MagBlog

Perhaps the iTunes/Amazon marketplace (posts passim) isn't such a straightforward idea after all. A gatekeeper is a gatekeeper.

So the game is the same today as it was in the old days. The only question is where the money will end up. In the analog world the lion's share of the money ended up in the hands of big, bad media barons. This time around, the geeks in Silicon Valley are pocketing all the dough. Ironically enough, they present themselves as a bunch of pious, sweet-natured nerds who aren't doing this for the money—they're all about making the world a better place. The truth is that when it comes to exploitation, the new guys make those old media barons look like a bunch of amateurs.

Labels: amazon, digital magazines, digital revenue, distribution, electronic magazines, iTunes

The iTunes for newspaper publishing idea is taken up by David Carr in the New York Times.

The only trouble is, the examples he cites as successful examples of getting readers to pay for content involve either magazines or a highly specialised newspaper:

Other print publications have looked directly to the reader to help bear that cost. Cook’s Illustrated is a delightfully retro magazine that takes a modern approach to food. And its approach to publishing? Cook’s Illustrated takes no ads and charges for access to the databank of recipes. Apart from its 900,000 print subscribers, in addition to 100,000 or so newsstand buyers, the company has 260,000 digital subscribers at a cost of $35 a year, and that group grew by 30 percent in 2008.

I get Cook’s Illustrated at the office and don’t have access to the deep digital archive of recipes, but I’ve thought about how handy online access would be in the kitchen. Similarly, I subscribe to Consumer Reports because it has valuable content that I can’t get anywhere else. Both Cook’s and Consumer Reports have set a trend in part because they had no ads to begin with, so turning toward their readers to pay for operations and future growth made sense.

But I also subscribe to The Wall Street Journal, one of the few pay newspaper sites. I could cobble together a free version — you can get behind the firewall at The Journal if you go through Google News and know exactly what you are looking for — but I chose to pay the freight. To me, paying for content I want online is not all that different from paying for a DropSend account, which allows me to send and receive large files: the paid option outweighs the hassle and time of the free ones.

David Lazarus follows a similar line of thought in his LA Times article.

Luckily we in the UK have Martin Belam's Currybetdotnet to put a sensible gloss on their arguments.

Yes, an iTunes/Amazon Marketplace idea is worth pursuing - but newspapers, on the whole, are not differentiated enough to take advantage of an open marketplace. Somehow, that idea is almost as ironically funny as Max Hastings (former editor of the Daily Torygraph) writing about the effects of unregulated financial markets on the value of his pension.

I especially love this sentence: "Even back in the 1980s, this notion rang alarm bells with some of us." Well, Max, you didn't do much about it, did you?

Labels: aggregation, amazon, digital revenue, iTunes, magazines, newspapers

If screen size is the key to creating a satisfactory "magazine" experience on a handheld digital device (hdd), something the size of a Kindle should be better than an iPhone – and something more like a sheet of A4 better again. This is what Hearst, the American publisher of magazines and newspapers, seems to be hoping, according to various reports (well summarised on this post from CNet).

Implementing a tied-in device could also give Hearst the opportunity to try an iTunes like subscription service, and such a service could be extended to include other publishers, thus creating the Amazon-style service proposed in previous posts.

Fortune magazine's first report of the Hearst hdd
The Wall Street Journal on Hearst's plans to charge for content

Labels: amazon, digital magazines, digital revenue, electronic magazines, haptics, Hearst, iTunes, magazines, print magazines, subscriptions

I swear that I wrote the previous post (about an iTunes equivalent for magazine distribution) BEFORE I ever saw this article about a magazine app for the iPhone (and also available through iTunes. The author makes an interesting point about the importance of touch and feel to magazines ("haptics"), and then relates it to the iPhone's touch screen.

Meanwhile in another part of the forest, US News & World Report thinks it is a good idea to launch a weekly paid for news magazine in pdf format. I am not sure I agree with Martin Stabe, whose cryptic tweet indicated he could see three major problems with it; I'm guessing the operative words are news, paid for and pdf. News is a highly perishable commodity, no doubt about that, but informed summary and analysis is not – at least in paper form, if the paid for inky The Week is anything to judge by. The pdf format is more tricky as Mark Potts points out in a Recovering Journalist post:

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.

And in yet another leafy glade, Richard Addis suggests on Shakeup Media that newspaper publishers should, among other things, "Create one single national website for local news."

Labels: digital magazines, electronic magazines, haptics, iTunes, magazines, mobile, news magazine, print journalism, readertorial, weekly magazine

Ideas for new business models for the media are springing up all over (perhaps the current general economic climate is encouraging creative thought). I have suggested in earlier posts that Amazon might provide some ideas; here are a couple of pieces that consider the iTunes model for news operations:

David Carr in the New York Times

Paul Bradshaw's response to the above

Labels: amazon, David Carr, iTunes, New York Times, Paul Bradshaw