• by OMMA Magazine Writers , January 29, 2008

Publishing people — the old school-kind who have thick tortoise-shell spectacles perched on their heads and pencils behind their ears — tend to be slow to accept change. And those of us who still work in print (forgetting for a moment the irony that OMMA is a paper periodical devoted to the online industry) can be territorial about what, for so long, has been our word and ours alone. Where do these Web guys get off calling themselves publishers? 

Perhaps we take small solace in the fact that the Latin root of the word is puclicare (to make public) from publicis and that when we go all the way back to 1330, the original meaning of the word publicen in Middle English was merely “to announce.” So it was never our word at all. Once upon a time, anybody with a bell and a loud voice was a publisher.

It bears noting, though, that of course nobody ever referred to television broadcasts as “video publishing” or some such. In her look behind the online publishing curtain in this issue, Laurie Petersen finds that “online publishers” started out as a reference to print pubs scrambling to stake out their online territory. In those days, as traditional media companies saw that they’d need to get digital real fast in order to compete, the old mantra of publish or perish took on new meaning.

We know that online publishing is no longer so rigid, and tried to narrow the criteria for our rankings this year (where we focus on performance and ad ROI). For starters we thought publishers needed to hire professional editors (or more often, in the online parlance, producers) and they needed to be providing some function of the old meaning — making things public. In this way, MySpace, a failed social networking site gets a second lease on life as an online publisher, while Facebook stays out of the territory because they don’t produce original content and they succeed on networking alone.

You can quibble with our methodology, but the line needs to be drawn somewhere, lest you end up with a tangle of anybody with broadband and a bell.

The Editors
editorial@mediapost.com