Media Industry (Print, Publishing, Digital etc.)

[winston]

It was an ugly January not just for Allure, but also for Condé Nast magazines in general. January issues tend to be thin even in good years, and most magazines posted a decline in ad pages.

But the average decline across all monthly magazines was only 17 percent, and most Condé Nast magazines fared much worse, according to analysis of Media Industry Newsletter data.

Wired, which is usually thick with consumer electronics ads, was the worst hit, down 47 percent from a year ago to 43.6 ad pages. Architectural Digest fell 46 percent, to 63.2, from 116.8. Vogue and Lucky were both down about 44 percent.

– New York Times

[winston]

Magazines are generally seen as good early warning signs for economic downturns. The thinking is that corporations would rather cut back on ads before they actually have to start cutting back on people.

If that thinking holds, we're in for a long and deep recession.

Tomorrow, Media Industry Newsletter is releasing its report on the first quarter of 2009 and it will show ad pages have tumbled a numbing 21.5 percent for monthlies in the period compared with the first quarter of 2008.

Newsweek lies are decimated. Time is down 47.7 percent through its Feb. 16 issue and Newsweek is down 37.6 percent through the same period. Not surprisingly business/finance titles are bleeding: BusinessWeek is off 34.8 percent; Forbes is down 33.1 percent and Fortune is 24.9 percent below last year.

So what's looking good? Guns & Ammo is up 7.4 percent.

– New York

[iam802]

Received this email today. It shows the challenges faced by Print media.

---

Dear CFO Asia reader,

I hope this letter finds you well. I have some unfortunate news to share: effective March 31, 2009, CFO Asia and its sister publication CFO China will cease publication. The February/March issue that you have received is our last.

The magazines’ owner, The Economist Group, will continue to conduct CFO-focused conferences in the region. You can also continue to read many of the articles you have been receiving by logging onto www.cfo.com, the website of CFO in the United States. The U.S. and European editions of CFO continue to publish as before.

This is a tough time for print publications, as you well know. I’m proud of what CFO Asia has achieved over the past decade, and I have enjoyed tremendously my two years as part of the Asia editorial team. From the Asian financial crisis to the dotcom boom and right up to today’s economic chaos, we’ve written some great stories and, I hope, helped our readers make sense of Asia’s complex financial scene.

On behalf of the entire CFO Asia team, I would like to sincerely thank you for your dedication and support over the years. I wish you all the best in your career.


Sincerely,

Don Durfee
Editor-in-Chief
CFO Asia and CFO China

[iam802]

MagCloud - the 'Lulu' for magainzes (aka self publishing magazine) ??

http://magcloud.com/

An article on MagCloud can be found here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/30/techn ... ml?_r=1&em

----
Do-It-Yourself Magazines, Cheaply Slick

By ASHLEE VANCE

PALO ALTO, Calif. — For anyone who has dreamed of creating his own glossy color magazine dedicated to a hobby like photography or travel, the high cost and hassle of printing has loomed as a big barrier. Traditional printing companies charge thousands of dollars upfront to fire up a press and produce a few hundred copies of a bound magazine.

With a new Web service called MagCloud, Hewlett-Packard hopes to make it easier and cheaper to crank out a magazine than running photocopies at the local copy shop.

Charging 20 cents a page, paid only when a customer orders a copy, H.P. dreams of turning MagCloud into vanity publishing’s equivalent of YouTube. The company, a leading maker of computers and printers, envisions people using their PCs to develop quick magazines commemorating their daughter’s volleyball season or chronicling the intricacies of the Arizona cactus business.

“There are so many of the nichey, maybe weird-at-first communities, that can use this,” said Andrew Bolwell, head of the MagCloud effort at Hewlett-Packard. Samir Husni, a journalism professor at the University of Mississippi who plans to use the technology in his classroom, said, “We’re not talking about replacing the Vanity Fairs of the world. But it’s a nifty idea for a vanity press that reminds me of the underground zines we had in the ’60s and ’70s.”

Should the service take off, Hewlett could expand its lucrative business of selling huge digital printers to companies that would print the magazine and then ship its profitable inks by the barrel instead of the ounce.

It is not clear how big a market there is for small runs of narrow-interest magazines when so much information is available free on the Internet. So far, users of the service, which is still in a testing phase, have produced close to 300 magazines, including publications on paintings by Mormon artists, the history of aerospace, food photography and improving your personal brand in a digital age.

Aspiring publishers must handle their own writing and design work, sending a PDF file of their creation over the Internet to the MagCloud repository. H.P. farms out the printing jobs to partners scattered around the globe and takes care of billing and shipping for people who order the magazine. While H.P. charges the magazine publishers 20 cents a page, they can charge whatever they like for the completed product.

Traditional printing presses are fast and can produce large quantities of publications for much less than 20 cents a page. But the business model and technology relies on replicating a single, fixed image in volume to achieve cost-effective scale.

With digital presses like those made by Hewlett’s Indigo unit, a company can print one copy of 10 magazines or 10 copies of one magazine for about the same price. It is simply a matter of turning on the press and hitting a button.

Doreen Bloch, a student at the University of California, Berkeley, who created and runs a fashion publication, said MagCloud had made it much easier to produce her magazine, Bare, on a tight budget.

Ms. Bloch used to send final versions of Bare to a print shop in Arizona. If the editors noticed a typo or wanted to make a last-minute change, they had to pay $60 a page. “If we needed to change the cover because it had the wrong date, they gave us so much trouble,” Ms. Bloch said. With MagCloud, the editors can fiddle all they want free.

MagCloud could also open up new opportunities for local print shops.

Progressive Solutions in Santa Clara, Calif., has bought five of H.P.’s Indigo presses, which range in price from $300,000 to $600,000 a machine, in the last five years. It produces custom documents for companies like Tiny Prints, a popular service that lets people design their own invitations, stationery and announcements.

According to Scott Feldman, the co-owner of Progressive, the company needs to run its presses eight hours a day to break even and 12 hours a day to make money. It has been printing about 50,000 pages for MagCloud a month, including Bare.

The creators of Bare and other publications warn that it takes a lot of work to produce each issue, and some of the early MagCloud customers have had little success selling their publications online.

H.P. has developed technology in its research labs that could smooth the publication process. It has software that relies on algorithms to automate part of the design process, arranging photos in a way that is pleasing to the eye and suits a page packed with text. Down the road, H.P. might add such applications to the MagCloud service.

H.P. is also using technology similar to MagCloud to help publishers make out-of-print books available. It scans old books, cleans up the images and sends them off to the digital presses.

“By using electronic processes rather than humans, we were able to get our costs down from $2,500 per title down to about $50 per title,” said Phil Zuckerman, the president of Applewood Books in Carlisle, Mass. He said he can now afford to print single copies of old titles.

For H.P., MagCloud is also a way to provide customized service at low risk. And if the niche does not thrive, the company will simply move on. “We are trying to experiment with these new types of business models,” Mr. Bolwell said.

[iam802]

More changes going on in the Publishing space.

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Guardian to publish exclusviely via Twitter
• Newspaper to be available only on messaging service
• Experts say any story can be told in 140 characters

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/ap ... technology

Consolidating its position at the cutting edge of new media technology, the Guardian today announces that it will become the first newspaper in the world to be published exclusively via Twitter, the sensationally popular social networking service that has transformed online communication.

The move, described as "epochal" by media commentators, will see all Guardian content tailored to fit the format of Twitter's brief text messages, known as "tweets", which are limited to 140 characters each. Boosted by the involvement of celebrity "twitterers", such as Madonna, Britney Spears and Stephen Fry, Twitter's profile has surged in recent months, attracting more than 5m users who send, read and reply to tweets via the web or their mobile phones.

As a Twitter-only publication, the Guardian will be able to harness the unprecedented newsgathering power of the service, demonstrated recently when a passenger on a plane that crashed outside Denver was able to send real-time updates on the story as it developed, as did those witnessing an emergency landing on New York's Hudson River. It has also radically democratised news publishing, enabling anyone with an internet connection to tell the world when they are feeling sad, or thinking about having a cup of tea.

"[Celebrated Guardian editor] CP Scott would have warmly endorsed this - his well-known observation 'Comment is free but facts are sacred' is only 36 characters long," a spokesman said in a tweet that was itself only 135 characters long.

A mammoth project is also under way to rewrite the whole of the newspaper's archive, stretching back to 1821, in the form of tweets. Major stories already completed include "1832 Reform Act gives voting rights to one in five adult males yay!!!"; "OMG Hitler invades Poland, allies declare war see tinyurl.com/b5x6e for more"; and "JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?"

Sceptics have expressed concerns that 140 characters may be insufficient to capture the full breadth of meaningful human activity, but social media experts say the spread of Twitter encourages brevity, and that it ought to be possible to convey the gist of any message in a tweet.

For example, Martin Luther King's legendary 1963 speech on the steps of the Lincoln memorial appears in the Guardian's Twitterised archive as "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by", eliminating the waffle and bluster of the original.

At a time of unprecedented challenge for all print media, many publications have rushed to embrace social networking technologies. Most now offer Twitter feeds of major breaking news headlines, while the Daily Mail recently pioneered an iPhone application providing users with a one-click facility for reporting suspicious behaviour by migrants or gays. "In the new media environment, readers want short and punchy coverage, while the interactive possibilities of Twitter promise to transform th," the online media guru Jeff Jarvis said in a tweet yesterday, before reaching his 140-character limit, which includes spaces. According to subsequent reports, he is thinking about going to the theatre tonight, but it is raining .

A unique collaboration between The Guardian and Twitter will also see the launch of Gutter, an experimental service designed to filter noteworthy liberal opinion from the cacophony of Twitter updates. Gutter members will be able to use the service to comment on liberal blogs around the web via a new tool, specially developed with the blogging platform WordPress, entitled GutterPress.

Currently, 17.8% of all Twitter traffic in the United Kingdom consists of status updates from Stephen Fry, whose reliably jolly tone, whether trapped in a lift or eating a scrumptious tart, has won him thousands of fans. A further 11% is made up of his 363,000 followers replying "@stephenfry LOL!", "@stephenfry EXACTLY the same thing happened to me", and "@stephenfry Meanwhile, I am making myself an omelette! Delicious!"

According to unconfirmed rumours, Jim Buckmaster, the chief executive of Craigslist, will next month announce plans for a new system of telepathy-based social networking that is expected to render Twitter obsolete within weeks.

NOTE:
This is an April's Fool joke

[winston]

News Corp's Murdoch leads charge to get readers to pay online

WASHINGTON: As US newspapers shrivel up and die, an unlikely figure is emerging as their potential saviour: News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch.

The much-vilified Australian-born media tycoon is preparing to battle against the practice many hold largely responsible for newspapers' current plight – the "original sin" of giving away their content for free online.

The 78-year-old Murdoch announced this week that the days of free are over.

He said he planned to begin charging readers of the websites of News Corp. newspapers "within the next 12 months," testing the scheme "first on some of our stronger ones.

"We are now in the midst of an epochal debate over the value of content, and it is clear to many newspapers the current model is malfunctioning," said Murdoch, whose newspaper holdings include The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, The Times of London, the Sun and The Australian, among others.

The Wall Street Journal online already requires a subscription fee but newspaper owners across the United States will be closely watching as Murdoch bucks the conventional wisdom and extends a pay wall to other publications.

Murdoch himself is a late convert to the notion of making readers pay online, having planned before buying the Journal two years ago to do away with the subscription system in a bid to increase traffic to wsj.com.

He changed his mind after taking over the paper, but it is precisely that kind of flexibility that some analysts pointed to when they said Murdoch may be the media magnate best equipped to lead newspapers into the digital age.

"The track record shows that Rupert Murdoch is nothing if not bold," said Rick Edmonds, a media business analyst at the Poynter Institute, a non-profit journalism school based in Florida. "I don't think it's entirely surprising for him to be leading the way."

Frequently accused in the past of promoting tabloid journalism, Murdoch is "sometimes vilified for the wrong reasons", according to Edmonds. "There's quite a degree of respect for him as an operator."

"Whatever you say about Murdoch, the guy's a savvy businessman," said Ryan Chittum, a business writer at the Columbia Journalism Review. "He knows a failed business model when he sees one.

"The free model has failed," said Chittum, who worked as a reporter at the Journal and left around the time News Corp. took over.

"The ad revenue's not there online and it's not going to be there," he said. "To have the scale to produce their current levels of journalism, newspapers are going to have to find other revenue sources."

Struggling US newspaper publishers would not dispute Murdoch's assessment that the current system is "malfunctioning" and that online advertising is not generating the revenue needed to support their current newsrooms.

But few have been willing to start charging readers online out of fears of losing traffic to their websites.

With Murdoch taking the lead and print advertising revenue evaporating at a dizzying pace, analysts said more newspapers may be ready to take the plunge.

"There's definitely momentum among newspapers in the area of charging online, especially as the financial situation continues to deteriorate," said Zachary Seward, assistant editor at Harvard University's Nieman Journalism Lab. "Whether it's a good business decision remains to be seen."

"It's risky," agreed Poynter's Edmonds. "But on the other hand, there's a lot of debate and a lot of sentiment within the industry that maybe they took the wrong fork in the road a few years ago."

Edmonds noted that a number of US newspapers, including The New York Times with its failed "Times Select" payment scheme, had experimented with charging readers.

"The proposition of putting the New York Post or The Times of London behind a pay wall – it's not immediately clear to me why that would go over better with readers than pay online attempts in the past," Edmonds said.

"Quite a few United States papers experimented with that at least for a while and typically found their traffic fell through the floor and therefore weren't getting much ad revenue.

"The Journal, a lot of people say, is a special case because of the relevance of that information to people's businesses," he added. "It makes them a lot more willing to pay."

Chittum said there may be risks but the US newspaper industry no longer has the luxury of sitting back, waiting and watching what happens with the Murdoch papers.

"They can't dither and talk and think-tank anymore," he said. "A lot of these papers are going to go broke if they don't do something soon."

- AFP/so

[iam802]

15-yr old Morgan Stanley intern says future consumers want media for free

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/035e83fe-6f18 ... ck_check=1

A research note written by a 15-year-old, who was not born when former UK chancellor Nigel Lawson dismissed London analysts as “teenage scribblers”, has become the talk of middle-aged media executives and investors.

Morgan Stanley’s European media analysts asked Matthew Robson, one of the bank’s interns from a London school, to describe his friends’ media habits. His report proved to be “one of the clearest and most thought-provoking insights we have seen. So we published it,” said Edward Hill-Wood, head of the team.

The response was enormous. “We’ve had dozens and dozens of fund managers, and several CEOs, e-mailing and calling all day,” said Mr Hill-Wood, 35, estimating that the note had generated five or six times more feedback than the team’s usual reports.

However, he made no claims for its statistical rigour.

As elderly media moguls gathered at the Allen & Co conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, to fawn over Twitter and fret over their business models, Mr Robson set out a sobering case that tomorrow’s consumers are using more and more media but are unwilling to pay for it.

“Teenagers do not use Twitter,” he pronounced. Updating the micro-blogging service from mobile phones costs valuable credit, he wrote, and “they realise that no one is viewing their profile, so their tweets are pointless”.

His peers find it hard to make time for regular television, and would rather listen to advert-free music on websites such as Last.fm than tune into traditional radio. Even online, teens find advertising “extremely annoying and pointless”.

Their time and money is spent instead on cinema, concerts and video game consoles which, he said, now double as a more attractive vehicle for chatting with friends than the phone.

Mr Robson had little comfort for struggling print publishers, saying no teenager he knew regularly reads a newspaper since most “cannot be bothered to read pages and pages of text” rather than see summaries online or on television.

Executives and investors have grown fascinated by the opinions of teenagers. Rupert Murdoch, 78, has described himself as a “digital immigrant” and his young daughters as “digital natives”, while UBS pulled in an 18-year-old three years ago to demonstrate MySpace to portfolio managers.

[winston]

I've said before that eventually there will be only three newspapers in the USA: The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and USA Today.

Why? Because of two trends:

1. General advertising (ads for cars, perfume, cigarettes, etc.) has been in a long-term downtrend. And with the Great Recession, that downtrend has become a tail-spinning dive.

2. News reporting in print is outdated. The Internet has seen to that.

The only print publications that survive will be those that provide not just reliable information but a unique and compelling perspective.

The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times are the best-written newspapers in the country. And both will survive because they represent two significant but different readerships: The NYT represents intelligent liberals. The WSJ represents intelligent conservatives. (I like both!)

USA Today is pitched to Middle America. That is a big crowd, but a tough market to serve. The reason I think it will survive is because the people behind it have been very clever about how they do their job.

For one thing, USA Today is on top of U.S. culture.

Examples: It was the first national paper to cover the Internet boom, natural health, and mixed-martial arts in any depth. (Just recently, I noticed the results of a MMA championship contest on page one. That is astonishing.)

For another thing, they have become competent direct marketers.

Example: Michael Jackson was not even buried when USA Today published the first half-page ads selling its own MJ memorabilia. I bet they pulled in a half-million dollars in profit off that one campaign.

The Take-Away: If you are an information publisher, you need to have a unique perspective and you need to master direct marketing.

Source: ETR

[iam802]

Reinventing Print Media

http://www.strategy-business.com/media/ ... _09308.pdf

Note:
- long article (14 pages)

[winston]

Fortune magazine bleeding to death... slashing publishing frequency
From 24/7 Wall Street:

First Portfolio, the business magazine launched just two years ago by publishing giant Conde Nast, folded.

Then, the largest business magazine in America, BusinessWeek, was sold by its parent company, McGraw-Hill (MHP), to Bloomberg for as little as $3 million plus its subscription liabilities.

Now, Fortune, started by Time, Inc. founder Henry Luce, will cut its publishing frequency from 25 times a year to 18 times.

http://247wallst.com/2009/10/23/fortune ... frequency/