Everything is now a data business. My friend Alex Boden’s analysis of the Washington Post’s pivot to WP Intelligence is characteristically sharp: editorial expertise converted into structured intelligence products, sold to professional audiences on enterprise contracts. The playbook works for a news publisher. The question for trade publishers is what version of that pivot is available to them.

The honest answer is: not the same version. Trade content such as fiction and children’s books doesn’t map neatly onto business insight; even quite specialist trade non-fiction operates on a far slower cadence than news. But that’s also the wrong place to look. The WP Intelligence model works because the operations of making news produce valuable byproducts—policy relationships, source networks, proximity to decision-makers—that can be repackaged as intelligence. Trade publishers also produce valuable byproducts. They just haven’t treated them as products.

Reliable taste signals are genuinely scarce. Publishers see concepts years before they become cultural moments. They watch auctions unfold, track category momentum, and make bets in the market. That is forward-looking intelligence about where culture is heading. Studios building adaptation pipelines, streaming platforms planning slates, brand strategists scanning emerging themes, consumer trend analysts modelling demand curves: all operate on incomplete forward signals today. My hypothesis is that there are people would pay for a structured, analysed view of what publishers are collectively betting on. Trade press captures fragments of this in raw form. Ingram’s MediaScout touches parts of this, but further downstream in the creative process. A properly designed intelligence product built on acquisition patterns, deal velocity and category heat would be something qualitatively different: probabilistic cultural forecasting grounded in real capital allocation.

That would require scale and thus coordination across competitors—which is precisely why it has not yet happened: this is not an industry with a good track record in that area.

Behind this is Alex’s insight, applied differently: the asset is not the content itself, but the structured knowledge that content-making produces as a byproduct. News organisations generate policy intelligence. Trade publishers generate taste signals, rights flows and creator-economics data. Different substrate, same structural opportunity.

The economics would likely be smaller than WP Intelligence. Cultural intelligence would be more probabilistic than operational, closer to pattern recognition than workflow integration. But the logic is identical: convert operational expertise into recurring-revenue products sold to professional audiences.

For years, trade publishing has focused on monetising narrative output. It has paid far less attention to monetising the informational exhaust of its own operations. The manuscripts it backs, the advances it sets, the rights it licenses, the themes it amplifies: these are signals about the future of culture and commerce. The Washington Post has recognised that its newsroom generates more than stories. Trade publishers should set themselves the same challenge.