COMPUTER COMPANIES: DO YOU REALLY WANT TO BE PUBLISHERS?
Michael Rogers is the technology editor for Newsweek and the managing editor of Newsweek InterActive.

Watch enough talk shows and you learn that all actors, deep down, really want to direct. These days it sometimes seems that a lot of computer companies, deep down, really want to publish.

One can’t help but wonder: why? The publishing industry has spent several hundred years sorting out all the problems associated with making money off what’s now known as “content,” and it’s still awfully tricky. In

my years as a writer I’ve been sued for libel, investigated by the FBI and threatened with firebombing — and I don’t even do anything controversial. Publishers get the same — only more. Has the computer industry really thought through the job they’re seeking?

Take, as an immediate example, Apple’s model for Newton publishing. Content owners will license the Newton publishing tools to produce titles, and then Apple will get a dime, figuratively speaking, every time a copy is sold. That gives Apple one nice part of the publisher’s job — a continuing revenue stream. Other toolset developers, of course, have similar approaches. But Apple is a household name, an important qualification for catching flak, and Apple’s contract provides no control over content. Consider one randomly imagined Newton title: The Terrorists’ Guide to the Bridges and Tunnels of New York City. Suddenly, wholesome Apple is making money on terrible stuff.

IT’S THE PUBLISHERS WHO TAKE THE HEAT

The bad part about publishing is that anyone who is upset about your content — victims of crimes, government agencies, religious fundamentalists, random pressure groups — will follow the money and lodge protests, lawsuits, subpoenas, boycotts, letter-writing campaigns and terrorist threats right on your doorstep. People incensed by an article don’t protest in front of the printing press manufacturer. Individuals who have been damaged by an exposé don’t sue the ink or paper companies. It is publishers, in the continuing revenue stream, who take the heat.

So how about just publishing nice safe things? There are two problems with this approach. Number one: in the mass market, one has no idea what a nice safe thing really is. The recipe book has one small misprint that turns Wintergreen Delight salad dressing into a toxic substance. The author of the novel about a psychotic killer happens to have libelously patterned his main character after his real-life ex-girlfriend. And so on. Publishers try to protect themselves with all kinds of diligence and contractual stipulations and libel insurance and even then, lawyer everything but the page numbers. But in the end, wronged parties still go after the deepest pockets and as publisher, you’re almost certainly it.

Problem two: for the most part, you don’t make money by publishing nice safe things. (Every few years, for example, someone with more money than publishing experience decides that the public is sick of papers that print nothing but bad news and launches a paper that has Nothing But The Good News! Guess why there’s a fresh opportunity to do this every few years.) An inexorable force in publishing seems to push the envelope of whatever topic you’ve chosen to assay. Perhaps this is because people are paying you to tell them things they don’t know — and very often that turns out to be things that other people don’t want them to know.

The issue of payment raises another tricky aspect of publishing. Americans aren’t used to paying full freight for a lot of their information, at least in magazines, newspapers, radio and most television. It’s brought to them courtesy of advertising, and the same model may well emerge in mass-market electronic publishing.

THE SYMBIOSIS OF ADVERTISING AND EDITORIAL

The so-called “church and state” relationship between the editorial and advertising departments is a delicate symbiosis. The most extreme editor would like the freedom to be able to roast Company Z’s product in print and still run the company’s advertising on the next page. At the other extreme, Company Z would sign a long-term ad contract if the editors would just agree to say only nice things, often, about the product. The real world is an uneasy truce between those extremes.

The relationship has evolved over decades and is constantly tested by both sides. It works, on balance, pretty well. The same is certain to happen in the digital realm, and players without a lot of experience will make mistakes. It’s a fair bet that, given the revenue inherent in transactions, plenty of electronic magazines will turn into catalogs before the erstwhile publishers even know what’s happening. And catalogs are nice things — but not when people think they’re buying a magazine.

To be fair, the software companies that work with content owners to produce titles are definitely not just the electronic equivalent of printers. In really great interactive media, computation is itself an element of content, as creative an act as the generation of words and images and sound. At Newsweek, the printing plant doesn’t telephone New York with last-minute suggestions for better wording. But when we send Newsweek InterActive material to our software developers, we expect to hear great new ways to make the product work. That creative participation doesn’t necessarily mean they have to be publishers as well.

Publishing, in all, is a complicated and often messy task that can easily earn one as much grief as glory. That’s not to say it isn’t an exciting thing to do. It just may not be exactly what your average computerist has in mind for a career path. Given Silicon Valley’s often dour view of the media, do technologists really want to wake up one day and find out they’ve become it?

Michael Rogers