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)
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.”
“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.
With its recent re-design (which I like), Newsweek.com cloned one of the lesser known, but truly incredible, parts of the New York Times website: an encyclopedia-like organization of its archives — including in most cases, an introductory overview — called “Topics,” that can be found at the easy-to-remember URL, http://topics.nytimes.com. Newsweek calls its clone Newsweekopedia but uses the Times-like URL: http://topics.newsweek.com.
That’s where all similarities end.
Newsweek broke cardinal rule #1 of building an encyclopedic resource — or anything that is “-opedia” -ish — they didn’t seed it properly. In fact, they barely seeded it at all. Compare, for example, the letter “H” on http://topics.nytimes.com to the letter “H” on http://topics.newsweek.com. The image below doesn’t do justice to the 1,000+ entries on the NYTimes site, but since Newsweekopedia has only one entry, I think you get the point.
Newsweek also broke cardinal rule #1 of anything you do on the web: Don’t claim to be something that is drop-dead simple to disprove, like, say, that you have an “unmatched knowledge resource.”
My geek friends have a word for something like this: FAIL. (But please, keep trying.)
Michael Hirschorn has written an interesting piece for the Atlantic called The Newsweekly’s Last Stand. As I’ve said here many times, while “the magazine format” is alive and well, certain magazine “business models” and certain genres of magazines are greatly endangered. The general newsweekly is tops on that list. Newsweek is trying valiantly to survive and I have become a fan of its editor (and fellow Tennessean) Jon Meacham (primarily through my enjoyment of his non-fiction books). But, as Hirschorn points out, it is going to be tough for the newsweeklies (and we’re talking just Time and Newsweek) to redefine what they are. Newsweek, as is obvious from those who are receiving its newly re-formated, re-designed and re-positioned iteration, is attempting to be something like the Economist, NewYorker and the old Newsweek. Time, on the other hand, keeps getting curiouser and curiouser — it contains, I’m sorry, a continuous stream of mis-directed and poorly informed articles.
Hirschorn’s piece, rather than being about Time or Newsweek is, rather, a love-letter to The Economist.
However, the reason I wanted to point to his essay is found in the last paragraph of the piece — which I doubt few readers other than his closest friends and kin have made it to. It contains the key to successful magazine publishing, and, frankly, the success of any media today:
“General-interest is out; niche is in. The irony, as restaurateurs and club-owners and sneaker companies and Facebook and Martha Stewart know—and as The Economist demonstrates, week in and week out—is that niche is sometimes the smartest way to take over the world.
For a reason I have often explained here (mass merchants need mass media), the business model of consumer magazines has been all about getting in front of the most eyeballs as possible. The same mis-guided theory also drives the “page view” advertising metric online.
But today, our media choices are driven by our personal and professional passions. Our purchasing decisions are informed by the content and conversations found in the niche media and communities to which we subscribe and belong. It’s not a hard concept — unless you are still trying to be a mass medium.
Passion = niche. It’s an easy formula to remember, even for media people who have never studied math.
From Pokemon addiction to satanism, Time magazine has been a consistent chronicler (and sometimes creator) of faux crises over the years. Anxiety-inducing covers sell well on the newsstand, apparently.
In this post, Reason.com recalls some of the classics of covers that over-stated some cultural or health problem.
Reason.com left out a cover I recall from some cob-webbed corner of my brain. During the summer of 1982, less than a month before the CDC first started using the term AIDS, Time ran a cover story suggesting there was a national Herpes epedemic.
Reason.com’s point (or at least mine): there are always things to be scared of — but not always the ones that show up on the cover of Time.
(via: The New Yorker Blog) Artist Jorge Colombo drew this week’s New Yorker cover using Brushes, an application for the iPhone, while standing for an hour outside Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in Times Square. The magazine’s blog has also posted a video playback of Colombo’s painting (embedded below). According to the post, the NewYorker.com website will post a new drawing by Colombo each week.
One of the more interesting and articulate comment threads I’ve read in a long time is taking place on the BoingBoing Gadgets blog regarding the difference in Wired magazine and the website Wired.com. While there is some typical flaming among the comments, most of the thread is written by magazine and web tech-oriented writers — many of them among the best in the business. Even Wired magazine editor-in-chief Chris Anderson enters the fray.
Someone needs to create an annotated version of the comments to explain who everyone is.
As I’ve written before, schadenfreude “dead pool” websites* are something I’ve never quite understood. Sure, sure — I get dark comedy as a coping mechanism and I, too, am amused by the comeuppance of an over-the-top egotist: there can never be too many Donald Trump failure stories for me.
But maintaining a blog with the single focus of attempting witty posts about news regarding companies, projects, products, departments shuttering and people losing their jobs — that’s got to be one of the least compelling reasons for starting a blog I can think of.
I’ve always suspected that readers also grow tired quickly of such dispiriting morosity. And guess what, they do. At least the ones who were visiting a website called the Magazine Death Pool. (Sorry, no link-love from me on this post.)
From its dramatic fall-off in readership (see chart above) during the past few months, I’m guessing it should be heading into a pool itself, soon.
I trust they’ll find their ending full of laughs.
*I’m referring to sites inspired by F**ked.com, not to sites that make predictions about the mortality of celebrities.
I first started writing last January about the incredible Apple ads that appear on the front of NYTimes.com and, at least in the past, WSJ.com. I think they are great ads, but as I have said as soon as they started appearing, I am struck by the irony of these extravagant ads taking over the front of such news sites when, if anything remotely commercial ever appears on the cover of a magazine, the New York Times inevitably runs an article like this one that reports, “Recent issues of Entertainment Weekly, Esquire, Time, People, ESPN the Magazine, Scholastic Parent & Child and other magazines have woven in advertisers in new ways, some going as far as putting ads on their covers.” (Or this one that says about the same thing.)
Oh well, such is life. Anyway, for a front page cover story ad that puts to shame any advertisement ever to appear anywhere close to the cover of a magazine, enjoy this:
Sorry as I am to see Portfolio magazine shutter (also, see AdAge.com, NYTimes.com), it’s not hard to understand why such a major launch failed in the current environment. As I’ve said before on this blog, this is the worst time ever to launch a magazine — except for all of the other times.
The magazine’s focus was great story telling about the titans of finance and industry. Unfortunately, the advertisers who want to reach readers of such story-telling are all hiding in holes. And being a rich Wall Street titan of finance and industry is so, well, 90s.
Despite the all-star team on the editorial and publishing sides of the venture, there are certain forces in nature — is the market nature? — one cannot overcome.
Without a doubt, some of the best long-form writing of the past two years on the topic of business has come from Portfolio writers. Great design and photography, also. Lush, Condé Nast stuff.
That said, I believe it was the “business model” of Portfolio that failed, not the magazine format.
It is hard to believe there will ever again be a magazine launched with Condé Nast-sized overhead intended for a consumer-oriented general business (not vertical trade or niche focus) audience that is distributed nationally and depends on the traditional advertising/circulation/print-centric business model.
Ironically, another business-focused Condé Nast brand, Wired, proves that a niche focus print/online business model does work. Its focus and readership are tech-savvy and geekish. Yet it keeps improving with time — both online and in print.
The last time a virus story hit the news radar was six years ago (almost to the day). One of the symptoms of the SARS virus was its effect on magazine cover designers and the editors with whom they work. I can’t track it down, but that week’s cover of U.S. News & World Report also had a version of the same cliché. Each of these covers appeared on the issue dated May 5, 2003:
Some of you may recall my post last November when I was in awe of a post-election New Yorker cover illustration by Bob Staake. (Later, the cover was selected by Time as the best magazine cover of the year). When I just saw the cover of the current New Yorker in my stacked-up (staaked up?) in-box, I recognized the Staake style immediately. Perhaps it won’t be best cover of the year, but I like it a lot:
I just posted a set of photos of the first issue of Mine Magazine on Flickr (or view, left). Last month, I wrote about the “customizable” magazine Time Inc. has created for advertiser Lexus. As I wrote then, the idea is not new, but the concept is creative: a customizable magazine to echo the “branding message” of the Lexus RX — a brand they apparently started out to customize for me, but somehow forgot to add the “e” in the middle.
31,000 readers got the print version (am I lucky, or what?) and another 200,000 could get a swell PDF version. (Aren’t you lucky? Only 199,000 have signed up.)
The readers can select content appearing in five titles from eight published by subsidiaries of Time Inc. and American Express Co.: Time, Sports Illustrated, Food & Wine, Real Simple, Money, In Style, Golf, and Travel + Leisure. Each issue will contain content selected by editors that correspond with the personal choices of the readers. There are 56 editorial combinations in all (the Lexus SUV has 22 customizable advertising message settings, plus eight options handled by a dealer).
My take: It’s nice — and a lot better than a conventional Lexus ad. But frankly, it looks like what you’d expect a magazine full of re-purposed content would look like. And those full page section heads are an exercise in corner-cutting “free edit.” And as for it being a project that portends the future: Not.
Later: A few hours after posting this, I received the following “mass” e-mail that, apparently, was sent to subscribers:
Dear Rex,
Thank you for subscribing to mine magazine. We want to let you know that a computer error may have affected the first issue you received this week. It’s possible that this issue did not contain the combination of magazine content you selected. Please know that the problem has been resolved, and that each of your subsequent issues will reflect the exact content you originally requested.
In appreciation of your support, we have extended your five-issue subscription to include a sixth free issue of mine. You can also access real-time mine content through your smartphone device at http://mine.mwap.at.
We apologize for the inconvenience and, again, thank you for being among the very first to experience mine.
Best regards,
Wayne Powers
President, Time Inc. Media Group
Dear Wayne. As the subscription was free and I can’t recall the combination of magazine content I selected, I am happy to report that I was not inconvenienced.
Seven years ago, I pointed to a now-dead press release announcing the launch of a now dead line of “randy” hair-coloring products that was being marketed under the Maxim brand.
I wonder what made me remember that long-ago magazine brand-extention effort? Oh, yes, now I remember: Today, Hearst announced the “Country Living Collection” of “home fashions that includes bedding and bath, tabletop, furniture and home decor” that will debut this summer in Sears and Kmart stores.
It sounds a little like The Martha Stewart Collection exclusively at Macys, and the Martha Stewart everyday collection, exclusively at Kmart. (Not to be confused with other Martha Stewart home furnishing lines found exclusively at other places.) Those, however, are more an extension of Martha Stewart, the brand, than Martha Stewart the magazine.
Despite a long history of magazines licensing their brands in a myriad of ways, the current “narrative” that “print is dead” will, no doubt, lead some reporters and pundits to suggest the move by Hearst is a response to the extinction of the magazine format. Note to pundits: Think about how little sense it would make to brand a line of products with a name of something that is dying.
My only question about the “collection” of Country Living-branded products: Will other brands of home furnishing products that advertise in Country Living magazine believe they are now helping to support a new competitor’s brand?
Sidenote: I once attended a meeting at the offices of Country Living magazine which are located, with surreal irony, in mid-town Manhattan, the least “country” spot in America.
