The holiday season is upon us and the mind goes to this incredible year and the incredible challenges and opportunities that came with it. And I have a confession to make: once upon a time I was a well paid technical journalist, people would depend on my articles to know what was hot and what was not in the computer field. I even became editor in chief of a very successful monthly magazine, with testing labs, full time staff and all that.

And boy did that feel great. Readers would wait for the next issue to come out and they would write e-mail or letters inquiring about some subject and we would pick just the most “significant” and publish them with our answer (usually 1 out of 20 because of the limited space on the magazine). We also gave some e-mail answers but the magazine remained the center point of gravitation for the whole system.

And then the Internet came about and all of us journalists, along with the publishers and the advertising people, started reasoning how this would have changed our way of working. We figured out that people would come to our site in addition to our magazine and everything seemed familiar again. We were in control of the news and the publishing tools. We had control of the advertising so, we were still ruling. It was very expensive at that time (year 2000) to have a software to publish your articles on a site.

And then came eBay, and then came WordPress and we felt something was wrong: our magazines and newspapers were losing readers and advertisers every month and our sites were not growing enough to compensate for the loss. Actually some of the biggest “editorial” portals went down with a crash.

What was wrong? And then the internal fights begun: the paper guys fighting the online guys inside the same publishing company and they both lost because they didn’t realize the control was shifting from a central location to a distributed universe where everybody was actually capable of publishing his own content, promoting it and profiting from it, even by advertising. And then the Web 2.0 arrived.

I watched all this happen from the inside, passing from one project to another, and now I realize what was really wrong. We were not really listening. We were convinced that the flaw was in the editorial content that we produced or in the way the advertising was sold. I was personally successful in innovating several projects, but they required lot of work. We were holding meetings and brainstorming amongst people who had never been in the trenches and had no idea of what the real people outside were actually experiencing.

And now it struck me: the answer had been in front of me all the time. People haven’t changed with the arrival of Web 2.0, they are simply entitled to do what they always wanted to do. When I was running my magazines I knew very well that, by far, the best read section of the whole magazine was the “letters from the readers”. I tried to make it bigger but it was never big enough.

Sometimes I said to my publisher: “We should make a magazine composed only of a few explanatory articles (just to set the tune) and then fill the pages with just letters from the readers and some of our answers”. Even better would have been to have the readers answer one another. But it never happened and I never really pushed it. Today with Web 2.0, people read each other content and contribute to it.

The era of the centralized publisher is fading away. And I have learned to listen and to let other people create the “magazine” they want, and I maybe contribute setting a bit the tune.

This is the most valuable lesson I have learned in this year.

Roberto Mazzoni