Page 188 - AC/E's Digital Culture Annual Report 2015

Cultural business models on the Internet188A platform, that is, an infrastructure that offers:• a repository for the content;• a few publishing instruments (that is, which make it possible to improve the quality of content, publish it and make it visible on the Internet);• a content delivery service (that is, the possibil- ity of transmitting content to users);• an interface (that is, an access and meeting point for users and content that is functional and attractive);• data available to the platform administrators and, through them, to the content ownersin order to have better access to the point where supply and demand meet.And the ability to generate engagement (users’ interaction with content) on the platform, for which the following are necessary:• a brand (that means fame, reputation, identity);• a community;• specific techniques that activate and maintainthe interaction.The abovementioned examples, to which many others could be added, meet all or most of the requisites listed.Platishers (a definition derived from the combi- nation of platform and publishers) are regardedas the new publishers in the digital contextand platform publishing as a model to which traditional content producers should orient their change efforts.In general, content producers have ceased to be characterised by their ability to locate and direct creative talents and improve and sell their work, and are characterised instead by the ability to make available to everyone (and therefore not only to potential talents) a technological infra- structure that allows them to express themselves and relate to their own communities.Stories“Platform” and “platform publishing” are terms that require an infrastructure, code lines that define an environment in which we can write, edit, publish, share, comment and recommend. But what if, instead of that, digital technology were a new and powerful instrument for creating content? And what if not platforms but the actual content, the stories, were the field of innovation?At the end of 2012 the New York Times pub- lished “Snow Fall”,25 a long article exclusively in digital format that had major repercussions among readers, especially among professionals, and dealt with an event (the death of several expert skiers as the result of an avalanche they had triggered themselves when skiing down a slope off the trail).The use of images, computer graphics, videos and the audio recorded by the skiers themselves during the tragedy and the interviews createdThe digital age is transforming storytelling