Editor's Note: Laying the Groundwork for the Digital Frontier

Welcome to the first annual Publishing Executive Technology Issue and Buyer's Guide. We decided to put the Buyer's Guide package together in order to explore the technology changing and expanding the business of magazine media: digital publishing, online marketing, video, webinars, and data analytics. These are the tools of the future -- the tools for diversifying the publishing enterprise and for providing a 360-degree brand experience to an audience. The publishers that master these technologies will be the publishers that genuinely transform themselves from magazines into full-cycle media brands.

As BoSacks shares in this issue's column, magazine media companies are mutating so rapidly they hardly resemble each other. Gone is the linear business model. Here is the multi-platform, experience-based publishing firm.

Technological disruption can be disorienting. Guest columnist Andrew Davis provides some tips on evaluating and testing new technologies so as not to get left behind but also not be overly-preoccupied by the myriad "latest and greatest" tech tools.

As the past year has shown, print on paper is resilient because it is a powerful, flexible, and functional medium. Lest we forget this, our dear D. Eadward Tree provides 14 tips for enhancing the marketing power of printed magazines.

Print is a medium that publishers have mastered. The digital frontier is still being explored and its infrastructure still being designed and built. Our cover subject, Say Media CEO Matt Sanchez, typifies this pioneering mindset.

Sanchez aims to solve some of publishers' problems with technology that empowers storytellers, arming them with a publishing platform that integrates the needs of content, community, commerce, and marketing.

Here's to the technology that is changing the publishing game and making new things possible.