Publishing and a "Minimum Viable Product"

Murdoch still doesn't get the "web" but the following article (excerpt below) is worth a read--

How To Publish a "Minimum Viable Magazine" Online | MIT Technology Review: "Shocking no one, News Corporation’s iPad-only publication “The Daily” kicked the bucket today. . .Web startups live and die by a strategy called the MVP, or “minimum viable product.” Arment has applied that philosophy to digital publishing in his publication The Magazine, . . . What makes Arment’s app work–and what could make it a sustainable model for other, more ambitious publications–has everything to do with practicalities of technology, infrastructure, and user experience, not the free-floating abstraction called “journalism”. Mod unfurls these insights in a must-read essay, but here’s a distillation of how to build an MVP (minimum viable publishing) operation: Make it simple so you can make it fast. “Immersive reading experiences” are fine and dandy, but nobody wants to wait for a multi-gigabyte download. Optimize your publication for speed. That means text, not interactive doodads; scrolling single column layouts, not pagination and flashy nav schemes; and small bundles of similarly-sized features, not a print-like stack of sections surrounding a “feature well.” Think Instagram, not Photoshop. . . . Base the thing on HTML so it’s simple, i.e. fast, but also futureproof. This also ensures that every piece of content has “a corresponding, touchable home on the open web” . . . “content without a public address is non-existent in the eyes of all the inter-operable sharing mechanisms that together bind the web.” Exploit a seamless purchasing pipeline. . . . It’s nothing more than savvy digital development and product design strategies applied to a publishing context. Every other digital publisher is doing the reverse: starting with (legacy) publishing strategies and backing into the technology–which leads to bloated, unsustainable operations and user experiences that never feel essential enough to compete with the free web (or even print). . . . "


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