Content Wise

Notable Links: October 8, 2009

• Publishers are building an online store for magazines: Time Inc., Condé Nast, and Hearst are reported to be collaborating on an iTunes-style plan. (FT.com)

• The Time Inc./Condé Supergroup Conundrum: How many platforms and formats will consumers play with? (Foliomag.com)

• New Amazon Kindle to download books beyond the U.S.: New version of the Kindle can wirelessly download books both in the United States as well as in more than 100 other countries. (NYTimes.com)
  

• Simon & Schuster creating "hybrid books," video included. (NYTimes.com) Demo at vook.com.

• Disney announces online subscription service for kids' E-books. (NYTimes.com) Demo at Disney Digital Books.

Masthead Magazine Ends Print Edition

We just got our latest issue of Canada's Masthead magazine. Turns out, it's also the last issue.

The end of a print publication is not so unusual these days, but there's a bitter irony in the demise of a magazine that covers magazines.

Under the defiant cover line "Long Live Magazines," this final "special collector's edition" touts several painfully relevant stories.

• Why print still matters
• Do you need a digital edition?
• Business Outlook Survey: a bright future for magazines--but not necessarily in print

And of course the magazine invites its readers to visit MastheadOnline.com, where the brand plans to live on. One hopeful, and telling, sign: Masthead's weekly e-mail bulletin, which carries advertising, has a larger circulation than the print magazine--and it's been larger for several years.

We wish our friends and colleagues at Masthead success with their all-digital strategy.

Newspaper Ignores the Web--and Prospers

"I don’t understand how putting content on the Web would do anything but help destroy our paper," Dan Jacobson, the publisher and owner of the TriCity News of Monmouth County, N.J., tells David Carr of the New York Times. "The Web makes no business sense for us."

Jacobson's strategy is to "aggressively ignore" Web publishing, which puts him decidedly out of step with the industry. But as publications are dropping like flies and survivors are scrambling to find ways to generate income online, the TriCity News model may be worth examining. As Carr reports:

[The newspaper] just published the biggest issue in its history. The product is double-digit profitable, and it has been growing at a clip of about 10 percent a year since it was founded in 1999, right about the time the Web was beginning to put its hands around print’s neck.

Wired Magazine's Story Behind the Story

Wired.com has posted the final entry of its Storyboard blog, which followed the magazine's design and edit staff through the entire process of producing an article about screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. For magazine wonks—you're reading this blog, aren't you?—it's an irresistible look over the shoulders of a smart creative team.

Playing off the self-referential, Möbius strip-style world of Kaufman's films (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), senior editor Jason Tanz proposed tracking the story's development online. The blog would be a "profile of a profile."

Reading Storyboard grunt-by-grunt for a month might have proven a little tedious. We didn't. But looking over the whole collection of posts now that it's complete is fascinating.

Among the artifacts:

• Video of an early meeting exploring the idea with Tanz, creative director Scott Dadich (who is very into chronicling the creative process at his own design-oriented blog, The Process), senior editor Nancy Miller, design director Wyatt Mitchell, executive editor Bob Cohn, and editor-in-chief Chris Anderson.
• The pitch memo that Tanz used to get approval of the magazine article. It's a nice parody of the Kaufmanesque paranoid internal monologue that Nicholas Cage delivered in Adaptation, a vehicle that Tanz rejected as too predictable for writing the actual article.
• Excerpts of e-mail messages about headlines and other display copy
• Written comments on the developing manuscript from editors and fact-checkers
• Design layouts in various stages of evolution.

As interesting as it is to magazine makers and journalists, we can't help wondering what Wired.com's main audience made of the Storyboard blog. And did Wired learn anything from this exercise that will shape its publishing plans online, in print, and in the Kaufman-like realm in between?

See You at a Summer Publishing Conference

$1,500 Discount to Stanford Course
We'll be teaching again this July at the the Stanford Professional Publishing Course, an intensive and inspiring program for mid-career pros--and we'd love for you to join us. If you'll send us an e-mail to let us know that you're interested, we'll enter you in our random drawing for a $1,500 discount on the tuition.

Online Strategies for Magazines: Toronto Conference
On June 3 we'll present a workshop at the Mags University Conference in Toronto entitled, "Transcend Print! What Magazines Should Do Online." We'll also be speaking on "editorial marketing" for print publications and on how to write and edit for the Web. For descriptions of the talks, please see the seminar schedule.

Web Site Tune-up: Educational Publishers Summit in DC
If you can't catch us in Stanford or Toronto, we hope to see you at our "Web Site Tune-up" at the Association of Educational Publishers Summit on June 4 in Washington, D.C. We'll cover best practices in Web publishing and we'll conduct mini critiques of selected participants' sites.

Observer's Politicker.com: An Online Extension Into 50 States

Here's an ambitious online extension of a print operation: Observer Media Group, parent company of the New York Observer, has embarked on a plan to cover local politics through a network of Web sites in all 50 states.

Politicker.com ("inside politics for political insiders") now has 10 sites up and running--PolitickerNJ.com, PolitickerME.com, etc.--and will be adding more soon.

As Politicker's management told the New York Times, each state "bureau" will be a typically lean Web operation relying primarily on one or two reporters:

"[Managing Editor James] Pindell will hire young journalists, send them to state capitals with little more than a laptop and a BlackBerry, and let them build each state site.

"What the young reporters lack in experience, they make up for in passion about politics..."

Each Politicker site describes itself as "a virtual watercooler for the state’s political elite...a necessary daily stop for politically minded web surfers."

Will a big enough audience--and advertising market--gather around this watercooler? It will be interesting to watch.

Glimpses of the Future of Publishing

Four stories surfaced in the last week or so that suggest some answers to that nagging question in our industry: What is the Future of Publishing?

Squint, and you might see the vague outlines of what magazines and books may turn into in this increasingly multi-platform world.

1. The Industry Standard is back—with an online betting pool.

The magazine that chronicled the Internet explosion and then fizzled along with it in 2001 has been reborn, not in print but on the Web only. Its centerpiece is a prediction market, using ersatz "Standard Dollars," that aims to tap the wisdom of the Standard's crowd of expert readers and commentators.

If the market becomes a reliable trend-spotter for the tech industry, this could be a killer app. True, that's a big "if." Whatever happens, we think it's a creative attempt at an online extension for a brand that many believed had petered out. (Check out PPX, another magazine-related prediction market, at Popular Science's site; it covers "the future of science and technology." Simon & Schuster set up its own market, Media Predict, to spot ideas for books, recordings, and other media products that are likely to succeed; we wrote about it last year.)

More details on the Industry Standard's market and comments from Derek Butcher, vice president and general manager, are at Tech Crunch and the New York Times.

2. Here comes a unified, multi-platform book delivery system.

Writing about Amazon's plans to purchase Audible, Brad Stone at Bits thinks this is a real possibility:

"How about a service that allows you to seamlessly switch from reading a book on your digital device to listening to the same book read aloud as you get in the car, or if your eyes are tired, or if you simply want to hear a crucial scene acted out? And then switch back to the printed page?"

3. Cell phones are reading magazines.

Wired, Billboard, and Car and Driver have all recently published bar codes within the pages of their magazines in an effort to kick start their "mobile initiatives." Why? It's much easier to get cell phone users to tune in to related material if they don't have to manually type in those pesky Web addresses. Car and Driver's efforts are among the most ambitious so far, as Joanna Pettas reports at FolioMag.com:

"Car and Driver published more than 400 barcodes in its annual Buyer’s Guide in late December. Each car in the guide had a corresponding barcode linking to a microsite with pictures, reviews and a link to the full road test..."

4. And now, a platform to publish physical objects.

Three-dimensional printers—something in the neighborhood of Star Trek's transporter or replicator—have been used for a while now by aerospace and race car engineers, doctors, and artists. So reports materials scientist Mark Miodownik in the Independent.

As the technology continues to grow more sophisticated, it's not hard to envision the emergence of companies that enable their customers to "print out" a whole variety of physical objects: call them 3-D publishers. All right, maybe you have to squint a little harder to see it. But that's what they told Gutenberg, isn't it?

Consumer Reports Thrives Online

Consumer Reports, one of our designated Transcendent 10 publishers, just got some nice ink in the New York Times business section. CR has extended its brand into  a compelling online resource, complete with interactive product selectors and entertaining, ad-debunking videos.

According to the Times's article:

...it has three million paying subscribers online--up about 60 percent in the last 18 months--which experts say may be the largest number in the industry.

From Web to Print: User-Generated Magazines

While most of us are focused on moving print publications to the Web, two Web sites are working in the opposite direction.

JPG, a photo site, and Everywhere, which covers travel, gather user-generated material in order to create slick glossy magazines in print.

Both sites are owned by 8020 Publishing, which is backed by Halsey Minor, founder of CNET. Not only is 8020’s production process going contrary to most, it expects to make its money primarily from subscription revenue and to “limit advertising.”

The publisher’s trend-bucking model, described fully in last week’s New York Times, is an experiment worth watching.

Newspapers Showing the Way From Print to Web?

As if to prove that the Washington Post's multi-platform strategies are the way to go, the latest Nielsen//Net Ratings show that visits to newspaper Web sites rose 7.7 percent in the second quarter of this year, compared to the same period in 2006. Experts interviewed by Media Life attribute that growth to the current push by papers to make their sites into multimedia town halls--that is, to give the reader something well beyond the print experience.

Even so, the online revenue model remains elusive, as demonstrated by the New York Times' rumored decision to drop its subscription service, TimesSelect.