A “Tablet” computer

First off, if you are a reporter and you want to write about the coming digital devices that are going to be whatever Apple is going to come out with next year, stop calling it a tablet. Here’s a Wikipedia article about tablet computers. What you’ll read there is a device that has only one thing in common with the mythological Apple device — it is rectangular. So listen up: When it comes to anything that’s like a computer, the word “tablet” means something completely different than what is about to hit the world. Apple (and, those who attempt to enter the fray after seeing the Apple device) won’t call it a tablet. I believe Apple will call it an iPad (a name I credit Chris Messina with using first.). And we will all be talking about pad media in six months as if it had been around for longer than, well, I haven’t heard it called “pad media” before, so, now. Tablet is a word that describes fully functional computers that geeks have loved, but the only people who use them are doctors, some industrial process people and actors playing FBI and CSI agents on TV.

An “iPad” device
(concept: Isamu Sanada)

A pad device won’t be a fully functional computer — like a notebook computer. But you’ll be able to run “apps” on it and surf the Internet. It will be like an iPod Touch, only with a bigger screen.

Okay, that’s out of the way. Let’s get on to what this re-rant is really about:

If you’ve read this blog for ten days or ten years, you know one thing: I don’t believe the best use of a new medium is to attempt replicating an old one. So I cringe just a bit when I read a story like the one in Wednesday’s NY Times about the way in which (as has been discussed on this blog many times) magazine publishers are getting ready for the magical appearance of the mythological Apple iPad “and other such devices.”

The article includes a key point that most of the publishers quoted seem to miss (as typical):

The new approaches depend on two assumptions: that consumers will finally embrace the tablet computers that manufacturers have promised for years, and that they will want to read magazine-style content on them. Publishers are creating magazine like products for these devices, but different mediums lend themselves to different reading styles, as the Web showed.

(Sidenote: Can someone remind me who those manufacturers are who have been promising tablet computers for years? Manufacturers have been manufacturing tablet computers for years. What they haven’t been manufacturing, they haven’t been promising. I follow this stuff pretty closely and I’ve heard pundits and bloggers and fan-boys and Michael Arrington promise the devices, but “manufacturers”? No. But back to the main point.)

So, first important thing to note: The devices that are going to be coming out are, I’m sorry to disappoint the publishers, not going to be marketed as “magazine reading devices.” And despite all of the “getting ready for the tablets” activity, people aren’t going to be running out to buy them so they can replicate the magazine reading experience. No more than they purchase computers or videogame platforms to replicate the magazine reading experience.

People replace old media with new — they don’t replicate old media with new. (Well, at first they do, but not in the long run.)

Even the Kindle, perhaps the only gadget I have that seems most to replicate a preceding medium (the book), is not a success for the “replication” reason. How do I know that? Well, about a month before the Kindle was announced, I purchased a book called Print is Dead and chapter 7 of that book, page 115 in the ironically printed version of the book, is the author’s ill-timed explanation of why the eBook was such a flop — to that point.

How “FAIL” was that? To come out with a book about the end of print — but feeling the need to write a chapter on why the eBook was a failure at precisely the point in time when it suddenly became a success.

But I’m glad the author wrote that chapter because it allows me to echo what the author was saying at the time: eBook readers have been around since the 90s — and they flopped.

So it was not the technology that made the Kindle a success. But if it wasn’t the technology, why did Amazon succeed where others had failed?

Amazon got two things right:

1. The Kindle Store

As a reading platform, the Kindle device was not really that much of an advancement over the decade of attempts that came before it. Where they succeeded was in the way the digital books were delivered. For all of Amazon’s lack of learning from Apple’s mastery of product design, Amazon learned one thing from watching Apple capture the digital media download market — at the correct price point, digital media will sell if you get the “store” part and “storage” part and the “playing” parts all working together — and drop-dead simple for non-technical people to understand and use.

So, like the iTunes Store and the iTunes desktop software and the iPod/iPhone, Amazon set up the Kindle store so that a user could seamlessly find, buy, organize and read a book all on the same device. They even out-did Apple: they made it where nothing about the Kindle had to be plugged into a computer to be used. I’ve had a Kindle for almost two years and I’ve never plugged it into my computer — never.

I’m still amazed with the ability I have to hear about a book on NPR and have it purchased and loaded into my Kindle within 60 seconds. That is what is revolutionary about the Kindle — the ability to turn book purchasing into an impulse market among people who don’t hang out at bookstores.

2. Pricing

Listen up publishing industry who is licking its chops about all the money they’ll be able to make from publishing magazines on the mythological Apple iPad that may or may not be appearing next year. The Kindle dropped the price of reading a newly published book by half — and more, in many cases. I can now read first novels or dense biographies for $10 instead of $25 and up.

In other words, it was “dropping the price of books” that made the Kindle a success.

Every article I’ve read about magazine publishers and new devices has focused on how the publishers believe they can increase the price of digital media by packaging it in a magazine format (perhaps spiced up with video) that is displayed on a rectangular thin hunk of plastic instead of on a computer screen.

No doubt, some people will line up to purchase some content — and some of that content will be packaged like a magazine, but the notion that integrating video into print and offering on a pad media device is going to suddenly convince people to whip out their squares, well, I’m sorry to be the barer of bad tidings.

Bottomline: I love magazines. And I will love creating magazine-like content for iPads. I will love creating e-magazines and ebooks and e-you-name-it. But reading a magazine is going to get only a tiny, tiny segment of the time I spend using an iPad. It’s a device that will connect me to the world — with everyone I know or have known or will know. I will be able to help run a business on it. I will be able to talk — probably video conference — with co-workers, clients, friends and family using it. I will be able to listen to every song ever recorded and watch every TV show and movie ever produced on it.

It will be a place where people live.

To think the iPad’s highest and best use will be reading content presented via a magazine-metaphor interface is, well, missing a rather big point.

By the end of the day, you may be reading or hearing about something that may be described as “the Hulu of Magazines” or the “iTunes Store of Magazines” or something like that. By the time the news, first reported by PaidContent.org, makes it into the general media, the reporter will be trying — and failing — to give you a metaphor that allows you to understand the meaning of a joint announcement today by News Corp, Time Warner Inc., Conde Nast and Hearst Corp that they are readying their print titles with agreed standards for a range of devices from ebooks to tablets.

But this is no Hulu or iTunes or Amazon.

First, the standards.

While the group of publishers told PaidContent.org the standards are “open,” I’m guessing by “open” they don’t mean the common definition of “open” used by the software and Creative Commons community, but “open” in the “we all agree to these standards” but “we control them and the DRM attached.”

Additionally, the companies will create a “digital newsstand” to deliver their titles and content to all types of new digital and mobile devices. (Thus the Hulu (which really doesn’t work, because it doesn’t charge for content — the metaphor actually refers to the joint-venture nature of the agreement) and iTunes Store comparison).

Of course, there are already massive digital newsstands. While you may know the iTunes Store for delivering video or audio files or “apps” — which are all-of-the-above, it has long been capable of delivering digital books and magazines. Amazon.com is in the digital newsstand business in a massive way. I could go on and on. Buying digital media is nothing new or earth-shattering. Buying digital magazines or books are nothing new. Buying digital-video, -audio or -books is nothing new.

So what is? One thing: The notion (hope) that “digital magazines” (which are, in essence, souped-up and “rich-media” enhanced PDFs) have enough perceived value by consumers to be worth “paying for.” And if we (Hammock will be in the digital content media creation for “pad” devices) are to succeed in this arena, publishers also have to convince the audience that the value of the content is roughly equivalent to the value of a paper magazine without the cost of paper and distribution (if the publishers try to keep those costs in the digital version, this is a non-starter: Kindle proved lots of price-point debates on that front).

So, in my opinion, publishers have a much more daunting challenge than merely agreeing upon standards and setting up a joint-venture digital newsstand.

They must evangelize an entirely new medium.

With the help of Apple and Amazon and the parade of companies who will be selling you little tablet-like display devices in the coming years, the new medium will likely succeed over time. As I indicated (and have been preparing for) I look forward to developing content for the new “pad” media.

But I doubt the folks sitting at the table today will get it right. They need mass audiences for their business models to work. For the next few years, we’re in the era of niche and quick-response guerilla media. In other words, not these guys’ forte.

A long, slogging, trench war fought in content niches will likely win this war.

But hey, I’ve been wrong before.

When I started blogging almost ten years ago, I decided that I would not blog about the transactions of the magazine world: the buying, selling, launching, closing, hiring, firing stuff. Those things are what trade (business-to-business) publications and news websites focus on and I don’t really want to play the role of “reporter” here. (Self-appointed pundit is more fun.)

However, I have made some exceptions to that rule. If transactions involve friends or someone who is especially newsworthy, or if the launch or closure involves a publication that reporters start pulling out the adjective venerable to describe. (In journalism school, they must teach that there are no other adjectives to describe magazines that have lasted a long time.)

So I decided to point to an “insta-blog” in which Kevin Demara captures “the final days of the venerable magazine Gormet because it reminded me that while (as I’ve siad) magazines open and magazines close, magazines are also people.

(via: waxy.org)

The Wall Street Journal this morning reports (paywall protected) that the December issue of Esquire will include some “augmented reality” features that, when held up to a video camera, will trigger some video. While the phrase “augmented reality” is about to become one of those terms you’ll get sick of hearing because it will soon mean anything, so therefore nothing, the “idea” holds some promise unlike the incredibly awful blinking cover technology Esquire tried last year.

While I have not seen the issue of Esquire and don’t know exactly what they’ll be doing, last year a German automotive magazine and Mini Cooper joined up to create something that may give you a taste of what can happen when you link up new media and old in ways that create something completely new (unlike when you try to replicate old media with new media and you end up with something stupid). I’ve embedded a video below that demonstrates how it was done.

Warning: Early iterations of these approaches will be expensive, gimmicky, silly and only-for-nerds. But somewhere down the road, they will make sense and will be used to do things we haven’t even thought of yet. Stay tuned.

I love the magazine format. I’ve admitted that on this blog quite a few times during the past decade.

However, I’ve also repeated many times that I am not a fan of the magazine business model — the mass media business model where a publisher depends on gathering a mass audience and selling ads to mass advertisers who’d like to reach that mass audience.

For me, the future of magazines is all about tightly focused, niche titles that serve groups of people who share a passion — a passion so deep that those who share it go seamlessly from web to mobile device to magazine to off-line meetups to learn and share as much as possible about that passion.

That’s why I believe the future of magazines is more likely to be found in today’s news that HP’s on-demand magazine service MagCloud will promote the service to the people who have created and manage the 50,000 wikis hosted by Wikia than in the news that Fortune Magazine is cutting back from 25 issues to 18 issues annually.

Wikis and on-demand, printed magazines? A marriage made in heaven, if you ask me.

But a mass market, general interest business magazine? Can’t see it in my crystal ball.

To me, the only business magazines with a future will be tightly focused business-to-business magazines that fit within an ecosystem of related products (online and off), services and events. Perhaps local or regional business magazines that do the same. But magazines intended for a broad business audience that depend on mass advertising as their primary business model?

The clock is ticking down, and it doesn’t stop at 18, 12, six or even four.

Related: That Strange Light you’re seeing is the future of magazines

(Updated: See note added at bottom.)

This may surprise the people who confuse my championing the magazine format with some delusional form of cockeyed optimism: I fully expect all magazines to die. The first magazine in America lasted one issue, so the legacy of magazines dying is as old as magazines themselves. And unlike Dylan Stableford, I don’t think five gimmicks are going to save magazines. I don’t believe 50 gimmicks are going to save magazines.

But the death of one magazine title, is not the death of the magazine format. Nor is the death of five titles or 5,000.

If Dylan had labeled his post “5 ways to save nationally distributed magazines that depend on mass advertising and newsstand revenues to sustain a business model with outrageous overhead (do I need to go on: Geary-designed dining rooms, cars for all executives, legendary expense accounts”) I may agree with some of his points. But, frankly, I don’t think any of those things are going to help save those kind of magazines. And I say good riddance.

But he said “magazines.” And magazines don’t need saving.

I won’t rehash what I said in this interview recently with econsultancy.com or in this recent column I wrote for Publishing Executive magazine.

One major point I made in them is this: The mass-media magazine business model is what is broken, not the magazine format. For instance, magazine readership is up over the past eight years — which I think is pretty good for a dead medium. And technology has radically changed magazines over the past 20 years: it has enabled my company to compete on a level field with any magazine publisher in American in terms of design and production tools, access to collaborative tools and a myriad of other mundane things.

And, as I pointed out the other days, technology is changing the economics of the production and distribution of magazines.

But to reiterate a common theme of this blog: Magazines that try to be all things to a mass audience are dying.

But you can also say that about internet-based media that try to be all things to a mass audience.

Tight focus. Niche. Passion-focused community. Must-have information. Great design or usability. Those are the key to any media these days.

A business model that a medium supports (from contributions to dues to attendance fees) rather than a media business model (advertising and circulation) is the key to business success these days.

The problem with media is not about platforms, it’s about business models.

Gimmicks won’t save magazines (including “a Netflix for magazines” or a “Hulu for magazines“).

Creating a great magazine that feeds the passion or business-focus of a specific group of people is the only thing that will save magazines.

Update: Just when my friend Jeff Jarvis declares the end to magazines — or, at least an end to their value, P&G announces a magazine that, according to AdAge will reach 6, 7, or 11 million households — depending on whether your read the illustration cutline or the story. And, whatever it means, the magazine will use “mommy bloggers” to help build the database for the magazine’s distribution.

I’m not saying the quality of “rouge” magazine will be on par with the Conde Nast titles getting axed this week — it won’t be.

I’m just saying, the magazine format is not dead. Nor is its value.

Derek Powazek’s Strange Light
is a 40-page magazine that features
stunning photography from
the Great Australian Dust Storm of 2009.
The dust storm occurred two days ago.

“Strange light fell over Australia on 23 September 2009. An unexpected dust storm blanketed New South Wales and Queensland, turning everything an eerie shade of amber. At its peak, the storm swept up 140,000 tons of soil per hour. In spite of the worst dust storm in 70 years, intrepid photographers ventured outside to document what was happening to their homes, neighborhoods, and country. This is what they saw.”

Long time readers of this blog know that one of the recurring heros who appears here is Derek Powazek. This 2008 post links back to some of his accomplishments I’ve written about, including the rise and fall of JPG Magazine and his role in helping HP Labs create MagCloud, a platform that enables the creation and distribution of magazines that utilize on-demand printing.

Strange Light is a 40-page magazine that Derek just published (in this case, I mean “just” as in “sometime during the night, U.S. time”) using MagCloud.

So, to recap: The dust storm occurred on Wednesday. Photographers — professional and amateur — headed out into the storm and, with no organizing or pre-event planning, captured “a day in the life of a dust storm.” As people with digital tools in their hands are wont to do, photographers and observers began to upload what they were seeing and experiencing and capturing to the web. With the speed and finesse of someone who has an up-close-and-personal understanding of the “community” aspects of photo sharing (trust me on that one) and who helped to innovate much of the processes of web-based “social-media” collaborative magazine publishing, Derek put together a magazine — and has given us just one more glimpse into the potential of the magazine format.

I spend a lot of time pointing out that arguments over the future of magazines are rarely about the magazine format — they nearly always are about some business model related to circulation, advertising or cost-structure.

Derek continues to prove the magazine format — and print — can be a new media platform, if one gets their head out of (or into) the dust clouds.

Econsultancy’s Patricio Robles recently interviewed me and the result is posted on Econsultancy.com today. Knowing the global audience of digital marketing and ecommerce pro Econsultancy has, I was honored to take part in the discussion. I’m also grateful Patricio gave me this great ego-boosting pull quote: “When it comes to discussing what the future holds, Rex Hammock is one of the guys you want to speak to.” I’ve already forwarded it to my wife who said she’ll talk to me about the future after I finish changing the air filters at home today. Enjoy — and thanks.

Samir Husni (Mr. Magazine) posts a rant about the publishers of Ladies Home Journal’s apparent attempt to rebrand Ladies Home Journal into LHJ. In marketing material to advertisers, the word “magazine” is mentioned only once but the magazine is referred to as a “national media brand” several times.

Quote:

Now, the folks working at Ladies’ Home Journal may fondly refer to the magazine as LHJ, but do they really think the readers outside the magazine’s offices refer to the magazine as LHJ? If we are truly in the process of reinventing ourselves and reintroducing ourselves, should we make it easier for the readers to find our brand or should we make it harder? I hope that this test is not a sign of what “reintroducing Meredith” is going to be. Ladies’ Home Journal is a much bigger brand in the women’s magazine field to be reintroduced as LHJ… and so are the remaining magazines published by Meredith. I hope that the word “magazine” is not going to be a “taboo” in the vocabulary of the “Reintroduced Meredith” and the same is true for Ladies’ Home Journal. There is a big difference between a “brand experience” and a “magazine experience.” Please do keep the “magazine experience” well and alive and the “brand experience” will follow.

As our company has been in a two-year process of conveying the message that our services extend beyond magazine publishing (they always have), I nonetheless feel that my job also involves explaining, whenever possible, why magazines are a powerful facet of a multi-channelled conversational marketing approach. (#1 Lesson to learn from great brands like Nike and Apple: More media channels are better than fewer media channels.)

While I champion digital media and all forms of community-building online, I’m not running away from magazines.

Bonus: Not that you asked, but on another front, I think a two-inch video embedded on the page of a magazine is right up (down?) there with scratch and sniff: a clever gimmick in unique circumstances but not the future of magazines.

Bonus (addendum): When I saw the news that Entertainment Weekly was embedding 2 inch video screens in an upcoming issue of the magazine, it made me wonder (once again) why magazine publishers would rather resort to gimmicks than exploit the power of the medium they have. Let me stress this point: Video is not what’s missing from print magazines: great editing and design and passion and smart business people are what’s missing from magazines.

However, that’s not to say that there are not lots of ways one can use technology, innovation and fun to create experiences unique to print and the technology sitting on people’s desks:

A couple of days ago, the the New York Times reported on findings from the new Veronis Suhler Stevenson Communications Industry Forecast that projects media expenditures from 2009-2013. From that NYT story, a game of “telephone” has rippled forth across the land that has boiled down an exhaustive report that is hundreds of pages long into a sound bite that is a variation of the headline Gawker put on its snipped version: “Consumers Know: ‘Free’ Media Must Suck”.

The VSS annual research report has been around for 30 years and is far more accurate and insightful than research coming from other sources, so my rant is not directed at them. Nonetheless, every year there seems to be one misinterpreted statistic that within 24 hours shows up in every marketing guy’s e-mail, tweet and blog-post to everyone they know.

Typically, the misinterpretation is the classic one I’ve been writing about since 2004 in which “magazine advertising” is compared to “internet advertising.” However, the “magazine advertising” figure that is used refers to “advertising in consumer magazines” and leaves out 50% of the magazine advertising that appears in business-to-business magazines. As I pointed out last year, the “internet advertising” statistic includes all search, display, sponsorships, etc., spent online in both consumer and b-to-b marketing.

Without a doubt, there is a trend from print to digital media, both in the way we access, process, organize and use information and other forms of content. And yes, lots of this is “paid” and not supported by advertising — we just don’t think about it that way. And frankly, as the business I’m in has a fee-based marketing services business model that creates exactly the type of alternative media that VSS predicts is one of the fast-growing segments of media, intuitively, I should be rah-rahing the misperception that’s floating around out there.

However, it’s impossible for me not to react negatively to headline take-aways based on misinterpretations of a one-page press release that make it sound like a $30 billion market is going out of business in a few weeks.

*Quote from that clueless marketing guy on the DirecTV ads.

As people who read this blog know, a regular topic I write about is the magazine industry. That should make sense, as Hammock Inc. publishes magazines for several associations and corporate clients.

For their August issue, the business-to-business magazine Publishing Executive invited me to write a guest column about things I may have learned about magazines from nearly a decade of blogging.

As most of what one reads about magazines and blogs tends to place the two media in adversarial roles, what I wrote for the magazine may surprise you.

Here are nine things I’ve learned about magazines from blogging. The full column, which explains what I mean with each point, can be found on the magazine’s website:

1. Magazines and blogs are made for each other.
2. People in the magazine industry are consistently inarticulate in their attempts to describe the qualities of the magazine format.
3. No one will ever collect NationalGeographic.com.
4. The people who say print is dead don’t actually mean print is dead.
5. Successful magazines succeed for three reasons: a passionate niche, they are required reading for that niche, great design.
6. More magazines play a role in a non-publishing business model than in a publishing business model.
7. A digital magazine will never replace a printed magazine.
8. The magazine format can contain content that is “journalism” or it can contain content that’s anything but journalism.
9. Make lists end on a random number other than 10.

Again, some of these won’t make sense without reading the entire column.

Later: By auditioning a link to this column on Twitter, I’ve discovered that some people really like #3, which is a short version of my description of the common-sense observation that a physical magazine is not a digital website, and therefore, the two platforms that share the same brand should be and are different.

3. No one will ever collect NationalGeographic.com: OK, here is my suggestion to those in the magazine industry who haven’t figured out how to compare magazines with the Web (see point #2). The magazines we love are not merely things we read and enjoy; they are expressions of who we are. We display them on coffee tables and desks the way people wear designer labels on clothes or purchase one model of car over another. People collect magazines, trade them and display them on decorative racks or in frames hung on the wall. Magazines provide us with mementos of our life’s journey. They allow us to savor our passions and save special moments. The magazines we love are so important to us, they make us feel guilty to consider throwing them away. The Web is a wonderful thing when you want to drink information from a fire hose. But the magazines people love are like bottles of fine wine: Even if you have to wait a little before opening it, there’s something a bit exciting about the anticipation.

One of those intangibles about working on a magazine — an intangalbe that one doesn’t often experience when working primarily on the web — is a sense that something can have a beginning, a middle and an end — and then it starts all over again. But sometimes, those of us who are immersed in producing magazines all the time forget the joy of the process — admittedly, it’s hard to be reflective while you’re actually in the process.

But 24HourMagazine.com will give you a jolt of magazine-work adrenaline as it chronicles the efforts of an all volunteer team of aspiring European magaziners who created a fashion-lifestyle magazine — from concept to late-night-party, from nothing to press-ready — in, uh, 24 hours. (Here’s a PDF of the magazine.)

Especially impressive on the website are all the ways in which the team documented and shared the process. Lot’s to learn from this, especially for jaded magazine people who think producing an issue of a magazine is just a job. Share the process.

(Sidenote: Come to think of it, sharing the process is a lot of what we try to do all over our company website, Hammock.com)

(via: Springwise.com)

Free (the
book’s name,
not its price)

The New Yorker’s Malcolm Gladwell has a review (preview?) of his fellow Conde Naster, Wired’s editor-in-chief Chris Anderson’s new book Free: The Future of a Radical Price.

Like Anderson’s previous blockbuster book, The Long Tail, the new book started out as a Wired magazine cover story — so the ideas he puts forth in it have had lots of time for debate and pre-first guessing (or whatever you call sped-up second-guessing) in the blogosphere and elsewhere.* Also, as the original article was written before the economic meltdown, it will be interesting to see how a gut-wrenching recession may have altered the reaction the book will receive in the marketplace when it is officially released next Tuesday, July 7.

The publisher has reportedly already printed 80,000 copies of the book, so there’s a lot of cash riding on a book called free that costs $26.99 retail ($17.81 on Amazon).

In any discussion of the “power” of free (its marketing power was known long before the advent of the internet), there seems always to be a lot of rehashing of brands and products that have included “free” in their business models over the years: Think Gillette — give the razor away free, make money on the blades. Or think of almost anything one provides “free” that results in an indirect benefit rather than a direct benefit. My current favorite personal debate along these lines has to do with paid vs. free wifi. While all hotels and airports understand the value of providing the comfort of free air conditioning and restrooms to their passengers and guests, why do some hotels and airports not extend such logic to free wifi access to the internet while others do? Obviously, the answer has to do with the understanding by those airports who provide free wifi that the return on that “free” comfort/service is far greater than the licensing fee revenue they receive from selling internet access. Here’s one: One will arrive early at an airport with free wifi knowing they can be productive while waiting. More time that means more money spent in the shops and restaurants in the airport. Conversely, if one travels a lot and encounters paid wifi in airports and hotels, the value of purchasing a wireless 3G modem from a cell-phone carrier becomes easily apparent. (The current favorite public debate over this topic is free vs. paid content from newspapers — a topic Gladwell focuses on.)

What benefit do I get out of posting this item for free — or of doing anything on this blog that gives away ideas or suggestions I run across that may help someone — even a competitor — do something they may charge others for.

Well, hmmm. Let’s think.

Once I got an e-mail from Chris Anderson asking if it would be okay if he gave my name to a publishing group who wanted him to speak about how “the long tail” might affect magazine and journal publishing. As it was a publishing group and he’d read several posts I’d written regarding the book (or maybe the article), he knew I was at least somewhere in the ballpark of correct in explaining the concept to a group of publishers. More important to Anderson, I think he was probably making a few thousand dollars per speech at the time (vs. the “you can’t afford it if you have to ask” levels he makes now) and he knew I’d probably speak to the group for something closer to their budget, say, several one dollars for airfare and a room at a Hampton Inn.

Of course, I spoke. And for that group, I decided to do it for free for the opportunity to one day post (I’m using up that opportunity right now) that I can speak when you can’t afford Chris Anderson. Fortunately, at the meeting, someone heard me who had a specific nugget of information that has turned into a very worthwhile return on my investment of giving something away for free.

The whole notion of “free” is whirling around the media business these days — especially whirling around newspapering executives who want to equate “the business model” of leveraged rolled-up national newspaper chains with some notion of “journalism” or “free press.”

The argument by the rolled-up leveraged media executive is this: Giving away something for “free” always means that something that’s “paid for” will get killed.

I on the other hand, believe this: Free always kills things that are charged for, except when it doesn’t.

It’s sort of like the last line in Gladwell’s review of Anderson’s book:

“The only iron law here is the one too obvious to write a book about, which is that the digital age has so transformed the ways in which things are made and sold that there are no iron laws.”

As for whether or not the book will be a big hit? I predict it will, but the money it makes will pale in comparison to the appearance fees Anderson will continue to receive.

*On another front, the book Free has already stirred some controversy over free content included in it without citation. That’s called plagarism when someone I don’t know does it. However, when it’s someone I respect and trust and whose magazine and blog I’ve read for years, I give them the benefit of the doubt when they explain what happened, admit the screwup and take time to explain — not trying to get excused, but to explain — the screwup in great detail.

Update: Anderson responds to Gladwell’s focus on “the future of journalism” debate. Great quote in the post: “My business card says ‘Editor in Chief’ but if one of my children follows in my footsteps, I suspect their business card will say ‘Community Manager.’ Both can be good careers.

Dylan Stableford of Foliomag.com interviewed me recently about some work Hammock Inc. does in helping associations incorporate social media tools and approaches into events and publishing activities. He was nice enough to excerpt some of it and post it yesterday. And several people have been nice in e-mailing me to say, “Thanks, you are saying exactly what I’ve been trying to tell my boss.”

Here’s a re-post of my quote Dylan shared in his post, “If Obama Won Presidency Without Building Own Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Why Should You?” I think I was answering a question related to the risks an association or company might face when embracing social media:

“As with doing anything, from holding a meeting to publishing a magazine, there are risks with a company or an association initiating a social media initiative. And I don’t mean the kind of risks most marketers, publishers and editors fear regarding people saying negative things or acting in an inappropriate ways. Those are easily managed risks. The more serious risks are getting lost in the objectives of what you’re trying to accomplish by focusing too much in the early stages on the technology or tactics of social media and not focusing on the strategy and business-specific goals you want from the initiative. I apologize to my friends in IT, but the easiest way to doom anything related to social media is to start off talking about technology and features and platforms. I tell clients, “If Obama won the presidency using Twitter, Flickr and YouTube, then why do you need to build a platform from scratch?” If an IT person is in the room, they always have a reason that has something to do with integration into a legacy CRM or something. If you start out with “integration with your legacy CRM” as a social media goal, there’s a high degree of risk that you’ll fail. And there’s a 100 percent chance you’ll not have anything to show for six months to a year.

Confession: Sometimes, I preach better than I practice.