Special Report: Publishing Business Conference and Expo 2012: Excellence and Innovation Take Center Stage
None of this, Quittner says, diminishes the content creator's role, because distribution and the development of the technology behind it has never been central to publishing's mission.
Quittner pointed out that up to 50 percent of the costs incurred by newspapers and magazines go to distribution, a challenge to which Carr added the difficulty of obtaining new readers. Quittner said Flipboard can help overcome both these hurdles. "The New York Times should … be everywhere, and do deals with the Flipboards of the world, and Pulse, and Zite and Facebook and Tumblr and everybody else. Because where once you controlled distribution, now you don't anymore. But that turns out to be a relatively easily solvable problem if you open up your content, if you atomize it, if you let it go anywhere [readers go] to find relevant articles and you have great advertising against it."