• Mockingbird author wins U.S. medal | Reuters
  Not only is it wonderful that the author of my favorite book of all time, Harper Lee, is being honored this way, it’s wonderful that she appears so vibrant and lively in the photos accompanying the story.
  (tags: literature, harper lee, alabama)

French (and, now, Valley) entrepreneur and blogger Loic Le Meur has been invited to tonight’s White House concert honoring French President Sarkozy — and he’s blogging it.

Whenever you see a rumor about an Apple “tablet PC” being real, all you need to say is, “Oh, that’s Rumor #3.”

Heck, even TUAW.com (the Unofficial Apple Weblog) has started calling it “Rumor #3.”

Of course, I go way-back with Rumor #3.

I figure as long as we can keep this rumor alive, maybe there’s hope that one day it will come true. (And when it does, I’ll see you in line at the Apple Store.)

(See: The rexblog ‘All the Apple rumors you’ll ever need - update page’)

Later: Webomatica lists some “thoughts” about what may be announced at Macworld. I like that: Not even rumors, these are “thoughts.” That’s sort of what my rumors are. Things I’d like for Apple to do, sprinkled with educated guessing, wrapped up in idle speculation.

Yesterday, I marveled at the new web-based service (to call this a website is way-under describing it) that can be found at the URL, NPR.org/music. This morning, Rob Paterson of FASTForward Blog has a review of the site in which he describes it as a model for social media. I agree with his praise of the site, except I don’t understand why it’s a model of “social media.” Frankly, one of the reasons it compliments the array of new ways I now listen to music is that it’s not a social media, but highly dependent upon the old “top-down,” the-experts-work-here, model.

I’m a fan of music “social media” like Pandora or Last.FM. They are revolutionary models of social media and I’ve discovered lots of new music through them.

However, what I like about the new NPR service (and how it “compliments” those other services) is that it pulls together the “wisdom of experts” at some of the last, remaining bastions of full-time, professional musicology: public radio stations. This is your (to a small extent) tax dollars and (to a much greater extent) your corporate, foundation and individual contribution-dollars at work. (In that way, I guess you could call it the ultimate social medium.)

I don’t want to get hung up on a term like “social media” and what it means or doesn’t mean. However, as with other terms in a 2.0 world, when buzz-terms start meaning anything, they start meaning nothing.

I can see where NPR.org/music can be described as on-demand media, or amazingly-cool media, or, even, the most incredible new internet media. And I can see how, with a little hacking, it could plug into or serve as the focal point of all types of social media. But while it can be the model or benchmark for all sorts of great web development, I don’t think it’s the model for “social media.”

This morning, Jeff Jarvis asks a question to which I have an answer. He asks (in light of the closure of Business 2.0 and House & Garden) contemplatively, “Magazines won’t die. But I wonder how many new ones will be born.”

First, the precise answer to Jeff’s question can be found on Samir Husni’s website. He actually tracks how many magazines are born each month. And, as I pointed to in a link the other day, October was a big month, and September was a bad month. So it goes.

However, the part of Jeff’s post I want to address is this:

“A launch can easily cost $40 million before break-even. Entertainment Weekly, my baby, went through $200 million before turning profitable (that wasn’t my fault!). It’s a $300-million-plus-a-year franchise now. But you can bet that it wouldn’t be launched today.”

As anyone who reads this blog knows — and as he knows — I’m a big fan of Jeff Jarvis, but when it comes to magazine publishing, his career at Time Inc. and at Conde Nast has corrupted his thinking.

The magazine format is not a business model.

The magazine format (like its close online cousin, the weblog) can plug-into a wide array of business models. Some of those business models — like the ones operated by his former employers — require revenues of over $100 million to fit within the context of a global media company. Those are the types of magazines that require $40 million before break-even.

However, the magazine format can be plugged into the business model of a non-profit organization, or a university development program, or an entrepreneur who discovers any niche audience who have a passion for a specific topic.

Jeff’s answer to his own question can actually be found in his last paragraph in which he wonders about the free magazines that are replacing the free sheets in London. That’s another business model issue. The magazine format plugs into the free, local distribution model, better than the newspaper format. The same economics work: advertising with no subscription acquisition costs and (comparatively) low distribution costs; but the shelf-life of a magazine is longer than that of a newsprint tabloid or broadsheet.

Another post for another day: How technology has driven down the costs of producing a magazine.

Bottomline: It’s not the magazine format that’s under threat. It’s the consumer, mass-appeal, mass-marketed, subscriber/newstand/advertising business model that is built on a magazine that costs $40 million before break-even that’s under threat.

(Disclosure: I’m in the business of helping such clients publish magazines. Indeed, in the past quarter, we’ve helped a client launch a magazine that has a circulation larger than Time magazine — that has nothing to do with the business model Jeff describes.)

• Publishers See a Way to Track Their Content Across the Net | New York Times
  The company has developed software that identifies an electronic “fingerprint” for a particular piece of material — an article, a picture, a video.
  (tags: copyright paranoia)
• Alpha Channel weblog | msnbc.com
  From the transparency desk, here is a weblog from the team working on the re-design of msnbc.com.
  (tags: design)
• Off with their headlines | Buzzmachine.com
  Quote - Perhaps what the paper should be doing is not trying to impose its definition of “journalist” on any who receive its dollar but instead rethink that definition themselves.
  (tags: ethics)
• H&G to close | WWD.com
  Conde Nast will fold House & Garden with the December issue and shut down its Web site, houseandgarden.com.
  (tags: magazines)
• Miracle on Turf | John Feinstein
  Quote - At a civilian school the hardest part of a football player’s day is football practice. At an academy, the easiest part of a football player’s day is football practice.
  (tags: sports football)
• Handwriting key to learning | Newsweek.com
  A Vanderbilt professor finds that primary-school teachers believe students with fluent handwriting produced written assignments superior in quality and that result in higher grades.
  (tags: education)
• What level of education is required to understand this blog?
  You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to read the rexblog. However, you apparently need to at least be in high school.
  (tags: tools)