A few months ago, after U.S. News & World Report announced that it was going to end its weekly (er, bi-weekly) print edition and move to a Web-first publishing model, accompanied by monthly print special editions, I had coffee with a couple of the magazine's top editors to talk about their new strategy. They seemed to be totally committed to Web publishing, and even spoke about how liberating it was going to be to not have to worry about print deadlines anymore (an important psychological and cost-saving factor that I think a lot of print people fail to appreciate). I came away thinking that U.S. News had a chance to be a real pioneer in the post-print world of news and analysis.
So the magazine's
announcement that it's going to supplement its very good Web
site by publishing a weekly PDF edition, for a $19.95 annual subscription fee, is a real head-scratcher. And I'm not the
only one who's bewildered by it.
Look, PDF publications DON'T WORK, either as a reader experience, for advertisers or as a business. U.S. readers have rejected them over and over. (Don't tell me about PDF successes in other countries–those are different markets with different cultures and tastes, and I'm not sure those "successes" have been all that
successful anyway. The two Canadian PDF editions covered in this breathless
story from 2006, for instance, appear to be history).
PDF products are beloved solely by
printie publishers and editors who think readers want to read the news in a print-like layout, and don't understand that a) electronic delivery is a
completely different format than print and b) readers really don't want to have to print out their own magazine or newspaper.
Every PDF or "electronic edition" newspaper/magazine facsimile started in the U.S. with great enthusiasm on the part of the publisher has stalled out at a few hundred or a couple thousand customers, even at the biggest publications. There's no market there, and the time and resources are much better spent on figuring out the optimal version of a Web-based product, mobile versions, etc.
Given my conversation with the U.S. News folks, and the Web savvy they showed at the time, I suspect something else is going on here: I wonder if the PDF edition provides U.S. News a way to avoid legal problems by fulfilling long-term commitments to subscribers who paid for the print magazine but are about to be disenfranchised. Instead, they'll get the PDF version. (Tellingly, it's free to current subscribers.) That's about the only thing that makes sense. Otherwise, U.S. News, after showing indications of some real Web savviness, is getting back on the road to oblivion.
My local paper offers an electronic edition of itself through a shoddy third-party system that doesn't work a third of the time. (Really, it's just an overworked and over-complicated in-browser PDF viewer.)
My wife works in circulation at the paper and tells me that the paper doesn't make any money off of those subscriptions, yet they require a couple of hours of work per night -- and often that hard work is botched when the pages are shipped off to the service providers for processing (oh, those providers are located out of state, by the way).
Do they have a nice Web site? No. Have they invested a lot of money in a system that doesn't provide a lot of benefit to its readers? Yes. Will they see the inequity there? Doubtful.
Posted by: Michael Becker | January 24, 2009 at 10:53 AM
Mark,
I operate a small news site for Sedona, AZ at www.Sedona.biz. Our challenge is to monetize the site with monthly uniques of only about 20K.
In Nov 2007 we began emailing a weekly newsletter to our subscriber base: a summary of the week's news. People love to get it in their inbox and I highly recommend it for publishers because it's another opportunity to embed advertising.
Anyway, for the first 6 months we issued a PDF newsletter because we thought our readers would like a "newspaper" version that they could print out at their computers and read at their leisure.
PROBLEM: No one printed it out. Too much of a hassle and cost according to our survey. Also a lot of work for us to put together. ANOTHER PROBLEM: since people were trying to read the PDF online, we needed to create a whole host of navigation links to make it easy to jump around. And what about embedding video? Back then Adobe hadn't created that feature.
SOLUTION: We now send out our newsletter with a list of links to all the week's stories on our website. No one misses the PDF.
Posted by: Carl | January 26, 2009 at 07:32 AM
>> SOLUTION: We now send out our newsletter with a list of links to all the week's stories on our website. No one misses the PDF. <<
Not enough publishers take this simple step.
Many sites would most probably see a 25 per cent increase in page views if they spent five or ten minutes doing this once a week.
Posted by: Craig McGinty | January 26, 2009 at 02:37 PM