The issue of newspapers’ content management systems and their ability to publish on a schedule isn’t a trivial one; in fact, I’d say that a large part of papers’ inability to join the blogosphere in discussion overall has as much to do with MSM snobbery as does the fact that most papers have inflexible CMSes that couldn’t handle the change even if they wanted to.

One solution is to look at the work being done by open source CMS makers (disclosure, my organization produces a web CMS for news organizations), who are actually working on creating platforms that allow publishers to make these decisions based on merit and strategy, not just on what they can afford to do with their current platform.

In this way, removing technological ‘barriers to entry’ for publishers becomes that much more important as we go forward. Every publisher is going to have a different strategy on when they publish; the real trick is to let them do so without having to invest massive amounts to make the changes necessary, and to also allow them to change course if it turns out their decision wasn’t correct.

Far from a daily… at the AAPG we publish our peer-reviewed journal well ahead of the issuance of the printed/mailed. We’ve coupled the push/pull or readership with RSS to draw the readers in in such a way as to be non-obtrusive. If they don’t want the RSS… just unsubscribe… none of the opt-in, opt-out baloney. If they decide later they really DID want the RSS they come back. Totally on their terms.

We went from printing 19,000+ to fewer than 7,000 with no appreciable dent or blow-back from our membership and saved a ton of money we’re pumping into other programs around the association.

Gerald in Tulsa

Don’t worry about pushing the Telegraph to America, it’s far more likely we’ll pull it to America. With on-line publishing there is no problem with distribution other than that put into place by people. An electronic periodical doesn’t have to be delivered, it is called for instead.