The excitement around native advertising has spawned a proliferation of “native advertising platforms.”  The market is ready to move past the hype and choose the best technology.

Here are five key technology requirements to focus on when choosing a native advertising platform, whether you’re building a native ad network, selling native advertising to your own advertisers, managing native ad campaigns for your clients, or looking to join a native ad network. Ask native ad platform providers the tough technology questions and make sure they can deliver.

1. Real-time publishing for brand content

Does the platform support feeds, APIs, and other methods for automatically importing and distributing new advertiser content in real time?

Brands that make big investments in continuously producing fresh content want that content published as native advertising as quickly as possible. They don’t want to pay for the distribution of stale content. Platforms that require uploading each piece of new content manually, as if it were display ad creative, do not support this key advertiser requirement.

A native advertising platform must support dynamic feed management, to automate and scale the flow of content from “brand newsrooms” to hundreds or thousands of publishers.

2. Efficient content management for advertisers

Does the platform enable advertisers to easily choose which content they want to distribute as native advertising, and to assign that content to specific campaigns, specific publishers, and even specific publisher sections?

The more content that brands produce, the more essential that efficient content management becomes.  Agencies need a simple dashboard for managing native ad campaigns as content feeds, to easily populate those feeds with brand content and assign them to publishers.  If the content management process for native advertising is not efficient for agencies, it won’t scale across multiple clients.

3. Editorial control for publishers

Does the platform have a simple interface for publishers to review native advertising content available from advertisers and choose which content to publish on their sites?

Editorial control is essential for publishers to protect their brands.  Native advertising works only if publishers can ensure that they are publishing the most relevant, high quality content.  In that respect, editorial control is also a key mechanism for optimization, enabling publishers to direct finite reader attention to native ad content that they know their readers will engage with.

The only way to attract top publishers into a native advertising network is to give them the control that they need to scale native advertising on their sites.  Networks built on native ad platforms that don’t provide editorial control will be at a significant disadvantage.

4. Publish native ad content IN the publisher’s CMS

Can the platform integrate with a publisher’s CMS, to publish the content in the CMS, so that it can be displayed as regular article pages, i.e. actually*** native***?  Can the platform do more than simply link to the content on another site?

Some native ad platforms are merely linking off to where the content is published elsewhere.   If the content does not live on the publisher’s site, then it’s not native.

Top publishers who are running native ads are publishing the content in their CMS — this makes intuitive sense. To build a network of top publishers, a native ad platform must support backend CMS integration.  That means supporting a full range of content import processes, from RSS feeds to proprietary XML feeds to APIs like WordPress’ XML-RPC (standard on every WordPress site).

It’s a nonstarter to tell publishers that joining a native ad network means they must stop publishing the content in their CMS and instead shoehorn it in on the front end with javascript.

Javascript delivery of native advertising should be a fall back option, such as when a publisher uses a homegrown CMS that has no content import capabilities.  It’s one thing for ads and sidebar widgets to experience load delays when there’s lots of javascript executing on a page.  But it’s always going to be suboptimal to render native ad content with javascript when the editorial content is rendered server side by the CMS.

Bottom line, a native ad platform must enable the content to be served the same way the editorial content is served.

5. Automated content optimization

Can the platform automatically optimize content for distribution across a network of publishers?

If the advertiser is providing content from a blog feed, and the images are embedded in the text, but the publisher’s CMS requires them as separate content assets, can the platform automatically extract the images?

If publishers want links within the content back to the advertiser’s site to open in a new tab, can the platform automatically modify the HTML?

If the advertiser wants additional promotional links automatically added to the content, can the platform automatically add them?

Distributing content is not the same as serving ad creative.  Content needs to be formatted and presented properly, and the requirements vary across publisher sites and even across advertiser campaigns.  A native advertising platform needs to be adept at optimizing content, or distribution won’t scale.

Despite all the hype about native advertising, many publishers are still unclear about what native advertising is and why they should run native ads on their sites. Publishers need to understand the value of native advertising for their publications and for their readers.

Here is a primer on native advertising for publishers:

Valuable Advertising

Native advertising makes advertising valuable again for readers.

On the web and in mobile, readers do not value display ads. They do not value distractions and interruptions. They value high quality content, and they value control.

Native advertising is content produced by and for advertisers that is sufficiently interesting, relevant, and engaging that it is worthy of being presented in the same place as editorial content. Publishing advertiser content where editorial content is published is what makes it “native”.

Enhancing the Reader Experience

At its best, native advertising can enhance the editorial stream, not diminish or detract from it.  Native ad headlines and images, while clearly labeled as paid, fit well within a list of editorial headlines and images because the content is genuinely good.

Native advertising enhances the reader experience, rather than degrade it as display ads too often do.

Native advertising puts readers in control by earning their attention instead of trying to force it.  Readers choose to click on a native ad headline the same way they choose to click on an editorial headline.

Native advertising works well on desktop websites, but it works especially well on mobile devices, where readers are typically browsing streams of content.  High quality native ad content, inserted into the mobile content stream, is a much better reader experience than a tiny, illegible, interruptive display ad.

Publishers in Control

Native advertising also requires that publishers be in control.

Publishers control the flow of editorial content, ensuring that only high quality, engaging content is published. Publishers should be able to do the same for native advertising content, to curate and publish only the most relevant, highest quality content from advertisers.

Publishers should have a simple, efficient way to choose native ad content to automatically publish in their web CMS, or use in print. Publishers should be able to manage native ad feeds the same way they manage other syndicated content feeds.

Premium Pricing for Premium Value

Native advertising is a significant revenue opportunity for publishers because native ads are much more valuable to advertisers than display ads.

Advertisers value native advertising because they want to be more valuable to consumers. They don’t want to be ignored, as most display ads online are. Advertisers want their brands lifted by close association with the publisher’s brand.

CPM prices for display ads are dropping because the value is dropping. Consumers ignore display ads. They don’t click.

Publishers can charge a significant premium for native advertising precisely because the content is valuable to consumers. Consumer click on native ads because the content appeals to them.

Pricing for native advertising is still being determined by publishers, agencies, and advertisers.  Some publishers are charging flat fees, which may include helping advertisers create content.  Publishers are justifiably trying to avoid the CPM pricing associated with display advertising.

One national business publication cited a “cost per engagement” of $1.  That works out to a $1,000 CPM.  While pricing that high likely won’t last, it is indicative of the premium that advertisers will pay for readers actually engaging with their content, as opposed to loading a display ad that most readers ignore.

Ultimately, the better native advertising performs as content, the more publishers can charge for publishing native ads on their sites.

Native Advertising Metrics

Metrics for native advertising are simple — great advertiser content should perform like great editorial content. So the performance of native ads can be tracked the same way that the performance of editorial content is tracked:

• Article page views — the consumer clicked on a headline and chose to view the content
• Clicks on links within the article, e.g. back to the advertiser’s site
• Social shares (Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
• Time spent on the article
• Number of advertiser articles read

By publishing native ads in their web CMS along with the editorial content, publisher can track the performance of native ads alongside the editorial content. The editorial content can actually help benchmark the performance of the native ad content.

New Business: Helping Advertisers Create Content

Native advertising can only succeed if advertisers have high quality content to publish on publishers’ sites.  In addition to the significant revenue opportunity of distributing native advertising, publishers can create a new business helping advertisers create content.

Creating great content is what defines great publishers.  If publishers can adapt these editorial skills to the business side, they can create a new revenue stream further up the “value chain” of publishing native ads.  With a business that creates content for advertisers, publishers could start hiring journalists again.

The display advertising value chain is dominated by ad exchanges and programmatic buying. But who will control the emerging market for native advertising, which depends on human factors to drive real value and scale?

Here are the four critical elements of the native advertising value chain, how they create value, and who is best positioned to control them:

1. Content creation

As Edelman’s Steve Rubel pointed out: “Very few brands have truly operational ‘newsrooms’ that are producing content with enough scale and — this is key — quality to match what the press does daily.”

Creating a newsroom is exactly the right way to frame the goal for scaling content creation to drive native advertising.  To be publishers, brands must develop the capacity of publishers. They must have newsrooms that can consistently produce fresh, high quality, engaging content. To make native advertising work, they need a continuous supply of new content, because there’s no value for consumers in constantly recycled stale content (not like running the same display ad creative over and over).

The organizations best positioned to help brands create newsrooms are the ones that already have newsrooms, that already employ journalists who create high quality content — publishers and… PR firms.

Publishers like BuzzFeed and Forbes, who are at the vanguard of scaling native advertising, have created dedicated newsrooms for brands. They are leveraging their own deep knowledge and experience with running newsrooms and creating high quality content at scale. Publishers also have the unrivaled advantage of being able to leverage their own publications to optimize brand content, i.e. the best way to figure out what content works is to publish it.

In recent years, PR firms have been hiring more journalists than news orgs have, and have great experience running newsrooms for brands.  While PR firm newsrooms haven’t traditionally been focused on content marketing, they do know how to create content that meets the standards of big brands, and they have developed boutique businesses in digital around content marketing.  PR firms have also traditionally been in the business of developing relationships with publishers based on providing editorial value, rather than transactions, so they are well positioned to develop a native ad media buying capacity, which could compete with that of existing media buying agencies.

Of course, media buying agencies still control most of the brand advertising budgets, and publishers and PR firms may well seek strategic alliances with these buyers.

Not to be counted out are the many boutique content marketing agencies, which already create content for brands, often in partnership with the big agencies.

A publisher, PR firm, or agency that develops a robust newsroom for brands, and can cost effectively scale the creation of high quality brand content, is best positioned to control this element of the value chain.  (And most likely to get bought up by the big agency holding companies that own the media buying agencies, control the budgets, and always end up owning all the pieces of the value chain.)

2. Feed management

The only way to scale the distribution of content produced by a “brand newsroom” is the same way that publishers manage content distribution at scale — feeds.

Manually uploading advertising content, one piece at a time, like traditional display ad creative, isn’t going to cut it. Not for the firehose of newsroom output.

A feed is simply a stream of content, but it’s a powerful mechanism for delivering continuous content value. It’s no accident that Facebook organized its core stream of social content as a “news feed”.  Twitter is essentially a never ending feed of 140 characters. Feeds define the content consumption paradigm for mobile, where consumers will increasingly consume most of their content.

Feed are how brands can efficiently organize and manage native advertising content across campaign goals, products, audiences, and markets.  The brand newsroom churns out content, which is curated into feeds that are then plugged into publishers for distributing the content as native advertising.

In fact, for media buyers, “feed management” is what campaign management becomes in native advertising.  Instead of flighting creative, you’re managing a continuous stream of content.  The ideal native advertising interface for a media buyer allows them to take a feed of brand content coming from the newsroom, set a campaign budget, and then choose the publishers (and even specific publisher sections) that are the best fit for the brand and for that particular feed of content.  They can choose the publishers that perform best for each content category, and specify any other targeting criteria.

Simply check a few boxes, and a content feed becomes a native ad campaign.

A native advertising platform designed to manage feeds at scale, that automatically imports content from brand newsroom and enables brand content feeds as native ad campaigns, will be best positioned to own this link in the native ad value chain.  It’s a platform capability that any player who wants to own and control brand content creation will need to have.

3. Editorial control

Publishers with the most respected brands — which have the greatest value as a context for native advertising — will not cede control over their editorial content streams to an ad network that programmatically controls the selection of brand content.

Denying publishers editorial control over native ad content is the enemy of scale. Publishers that value their brands — which is the greatest asset that any publisher has — simply won’t go for it.

The key to editorial control is providing an efficient workflow for editors to select native ad content that fits the publication brand and will be valued by readers, and to share that editorial judgment across a network of editors.

A native advertising platform designed for content curation, efficient newsroom workflows, and enabling network effects for editorial judgment, is best position for this dimension of the value chain.

4. Native ad publishing

Brand content is only truly native if it’s published in the publisher’s CMS, not merely presented on the surface like a display ad. That’s a key to the native advertising value chain for publishers like BuzzFeed and Forbes, who give advertisers direct access to their CMS.

But manually entering brand content in a publisher’s CMS won’t scale across hundreds and thousands of publishers.  Just as brands need feed management to scale the distribution of their content, publishers need deep integration with their CMS on the backend to scale native ad publishing.

A native advertising platform that natively integrates with a publisher’s CMS — from open source CMSs like WordPress and Drupal to the proprietary (and even home grown) CMSs of large media companies to print editorial systems — is best positioned to control native ad publishing.

In fact, the term “native ad publishing” much more accurately describes the true content aspirations of native advertising, which is about shifting the value for brands from advertising to publishing.

Premium pricing for premium value has made native advertising the great hope for publishers desperate to escape the death spiral of plunging CPM prices for display advertising.  For newspapers, premium pricing for premium value is why print advertising cash flow is still keeping their businesses afloat.

Native advertising could be the long hoped for bridge to a digital future for newspapers, to finally achieve the kind of premium pricing for digital advertising that they have in print, and to effectively monetizing the rapid rise of mobile news consumption.  But near-term, the opportunity for newspapers with native advertising is not just digital.

Newspapers should sell native advertising in print.

Magazines have been running “advertorials” for years, i.e. native advertising in print is not a new idea.  Forbes, for example, wisely extends its BrandVoice native advertising program into print:

Forbes is very smart to position the value of native advertising in print as a complement to the value in digital:

Newspapers can and should do the same.  And some already are. The New York Post ran this ad for their new native advertising program… in the print newspaper:

There is clearly demand for businesses to have a “voice,” to be part of the conversation with consumers, beyond the pure marketing of display ads.  Newspaper brands are still an extremely high value, trusted context for making your voice heard.

For businesses, reversing the old adage, 1,000 words printed in a newspaper are actually worth far more than a 300×250 picture on the web.  For local businesses in particular, having a substantive voice in the affairs of their community has huge value.  It’s a way to brand themselves as an integral part of the community, and worthy of local consumers’ business.

With their new focus on marketing services, newspapers could for example help local business leaders start blogs, with that content appearing as native ads in print and in the newspaper’s digital products.  In fact, for newspapers that help brands create content, distributing that content in print and the newspaper’s website would be a powerful complement to the social and search distribution that the newspapers’ marketing services have been selling.

Just as many publishers are still using display ads to complement native ads in digital, newspapers could run native ads for local businesses alongside their display ads — so no cannibalization. Cannibalizing print ad dollars is the great fear of every newspaper sales team, and such fear is how they have managed in many cases to thwart the development of new digital ad models.

But with native ads, the print sales team can not only protect but actually grow their key accounts.  It’s the alignment of interests that every newspaper publisher has been struggling with in the business model transition.

Will native ads in print break the church/state barrier and destroy the newspaper’s credibility? Not if it’s done right.  It’s all about transparency. The key is readers need to know the content is paid for.  Keep in mind that display ads in print are not typically labeled as ads — even when they started appearing on the once sacrosanct front page.  Traditional display ads in print work because consumers have learned over time how to recognize them as ads.  With ads as content in print, consumers can also learn, with the right labeling and design framework, to distinguish pay-for-play content from editorial content.

The Washington Post recently launched Sponsored Views, which lets businesses and advocacy organizations pay to have their comments appear at the top of the Post’s comments section.

It’s a not big leap from there to giving businesses a voice in print with native ads.

Native ads in print could also revitalize the appeal of newspapers to national advertisers, by providing a seamless extension for the digital distribution of branded content into print.  For a native ad network, extending the value into print could be a significant near-term arbitrage opportunity, and a key competitive advantage (albeit counterintuitive).

With a native ad platform that supports both digital and print distribution, newspapers can scale native ads across all their products, with the sales team fully aligned on the value for key accounts.  With a native ad platform that supports both local sales and a national network, newspapers can maximize the near-term cash flow from print and have a much greater chance of succeeding with the longer-term transition to digital.

When a term is as hot and hyped as “native advertising”, it’s inevitable that everyone will want to appropriate it to describe everything they are doing. Which means the term will be widely misappropriated.

While it’s still open for debate exactly what native advertising is, it’s useful to agree on what native advertising is NOT. Here are 5 types of advertising that are not native advertising:

1. Advertiser content that’s a poor fit with a publisher’s brand

• “15 Crazy Dance Crazes” on a financial news and commentary site
• “Men Only: The Case Against Exercising” and “2 Metabolism-Destroying Foods to Avoid at All Costs” on a high-end real estate site
• “Rare plant may increase muscle growth 700% — but is it an unfair advantage?” on a state capital news site

If it makes the editorial staff cringe or quake, it’s NOT native advertising.

The problem for the publisher’s brand is an issue of both relevance and content quality. Many publishers have tolerated low quality content that’s a poor brand fit when it was just links on their site. But when the content actually appears on their site, the potential for brand damage and alienating readers is much greater.

Ensuring the brand fit that makes the advertising native can’t be managed by an algorithm, it requires editorial judgment.

2. Link to advertiser’s site that takes you off the publisher’s site

If you leave the publisher’s site to engage with the content on the advertiser’s site, you’re off the reservation. Literally. The key to native advertising is the value of the publisher’s BRAND, and the value to the advertiser’s brand of appearing in the context where the publisher’s editorial content appears.

The value of the publisher’s brand and the editorial context is lost if you leave the publisher’s site.

Brands understandably want to build their own destination sites, and there are plenty of effective ways to buy traffic with links. But that’s NOT native advertising.

3. Advertiser content that isn’t in the publisher’s CMS

Delivering native ad content with javascript onto a publisher’s site, like a display ad, is likely to be the simplest option for many publishers. But if the content only appears to be on the publisher’s site, then it’s not really native. It may fool consumers, and that may be sufficient in many cases.

But there’s a reason why publishers like BuzzFeed and Forbes, who are leading the charge on native advertising, have given advertisers direct access to their CMS on the backend. These publishers want to give advertisers access to the same content tools used by their editorial staff.

Only by publishing the content IN the publisher’s CMS, just like the editorial content, can ad content be truly native. Native advertising doesn’t need to simulate the publisher’s template and styling if it’s in the publisher’s CMS alongside the editorial content.

For a native advertising platform, the ideal integration with a publisher’s site, where possible, is on the backend, directly into the CMS. The larger, more sophisticated publishers, and advertisers, will ultimately demand this approach.

4. Fixed position above or below the content stream

Native advertising headlines need to appear dynamically WITHIN the editorial content stream. That’s what makes, for example, Twitter’s Promoted Tweets so native — they are IN the stream.

A fixed position above or below the content stream is just a display ad position that happens to have content in it (which has been around for a long time). It may be advertiser content, but it’s not native advertising.

5. Advertiser content that’s not in a feed

When publishers and editors talk about the flow of editorial content, they talk about FEEDS. Feeds are fundamental to news, and they are fundamental to mobile, where the optimal user experience for content is a feed, i.e. a stream.

If advertiser content must be added to a native ad platform as separate, disconnected items, then it’s not a FEED , and therefore it’s not managed in the same way as the editorial content. If  advertiser content is not in a feed, then it’s not a continuous flow of value, like a publisher delivers — it’s just a one-off ad, like a display ad.

Native advertising isn’t flighted, it flows continuously. It’s iterative. It tells a story over time.

Truly native advertising requires “feed management”, whereby feeds of advertiser content are integrated with feeds of editorial content to create a seamless user experience.  That’s how brands can achieve the continuous engagement that they want from native advertising.

For brands to truly go native, and for native advertising to scale, advertisers must manage and distribute their content via feeds, just like publishers.

The newspaper industry has staked its future on failed legacy newspaper editorial systems that require “tremendous effort and patience“. GateHouse Media could not implement this old desktop software masquerading in the “cloud” because it required too much bandwidth. Seriously! What is this, 1996?

This legacy print CMS software is so ineffective, so destructive to digital innovation (not to mention legacy cost reduction), that newspaper executives are ready to take drastic measures — cut it off like a rotting limb. That’s what John Paton, CEO of Digital First media, is contemplating:

“[Digital has] got to move faster. I think it has to be more independent. It’s my job to figure out the encumbrances between the print assets and the digital assets. It’s my job to ensure that digital, if it’s going to be our future, is well funded and has as fast a path to success as possible.

I’m beginning to think that the very best way I can do that is to have it stand alone separate so that it can — unencumbered from the print piece — be able to do things we think it should do as a content company and as a sales company in the digital space.”

Paton isn’t talking about the print product itself that’s holding back digital. He’s talking about the software used to produce the print product, the same legacy print editorial system, which is putting DFM’s digital ambition and future at risk of failure.

Obsolete software and failed system architecture is one of the newspaper industry’s greatest “encumbrances,” a barrier to innovation, and ultimately a barrier to survival.

It’s not at all surprising that legacy print editorial systems in the “cloud” are failing, systemically, at every major news organization that has rolled them out. It’s not what they were designed to do.

And yet GateHouse is sticking with their legacy vendor. Why? Because they have invested millions of dollars and years (years!). But more significantly, they probably don’t know that there is an alternative.

But there is. A whole new paradigm for newsroom technology.

Forget the CMS. Stop searching for the grand unified CMS that does everything. It’s a unicorn. CMSs are designed to do one thing, e.g. produce a newspaper, a website, a blog, etc.

Publish2’s platform is a technology layer ABOVE the CMS. Publish2 commoditizes the CMS, and overcomes all of its limitations. Publish2 connects a newspaper’s old and new CMSs to work dynamically as if they were one.

Above all, Publish2 liberates newspapers from the CMSs that are holding them back, so they can create news digital products that drive new revenue while producing the print product more cost effectively.

True digital-first workflow, new sites, new apps, new revenue-driving products — it’s easy, not hard.

Ready for total CMS freedom? Get in touch.

​”You can’t fix what you won’t admit is wrong.” says Digital First Media CEO John Paton of the newspaper industry. That much needed tough love applies to the newspaper industry’s struggle with legacy editorial systems. (The title of this post is inspired by the title of of a recent talk by Paton.)

Newspaper executives have been sold on content hub solutions by the “old dogs” of news industry technology — the print editorial system vendors — whose “new tricks” are failing because they are implementing clouds solutions with desktop software architecture.

​Executives at news companies are beginning to realize, to their dismay, that although these print editorial system vendors have slick brochures, their cloud content hub solutions are mostly “smoke and mirrors” (to quote an executive).

News executives bought into these print-CMSs-in-cloud-clothing because neither they nor their IT executives have little basis to understand why the desktop editorial software they have used for so many years can’t simply be put into the cloud. Creating a dynamic network across newsrooms requires an entirely different software architecture, which legacy editorial system vendors could only create by completely rewriting their software from scratch… which none of them has done.

​The first step for news executives to admitting that they have a serious technology problem is understanding why the technology they have is wrong. News executives previously didn’t have to understand much about technology, but as Silicon Valley has driven the convergence of media and technology at an accelerating rate, all media companies must be as savvy about technology as they are about content.

​A simple way to understand why legacy editorial system vendors can’t deliver cloud content solutions is to draw an analogy to office productivity software. Imagine if Microsoft took the desktop version of Office — Word, Excel, PowerPoint — and put it on server. Would that be the equivalent of Google Apps, a web application designed from the core to enable collaboration in the cloud?

Of course not. In fact, Microsoft, with its massive development resources, only released a cloud version of Office last year — that’s how hard it is and how long it takes to re-architect desktop software for the cloud. Yet legacy print CMS vendors have been selling cloud content hubs for years — how much re-architecting do you think they did?

Based on what we’ve heard about the struggles that news companies have had with these legacy print CMS content hubs — even just keeping them from crashing constantly — not very much re-architecting at all.

Content management in the cloud, connecting disparate systems, workflows, content formats and types, is a complex problem — one that is too often beyond software not originally designed to solve it.

To make matters worse, implementing a single CMS that promises to do everything has proven to be a disastrous decision. But the alternative — a network that connects legacy and new systems with a flexible cloud-native architecture — was not a solution the old dogs could deliver.

As Paton said, “I meant what I said earlier when I used the word struggle.”

News companies have invested millions of dollars in “crappy” hacked technology with fundamentally bad architecture. How hard do you think it is for news executive to admit that they have a fundamental problem?

Very.

But to quote Paton again:

“We ignore this at the risk of killing our business but worse we ignore it when the solution to our future is sitting under our noses if… we would only let go of the past and embrace the future.”

Couldn’t have said it better. The news industry needs Paton-like truth telling about their core content technology. And the solutions are right under the industry’s nose — content platforms architected from the ground up to bring the news industry into the cloud, to create dynamic networks that turn siloed newsrooms into a fully integrated news operation.

Unfortunately, the politics of bad technology decisions have left some of the largest news company scrambling to overcome the failings of “smoke and mirrors” products. But even these problems can be overcome with properly architected technology — not by abandoning failed platforms, but by filling in the gaps.

The news industry is beginning to embrace Jon Paton’s tough message about what’s broken and how to fix it. Hopefully, they will soon begin to embrace his message as it applies to broken content management technology.

The news industry’s digital transformation is being thwarted and outright threatened by legacy editorial and content management systems that were not designed to build a bridge from old to new.  Here are seven ways that legacy CMSs are hurting the news industry:

1. Creating content in a print editorial system is NOT digital-first
Many print editorial system vendors have convinced newsrooms that creating content in a front-end system and then “sending” it to the web counts as digital-first. These same newsrooms have used web-native blog software like WordPress to create true-digital first workflows where reporters publish on the web first and continuously update stories.  Excellent workflow tools (e.g. Edit Flow, NYT’s Integrated Content Editor) have been developed for platforms like WordPress that make it truly viable to publish everything digital-first by using a blog or web CMS as the newsroom’s primary CMS.

But this web-first content has no way to make it back into the editorial system for the print workflow… other than copying and pasting, or forcing reporters and editors to recreate these stories. That’s a huge disincentive to being digital-first! It’s telling that most newsrooms still think of this as “reverse publishing” — you can imagine the gears of the legacy editorial system grinding as you try to force it into reverse, but it gets stuck in neutral!

Newsrooms that create content in a print editorial system remain anchored to print-first workflows, and that puts digital products and digital revenue last.

2. No way to efficiently share content or create integrated workflows across newsrooms
Legacy editorial systems, which were designed as siloed desktop software that runs in each newsroom, have hacked an ostensible “content hub” layer on top of their outdated software architecture and sold it to news companies on the promise of internal content sharing.  These print editorial systems masquerading as hub solutions have not only proven notoriously unstable (see 7 below), they have failed to enable any kind of viable workflow for sharing content across newsrooms.

Giving every newsroom access to every other newsroom’s content via a shared database is not a workflow!  Imagine an individual newsroom, or a national desk, rooting through piles of local content to find stories of broader interest.  It’s like stealing from your sibling’s room — it’s a recipe for strife and frustration.

News companies are all focused on transforming from holding companies for local news orgs into fully integrated media companies that can leverage all of their content in new digital products.  Given the strategic importance of integrating newsroom operations, the failure of these print editorial system pseudo-hubs is particularly distressing.

3. Can’t create distinctive apps and mobile products when powered by a web CMS
There is a huge opportunity for news orgs to create apps that are highly differentiated from their websites, to support both a subscription model and premium advertising.  But how is that possible when all that news orgs have to power apps are the feeds from their website?  If content doesn’t go into the web CMS, then it doesn’t go into the app. Forget creating a content package distinct from the website, or curating content from new local and national sources.

For years, news orgs were criticized for “shoveling” print content onto the web. Now legacy CMSs are forcing them to re-shovel content into apps and mobile.

4. Can’t curate new content sources outside the newsroom
Apps like Flipboard and Pulse are seeing huge consumer adoption by aggregating content from top news sources and presenting it in innovative tablet user interfaces. Can news orgs compete? Not if their app is powered by their web CMS!

Outside of commodity wire content, news orgs have no way to aggregate content from new local and national sources because they have no way to get it into their CMS, and so no way to get it into their apps. Local news brands could create compelling new products by combining their original local content with a network of local and national content partners. In fact, they could use new content sources to enhance their print product in parallel.

Unfortunately, their editorial systems assumed that all they would ever use is commodity wire content. FAIL.

5. Downsized newsrooms are drowning in inefficient workflows (copy/paste/email/reformat)
Everyday, we hear about workflows based on copying and pasting from one legacy editorial system or CMS to another, or emailing content from one newsroom to another.  How can you ask newsrooms to do more with less and then ask them to spend hours a day hacking their way around deficiencies in their legacy content management systems? Newsrooms are so beaten down with these hacked workflows that it never even occurs to them that there could be a better way, that content management technology can actually create efficiencies instead of headaches.

6. Can’t integrate with partners and distribution channels
Want to share content with regional partners. Open up that legacy CMS, copy, paste, email. Want to use content from regional partners. Open up your inbox, open the email, copy, paste. Lather, rinse, repeat. Want to distribute content to a new channel or platform? Create an IT project to produce a custom feed — if you’re lucky! With a legacy editorial system, connecting with external partners is as efficient as a game of phone tag.

7. Content hubs built with legacy print editorial systems have been a disaster
Can you imagine in an age of agile cloud software an implementation plan that is slated to take 12-18 months?  That’s how long most news companies have had to budget to roll out print editorial system pseudo-hubs.  It’s desktop software, so if you have 50 newsrooms with thousands of people, that’s a lot of installations!  Hard to imagine in the age of the cloud.  Also hard to imagine that news companies should be in the business of maintaining servers that are more reliable than Amazon Web Services, or maintaining software code that has been hacked to do something it was never designed to do.

So it’s no surprise that these print CMS pseudo-hub implementations have produced notorious failures.  We know of implementations at some of the largest news companies that constantly crash, have horrible 15-year-old Windows desktop user interfaces, and rather than create efficiencies have turned into black hole time sinks.

We Feel Your Pain — There’s a Better Way!
We designed Publish2 for newsrooms to overcome all of these limitations and more, without actually changing any of these legacy editorial systems or spending a dime on upgrading them. When we implement Publish2, we ask the newsroom to imagine their dream digital-first workflows, what would be optimally efficient, and what they never thought possible with their legacy CMS. And then we make it happen, like magic.

Publish2 can:

1. Deliver digital-first content into print CMS wire queues — the newsroom can go digital-first by turning digital content into an internal wire service for print. Newsrooms are free to adopt any blog or web CMS without worrying about integrating with legacy editorial system.
2. Enable seamless sharing of content across newsrooms (including newspapers and broadcast TV) by connecting legacy editorial systems.  No need to purchase expensivee upgrades or spend 12-18 months consolidating on a legacy system that won’t deliver any efficiencies.
3. Power apps and mobile sites that are highly differentiated from desktop websites, with distinct original content and content curated from a network of partners.
4. Enable local and national content partnerships, to create new local products with curated content that engages consumers better than the best Silicon Valley news aggregator startups.
5. Eliminate all copy/pasting/emailing/reformatting from newsroom workflows. Enough is enough!
6. Enable seamless content sharing and distribution. No need to create an API and deploy development resources that you don’t have. With Publish2, you can connect with any partner or platform — it just works.
7. Provide a reliable, scalable, efficient software-as-a-service to enable news orgs’ digital transformation.  That’s all we do.  And that’s why we’re really good at it.

How many times today did someone in your newsroom copy and paste content from one system to another? Or move content by logging into multiple systems or emailing files around to editors?

How much time did your newsroom staff waste today overcoming the inefficiencies of your internal systems, redoing work that had already been done, or chasing after content from partner or sister newsrooms?

Think about the real cost of inefficiency in your newsroom. If you added up all those wasted hours every day, across a year, what would they amount to? What could your newsroom afford if it wasn’t paying for that inefficiency? Depending on the size and number of newsrooms, that wasted time could add up to hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars per year.

With the staff reductions of recent years, newsrooms simply can’t afford to waste time. It’s a top of mind issue across all the newsrooms we talk to.

Everyday we hear stories of workflows accomplished through tedious copying and pasting. Reporters enter breaking news stories into the web CMS, where they create headlines, subheads, breakouts, and info boxes, and then editors have to start all over from scratch in the print editorial system. Or web producers labor to manually recreate on the web what editors have already spent hours of the day creating for print.

Every newsroom has to update their website throughout the day, publish content into new tablet apps, engage with their community in social media, and still put out the paper. The problem is that these workflows are fundamentally separate, rather than being an integrated daily news operation.

We also hear over and over that partner and sister newsrooms are emailing content back and forth, calling each other up to chase after copy. There are so many high value content sources that editors can tap into outside of the newsroom, but it costs them hours to go out and fetch it, rather than have the content come to them as the traditional newswire has always done.

These are hours that reporters and editors could be spending on creating original content. How much more content could your newsroom have produced today if editors and reports hadn’t wasted so much time with inefficient workflows?

The newsroom has always prided itself on efficiency, because nothing less than the most efficient operation could get a newspaper to press everyday. But the staff reductions, the demands of the web and other digital platforms, and the ad hoc nature of new content partnerships have taken a huge toll on newsroom efficiency.

That’s why Publish2 has been focused on solving newsroom inefficiency by addressing one of the key root causes: disconnected systems.

Simply by syncing a newsroom’s existing print editorial system and web CMS, we can save newsrooms hours a day in lost productivity. By connecting the newsroom’s publishing systems, then, to those of sister newsrooms, content sharing partners, and alternative news sources, we eliminate emailing content back and forth, more rounds of copying and pasting, ad hoc phone calls in search of content and permission, and yet more copying and pasting from third-party websites.

With all publishing systems connected through Publish2, **all content gets created once **and is then synced across all systems, within your newsroom and across newsrooms.

Suddenly the time savings starts to be measured in FTEs.

Think about how your newsroom could redeploy that staff time. What new products could your newsroom create? What new revenue opportunities would you be better positioned to pursue, especially if the gains in efficiency come from an integrated content workflow?

Every newsrooms should make it a top priority to remove all copy and pasting and emailing from their workflow and enable content, both internal and external, to flow efficiently across all platforms. That’s a critical step in transforming the newsroom into an agile organization positioned for growth.

The best that any company can hope for is to find a big, universal problem that nobody else has solved. It seems we’ve hit upon that problem, based on the reaction to “How to Make It Easy for Newsrooms to Link on the Web“, and a follow up email we sent to our community that framed the larger problem — “How to Solve the Print-Web Workflow Problem.” (Hat tip to Paul Balcerak who first framed it that way.)

The response has been tremendous.

Every newspaper newsroom in the world is struggling with integrating print and digital workflows.  And Publish2 can solve this problem for every newsroom, using their existing systems.

The inefficiency created by disconnected print and web workflows — all that copy and pasting, and emailing, and more copy and pasting — has huge costs. Newsrooms can no longer afford that kind of inefficiency.

The beauty of our solution is that by connecting their existing publishing systems, we can also connect newsrooms to a larger network: sister publications, regional partners, local blogs, and new content partners.  We can also distribute the newsroom’s content to tablet apps and social media. That’s the power of connected publishing.

And this isn’t just about newspapers. Magazine publishers, we’ve discovered, are wrestling with the same problem.

The evolution of publishing from print to digital can’t happen by flicking a switch. It requires a bridge. Every print publisher needs a bridge to digital. That’s the big, universal problem we’re solving for the news industry.

There has been a great deal of debate in the last few days about why mainstream news organizations in general and newspapers in particular don’t link out to sources from their stories. Many participants in the debate have asserted that this is because news sites still fear sending people away. Or they don’t “get it,” i.e. they don’t understand how the web works, or the value of linking, or even what a link is.

Perhaps that was true to a larger extent in the past. But having spent a lot of time working with newsrooms, I can tell you that by and large this is no longer case. The problem is not one of attitude or ignorance, but rather the more mundane yet still hugely significant problem of technology and workflow. And it’s a much bigger problem than most people discussing the issue realize — so much so that the solution has not been obvious.

Fortunately, there is a solution. But first, for the sake of broader understanding, let’s fully flesh out the problem.

Here’s how Brian Boyer at the Chicago Tribune explained it:

At the Chicago Tribune, workflows and CMSs are print-centric. In our newsroom, a reporter writes in Microsoft Word that’s got some fancy hooks to a publishing workflow. It goes to an editor, then copy, etc., and finally to the pagination system for flowing into the paper.

Only after that process is complete does a web producer see the content. They’ve got so many things to wrangle that it would be unfair to expect the producer to read and grok each and every story published to the web to add links.

The solution seems obvious — switch to a web-centric workflow by creating all of the content in the web CMS first. Most web CMSs make it easy to add links, or at least much easier than newspaper print editorial systems, many of which don’t even accept HTML.

While many newsrooms do now publish breaking news on the web first, there are two big reasons why newspaper newsrooms can’t easily ask all of their reporters to write all of their stories in the web CMS first:

1. Web CMSs don’t handle multi-stage editorial workflows

As Brian pointed out, after a reporter finishes a story, it needs to go to an editor and then to a copy editor. Most Web CMSs are not designed to handle this workflow. You can’t set story status to track where is in the workflow. Editors can’t be notified that stories are ready for review, or are ready for copy editing. Reporters can’t be notified that revisions are required. You can’t manage story assignments. You can’t customize the workflow in any way.

I’ve actually heard many web-native editorial operations complain about this limitation, even in a flexible CMS like WordPress. Daniel Bachhuber actually developed a plugin for WordPress, called EditFlow, to solve this workflow problem (which is great, if you use WordPress as your primary web CMS, which most newspapers don’t).

But why on earth, you might ask, do these newsrooms need all of this editorial process? Why do they need layers of editors and copy editors? Most web-native publishers let their writers post directly to web. If there are mistakes, they can just update the content in real time, fix typos, post corrections, etc.

That’s how web publishing works. But it’s not how print publishing works.

In print, you only get one chance to get it right. Publishing content as a continuously updated process works great when you can update in real time, but not when you have to wait until the next day to post the correction, at which point it’s really too late.

And there’s another big difference between publishing on print and publishing on the web — finite space. If a reporter files a story, and there’s not enough space for it, somebody needs to make it fit on the page. Because the web has infinite space, web CMSs were not designed to accommodate a workflow that requires making the content fit the available space.

Lastly, there’s one more major difference between a print workflow and a web workflow — press deadline. You’ve got to print the newspaper, and everything needs to be ready to go by the time the presses roll. On the web, you can publish on a rolling basis, 24/7. But for print, it only happens once a day, which by its nature requires a more complex, coordinated process.

It’s certainly open to debate how many editorial layers are really necessary for creating the print product. Many newsrooms have been forced to reduce the number of layers as the result of cost reduction cutbacks. But it’s simply not practical for most newsrooms to produce the print product without a system that can handle an editorial workflow with some degree of sophistication.

2. Web CMSs don’t support the print layout process

Creating the newspaper print product is, fundamentally, about traditional desktop publishing. Layout and design is done typically in InDesign or Quark. And most newspaper workflows are based on a process for easily getting content into page layout.

A key function of the print editorial system is to flow content, properly formatted, onto pages in InDesign and Quark. These systems can also sync edits made on the designed page (e.g. making it fit) back into the database. Many of these systems handle high resolution photos, also necessary for print, but not the web.

Bottom line — newspapers can’t simply throw out their print editorial systems and just use their web CMS for everything, simply because it’s easier (or even possible) to create links in the web CMS.

That brings us to another seemingly obvious solution: Why not create all content in the web CMS first, then simply import it into the print editorial system for the print workflow.

Newsrooms actually have a term for this: Reverse publishing

You could make a strong argument that it’s time to “reverse the polarity” of publishing, as newsrooms transform for a digital future.

There’s just one problem — there’s no way to get content from the website into the print editorial system. Most print CMSs can’t import RSS feeds, because they were all designed based on the assumption that content flows in the other direction. Print editorial systems are typically desktop applications that don’t natively connect to the web. (This, by the way, is why it’s so difficult for web publishers to deliver content to newspaper partners — subject for another post.)

So even if a newsroom reverses the polarity of its publishing priorities, the technology doesn’t make it easy.

Until now.

The Solution

Publish2 has solved this problem, with a very counterintuitive approach. We’ve developed support for delivering content into print editorial systems using the import function that these systems were designed to use — receiving content from a traditional newswire.

To deliver content into print editorial systems, Publish2 uses the formats and delivery mechanisms that are completely unknown outside of newspaper newsrooms and foreign to anyone who only publishes on the web (ANPA, NITF, I won’t bore you with the details).

Using the Publish2 Print-Digital Integration module, newspapers are able to create content in the web CMS, publish web and digital first, and then easily flow all the content into the print editorial system. We strip out the HTML for print, so reporters can link as much as they want in the web version. We can also deliver the content into the archiving system.

And we can do it all without any change to the existing systems, and without the significant expense of throwing out the old system and buying a new one.  So there’s no throwing out the baby with the bathwater to adopt a digital first publishing workflow. This solution also has the benefit of freeing up web producers from a lot of copy/pasting and other manual workflow to spend more creating original web content and features.

The result is that the only barrier to change is a willingness to change. And that is a barrier that most newsrooms, as a matter of survival, have already overcome.

Many people have reached out to us recently and asked, “How’s Publish2 doing? You guys have been very quiet for the last few months.” That’s because we’ve had our heads down rolling out the full content distribution service that we announced last summer and launched in beta last fall. And… we’ve successfully launched our business model.

So it’s time for an update on the growth of our content distribution network and our new software-as-a-service licensing business.

Network Growth

The value of any network grows exponentially with the number of participants. So we’re excited to report the our network now includes over 200 news organizations that are actively distributing and acquiring content through Publish2.

See who’s in the Publish2 network.

We’ve found the key to network growth is members “inviting their friends,” just like on Facebook, which in our case means news organizations inviting their partners. When all of your partners, and news orgs that you want to partner with, are on the network, it’s easy to see the value in joining.

We’re focused on bringing the hundreds of newsrooms we’ve worked with over the past three years into the network.  As with all networks, the larger it is, the more valuable it becomes for everyone involved.  We’re exploring every network vector for content distribution and content sharing — state, region, sports leagues, topics like health, environment, business, etc.

(Interested in joining the network? Let us know.)

New Business Model: Software-as-a-Service

In the past six months, we have also successfully launched our paid software-as-a-service business. Here are some of our paid SaaS customers, which include over 50 news orgs:

• Freedom Communications
• USA WEEKEND Magazine, a Gannett Company
• Bakersfield Californian
• Oregon Public Broadcasting
• East Oregonian Publishing Company
• Climate Central
• C-SPAN

SaaS is the ideal business model for our network because we can support the business models of our network participants — whether that be content bartering, licensing, ad revenue share, or branding — without dictating what their business model should be. All news organizations on our network control their content rights, terms of use, and the business agreements they set up with their network partners. There a lot of companies out there looking to take a percentage cut of your revenue, but we’re not one of them. SaaS also ensures our long-term sustainability as a network platform.

While joining the Publish2 content distribution network is free, our paid software-as-a-service license is required for automating the delivery of content directly into publishing systems — legacy front end editorial systems, hosted web CMSs, open source CMSs, mobile apps — we support them all.  We know most news orgs don’t have a developer with free time to code to an API, so we skip the API and integrate directly with existing systems using open formats and technology that newsrooms can use right out of the box. Our software-as-a-service comes with full support for integration and newsroom training — we’ll meet your technology and newsroom where they are today.

We also know that unless content gets delivered where time-crunched editors work every day, it won’t get used. Logging in to another website to download content is typically a non-starter.  We deliver content into existing wire queues and post directly to websites. That’s what puts news orgs in the position to reduce the cost of “filling the news hole” and create new products by curating content from their network (what we call the Content Graph).

Our software-as-a-service now includes a range of “content modules” that enable news organizations to take advantage of connecting the network directly to their publishing systems.

For example, Freedom Communications is using our Internal Newswires module to create a content sharing network for all of their properties, to maximize the value of the content that their newsrooms create everyday. Editors can export stories from their editorial system with one click, without having to log into Publish2. And shared stories show up in their existing wire queues alongside other wire stories. They are also sharing budgets to help newsrooms plan around shared content.

Once they have all their publishing systems connected, Freedom can use other Publish2 modules to:

• Join regional and national content sharing Co-ops
• Receive content from Alternative Newswires
• Integrate with social media

USA WEEKEND Magazine, a Gannett Company, is using our Syndication Management module to distribute content from partners like The Doctors, as well as some of their own content, to their hundreds of newspaper customers for use in print and/or online. Our Syndication Management module allows USA WEEKEND’s carrier newspapers to pull content directly into their publishing systems.For web syndication, we provide content tracking, branding and links back, and Google’s syndication-source meta tag to prevent problems with duplicate content in search.

Climate Central is similarly using our Syndication Management module to enable news orgs interested in their environmental reporting to get it delivered directly into their publishing systems, with the goal of significantly ramping up their syndication across hundreds of partners. We take care of all the implementation and support for their partners, while they sit back and enjoy greater pickup by getting their content to editors. Climate Central is also using Publish2 to automate posting content from partners on their own site — here’s an example.

East Oregonian Publishing Company is using our Co-op module to share content internally and with other news orgs in the Northwest, starting with Oregon Public Broadcasting. They are also using our Content Bridge module to bridge the gap that still exists in most newsrooms between print and web. At the same time that editors share stories through the Publish2 network, they can send them to their own website. For stories already on the web, they can be shared back into the print production process and delivered to the archive. Hours spent copying and pasting can now be more productively reallocated.

Bakersfield Californian uses our Alternative Newswire module to receive content from a range of news sources, from free newswires like AOL DailyFinance to licensed content from California Watch and McClatchy-Tribune.

News organizations continue to surprise us with new ways to use our platform — setting up content distribution as a peer-to-peer network opens up a lot of possibilities for cost savings and new revenue streams. Having integrated directly with news organizations’ web and print publishing systems, Publish2 makes it easy for them to expand their use of the network.

For example, based on newsroom feedback we created a module for newsrooms to set up a PR newswire service for local businesses, as a way to add content to their sites, source local business stories, and source local advertising leads. We created the Local Industry Newswires module as a way for news orgs to enable companies in a major local industry to share news and information — news orgs can even create a B2B publication and sell advertising. We created the Community Newswires module to make setting a blog network turnkey and easily scalable.

We are also excited to be serving the mission of news organizations on our network:

• Sustaining and growing resources for original reporting (especially local) by reducing the costs of third-party content
• Enabling new products that produce new revenue streams to support journalism
• Enabling broader regional and national distribution of important public issues reported at the local level
• Enabling broader distribution for nonprofit news organizations, and new business models that support those organizations
• Enabling news organizations to be the beneficiaries of disruptive new models, rather than the victims

The other question we get asked is, “Why is Publish2 creating a network for the news industry? Isn’t that like vitamins for dinosaurs?”

Yeah, well, for those keeping score, the news industry is still a $100 billion worldwide market and many newspapers are in fact profitable. The last few years may have been painful, but every news organization is now solidly focused on transforming for future growth.  To do so, news companies must adopt technologies that enable their newsrooms to create new digital products while simultaneously preserving the ROI of their legacy print product.  Providing that bridge between old and new is precisely what Publish2’s platform and network are designed to do and, given the rate of adoption we’re seeing now, we are very optimistic about the future of the news industry.

I’m going to be speaking at the American Press Institute seminar on Creating the Digital User Experience, May 12 – May 13, 2011. Here’s my session on “Content (Re)Packaging: Curation and Syndication in the Age of Unbundled Digital Content”:

Digital consumers get their news from a wide range of “content packagers” — social media (Facebook, Twitter), search (Google), portals (Yahoo, AOL), and now a new breed of tablet apps (Flipboard, News.me, Zite). Find out how news publishers can meet consumer demand and support new business model by distributing their content through all of these new channels. Learn how editorial brands can become curators themselves and take back control of content distribution by creating news packages the news consumers want.

Here’s the program overview:

In today’s complex digital media landscape, there is only one way you can stay ahead of your competitors: create a compelling user experience.

API’s Creating the Digital User Experience will connect you to the interrelated world of content and revenue and platforms and applications on the Internet. It’s about understanding what people want and giving them the rich online experiences they crave. It’s about the wave of always-connected consumers, location-aware mobile apps and services, and digital platforms that are making business and news unlike anything we’ve experienced before. And, it’s about driving revenue from it all.

And the other session leaders — awesome group:

In my contribution to the Nieman Journalism Lab’s 2011 Prediction series, I agree with Clay Shirky’s prediction about the disruption of the traditional news syndication model, but disagree (yes, I disagreed with Clay Shirky) about how the disruption will play out.  Here’s an excerpt:

The desktop web has been a revolutionary platform in terms of access to information, the democratization of publishing, and the socialization of media. But as a medium for consuming news content, from a user interface and user experience perspective, it’s problematic at best and downright awful at worst. News consumption has begun a major shift from the traditional desktop web to apps for touch tablets for a simple reason — the user experience and user interface are so much better, as the recent RJI survey of iPad users reflects. Consumers are choosing tablet apps over the traditional desktop web based on the quality of the user experience and the overall content “package.”

News organizations are already shifting their strategies to take advantage of that consumer shift. But few have thought about the role of syndication in news apps. With the immersive, hands-on experience of a tablet news app, the value of syndication changes entirely. Apps that deliver nothing but one news organization’s content will not compare favorably with the content richness of the web, no matter how good the UI is. And apps that bounce users around from site to site with an in-app browser, mimicking the traditional desktop web model, will fail for precisely the reason why users chose the app in the first place.

But news apps that can deliver full content, curated from a wide range of sources, within a cohesive, optimized — even breakthrough — UI for news consumption, will win because users will have the best of both worlds. Syndication in news apps will not be about republishing news that everyone else has. It will be about combining curated news with original content in order to create consumer packages that are deeply engaging and in many cases worth paying for. With this shift, news organizations will stop ceding to aggregators the huge value creation of curating and packaging news. Instead, news organizations will start defining their editorial brands as curators as much as they define them as original content creators.

Read the rest at Nieman Journalism Lab.

We’re excited to announce that Demotix, the award-winning open photo agency for independent journalists, will begin offering content via Publish2 News Exchange when we launch photo support later this summer. Newspapers and other news organizations will not only benefit from the huge efficiency of sharing photos directly through Publish2 News Exchange, but they will now also benefit from the efficiency of Demotix’s open photo sourcing platform and their presence in the U.S. news market.

Demotix pioneered the professionalization of what they call “street journalism” — enabling photographers on the scene of major news events to sell their photos to news organizations. Demotix splits the revenue with photographers 50/50 each time the photo is sold (unlike some major photo agencies that take a much larger cut and only pay photographers once). Photos sourced from Demotix have appeared on the front pages of New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Time, and The Guardian.

Newspapers seeking alternative sources of news photos have already recognized the huge benefits of sharing photos directly, which News Exchange will enable them to do now on a national scale and with much greater efficiency (and no more emailing photos back and forth!). With the addition of Demotix to News Exchange, newspapers will also be able to buy photos a la carte for coverage of major news events around the U.S. and around the world.

Turi Munthe, CEO and Founder, describes Demotix as “the freelancer’s AP”. We love that. Demotix is disrupting the news photo market, opening new options to photo buyers like newspapers. We love disruption that helps all the news orgs on News Exchange evolve evolve their businesses — that’s our mission.

Here’s what Turi had to say about our partnership:

“We’re thrilled to be partnering with Publish2 News Exchange. The future of news is open, agile and collaborative. Publish2 is at the very cutting edge of that revolution, and we are proud to be joining them. We have a shared vision of democratising news gathering and distribution. Activating our 3,000-odd global contributors across the News Exchange platform brings every corner of the world to News Exchange and gives voice to our community across the US.”

Check out Turi’s piece in the Spring Nieman Reports on creating a new marketplace for news photography.

Here’s more on Demotix:

Launched in January 2009, Demotix now has over 3,200 active reporters in 190 countries around the world, a 250,000-strong picture archive from Kabul to Kentucky, and a monthly growth of over 20,000 editorial images and video.

Demotix has been profiled by Reuters TV (twice), Bloomberg, CBC, Le Monde, The Guardian, Wired.com, El Pais, The Telegraph and countless other media all over the world.

In the last year, Demotix has won the Guardian Media Award for Independent Journalism, the British Airways Young Business Award, was named a Tech Invest 100 company by PWC, was a finalist for Mashable’s Open Web Award, SXSW 2010’s Community Award, and the Knight Batten Prize (Demotix was the only non-US news outfit nominated).