Transforming Print Media for a Digital World

Written by : Swati Goyal

Many traditional media businesses have faced declining revenues year over year. Even with a strong brand name and vintage legacy, organizations must focus their efforts to remain on the beat. Established media publishers often face major disruptions, largely due to five market trends that are rapidly changing consumption as we know it :

In publishing and everything else, we are clearly moving towards digital. There is a certain air of inevitability to it, which has become even more evident in the past two years. This paradigm shift has occurred for readers as well as publishers, with the proliferation of smartphones to every nook and cranny and adoption by most demographics in the second half of the previous decade. Access to digital media is ever improving, making print distribution increasingly irrelevant. Considering these trends, a hassle free solution for this transition is required.

Through discussions with myriad personas in the publishing industry, Quintype has put in the hard yards to understand the challenges and concerns of these business owners, and ensure that Bold CMS is aligned with fulfilling their needs.

First challenge that a lot of print publishing owners face when trying to anchor themselves onto the digital shores is to find a reliable and robust platform that can plug into any print workflow and seamlessly synchronize their content & assets. Not just data, publishing of the content should also be in sync on both platforms, option to skip publishing in print and manage subscriptions & subscribers as part of the whole deal. Publishers are also anxious about retention of their readership when they move on to the digital platform.

What they need is someone to carry the burden of this transition and point in the right direction with useful insights to expand their readership and revenue in the digital space. Some publishers come with larger baggage than others, with decades old data and they are the most timid ones, but now it is required of them to accept the change and mark content consumption on a broader scale. Stepping out of the comfort zone is always tiresome at first, but it opens a whole new runway for businesses. Embracing the digital also means allowing yourself to understand your readers and give them room to grow, find solutions to emulate the contextual ad experience for better engagement, letting go of the distribution and storage costs that comes with print publishing without any operational overhead. To be able to navigate with confidence, all that is required is to find an optimum partner to ease the transformation.

1. Out of the box features to digitise data as old as a few decades, migrator app at quintype offers to accept this historic data in an intermediate format and bulk import it into Bold app (headless CMS), keeping all of it intact as good as new, ready to be shipped.

2. Digital First: Once on Bold, you create your new content only once and publish it everywhere--websites, mobile apps, social media, feeds, and now print.

3. Bold, our content CMS, triggers 'webhooks' every time a story moves to a submitted or approved state, allowing data to flow into the 'webhooks' listener, massaged for print consumption and pushed to the print pipeline. Using the schedule story feature, both print and digital platforms have the stories published at the same time for their respective readers.

4. Stories can be bundled into magazine issues using Bold Collections and scheduled to be published digitally the same time as the print hits the stands. Apart from bundling, you may also provide your readers an option to download the pdf and save it offline. Content can be made premium by putting it behind a paywall, and all the while tracking the readership and other engagements.

5. Most worrisome of all are the assets, namely images and their IPTC & EXIF metadata, Quintype has integrated bulk auto import of images to CMS media library using watch folders in S3. It manages to retain the artist, location, caption and other details of the image. Digital Asset Management (DAM) is a game-changing capability for owners to never fear loss of integrity of their reader’s experience.

6. If that’s not all, quintype has solutionized syndication from print to digital as well using the unique id of a story written in our editor, it accepts updates from print for the story, keeping options available to readers to choose from.

By combining these technological solutions with content management, quintype would provide to the publishers a disruptive and unique capability to sail smoothly through digital oceans.

Many publishers are already making use of these features and flourishing, feeling much satisfied with the outcome of our collaboration which in itself is our testimonial. So it seems rather tactical to choose Quintype for your digital publishing solutions.

Schedule a demo today to learn more.