Recovering Journalist

Imagine the World's Best Doctor's Waiting Room...

There are a couple of interesting developments on the magazine distribution front that are worth looking at.

The first one is Portfolio's takeout on Maghound, Time Warner's plan to turn magazine subscriptions into an a la carte business: basically, you'll be able to decide which issues of which magazines you take on a subscription, switching back and forth between Time, People, Sports Illustrated and 100-plus other magazines. The idea is that you'll pay a set fee of a few bucks a month and then choose what mags you want delivered to you. 

I'm not sure magazine subscribers are truly that eclectic and fickle. Do you really want to have to manage your magazine choices every month? The whole point of a subscription, after all, is a sort of set-it-and-forget-it model. Still, it's an interesting approach that might find a nice niche market.

Far more fascinating–and pernicious–is something called Mygazines.com, which is urging people to scan and upload magazines so that they can be shared among the company's 16,000–and growing–members. Oprah, Wired, BusinessWeek, Men's Health, you name it–virtual copies of the latest issues are sitting on the Mygazines site for your perusal, just as if you're sitting in a doctor's waiting room surrounded by piles of fresh magazines. (The company apparently draws that parallel, in fact.) None of this is authorized by the publishers, natch.

Ding ding ding ding ding! That alarm you hear is the copyright police going completely nuclear on this wacky concept, which claims to be based on the first-sale and fair use doctrines in copyright law. The company behind it has the advantage of being based on the Caribbean island of Anguilla (a British territory), and thus is harder to prosecute under U.S. law. The company's ownership (the URL is registered to a John Smith, for instance) sounds pretty dodgy, too.

Nice try. As an AP story on the new service points out, copyright lawyers don't think much of this idea, and the publishers that employ those lawyers will think even less of it. You'd better hurry and get over to Mygazines for a look before the cops–or maybe Interpol–get there.

When the Presses Go Silent

The New York Times has an interesting story about International Data Group, the tech industry trade magazine publisher, which is transitioning its print magazines to a Web-only model. Results: losses turn to profits, online ad revenue outstrips print, and revenue is growing 10 percent a year. Surprise!

Stewart Alsop, the journalist-turned-VC who once edited IDG's flagship, InfoWorld, gets the kicker quote: “What’s happening at IDG is a fairly accurate map for every other publishing organization. Get over it, it’s going to happen.”

Seven Wonders

People love making and arguning about lists, and the Poynter Institute has come up with a dandy: It wants to compile a list of the Seven Wonders of the Journalism World. Silly and trivial, yes, but great fun.

They propose nominations in six categories as follows:

• Documents (such as the First Amendment)
• People (such as Walter Cronkite)
• Institutions (such as the BBC)
• Events (such as the publication of the Pentagon Papers)
• Technology (such as the invention of the telegraph)
• Works (such as the front page of the New York Times on Sept. 11)

OK, given that, here are my seven, off the top of my head, in no particular order except for the first two:

• The First Amendment
• The New York Times
• Woodward and Bernstein
• USA Today
• CNN
• The Pentagon Papers
• The Web and online journalism

I wonder if they should have split the list, as Seven Wonders lists often are, into Seven Wonders of the Ancient Journalism World and Seven Wonders of the Modern Journalism World. But no, they just want seven, from all eras (and around the world).

As the comments on the story correctly complain, it's not totally clear where you should be submitting your nominations—that still seems to be a wonder all by itself. You might try to start here, which has a giant Seven Wonders link, at least at the moment, that, um, goes back to the story. Oh well. It's still a fun little mental exercise and a great argument for the next time you're hanging around your local newspaper bar (wait--are there still local newspaper bars?).

Outdated Magazines

As ossified as newspapers can be about adopting the latest Web technologies, magazines are even worse. When I started doing work for magazine Web sites a few years ago, I was shocked at how digitally backwards they were—even compared to newspapers. They just couldn't see past the print model. And it hasn't gotten much better since—can you think of more than a couple of magazine Web sites worth looking at regularly?

Now Bivings Group is reporting on the same phenomenon. Bottom line: "Newspapers fared better than magazines in nearly every category in 2007," Bivings says (and newspapers didn't do so hot). "In general, we have found that magazines are slower at adopting Web 2.0 trends than newspapers." Blogs? Magazines trail newspapers. Video? Newspaper sites lead. Comments on stories? Magazines are behind the Times.com. And so on. The only thing magazines seem to do better, Bivings reports, is allowing tags on stories—and those numbers, in both cases, are so small that they look like rounding errors.

The world of magazine publishing is even more rarified than newspapers. It's much less geographically diverse, and there's a level of elitism that would shock most newspaper newsrooms. There's also little culture in the magazine industry of sharing resources and know-how, unlike newspapers, which have the AP and news syndicates and active staff-level industry organizations that foster the exchange of ideas. Magazines are just a little above it all, and therefore it's been easy for them to pooh-pooh the Web and cling to the old ways (among publishers, the book industry is even more moribund, but that's a tale for another time).

What's most frustrating about this is that magazines are natural homes for the best Web 2.0 features. Because most magazines cover specific, vertical subjects, they speak to audiences that share interests in a given magazine's topic. Those audiences are perfect spawning grounds for online communities, bringing together magazine readers who want to talk to each other about gardening, or cooking, or model railroads, or crafts, or sports, or cars, or whatever the magazine is about. It seems like a slam dunk, but very few magazines are taking advantage of this opportunity to really connect with their audience—and to help the audience members connect with each other.

Jeff Jarvis touches on this potential today in his post about the demise of Business 2.0, which could have been a great online community-cum-publication, but instead is dying a miserable death as a print publication whose primary audience, ahem, lives its life online.

In many ways, the magazine industry is facing the same challenges as newspapers: fragmenting audiences, rising costs, declining advertising. Over the years, magazine publishers have proven a willingness to experiment and take chances—in print—that far outstrips the print innovation practiced by newspapers. But the action is moving online, and magazines have always lagged there, as the Bivings report confirms. There's a huge opportunity for magazines to convert their special-interest audiences into thriving online communities, and it looks like they're blowing it.

Must Read: Chaos Scenario 2.0

Not to be missed: Advertising Age's Bob Garfield's brilliant "Chaos Scenario 2.0" piece, which outlines a truly visionary--and largely correct--view of the future of media, especially as it pertains to advertising. You should go read it now.

And know this: If you think newspapers, or magazines, or television, or any other media businesses have been slow to adapt to the revolution in media consumption that's happening all around us, they pale in comparison to the advertising business, which apparently is just now discovering dial-up connectivity. The single biggest limiter of new revenue models for online media is the old-fogeyism of Madison Avenue. Mega ad agency Ogilvy North America, for instance, just finally appointed a Chief Digital Officer. Hey! Welcome to the 21st century!

Anyway. Go read Garfield. It's a terrific column. And Version 1.0 of Garfield's Chaos Scenario, two years ago, was just as good.

Flipping for flip.com

As slow as the newspaper business has been to understand, embrace and exploit the Web and online technologies, the magazine business has been even worse. Much worse. Except maybe in the technology sector, very few magazines have come up with interesting, usable Web sites, much less taken any kind of leadership position in the field.

There's just something about the magazine metabolism that doesn't mix well with the Web. (Pathfinder, anybody?) Which is odd and sad, because specialty magazines are the centerpieces of devoted communities of readers that could be energized to do fascinating and highly active social media products online. It's truly been a missed opportunity for magazines. (Jeff Jarvis has some smart thinking on this.)

But let's give credit where credit is due: Conde Nast's new flip.com project looks like a home run. Basically, Conde Nast is taking a shot at MySpace, with a product aimed at teenage girls that will let them create "flip books" to show off...well, pretty much whatever they wants. Think of them as online, multimedia scrapbooks, places where teenagers can post and share whatever is special to them. Participants also will be able to form clubs online, have social hierarchies, etc.

It sounds just like junior high, and that's exactly the point. It's not really MySpace—and wisely, Conde Nast is saying that it sees flip.com as a complementary product—but it looks like a really elegant idea, and with Conde Nast's magazine promotional power behind it, they could really have something here.

Of course, there are a million ways they could also screw it up. But flip.com is one of the most innovative online products to come from a mainstream media company in a long, long time. Publishers of all types should be looking for similar out-of-the-box ways to reach online audiences.