Publishers Look to the Database For Efficient Content Repackaging

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, July 1, 1999 by Dzintars Dzilna

As magazine publishers amass content in digital form from their print pages, they are investing in technology that helps organize and repackage that content. They are moving to database-driven content production workflows to output electronic-based products: news feeds and syndication, directories and catalogs, personalized Web pages and e-mails, and more. Publishers want not only to slice and dice content efficiently to the Web, but also to position themselves to be able to publish in new electronic formats such as e-books, Palm Pilots and cable set-top boxes.

"What you ultimately want is to be able to repurpose your unique intellectual property in as many ways as you want to from a business perspective," says Brian Loew, president, CEO and co-founder of Worldweb.net. "If a media type doesn't exist today, but it comes out next week, you want to be able to output to it without agonizing effort."

"DeQuarkification" workflows

But even just posting stories to the Web can be agonizing for magazine publishers. Most must first "deQuarkify" magazine content. Editors cut articles from XPress pages and send them to Web site producers, who then typically code them into HTML and post them online. That kind of workflow creates a paralyzing bottleneck between the magazine editor and Web producer, and does not allow for efficient archiving.

"The people who are responsible for the content should have access to that content and be able to modify it," says Intertec Publishing's Web manager Greg Long. "But within that you want to be able to give them very defined roles regarding what they can actually modify on the Web site."

Whether through homegrown systems or Web publishing software packages, publishers are setting up processes that give editors the tools to move data to Web sites via databases. This allows editors to manage Web postings themselves--copy edit text, change content, embargo stories--rather than push those responsibilities to a Web site producer.

On the output side, database-driven content management allows publishers to store the content in an organized fashion and render articles through templates. And changes can be made directly to those templates to modify how content is formatted--making it no longer necessary to separately change thousands of archived HTML pages, for example.

Data can be stored in the database in HTML, or in text. But today, a number of Web publishers are moving to XML (eXtensible Markup Language) to structure their content in the database. XML allows the publisher to add information--called metadata--to the content, describing what the content is: a headline, a print advertiser's product, or a dosage amount for medical publishing, for example. Because it can denote what the content is, XML metadata can be used and searched much more thoroughly than HTML metadata, which shows only how the content should be rendered.

"XML adds depth to our data by representing relationships between elements, such as a company, its Web address and its products," says Robert Rubin, chief technology officer for Cahners. "It allows for finer content aggregation and contextual searching." Cahners is looking to implement XML for hooking up its online directories with the e-commerce sites of companies listed there, for example.

XML is a cutting-edge technology, however. Industry standards have not yet been established, and not all Web browsers can use MXL--so documents still need to be converted into HTML. "But even before you have serious penetration there, it makes sense to use XML in content management systems," says Worldweb's Loew. "While the world may be using HTML for a long time, it makes sense to store and manipulate content in something much richer, such as XML."

                            XPress Route to XML
                 The following software vendors' products
                 are designed to convert QuarkXPress pages
                 Into XML-based documents. (Troika is due
                out at the end of this year; Expressroom is
                     scheduled to debut in September.)

Company           Product
Quark Inc.        Troika
www.quark.com
RVC Ltd.          Atomik
www.atomik-xt.com
Worldweb.net      Expressroom
www.worldweb.net