How social media is changing publishing?

Social media has changed the world of publishing a lot and it is continue to change it every day. Few days ago I watch an interesting interview with Merritt Colaizzi, publisher of SmartBrief, a media company that aggregates content in more than 150 daily business publications covering 23 industries. She presents few most important trends about publishing industry related to social media.

sme_mc_022310 from Michael A. Stelzner on Vimeo.

The most important trend she points out is that people are reporting breaking news through social media and their reports are sometimes really edgy stuff that can not be seen in media. There is more and more audience participating in the actual production of what they are publishing every day. And there is so much information out there and every day new sources are proliferating, but we have the same amount of time to absorb that information, so there is more and more important the filtering and aggregation of the content. The survey among readers of Smart Brief publications showed that most important things of coming to readers in 2010 are mobile applications, content aggregation and filtering. Smart Brief adjusted their publishing model to these trends. They present few top stories from different areas in their publications and because there is important that conversations are going around the news, they enable their readers to have a discussion on different streams. They are also moving to aggregating the most important user comments and finding other ways to integrate reader input and develop their community further. That is why Merritt predicts audiences will get even more involved in the creation of the content they consume in the future. In my opinion this kind of publishing model will get more and more attention because engagement is becoming a key feature in media landscape.