Canceling My Print Subscriptions

I just picked up a pile of magazines and newspapers from my mail folder and dumped them into the ever-growing pile in my office — I’ve had it. I’m canceling all of my print subscriptions.

Thanks to the RSS feeds from a select group of blogs on media (see the list at the bottom of Publishing 2.0’s sidebar), which point me to other blogs and mainstream media articles, along with e-newsletters from a handful of sources that don’t use RSS (still clinging to their “content container” businesses), I have more high-yield, high-quality business-related content than I can possibly consumer in a 24-hour period.

Once I cancel my subscription to the print edition of BusinessWeek and WSJ, I will try browsing them online and receiving some of their e-newsletters, if only to keep up with how they’re evolving their brands online. But I already come across plenty of BW and WSJ articles through my other channels. I may miss out on larger business trends, but those that are relevant to my business have a way of finding me these days.

I will continue to visit the New York Times online everday, not because I trust everything I read there anymore, or because I think all the news I need is there, but because I’m still attached to the brand (one reason I still believe in the future of publishing brands).

And, of course, I will use Google innumerable times a day to find anything and everything.

So if you’re a content provider who wants to get my attention, you’re going to have to do it through one of these online sources.

Prediction: In the very near future a cottage industry will grow up alongside Search Engine Optimization to help publishers and other content creators, whose own branded distribution channels are increasingly being abandoned, to develop strategies for disseminating their branded content through blogs, aggregators, collaborative Web 2.0 sites, on-demand services, and the other new gatekeepers of the digital content world. Call it PR for media, or earned media for media.