Publishing has always been about building communities, then monetizing them. (Here’s what Perplexity thinks about that.)
This blog isn’t a business because I don’t do that. Here, the community is me, what I think about, what I worry about, the issues I think need to be talked about. No one else is me, so unless you’re a fan of me you’re not inclined toward joining my community. I get that.
But anyone who wants to make money publishing something, and the Internet is a publishing medium, must focus on serving, then building, a community of interest. It could be the place you live, the industry you serve, the job you have, or just a hobby.
This is not news. It’s been the case since the first printing press. It’s a fact that unites all media types from print to video to this Internet you’re using. A good publisher will use every means at their disposal to serve their community in every way they can. There’s no print media, no daily or monthly media, no TV media and no Internet media. There’s just community, and the key to community is interaction.
This is a point observers consistently ignore, and it’s why otherwise smart writers keep writing about the death of media. What’s dying are those outlets that ignore, or forget, the first sentence of this post.
Do you remember it?
The Means and the End
The rise of the Internet as the medium of choice has led publishers to confuse means and ends. News is a means, not an end. Print and video are means, not ends. The end is to build a community of interest, and then to draw in businesses that wish to sell to that community.
Focus. That’s the key.
At this point you’re saying the competition is Facebook. Or LinkedIn. Maybe NextDoor. You’re right. But a publisher has something the social sites don’t have. It’s in the paragraph above.
You beat the social sites by paying people to attend to the real needs of your chosen community. Social sites don’t pay moderators. They don’t direct their discussions, seeing them as nothing but traffic. A community site must do these things, and 99% of the sites I’ve seen, even the good ones, don’t.
A community director is more important to a modern media site than a good reporter, even an editor. The coin of the realm is interaction. Not just interaction between you and the reader, but among the readers. A modern media site must become the first place you go when something happens that impacts your community of interest.
Defining that community, both what it is and what it isn’t, then serving that community, learning not only who is in it but who knows things, is what publishing has always been about. The Internet offers great tools for this, but publishers and even social networks use only a fraction of them.
I’m part of several communities. Some are on Facebook, some are local news sites, and others are mailing lists. The difference between me and a publisher is that the publisher will be focused on only one community, the one they serve.
Where They Get It Wrong
I remember back in the last century when I wrote for Electronic Media, a Crain publication aimed at TV station management. The publisher there seemed indistinguishable, in his thoughts and in his interests, from the owner of a TV station in Iowa. He understood the assignment, to think like his reader, and to deliver them the information that would make their day easier. But only that information.
In 1987, I was sent to cover a riot by prisoners at the Atlanta Federal Prison. I didn’t care about the riot, or the issue. My job was to talk to the people inside the TV trucks, to learn what they were doing and how they were doing it, what it cost and when they would leave. Because that’s what a TV station owner or manager needed to know.
Knowing your reader, or more precisely in this century your community member, means you listen to their concerns, identify with them, and focus on getting them answers to questions involving the community as they come up. It requires you to direct the discussion of those issues into useful directions, curating it in other words.
It’s when you have a community that values itself, through your site, that you start building a business model around it. You don’t sell advertising, although you might sell sponsorships. What you’re selling is access to your community members. You’re their gatekeeper. Which means you don’t sell to people whose products or services will harm your community. Let your competitors do that and let them suffer for it.
The Bottom Line
By building a community, by focusing on its needs, you will learn what you need to cover and how. Once you do this, money will flow to you, which you will pass out to people who best focus on those community needs, through writing, or video, or code.
What you and your people can do that no AI can do is to care. AIs aren’t built for caring, because computers have no heart. People do. You become a publisher because you care desperately about where you live, or what you do. Focus on serving that need and you can succeed. Fail to do so and you deserve to fail.
