As with other business-to-business content creators these days, there are few trade press editors who don’t have—and at least occasionally use—a Twitter account. From among the 15 magazines produced, I looked for any senior-level editors who tweeted at least once every business day on average, or 22 tweets per month. Even 10 tweets a day may be a challenge for many busy editors, but the closer you can come to that number, the better. But how many use Twitter not just for promotion, but for its most valuable benefit, social engagement? Curatorial. Conversational. MORE >>

Alan Mutter puts it plainly : “Publishers today are struggling to pivot to a new business model that they call ‘digital first’—whatever that means—while managing through the seemingly relentless decline of their existing one. As Mutter points out, one reason that newspapers have failed so miserably at the digital transition is that they “unimaginatively tried to export their formerly successful print business model to the digital realm. John Paton: Misguided, or misunderstood? Print sucks!”. To my mind, that’s not what digital first means. Try This Test. MORE >>

In the trade magazine business, not generally known for early adoption of new-media developments, Paul Conley is something of an anomaly. As early as 1996, not long after the birth of the World Wide Web, he founded a business-to-business internet news service. While “the biggest opportunities in B2B media are clearly in content marketing,” challenges to its potential as a new outlet for journalism are growing rapidly: Much of my business in the past few years has involved helping non-publishers enter content marketing. Paul Conley. Schaefer. MORE >>

Too many executives accept this distinction as the smart way to protect their business. It’s time for them to throw their reluctance aside and, as the key profit generators, get more involved in the business of publishing. Early this week, Steve Yelvington made a comment on Twitter that reminded me of something I’ve been mulling over for some time. Our newsrooms (or whatever we choose to call them) should be engines of success,” he said , “not cost centers.”. He’s right, but I prefer stronger phrasing. Sales is a profit center , editorial is a cost center. MORE >>

But recently, he says, it has come to mean something less good: Over the past three or so years, the term media curation has evolved in its meaning to being less-and-less an act of help and service and more and more a term that’s used to add lipstick to a pig of a business model that is based on something like the following: “go re-write stuff you find elsewhere that’s about whatever is trending on Google and bury a link to them somewhere towards the end of the story so we can claim it’s not merely re-writing their story.”. How can you distinguish between good curation and bad curation? MORE >>