One More Made-up Word about Publishing in 2016

deadtree“Although we’re in the words business, we publishers often can’t find the words to explain what’s going on in our industry.” – D. Eadward Tree 

The art and business of publishing has changed so much in the past several years that parts of it are unrecognizable. No one  knows that better than D. Eadward Tree of Dead Tree Edition.

“Although we’re in the words business, we publishers often can’t find the words to explain what’s going on in our industry,” Tree writes in Publishing Executive. To help, he cheekily offers his list of 13 made-up words that help describe what’s really going on.

From “datarrhea” (“What a publisher gets when it jumps on the Big Data bandwagon, then discovers that its staff has no clue what to do with all the information”) to “click magnets” (“those over-hyped listicle headlines that you can’t resist — even though the last time you fell for such clickbait you were bombarded with four pop-ups, three auto-play ads, two interstitials, and a partridge in a pear tree before realizing there wasn’t anything there worth reading”), Tree provides a good look at some of the nonsense going on out there as publishers try to sort things out.

Still, some things have never gone out of style in publishing, like high quality content and relevant ad messages, outstanding imagery and creative design. These are the things that make magazines magazines. While the way we fund and market them has changed, a good read remains thing of beauty.

That’s why we have one more made-up word of our own: “printology.” To us, it boils down to using the best people and technology to achieve superior results. If you’ve got that, you’re way ahead of the game.