ZATZ Publishing is an independent digital media publisher. We currently publish online magazines and electronic books. You can read all about our magazines and books in the ZATZ Publications section of this site.
If you're looking for contact information, click here.
We publish two types of magazines. The first are online magazines, an example of which is DominoPower Magazine. For these magazines, we produce very detailed articles in concert with experts the world over. We do a monthly issue, a weekly tip, and daily industry news updates for all such in-depth publications.
We also publish Weekly Updates, our newsletter-style publications, an example of which is OutlookPower Magazine. These publications are designed to impart very valuable information quickly to a busy audience. For these publications, we publish a weekly tip and daily news updates.
"Say 'ZATZ' with feeling and see if you don't feel just a bit better about yourself and see if you don't notice yourself smiling just a bit more."
|
In addition to magazines, we also publish a line of e-books, the ZATZ Solutions Guides. Each ZATZ Solutions Guide is subject to the same high editorial standards and impartial perspective we bring to all our publications. By combining a series of articles and tips into one comprehensive, handy, and incredibly useful Solutions Guide, we provide deep, in-depth information on a specific topic.
Solutions Guides are available both from The ZATZ Online Store and Amazon.
In 1999, The New Jersey Technology Council awarded us "Best Sales and Marketing Strategy," rating us as having the best strategy of any technology startup in the state. Given that New Jersey is one of the country's leading technology hotbeds, this was quite an honor.
ZENPRESS makes it easy
We produce our journals using a piece of software called ZENPRESS. ZENPRESS is a tool that generates magazines online. Unlike a lot of the other HTML generaters or production tools like, say Vignette's StoryServer, ZENPRESS knows about the structure of certain kinds of publications.
Although we use it primarily to generate magazines (including the front page, tables of contents, back issues, paginated pages, and so forth), ZENPRESS also knows how to make technical manuals (including cross-linking all the API calls) and hub sites and can even be embedded in other content management systems (as it has been to generate this ZATZ home page site).
The idea is that our writers and editors don't need to worry about Web technology or HTML. They write their articles, determine the titles, sidebars, headers and such. Editors decide which articles are features and which are spotlighted on the home page. We can even decide when to throw a page break (which generates a new Web page with links backwards and forwards) and when to force a "keep", so the page doesn't break. There are about two hundred more editor-friendly features, but that's the subject of another article.
We could go on for hours about ZENPRESS, but here's the part you need to know. We hand it a folder of text files and about a minute later, it's generated about 50,000 lines of HTML code, uploaded directly to our server. Each month, we need to produce about 27 articles of 1,000 to 2,000 words each, 12 tip mailings, and about 240 news stories a month. ZENPRESS is what makes it possible for us to do all this.
ZENPRESS is our own proprietary advantage for becoming what we're calling the Internet Printing Press.
Our market opportunity
While our current journals are valuable and ZENPRESS is unique technology, it's how these all go together that's a big market opportunity. The idea is that we'll use ZENPRESS to build our own independent publications (hundreds of them if we get our way) and (and here's where real opportunity lies) we'll also produce and host custom publications for anyone who wants a magazine without the hassle of running servers, managing programmers, and fighting with ISPs.
There is no question we can produce an online magazine for a lot less than a printed one. And there's no question there are considerable advantages, including community building, a much larger audience, faster time to press, and so forth. Since we're aimed so tightly at online publishing, we're not trying to sell the "we'll build your Web page" sorts of services. And those independent Web site designers, while they might be great at building home pages and online stores, just don't have the years of publishing experience we do.
Before starting ZATZ, founder and Editor-in-Chief David Gewirtz had been an editor on and off for Ziff-Davis since 1980. Together, he and Denise Amrich, our co-founder and Managing Editor, ran journals for the (former) Cobb Group division of Ziff for nearly five years.
"When we say the name ZATZ with feeling, it's like a war cry or a cheer."
|
In addition to our founder's strong publishing background, we've also got a strong engineering and marketing background, so we can combine a bunch of disciplines. This is why the cross-over field of online publishing works so well for us.
 What's ZATZ mean?
We got into this business by what you might call "stepwise refinement". Prior to doing ZATZ Publishing, we had two micro-businesses: publishing journals for Ziff-Davis and doing a database add-on for Macromedia Director. Our company, fittingly, was called Component Enterprises. But while "Component" worked well for a company that produced add-on software, when we sold that product and became purely publishers, it was clear that as an Internet company, the name "Component" didn't provide the right kind of brand impression we wanted.
We wanted our name to inspire in others what we feel every day. When we say the name ZATZ (which isn't an acronym and doesn't mean anything -- it just sounds cool and looks cooler), we smile. When we say the name ZATZ with feeling, it's like a war cry or a cheer. Try it. Say "ZATZ" with feeling and see if you don't feel just a bit better about yourself and see if you don't notice yourself smiling just a bit more. ZATZ. It's fun to say. It has spirit and life and warmth and just a bit of challenge. ZATZ.
Of course, publishing is what we do. We publish magazines on the net. We're not a mixed media company, shoveling the same old content from our world-weary paper publications onto the Internet. No way. Our publications are designed from the ground up, proud to be online, proud to be Pure Internet Publishing.
"This orthographic structure reinforces clarity, lightness, structural integrity, and simplicity."
|
The logo (which you can see at the left side of the screen) is certainly cool. The ZATZ name has nothing but straight, angular letters. This orthographic structure reinforces clarity, lightness, structural integrity, and simplicity.
It almost reminds you of the underlying steel beams in a modern building. By placing over the ZATZ name in the logo two large, white Z's with the vivid yellow '@' sign floating above, together above a field of black, the symbolism expresses the energy, vibrance, and communication flow of the Internet.
But is it a good branding choice? A recent article on branding in the Harvard Business Review asked if the name breaks any rules. They also asked if you're comfortable with the name, suggesting that if you are, it's probably not "dangerous" enough. We lost a lot of sleep over "ZATZ". It breaks all the rules. It's cool, it's fun, it's got buzz, and we've got some great T-shirts.
About the surname "Zatz"
After founding ZATZ, we discovered that Zatz was also a somewhat uncommon surname. Although it's taken us a while to find out more, Martin Zatz was kind enough to give us a deeper understanding of the meaning of the surname Zatz:
The name Zatz is an acronym of the letters that correspond to "z" and "tz" in Hebrew. They, in turn, are abbreviations for the words "zo-vay-ach" and "tzedek." "Zovayach" means to proffer, here, to proffer sacrifices -- an important role of the priestly caste (Kohanim, plural, Cohen, singular) in ancient Israel. "Tzedek" means "righteous" or "with God." So Zatz designates its bearer as a proper Cohen. The name Katz is similar: it is simply an acronym for "cohen tzedek."
|
|
|
