription piece we offer through our NCS product.

Web apps through HTML5 are something we’re keen to embrace, partly for that reason, but mainly because it gives us the chance to offer publishers an even easier route to digital publishing – with or without print – that  will maintain the look and feel of a brand across multiple digital platforms.

Other ideas include charging only for specialised, long-form journalism or collections of historical or subject-specific material, and there’s even a model which attempts to give individual articles a market price and charges on the number of times the story’s read.

Interestingly, we might have a web app for that, too...   

The younger generation - representing the future of business...

As the father of two teenage girls, one just about to go to university and another entering sixth form, I sometimes feel that young people are given a bit of a hard time by their ‘elders and betters’ – particularly those who seem to think that everything’s too easy for a generation of kids who have no drive, little ambition and almost nothing to offer prospective employers.

Maybe I’m lucky because neither of mine lacks that bit of get up and go which means one’s get-up-and-going to study medical neuroscience at one end of the UK or other (grades allowing!) and the other can’t wait to get-up-and-get-gone when her turn comes.

They do – and I’m sure will continue to – make me proud, but they’re not the only ones.

At PCS we’ve taken a strategic decision to encourage young people to join the business because what’s good for them is good for us.

We have a group of under-25s who represent the future of the business over a number of departments – whether that’s in programming and support; marketing and design; or even in accounting.

They come from a range of backgrounds and abilities, but we value all of their contributions. We’re not making it easy for them, they’re responding to a challenge.

Some employers might just think that ‘young’ equals ‘cheap’ – and let’s be fair, while they’re learning their trade, our young guns shouldn’t be breaking the bank financially. For us, actually, that’s not the point – although to be fair, it helps...

For us it’s a chance to bring people into the business to learn its culture and hopefully pick up good habits in terms of everything from customer service to an appreciation of what it takes to keep an operation like ours moving forward.

It’s an investment – and we can already see it beginning to pay off with some of the key contributions they’re making and have made. Some have come as apprentices or interns and we’ve been happy to convert them into full time roles.

Some of what they do is very visible – in our marketing materials or the way we present PCS to the wider industry.

Some of it is hidden, maybe within lines of code that users never see, but without which they couldn’t do what they do, and some of it is seen by only a handful of people when they call down for some hands-on support as a deadline approaches.

They’re all here for a purpose, working in important roles, developing their skills and, hopefully, helping PCS to grow.

I see no lack of drive or ambition in any of them. At some point that may come back to bite us when they perhaps want to put their skills into action elsewhere, but in the meantime we can only encourage their development, for their benefit – and for ours.

Like it, but link it...

This week, I’m handing the reins of Above the Cloud to PCS’s Marketing Intern Matt Cole, who argues that social media is a useful tool, but should be just one strand of a company’s overall marketing strategy...

After sharing an article titled “How do you prioritise social media metrics” with the social media marketing group on LinkedIn and reflecting on some of the comments it generated, it got me thinking about the ways social media can, and really should be, utilised by all organisations and the reasons why.

Ok, so implementing and running a social media marketing plan is going to require a few hours here and there of someone’s time. However, as I once read, we managed to make room for emails when they first came on the scene, and now they are an everyday part of our office lives.

The fact that a social media marketing plan can be implemented with no additional financial investment, let alone the worldwide reach it can provide, should make it scream out to businesses as an opportunity that is too good to miss, whether that’s to raise awareness or actually make sales.

In fact, I think it is getting to the stage that if you don’t get marketing via social media, you really will be missing out, and not just through having a profile that sits there, but by really using the numerous channels on offer and engaging with your audiences.

Here at PCS, we are in the process of fully implementing our plan via Twitter, LinkedIn and this very blog.

On that note, I think there is a misconception at times that only B2C organisations can fully utilise social media. For me, B2B organisations can use social media as well as anyone; it is just that a different approach is required.

If we were a B2C organisation we would certainly be using Facebook within our integrated social media marketing. Due to the overall clientele it attracts and the way they use Facebook, it is a much more effective social media channel for B2C organisations than B2B organisations like ours.

For example, offering a 10% discount on a software system for the best wall comment wouldn’t really tie in with our operations.

We can use Twitter to build up awareness by providing news and information that is of relevance to our potential customers. We’ll then use this blog to go into greater detail about industry matters and finally we can use LinkedIn to join in or lead discussions among our relevant communities.

Making sales in the B2B world is a much more drawn out process than B2C sales; people won’t just walk to their nearest software supplier and purchase an editorial system off the shelf.

We have to add value to what we do - and being recognised as a thought leader in areas that are of interest to customers is important to B2B organisations and could really assist with sales activities. Or at least we hope so...

If anything, the engaging nature of social media could well be a more effective tool for B2B organisations, especially if it’s used correctly.

But it’s a big old social media world out there and it’s important to enter it knowing not only what you want to achieve for your business, but also what you want your business to achieve within that sphere.

The content you can deliver via social media, and the way you use it, can really shape how your business is seen by the world so it is important to ensure your social media activities tie in with your overall business activities, so, targeting is very important.

They say there are more than 600 million Facebook users. Twitter is expected to reach 200 million users by the end of 2011 and LinkedIn has also passed the 100 million user mark.

No single organisation is going to try to target each of these users, and B2B organisations are going to be much more niche in their operations. So for social media marketing to offer an ROI, it is vital that content is aimed at relevant target markets. It is important to stay on track and continue to focus on those targets.

Now PropertyNet, PCS’s property advertising creation system, is allowing estate agents to get in on the social media act too, enabling property listings to be displayed on agent’s Facebook pages and via tweets from their Twitter accounts.

In terms of marketing potential, it’s a great fit. Given the nature of buying houses and the number of people on social media, there’s a huge, real time market place for agents to promote their properties.

It’s an example of using social media to actively promote and sell. And maybe this approach couldn’t be completely replicated by another organisation – it would depend on what the organisation wants to do, how it goes about its business, what it sells and who it sells to.

There is a great opportunity to be had with social media for organisations to market, but this opportunity needs to be harnessed in the correct way that is right for the business, because to be most effective social media should first fit in with the overall objectives of the business.

History repeating in search for efficiencies

A while back I was having a discussion with a colleague about what exactly it was in newspaper production that was totally nailed down. That’s to say big and heavy and hard to shift.

We got it down to plate-makers and presses. Everything else was totally transportable – and that included people.

Back in the 1980s, the big battle in UK newspaper technology was over ‘re-keying’ – mainly getting rid of it. It was like a game of musical chairs. Whoever was left with no reason to be there when the music stopped was thrown out of the game.

‘Re-keying’ was the process by which journalists typed a story onto paper – often with a carbon copy or ‘black’ for safety – a sub editor scrawled all over it to make it readable and legal and then someone in production typed it out all over again either to hot metal or to photosetters to transfer it to print.

There had to be a quicker way and there was.  Cue ‘new technology’, cue ‘efficiencies’, cue the new reality. The music stops and the typesetters suddenly have nothing to sit on.

Next came desktop publishing: Another round of change; another seat out of the ring; and yet more efficiencies.

It’s not all onwards and upwards, however. The trouble with the desktop revolution was that it turned sub editors from wordsmiths to box-jockeys. For many, tweaking text boxes in Quark Xpress or Adobe InDesign and fitting headlines by bastardising typefaces became the norm, because it was easier than dealing with the words themselves.

And even advances can create duplications of effort.

That may come with subs drawing the same boxes in the same place, using the same style sheets and the same page furniture every day. And in the case of a typical news operation, it might be, for instance, that news editors are making decisions about stories and their places within the book that sub editors are interpreting and carrying out time and time again.

What if, having made that decision, the technology handled the mundane bit of actually applying it to the page? No duplication of effort. No tinkering with boxes. No need, actually, to have Quark Xpress or InDesign on the desktop, meaning Sub editors can get back to hand-crafting words and spaces.

That’s one of the workflow options available in our new digital content management and publishing system, Knowledge, which is designed to work in a browser over nothing more robust than home broadband.

And, of course, if print is just one of your output channels – maybe not even your main publishing channel if you’re going digital first – then crafting the words and spaces and prioritising the publication of particular stories assumes far more importance than the mundane mechanical process of box-creation.

We know from talking to publishers that this sort of flexibility – and the savings it can promote – is going to become more and more important. And while the prospect of ‘efficiencies’ usually implies a cost in terms of headcount.

That may be unpalatable, but the dilemma for publishers, particularly in these difficult times financially is not in deciding whether they can afford to update their publishing technology, but whether, actually, they can afford not to.

HTML5 - bringing consistency across platforms

I was blown away by the FT’s new ‘non-app’ app – for itself, for its potential to change the mobile applications landscape and particularly for the way it gives publishers a different route to tightening the relationship between print and digital branding.

For publishers, there was always a certain amount of tension created by having to run iPhone and iPad subscriptions through Apple’s iTunes gateway, not least because of Apple’s insistence on taking a 30 per cent cut of the revenue.

But some publishers were of the opinion that if Apple were going to take away the pain of managing subscriptions so that essentially they became the fulfilment house – and 30 per cent was what it cost – then so be it.

For others, though, it wasn’t just about giving away a chunk of revenue, it was about losing one of the key benefits of digital subscription – and that was the potential to build much closer relationships with the customers, the subscribers, the readers.

We spoke about the importance of that relationship at Publishing Expo in London earlier in the year. A lot of regional newspaper publishers already have it because they have a close connection to the people who push papers through letter boxes. Taking control of digital subscriptions would bridge the gap in the world of pads, pods and phones.

Doing it the FT way means publishers don’t have to jump through the Apple hoop at all. So that’s subscription sorted – ish, probably...

The other thing is that HTML5 means publishers can get their digital offerings out to multiple platforms – including the good old web – using pretty much the same codebase whatever the output.

For us that’s really important. We’re always talking up the benefits of what we call ‘concurrent multi-publishing’ and that is the ability to publish pretty much the same content  simultaneously to many channels in exactly the right format for each and it’s what we built our Knowledge digital content management and publishing system to do.

And we know from our own experience that those channels can change pretty quickly. One minute we’re developing for e-reader, say the Irex, then along comes something like the iPad which turns the market on its head and creates a whole new set of challenges – and opportunities of course.

As an event, the FT’s adoption of HTML5 may not have been as seismic, but you can bet they’re feeling the rumble down Cupertino way.

HTML5 brings a level of consistency into creating digital content for multiple platforms. That helps publishers to maintain the look and feel of the brand, even if we as developers do have to take into account the many hows and whys of getting content out there.

And we know that once we have the wrapper looking good, we can fill it with content exactly how and when we want – and change the dynamic of the way it’s done so that publishers can make the whole process more efficient.

We’re demonstrating at two of the UK’s most complex evening print publications that creating and processing content for multiple platforms is a unified process  – and we’re sure we can offer even more efficiencies in that area.

We know from talking to other publishers that in these straitened times they’re going to be looking for even smarter ways of maintaining the level of service with a much lower cost base.

For us, feeding HTML5 into that strategy is pretty much a no-brainer and the potential benefits are huge.