Today is my tenth anniversary (3,650 days) of working full-time in online publishing.

"…As far as I'm concerned - the guru of online publishing strategy,
Vin Crosbie. Recommended reading for all you online publishers."
— Mike Butcher, formerly editor of New Media Age and executive
editor of the Industry Standard Europe, writing in mbytes.co.uk
29 January 2003,

"Vin Crosbie is making perfect sense" – Doc Searls blogging
the ClickZ 2003 Weblog Strategies Conference on 10 June 2003.

"Still inspiring [other] consultants after all these years, Vin Crosbie
is an expert on 'solicited' Push media." — Gary Wolf, author of Wired:
A Romance, a history of Wired Magazine, writing in his blog
on 2 July 2003.

"…Online news consultant Vin Crosbie - as near to a veteran
this young industry has" — Neil McIntosh, Guardian Online,
7 November 2003

Nice words that mean a lot to me, and perhaps I do have a modicum of knowledge about online publishing.

However, despite a decade at the front, it's only during the past 12 to 18 months that I have thought I fully comprehend online publishing — and now have the temerity to say so. I finally perceive the latent currents beneath its chaotic flow. I"m posting this as pre-apology for what I'm going to do during the next few months.

There is a lucrative business plan for online publishing in this New Medium. I now know what it is, which is something I couldn't have stated earlier this year. After the New Year, I plan to publish everything that I know about it. There is a official forum I've chosen, which has a mid-January deadline and a publication date of Spring 2004. I'm meanwhile going to cease making conference speeches and cogent public comments about online publishing.

No one is doing the business plan, which is partly because they don't yet know what it is (despite what seems to me to be its 'latent obviousness' — which is an oxymoron for they can't yet see the forest for the trees) and partly because the requisite technologies for the plan exists but hasn't yet been brought together and commercialized.

What's probably odd is that I'll be leaving the online publishing industry as I publish all I know about it. I'll be departing because online publishing is no longer where the work needs to be done. Online publishing is now a sideshow, albeit a very necessary one.

The more I know about online publishing, the more I realize that the solution to its woes and to those of declining print edition circulations and readerships is the same solution. The same solution can and will revitalize and revolutionize both.

Simply putting print or broadcast contents online isn't the solution. Merging print and online (or print and online and broadcast) newsrooms and advertising departments isn't the solution. That is merely multimedia. Those who think that multimedia is the solution are mistaking the surface as the substance.

Work now needs to be done (by others and me) to unify print and online into one product. Literally, not figuratvely, one product. The content and workflow applications and the pre-press, printing, electronic distribution, and display technologies necessary for this all today exist for the solution, but need to be conceptionally and commercially brought together. (There obviously is more to the solution than just that, but you'll have to await my planned publication of it.)

It's now time for that work. Please forgive us if we largely withdraw from public discourse during these next many weeks.

          — Vin Crosbie