The core dilemma of online publishing is that revenues are lower than traditional print publishing, yet the cost of original content remains high. So there has been much talk of the curated model, where editors select articles published elsewhere and signpost readers to relevant external content, rather than create it all in-house.  If well-executed, this is valuable to readers suffering from an overload of information and paucity of time, particularly in business to business markets.  But if the scope of the publication is wide, even curation is a mammoth task.  Enter the automated indexing systems which gather relevant articles from multiple sources and tag them.  Great time-savers, but there is always the risk of the jarring note of a feature that doesn’t belong; maybe you saw the articles on misplaced ads that circulated recently…

Given this tension between low cost automation and expensive human editors, I was interested to meet Neil Thackray of Briefing Media last Friday, and learn more about his latest venture, The Media Briefing, which combines a powerful semantic indexing system powered by Idio with a human expert editor; in this case Patrick Smith.  They only launched last week, but already have links to over 30,000 articles - and have no plans to increase the staff beyond Patrick.  Here’s some insight into how an online publisher can combine expert human insight with a powerful automated indexing system: (more…)