Small media companies need flexible, cost-effective tools that can be ramped up quickly and with little technical expertise. Actually, large media companies want those things as well, but the enterprise requirements of companies with 50 or 100 publications put them in another league.

Here at eMedia Vitals, we run our business almost exclusively using "cloud-based applications". That's the fancy way of saying that the applications we use are on the Internet and we pay for them by the month.

 The Columbia Journalism Review just released a report called "Magazines and Their Web Sites".  It's possible to draw a conclusion from the findings that magazine websites are more likely to be profitable if they put "web guys" in charge and don't worry much about things like copy editing or fact checking.  Well, you might think that if you confused correlation with causality.

Website redesigns are vital projects that don’t happen often enough for most of us to get good at them. Developers and designers know exactly what they need to do, but struggle because the rest of the players often … don’t. Here are some guidelines for assigning responsibilities to make your next website redesign more successful.

Publishers tend to approach online directories with a path to least resistance mindset: create a yellow pages-like directory specific to their niche, sell listings to vendors in that space, and publish them. They give little thought to improving either the advertiser or the user experience – and then get frustrated when the products don’t meet their revenue goals.

Many B2B publishers are sitting on a gold mine of rich data disguised as dusty old directories, sold to libraries and a dwindling population of industry customers who order more out of habit than need.  Even when those directories are turned into an online application, they rarely deliver on their potential to be significant revenue drivers.  Directories often get moved online in ways that make them hardly any more useful than the printed product, with clunky interfaces that discourage users from digging into the information.  That’s a shame, because even a moderately s

The growth of behavioral ad targeting technologies has focused more attention on what publishers do with the personally identifiable information they collect from site visitors.  A website privacy policy is a legally binding disclosure to site users about everything you do with all of the data you collect from them.  There are two great reasons to make sure your privacy policy is both accurate and well written.

If you publish a newspaper or magazine, you are likely bombarded with requests to “use more social media”. Deciding what to focus on can make you insane. The best advice I can give is to make a plan and start trying different tools. 

Make a plan

Write a simple plan for your social media efforts so that everybody is working from the same assumptions. The plan should address the following questions:

Budget season is when we focus on what we’re going to do differently to make next year better than this year.   The challenge is that there are inevitably more good ideas to pursue than we have time or resources to execute on.  That makes picking the right ideas critical to any media company, big or small.

Here are the critical factors I want to see in any new product that I’m going to throw my effort and reputation behind:

It’s a given that you need a mobile version of your website in order to deliver a good user experience on a mobile phone.  But does the content itself need to be tweaked as well? You bet it does.

Assuming you have a mobile version of your site, can’t you just strip out the graphics, images, pdfs and flash and call it a day?  If you want to make your content useful on a mobile device, you’ll need to do more.

Here are 5 factors to consider for publishing to mobile platforms:

Do you want readers to spend more time, read more stories, register for more services, or buy more products from your site?  Of course you do.  What you need (in addition to great content) is a standout website design that spotlights your brand and meets your readers’ needs so well it’s like you’re reading their minds.