MacWeek media masters: Content creation rules. (includes related article on methodology)(Media Masters Special Section) (Product Information)

Content creation and education, identified by interim Apple CEO Steve Jobs as the Macintosh's two greatest strengths, are the underpinnings of the MacWEEK MediaMasters, our list of leading media-rich business sites and universities in the United States.

If Hollywood hadn't already claimed the word "producer," we could easily term this list the top Macintosh media producers: A whopping 93 percent of our MediaMasters produce Internet content on their Macs, 90 percent produce publishing content and 83 percent produce multimedia content.

We set out to identify sites that are particularly strong in certain key areas for the Mac: publishing, prepress, graphic arts, digital video, 3-D, multimedia, CAD, science and technical applications, internet content development and site management, digital sound, and custom application development.

Drawing our initial pool of respondents from MacWEEK and Computer Intelligence lists of 460 sites with the largest base of installed Macs (see Methodology, below), we focused on application areas, looking for sites that had unusually heavy concentrations of Macs working in our target areas.

We found that many sites were rich in more than one area. While we expected synergies, such as sites that did intensive work in the triad of publishing, prepress and graphic arts, it was striking how many sites combined an intensive use of Macs for publishing with an equally intensive use in areas such as multimedia or digital video.

Also noteworthy was the predominance of science and technical applications: Almost half (48 percent) of our MediaMasters had 25 percent or more of their Macs working in science and technology; the exact same percentage had 25 percent or more of their Macs engaged in publishing activities.

When we looked at sites that dedicated almost all of their Macintoshes to particular tasks, we found, not surprisingly, that publishing led the way, with 26 percent of our MediaMasters having 90 percent of their Macs dedicated to publishing tasks. But prepress, graphic arts, multimedia, and Internet content development and site management were popular choices as well, with 15 percent to 18 percent of sites reporting that they had at least 90 percent of their Macs working on these tasks.