Early this morning, there seemed to be a theme emerging in my RSS newsreader. Here are a few items that showed up:

Frank Anton of Hanley Wood, says:

“If the magazines published two or three years from now aren’t different, we’re in trouble. The current magazine model won’t take us into the next five years, let alone the next 100 years.”

Colin Crawford of IDG says:

“…being unburdened by print allowed the team at Infoworld the opportunity to focus on the changing needs of their customers and to develop online, event and mobile products.”

Jeff Jarvis responding to Colin’s post, says:

“Yes, print is a burden. It’s expensive to produce for it. It’s expensive to manufacture. It’s expensive to deliver. It limits your space. It limits your timing. It’s stale when it’s fresh. It is one-size-fits-all and can’t be adapted to the needs of each user. It comes with no ability to click for more. It has no search. It can’t be forwarded. It has no archive. It kills trees. It uses energy. It usually brings unions. And you really should recycle it. Wow, when you think about it, print sucks.

So what was the theme? Print is a burden. Unfortunately, saying “print is a burden” implies that there are other options out there that are not burdens. Frankly, the web is a burden. Traveling to events IDG puts on is a burden. Trying to synch my phone and computer is a burden. As Scott Karp displayed in a post yesterday, trying to discover which among 2,000 different news stories on the same topic is a burden.

Despite my love (and I use the word love very deliberately) of the magazine medium, I have never been burdened by thinking print is a hammer and every communications or marketing challenge is a nail.

Granted, my company has published magazines since the day it opened 16 years ago. But even back then, we also created lots of “interactive multimedia” (published on CD-ROM). And in those pre-web days, we also managed “forums” on CompuServe. As a custom media creator, I’ve never felt “burdened” by any medium that helps build strong relationships between our clients (associations and companies) and their members or customers. If smoke signals would help forge and sustain those relationships, we’d be all over it.

Those who know me — even through this blog — know I personally agree with Jeff Jarvis on his somewhat satirical indictment of print. I’m about as paper-free as someone can get in their personal and business practices, but I’m no print vegan (did I just create a new buzzterm?). As Jeff is writing a book and writes for newspapers and magazines, it’s not like he’s a print vegan either. But my print aversion is neither “environmental” (as I always say , if paper is the cause of global warming, someone needs to share that inconvenient truth with this guy) nor based on any belief that print is inherently bad. What I find a burden is poorly designed, written and produced print. What I find a burden is the clutter and confusion print and paper often add to my already cluttered life.

Bottomline: Print is not the burden. My time is the burden. If you publish a beautiful magazine with articles that really matter to me — that instruct, inform or celebrate something I feel strongly about, it is no burden on me. If you help me get to the information and insight I need to live a fuller life or conduct business in a more flexible and productive way, your blogging and tweeting and bookmarking does not burden me. Useless, redundant, meaningless, re-shuffled drivel is the burden. It can be delivered via print or on a weblog or a mobile device. Crap is a burden no matter what the medium used to deliver it.

If you haven’t noticed how FolioMag.com has embraced blogging with a vengeance (since Dylan Stableford’s return), it’s time for you to check it out. If you’re in the magazine industry — especially in B-to-B — they’re showing how it’s done. Indeed, today, they proved just how blogistic they are by using a post to bust a competitor’s lame attempt at gathering some competitive intelligence using the old (and I mean old), “we have a client who’d like to know so-and-so” approach. No, the calling-out wasn’t hip-hop magazine level. It was a little more like Michael Arrington on Twitter very late at night.

Magazine quote of the week, no, make that month:

“(Wired magazine is) NOT about technology — we’re about how technology is changing the world.” — Chris Anderson, editor

(From Wired wants to blow your mind - MarketWatch)

Observation: Whether you’re a blogger or a big-city newspaper reporter or a superstar national news personality, you need to realize that you’re just shuffling information if your content is only the transactions (starts, stops, hires, fires, sales, loses) related to a topic. It’s only when you start informing readers how and why such information matters that you become a writer or reporter or blogger who matters.

Wired is still around because Chris Anderson understands — and displays — how a magazine can be a perfect medium for exploring the reasons why things matter.

Not that it matters, but if you used Twitter, you’d already know that Ana Marie Cox, original Wonkette and Washington Editor of Time.com, is no longer a Time employee (but still a “contractor”) — before anyone started “reporting” it. How? Because she is using Twitter right now to inform the world.

See previous post — of course, this makes a liar out of me as I claimed I didn’t “do Twitter” during work. Technically, I was “at lunch.”

[Note: After I posted this, Rob took down his original post and replaced it with a note saying the gallery needed a little work before going live. I’ve redirected his link to the new post and will update this when he gets the gallery working the way he wants.]

[Note #2: On April 14, Rob re-posted the gallery. I have updated the embed below.]

Rob Haggart, whose blog, A Photo Editor, has become one of my favorite magazine-related “skill” blogs, has put together a slide show (using Flickr) that displays the work of 297 photographers. Explains Rob, “This is a free promo that’s meant to supplement all the other ways you find photographers to hire.”

Over on the Custom Media Craft blog on Hammock.com, I just posted some highlights from the annual survey conducted by the Custom Publishing Council called “Characteristics Study: A Look at the Volume and Type of Custom Publications in America”. (Note: Hammock Inc. was one of the founding members of the Custom Publishing Council). According to the survey, in 2007 a record number of marketers used custom media to promote their products and brands. Personally, I believe the numbers are still conservative as there are lots of online “content marketing” activities taking place that fall through the cracks of this research. For instance, most of the digital startups that have content creation for marketers (i.e., video distributed online) as part of their business model should probably be covered in this research — but aren’t.

One thing this survey underscores is a statistic that doesn’t click with many of my friends in the magazine and media industry who think of the magazine format as being, exclusively, a business model (i.e., consumer of B2B magazines). The magazine format is not just a business-model, it supports and serves other business models. I typically use university alumni or association magazines as examples here, but think of all the institutions and, now, companies, who use magazines and other media they create as platforms for fostering long term relationships with their constituencies (customers, alumni, members, supporters, etc.). While there are probably (and I’m guessing here) less than 20,000 magazines that have advertising and circulation-revenue as the focus of their business models, this survey indicates there are 143,173 magazines in America. Even if my number is low and their’s is high, the truth of magazine publishing is this: Most magazines in America “support” a business model — they aren’t a business model.

This is an important fact to consider when thinking about the “business model” of another media: blogging. Today — and forevermore — there will be only a small fraction of blogs that are, themselves, a business. The vast majority — as in 99% or more — of business-related blogs will support a business model (or a cause or institution or campaign), not be a business model.

Another thing: I confess: As much as I enjoy publishing — indeed everything about — magazines, I’m also very-much a new-media guy. I believe content-marketing, custom media, social media, conversational media — whatever you want to call it — should be front and center in any company or institution’s marketing effort (our company works with clients in doing just that). I see no “competition” or “conflict” or “irony” in me advocating new media while still championing the magazine format as the most compelling engagement media available.

At Hammock.com, view statistics and highlights from the Custom Publications in America survey.

I believe I’ve mentioned on this blog before my fascination with Phillip Moffitt. Moffitt, along with Chris Whittle, started a company in the mid-1970s that is no longer around, but the alumni of that company are all over the magazine publishing world — some in very senior business and editorial roles. (Some even read this blog from time-to-time.) When they were business partners, Moffitt and Whittle were perhaps best known for their purchase of Esquire magazine in 1979. In addition to being its CEO, Moffitt served as editor of Esquire for the next few years. I read the magazine fairly closely during his years as editor. Certainly, no one (except, perhaps ad sales people) would call that era the golden age of Esquire (far from it). But for me, it could not have been more compelling. I was around the magazine’s target age and demographic. I was intrigued by Moffitt (and to a lesser degree, Whittle, who I once described on this blog as being to publishing what Tucker was to the automobile) who were six-or-seven years older than me and from Tennessee and were trail-blazing some publishing and marketing trends I thought were both radical and smart — and, indeed they were. Today, those ideas have played-out in all sorts of amazing ways — including some side paths that I have journeyed down myself.

I’ve never met Moffitt, but I recall that in the mid-80s, he wrote an Esquire essay — I believe it was around the time he turned 40 — that was a penetrating, self-reflective piece that pretty much confessed that he believed there was way more to life than what he was experiencing — so much for fame and success and trail-blazing. I would have dismissed the essay as new-age babbling or mid-life crisis (or both) had Moffitt not soon-there-after cashed-out his holdings and, well, here’s an article from today’s San Francisco Chronicle, that picks up his story there.

Quote:

“At the pinnacle of his success as chief executive and editor in chief of Esquire magazine, Phillip Moffitt walked away from it all - the glamour, the accolades, the punishing schedule - and chose instead to wake up each morning and breathe, to explore the mysteries he had always intuited. “I was drawn to a sense that there was a greater meaning to life than getting ahead. It felt intuitively, intrinsically to me as is true for most people, that in the midst of all we know - science - there is a relatedness that’s possible, a mystery; it’s always drawn me.” It was 1987, and Moffitt had no real plan. Married for part of this time, he spent the next several years living in various meditation centers “in rooms so small that [he] could often reach out and touch both walls,” according to his new book.

Over the years, I’ve spoken with many people in the magazine publishing world who worked with Moffitt, some who’ve stayed in contact with him. (They always tell me that most people ask them about Whittle.) They’ve shared with me glimpses of what he’s been doing over the past 20 or so years. Now, he’s written a book on that topic. It comes out in a week or so, and while the topic is outside my typical reading box — "Dancing with Life: Buddhist Insights for Finding Meaning and Joy in the Face of Suffering" — I’ve ordered a copy. If it brings me joy and meaning — or some insights into Moffitt — I’ll review it here.

As usual, Chris Anderson is a voice of reason when he answers a question that implies magazines will be replaced in a decade or so by something digital that is distributed via a new device. Will it happen in a decade? he is asked. “No,” says Chris, “Technology adoption happens slowly. This is the editor of Wired telling you no. Obviously, newspapers are going to be changing dramatically over the next few years, but magazines are not newspapers. And I think magazines 10 years from now are going to look something like they do now.”

I’ll go further: magazines (like Chris, I won’t extend the following prediction to newspapers) will never be “replaced” by any digital device, especially the device hypothesized in the article:

“…you’ll walk onto a plane, or a subway, or a soon-to-be-invented mode of transport, and you’ll tuck a little electronic book under your arm. Inside that little book, which will be very expensive at first but soon will cost $150, there’ll be a series of mylar “pages,” and there will be small buttons off to the side, and once you hit one of them, whoooosh, words and photos from Vanity Fair will suddenly appear.

The problem with this future-scape is this: The technology/delivery channel being described is not a magazine. It may use the metaphors associated with a print magazine, but it’s not a magazine. It’s another media platform. It’s another distribution channel. And frankly, whenever the device being described breaks the $200 barrier, the last thing people will be doing with it is flipping through a souped-up PDF of Vanity Fair.

Moreover, the media platform being described in the scenario is more likely to replace whatever you’re reading this blog post with than replace the print magazine format.

You see, the device being described is already here — it’s just not the right size yet. For years, I’ve been writing about the device I now call the iPod Touch Book (or Rumor #3). Last year, I even comp’d up an illustration of what it would look like.

The device could be widely available 1-3 years from now. Indeed, today’s announcement about a new Intel chip could have a direct bearing on this new device.

So why won’t this incredible device replace magazines? Well, if you have this device that will provide you access to all the video, audio and digital content there is, will you be using it to flip through a souped up PDF? There’s an easy answer to this question that anyone who has used the Internet can answer: No. You’ll be using it to do the kinds of things you do with your computer. You’ll access all the content published by magazine companies in the form you’re now accessing it via the device you’re using to read this.

When it comes to magazines, you’ll be reading them on paper.

Addendum for those who aren’t familiar with this blog:

As I’m sure there are some who will stumble onto this post and who will be convinced I’m out of my mind, I’ll restate several things that are known by those who read this blog with some regularity (all 12 of you): I own an iPhone and use it all day, everyday. I’m fairly comfortable with my understanding of the incredible potential with that device. I own a Kindle and download and read about 2-3 eBooks a month using it, so I’m fairly comfortable with my understanding of that device. Indeed, I’m a huge fan of the potential of eBook readers — especially if Apple creates the iPod Touch Book.

However, my enthusiasm for such devices does not overwhelm my understanding of the history of media, technology and user adoption. As I’ve said every time I head into one of these magazine apologist rants, the magazine format is not a business model. Business models that depend on magazines — newsstand distributed mass-consumer magazines, for example, or transaction-oriented trade magazines — could one day slide into a Smithsonian Exhibit. However, magazines that support a business model (university development, for example) will likely grow as online strategies strengthen the communities who will want to expand their story-telling to print.

I also refuse to accept the notion that advertisers will leave magazines — or broadcast TV, for that matter. Why? Well, for one thing, the world’s best brand spends only a fraction of its advertising budget online: the majority goes to TV and, wow, magazines, along with a healthy chunk of outdoor spending. If you want to follow the leading brand (that’s what marketers do), you’ll hesitate before shifting all your advertising dollars online — even if it’s distributed on devices created by the world’s best brand.

Later: As often happens, when I write things during flights and that are responding to something that causes me to rant, I write in a way that confuses even me — when I read it later. My point is not to dismiss the appropriateness of digital magazines in certain circumstances. And if you enjoy reading or publishing digital magazines, I am not suggesting you’re wrong — as mentioned, I am currently working on projects that have digital publications as a component and I enjoy reading books on my Kindle. In these rants, I’m merely emphasizing my belief that the roles of print magazines and so-called “digital magazines” are not the same — and that digital magazines may grow in importance and acceptance, but they will not replace print magazines as a medium, even if certain titles “convert” some or all of their circulation to digital products. My second, and perhaps more passionate argument is focused on those who believe the highest and best usage of hand held digital devices is replicating a physical product. My argument is this (and has always been this): New technology enables new experiences and new media — rarely (if ever) is new technology’s ultimate use in replicating old media.

Talk about your opening day.

Just in time for baseball season, Sports Illustrated opened their archival vault during the past few days and my sports-enthused friend, Staci Kramer, dove in. Staci, of course, has that business media thing going to, so she actually can make hanging out on SI a work-related activity by digging into some cool stats and insight:

“SI can drive discovery and take search engine optimization much deeper with key topic pages and by linking and aggregating to related content like video search through sibling AOL’s Truveo, eBay collectibles, the wiki links. Putting it all up required a new classification system and the thousands of tags for the most complete metadata and flexible search. The platform to host the Vault and dynamically render pages was built by sibling Turner Broadcastings’ digital group; SI.com is part of the CNN Network, so Turner benefits from any increased traffic. Eventually, SI plans to add stats feeds, trivia, original video programming, self-publishing and more. By the numbers: The Vault launched Thursday so these are early numbers. According to data provided by SI, through Monday the site drew 231,000 unique visitors (97,000 Monday) producing 2.5 million page views (900,000 Monday) and spending an average of 9.5 minutes per visit.

I just love sports stats stories.

Earlier tonight, I was curious how different business news websites were covering the breaking story of the JPMorgan Chase acquisition of Bear Stearns. As there are now plenty of heavily-staffed business news websites that represent traditional magazine and newspaper companies, I thought it would be interesting to compare how quickly they each jumped on the story on a late Sunday afternoon. I used the Firefox Add-on Screengrab! (thanks, Jon Henshaw) to record the front page of five business news websites and then posted them in a set on Flickr.

What did I discover from my two-minute exercise? Well, at around 8:15 p.m. EST, the Wall Street Journal and New York Times both had staff-written breaking stories — indeed, multiple breaking stories. And while Fortune.com and Portfolio.com had Bear Stearns stories in the lead position, they were not about the breaking situation, rather that story was relegated to “headlines” from wire services. Forbes.com didn’t even have a link to a wire story. (My apologies to my friends at BusinessWeek.com for not including them, but, I got distracted by NCAA tourney bids.)

Here are links to each screengrab on Flickr:

WSJ.com - 8:18 p.m. EST
NYTimes.com (business) - 8:18 p.m. EST
Fortune.com - 8:17 p.m. EST
Forbes.com - 8:15 p.m. EST
Portfolio.com - 8:16 p.m. EST

This exercise also reminded me once more of one of the reasons I’m a fan of the reverse-chronological, perma-linked and time-stamped nature of blogging. As Scott Karp noted the other day, other approaches treat online content (and by content, I mean photos, video, articles, maps, etc.) with traditional editorial approaches and story-telling conventions. But by transporting the conventions of print online, traditional media sites provide no way in which to “follow” the timeline of a developing story. At least with print, historians can easily go back later and revive a day-by-day time-line of coverage of an event. Try that with a typical online news site.

There is a TV news archives at Vanderbilt University that has captured the ephemera of broadcast news since the 1960s. Is there such a thing for the Internet? (Later clarification: Is there such an organization that uses such a model of the TV New Archives that attempts to capture the day-by-day changes that occur on major news websites?) I know that the San Francisco-based Internet Archive, in a rather broad-sweeping way, is, it says, “working to prevent ‘born-digital’ materials from disappearing into the past.” However, when historians in the future try to dissect, for example, the 2008 Presidential Election, will the Internet Archives be able to help them?

Perhaps, but I think a more helpful source may be Flickr. For example, look at Patrick Ruffini’s Flickr set of day-by-day candidate websites. Or, click through Dave Winer’s photo-stream and you’ll be able to get a sense of what the campaign pundits were discussing on a daily basis for most of the past three months.

Until I noticed what Dave and Patrick are doing, I never really thought of Flickr as being a personal “Internet Archive.” However, now I do. And thanks to them, I plan to do more “snap-shots sets” on my Flickr account.

Sidenote: The blogosphere is chattering today about “video and Flickr” and how, when it is added as a feature, it won’t be able to compete with the dominant YouTube. Here’s a way it will compete: People like me will use it to archive in collections and sets the video that goes along with the photos already in those sets.

If you want to be out in front of the next Chris Anderson book every marketing consultant — and worse, your boss — will be quoting in a few months, go ahead and read this Wired magazine article from the March issue that was posted this morning: Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business. Those of us who read Chris’s Long Tail blog have been following along the book’s (and article’s) development (at least mentions of it) for quite a while, but this article is the first step in its public roll-out. And it’s a clever one.

For example, if you are one of the first 10,000 who sign up, Wired will send you a copy of its March issue for free. And not as a part of a subscription offer (but you’ll be trading them you e-mail address for it). In one of those weird magazine things, however, it will probably be April before you receive the copy of the magazine, according to the fine print.

And then, there is the How to Make Money Around Free Content wiki entry on Wired’s How-to Wiki that features a Hugh MacLeod cartoon and a Fred Wilson headline quote (what, no Robert Scoble?)

The topic may seem a bit dated for those among us who are online community, marketing and media obsessed — those who, for example, check in with Seth Godin on an hourly basis. Seth has provided us (beautifully) for years with the parable version of the value of free phenomena. Seth is the Mother Goose of marketing gurus — he explains things in ways even a marketing director can grasp them. And on the other end of the spectrum, a few brilliant academics have explored in deep, scholarly ways, other avenues in the village of the Economics of Free: for example, anything written by Yochai Benkler.

However, I predict that Anderson’s article — and subsequent book — will get the topic out of the marketing department and academia into the hands of finance and executive types. I’m hoping the book will — like The Long Tail — get into the hands of people who can not only get it, but do something about it.

Quote:

“But free is not quite as simple — or as stupid — as it sounds. Just because products are free doesn’t mean that someone, somewhere, isn’t making huge gobs of money. Google is the prime example of this. The monetary benefits of craigslist are enormous as well, but they’re distributed among its tens of thousands of users rather than funneled straight to Craig Newmark Inc. To follow the money, you have to shift from a basic view of a market as a matching of two parties — buyers and sellers — to a broader sense of an ecosystem with many parties, only some of which exchange cash.”

No matter, you have several months before you have to read the book. (I’m sure there will be a free downloadable version.) And even a few more months after that before its title becomes a square on buzzword bingo cards. In the meantime, I suggest you read the free article and write down some notes on a 3X5 card.

I could have just added this link to my link blog, however, it needs just a little bit more of a shout-out. So, here’s a quote from a post titled Why All Consumer Magazines Should be Free Online by Felix Salmon in the Market Movers blog of CondeNast Portfolio.com:

“Publishing in full isn’t just about maximizing web traffic, either: it’s also about not pissing off your readers. When I read a great article in the Atlantic, I want to blog it; many other people in my position will at the very least want to be able to email it to their friends and colleagues. None of that is really possible unless and until it’s online. And since the internet thrives on the new, and hates the old, people want to link to you when the magazine comes out. No one wants to link to you weeks later, when it’s old news.

As “publishing in full” also means making ones archives available, I suggest this post be distributed around CondeNast, as well.

(If you’re not an over-the-top magazine geek, you may want to go ahead a skip this post. I am such a geek, and this post proves it.)

In what is perhaps the most significant change in the print-production approach of a major magazine title since October, 1985*, Southern Living has changed from saddle stitch binding (the kind with staples) to perfect binding (squared-off along the spine) with its March issue arriving in homes today. My colleague (and long-time Southern Living subscriber — and food blogger) Laura Creekmore just wrote about receiving her March issue on the Custom Media Craft blog at Hammock.com.

Saddle stitching is expensive and technically challenging for a magazine like Southern Living that has 300 or so pages and is published in a vast array of local and regional editions. Perfect binding greatly reduces the mathematical challenges required to match up various versions of pages in the front and back of a magazine. I’ll skip going into the challenges more deeply, but if you do more reading on the topic, you’ll learn why the trade magazine of the magazine industry is called Folio.

Why did Time Inc. allow Southern Living to stick with saddle stitching for so long? (Other than the obvious reasons that SL is a cash-cow and many SL alumni are now executives at Time Inc. and they understand the nuanced down-side involved in such a decision.) I know there are some Southern Living alumni who read this blog occasionally, so I hope they weigh in with the real reasons, but here’s my semi-educated guess: Time Inc. has been afraid to anger the tens of thousands of readers who have vast collections of past issues of the magazine displayed on bookcases. Ironically, perfect bound magazines probably display better in such a collection (think National Geographic), but once you have a few decades of stapled magazines displayed (and if you grew up in the south, you’ve seen such), it may come as a shock when the March issue of the magazine shows up in the mailbox and it no longer lines up like the old issues.

Again, that’s a theory. Surely, the Southern Living folks went beyond the typical reader research to isolate collectors of the magazine to guage what their response will be. They did, surely? If not, this should be a very interesting experiment in what happens when one ignores the obvious.

Sunset magazine, another magazine owned by Time Inc., switched to perfect binding in the mid-1990s. Frankly, I don’t recall if there were controversies or protests from readers. Whatever the response, the magazine survived and the earth continued to spin.

Personally, I would have done it 20 years ago, but, then again, I actually liked the taste of New Coke.

*Magazine trivia buffs may recall that October, 1985, was the issue when Playboy switched from saddle-stitch to perfect binding. Additional fun fact: Madonna was on the cover of the last saddle-stitched issue of that magazine.

Check out this article in the Wall Street Journal about a Swedish-language Bible that:

“…marries the standard text to glossy magazine-style design. Full-color pages are illustrated with a striking combination of news and dramatized photographs: a homeless child wrapped in a sweater on the streets of Bogotá, Colombia, illustrates the book of Job; a man who drowned trying to enter Europe, for Deuteronomy; and models posing in stylized scenes convey joy or despair. Bible passages are pulled out as captions. The publishers wanted to draw new readers by getting rid of what they called “the old heavy book.”

Of course, this makes no sense, for we all know by now: Print is Dead.

Really, why would anyone want a coffee-table Bible when they could read it on their iPhone or Kindle? (Note for those not familiar with my running-commentary on the absurdity of the notion that print is dead - I don’t really believe that digital media is going to die in the next decade or so.)

If the idea of a Bible designed in a magazine format sounds vaguely familiar, it may be that you’re remembering one published in Nashville — one I blogged about five years ago called Revolve, a New Testament for teenage girls designed in the format of a fashion magazine. A couple of years later, a similar one was published for teenage boys — but I can’t find my post to verify my recollection that its design was based on Maxim. (Alright, alright - another joke.)

Technorati Tags: digitalisdead, printisdead

Today, Jacqueline Leo of The Huffington Post writes about the new IDG experiment with predictive markets that utilizes the brand of a magazine that was shuttered five years ago, The Industry Standard.

Here’s some of what she wrote:

“Finally, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel for print magazines. A new strategy has emerged thanks to The Industry Standard, the high priest of the Internet that folded after that bubble burst. Now, the magazine is back on line, but this time people are betting on it to win–literally.”

Huh? I think I’ve followed this news fairly closely and no where have I seen any mention of IDG bringing back any type of Industry Standard magazine, either literally or metaphorically.

I really don’t understand why it’s difficult for media critics (much, less, tech-bloggers and even magazine people, themselves) to understand the concept of “brand extension.” For decades, especially in the business-to-businesss media field, but really across the board, media companies that own long-established magazine properties have used the brands of those magazines to launch (or license) products that are not magazines. Media critics understand this concept when the product is not online. For example, when a magazine licenses its brand for men’s hair dye, you’d never hear a media critic describe it as “a magazine on a head.” I don’t think media critics find it difficult to understand that, say, Macworld Expo, is not “a magazine in a conference center” despite it having the same name as a magazine published by the same parent company.

So why is it difficult for a media critic to understand that when a media company uses a brand of a magazine shuttered five years ago for a product that is clearly not a magazine or even uses magazine metaphors, that it’s NOT “a Magazine”?

I could understand it if the online property called itself a magazine, say, the way 60-Minutes calls itself a magazine when it’s clearly a TV show. But a predictive market is a predictive market. It’s not an online magazine and no where on the site does it refer to itself in that way.

If a media company wants to use the magazine as a metaphor to explain what it’s doing online, that’s fine — I guess it can be called “a magazine.” But if you’re a media critic and you’re trying to develop a clever column, here’s some advice: When you call a predictive market a magazine you are mixing metaphors.