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In a variety of ways, the success of the iPad signals a branch point in editorial technology. The other night, working out a WoodWing Enterprise configuration for a potential newspaper customer, I realized that this branching possibly brings to an end the dynamic of writing "to the hole", resetting things back in time to the era of writing to the subject.

In the first generation of editorial platforms, the reporters covered a story and wrote it up pretty much as they saw fit, following a compositional norm that made it possible to cut from the bottom to adjust a piece to the space. The copy editors would do their job, and the section editors would make the cuts necessary to fit the pieces into the edition. The editorial technology was little more than a word processor, a file system, and the application that converted ascii text files to bit maps for the photo typesetters.

This all changed, starting about 20 years ago, when Marcel Coderch at Grupo Anaya in Madrid, a computer scientist not a journalist, invented from scratch a new workflow around the then very early versions of Quark XPress and Photoshop. Taking advantage of the Spanish newspaper tradition of no jumps, he had the designers make a large number of pre-designed page templates in which the typography and the space for the story was specified in advance. At that breakthrough newspaper, the short-lived El Sol, all reporters and editors worked with Quark XPress. The editors selected page templates and assigned empty text frames to the reporters, and the reporters filled them.

Thus was born the current paradigm, which in the hands of a crack editorial team could be faster, better, and (much) cheaper. Virtually all of today's prominent editorial platforms for both newspapers and magazines descend directly from Coderch's innovation, providing toolsets that organize parallel workflow to produce complete pages for print publications at top speed and low cost.

But this paradigm does not match the requirements of a multichannel world, where new efficiency metrics prevail over simply closing pages for print. Speed rules, speed in the composition of the original piece and speed in the transformation of that piece into a number of digital formats — notably Web, iPad, and Smart Phones editions — long before pages are closed to the CTP machines.

No longer simply a matter of making a copy application work as seamlessly as possible with a layout application, the editorial platform that matches the new requirements is one in which reporters are unconstrained by text boxes and editors have the right tools to shape content for and route content to the different media channels.

Another computer scientist, WoodWing's Erik Schut, developed the breakthrough application Content Station to manage these 21st century tasks. The relevance of Content Station showed first in the ease which which it adapted to supporting Facebook and Twitter publication, as well as Web and print.

Content Station was ready and waiting when the iPad appeared, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Configuring Enterprise in the September 2010 context, I start by arming the editors with Content Station, then make it so reporters can file as fast as possible from any spot with a WiFi or 3g connections, unconstrained by page layouts.

First be sure of the multichannel tools, without which the publication cannot stay in the game for long. Subsequently, the essentials for print.