June 3, 1996
The purpose of repurposing
By Bob O'Donnell
Publish or perish. That's the phrase college professors and other academicians learn to
loathe as they work their way into a highly prized tenured position at a university. Their
challenge is to keep generating original research and new writings on their subject
specialty until they've gained the respect and approval of their peers. If they don't,
it's on to another school.
Similar thinking already exists on the Web. Common wisdom says that traditional
publishers who create on-line editions of their magazines and newsweeklies need to fill
them with original content. You cannot simply repurpose, or reuse, existing material, the
thinking goes, or your site won't draw traffic and you'll slowly wither away.
The logic behind this train of thought is sound. Why would a reader visit an electronic
publication when there's nothing new to see? Or to put it another way, what benefit does a
reader get if all they see on-line is what they see in print? None, right? Well, not
necessarily ...
We're launching our new This Week in Print section here on InfoWorld Electric today,
and, frankly, we think it's an exciting, vital new addition to our site. Despite the
negative connotations associated with the word "repurpose," that's exactly what
we're doing with This Week in Print -- we're repurposing all the articles generated by InfoWorld's
editorial staff every week -- and we think our readers are really going to like it.
Every Monday morning (actually, Sunday at midnight Pacific Standard Time), we'll be
posting the entire text contents of the current issue of InfoWorld in an easily
browsable format. Click on the new This Week in Print button off of Page One and you'll
see a visual table of contents for the issue listing all the different sections. The
section headings, in turn, lead to a listing of individual articles within the section,
all of which are presented in a InfoWorld print-type look-and-feel. We're also
introducing a browsable listing of Back Issues that you can access off This Week in
Print's Table of Contents page. Initially, we have issues back into 1995, but we will soon
be offering the complete text of every issue back through 1991.
The benefit we think (and hope) our readers will soon learn to love about these
additions is the immediate access they give to the resources of InfoWorld. It's
easy to overlook this notion of easy access or shrug it off as too obvious, but as a news
organization, we know that this is vital to our continued success and one of the truly
unique opportunities afforded us by a presence on the Web. The truth is, some people don't
get their issue of InfoWorld until Wednesday or Thursday of a given week (or even
at all, if a co-worker snags your copy), and This Week in Print helps solve the problems
these late arrivals sometimes create.
Of course, we'll continue creating original material for InfoWorld Electric -- in fact,
we will soon be expanding our efforts in this area -- but I think you'll find the value of
our "reused" material is a lot higher than it first appears.
©
Copyright 1996, by InfoWorld Publishing Corp., a
subsidiary of IDG Communications, Inc. Reprinted from InfoWorld,
155 Bovet Road, San Mateo, CA 94402. Further reproduction is prohibited.
