That's marketing hype, to be sure, but I don't think that's just hot air. Morgan says newspapers are particularly well positioned to take advantage of this business model, because they produce a lot of content that niche online publishers want. A large portion of ScreamingMedia's initial clients for this service are medical or health care sites, for instance, and they seek articles from the mainstream press and trade publications that they can offer to their intranet and corporate Web site users. Even smaller newspapers can benefit, because some of the technology news from within their communities, for instance, is of interest to corporations or niche Web sites because it provides examples of industry trends. Morgan says magazines increasingly will benefit from this business model, and it's particularly important to the trade press, whose publishers have been concerned for some time about the Internet hurting their business.
Trade publications can use the model to increase the reach of their content into new markets.
A major selling point of the concept, he says, is that exposure of bylined articles on niche sites, intranets, et al increases traffic to the publisher's own Web site and exposes new, relevant audiences to the publisher's brand name. Because that program is older, it has more content providers than does ScreamingMedia. He expects the split to be closer to 50-50 as the Express service matures. Maske says the service is being designed to provide a platform where content creators can come to set themselves up for syndication and add themselves to the iSyndicate directory of content providers. First it'll be HTML, which is relatively harmless, but next it'll be Java and Shockwave and on and on.