Author
David Sleight
David Sleight is the founder and principal of Stuntbox, LLC. He spends his days helping companies grapple with product strategy, user experience, and design. He babbles on about publishing, the web, and anything else that strikes his fancy at Stuntbox and on the Twitters.
Also from this author
Not many newsrooms have the wherewithal to produce their own “Snow Fall,” and that, some say, dooms the NYT’s experiment to becoming a mere blip in the history of periodical web design. But it’s not all about per-article cost-effectiveness. The ambition that drives these efforts is exactly what the publishing business needs.
As I write these words, my fiancée and I are just a few weeks away from our wedding day. We’ve been planning the big event for months now, dutifully pushing through a thicket of caterers, photographers, bands, and too many other vendors to mention. And while we’ve been making the rounds online to pore over reviews and double-check details, advertisers have been triangulating our movements.
Last month, a U.S. District Court handed down a decision that’s pretty awful if you care about consumer rights and digital content.
The word "real" gets tossed around a lot when people compare physical objects and digital ones. That's fine for casual conversation, but when publishers use that kind of sloppy language it reveals serious flaws in how they think about their products and businesses.
Tools that give users ever more control over formatting, timeshifting, and sharing will continue to proliferate. This steady growth runs directly counter to the simple, one-to-many broadcast model enjoyed by many publishers in the past.
We’ve all heard about the painful transition newspapers and magazines are going through. Two decades after the arrival of the web, the search for durable, profitable business models that make sense in the digital age goes on. And it isn’t going well. Advertising, subscriptions, and data-as-service have failed. Now is the time for web developers, designers, and digital strategists of all stripes to lead experiments with making (and saving) money from the things technology and the web are good at.
You've got thirty seconds to sell your work to the well dressed nemesis who's paying you. Handle the next few moments gracefully, and the project will be one you can be proud of. Flub an answer, and you can kiss excellence goodbye. Are you prepared? Can you deliver?
