Thursday, September 27, 2007

French Newspaper to Debut Electronic Newspaper


French Newspaper to Debut Electronic Newspaper
http://neasetech.blogspot.com/2007/09/french-newspaper-to-debut-electronic.html

Posted by Michael Nease
I have this never ending obsession with Electronic Ink and E-Paper.

A press release on their site dated September 12, 2007 states that French Newspaper Les Echos, the French leading newspaper in electronic newspaper is partnering with Dutch based iRex Technologies to release the Les Echos Electronic Paper Edition on the iRex iLiad available for French readers sometime this month.

Two different editions will be offered to readers, and will be updated every hour from 7am - 9pm on Monday - Friday via a WiFi delivery system that will allow updates without the need to connect to a PC.

Pilippe Jannet of Les Echos states, "This will introduce a new era of newspaper publishing. It is a tradition of Les Echos to be the first to bring innovative solutions to their readers. With the subscription our readers will get an attractive offer of a year subscription of Les Echos with multiple editions, two free e-paper editions (one dedicated to Personal Finance information and one to Stock Exchange information), an extra AFP edition, some free e-books and the electronic paper device at a great bargain."

As to when newspapers in the United States will begin offering a service similar to this is yet unknown, but I hope it's not too far down the road.

For more info about the e-paper offer at Les Echos, you can visit: http://www.lesechos.fr/epaper/inscription.htm, or just read the press release

Beleaguered Men's Magazines Start to Battle It Out

Beleaguered Men's Magazines Start to Battle It Out
By David Crow
http://www.thebusiness.co.uk/the-magazine/columns/202431/beleaguered-menand8217s-magazines-start-to-battle-it-out-online.thtml



Men's magazines is truly a sector in crisis: in the first six months of 2007 nearly all UK titles aimed at the coveted 18 to 34-year-old market posted dramatic falls in circulation. FHM - Emap's leading men's title - was hit the hardest; it sold an average 312,000 copies in the first half of the year compared to 421,000 in the same period in 2006, a massive drop of 26%. Maxim didn't fare much better, dropping 18.1% to 108,000 copies.

Cheaper weekly magazines like IPC's Nuts and Emap's Zoo - launched in 2004 to help save the sector from decline - have also performed badly. Zoo sold 187,000 copies in the first half of the year, an 18.1% decrease that pushed the magazine below the 200,000 barrier for the first time. Esquire, published by the magazine giant Hearst, is the only title which is holding its own, although with a circulation of just over 50,000 a month it sells far less than its competitors.

Although all traditional media - be they television, radio or print - have been hit by the popularity of online content, the men's mag sector has felt the squeeze more than most. Over 44% of British men say their buying habits have changed as a result of online growth, compared to 36% of women. It's easy to see why: the kind of product that FHM et al pioneered offered readers a previously unseen degree of control. Polls, competitions and the ability to submit amateur content - such as true stories and pictures - created an audience ripe for user-generated content. When Web 2.0 came of age, men's magazine readers were ready for the next step.


Luckily for the industry, advertisers are still desperate to target this market. Men aged 18-34 often have impressive spending power twinned with an appetite for luxury and high-end goods, making them an attractive proposition. But they are famously elusive, known in the industry as "message averse": they will spend money, but it is hard to influence them on how to do it.

Over 71% of males aged 18-34 say they now spend more time on the internet than they did a year ago. For men's magazine brands, this offers the perfect opportunity to develop new products, an opportunity which most have seized. FHM.com now boasts an audience of over 1.7m unique users a month, a figure the print title could only dream of, even in its heyday.

The site began its transformation seven years ago when it started offering more video content, with clips of glamour models during photo shoots especially popular. Since then, FHM.com has launched a community section where users can create personal profiles, submit content and make online friends; more than 70,000 users have signed up.

Dennis Publishing's internet products are also thriving. Monkey - the online magazine tipped for success in The Business last year - now boasts nearly 270,000 users, a figure which is growing by 20% a month. More importantly, the eZine - which is read online but looks and feels like a printed magazine - has offered advertisers innovative ways of targeting this problematic audience.

In the current issue, Carlsberg are advertising a "draughtmaster", a product which it claims pours the "perfect pint". Instead of buying static advertising space, Carlsberg has purchased a full page where readers can test a virtual version of the product; it's the kind of fun, user-involved promotion the magazine's readers will love.

Hearst, publisher of Esquire, has been slow to offer an online competitor in this area. Its recent acquisition of UGO.com - a network of sites aimed at the young men's market - is its first real attempt to target young men on the web. UGO has had a chequered past. It launched in 1997 as Unified Gamers Online, to provide an internet destination for video gamers.

It was sold a few months later to InterWorld who spun the company off and began seeking venture capital. Since then, more than $82m (£40m, E58m) has been spent trying to build the ultimate men's site, although its success was thwarted by the emergence of Web 2.0. At one point, things looked so shaky that the venture capitalists pushed through a scheme to guarantee them five times their investment if the site was sold.

Despite its history, UGO is not a bad purchase. The deal, reported to have been worth $100m, has given Hearst a platform that boasts over 28m unique users worldwide, 11m of whom live in the US. It is also profitable, bringing in $30m revenue and $6m profit. The marketing solutions offered by UGO have been the envy of much of the men's entertainment industry for years, offering advertising which goes "beyond the banner". Most of these promotions take the form of branded mini sites; Fox sponsors The World of Simpsons section while Apple has branded the iPhone launch centre, keen to target this audience of "early-adopters" of technology.

Most importantly, UGO is one of the few Web 1.0 brands to have survived the dotcom crash, putting it in the esteemed company of eBay, Amazon and Yahoo! This will allow Hearst to add real value to the site by building in user-generated content and rich multimedia features, a move that should see traffic increase; that UGO is not yet finished is one of its best attributes.

The men's magazine brands already working online should watch the site's development carefully: Hearst's entry into the arena may be late - but it could really shake the market up.

--------------------------------------------------------

Emap: Consumer magazines 'challenging'

27 September 2007

By Paul McNally

Emap has warned that the outlook for its consumer magazines remains "weak" and "challenging" - with advertising revenue down 11 per cent year on year.

But in an update to the City this morning ahead of its half-year results in November, the magazine and radio giant said overall conditions were "encouraging".

Emap's B2B division continues to be its most successful asset, with like-for-like revenue between April and September up an estimated five per cent year on year.

The company has reported "good growth" in B2B information products and events, while the performance of business magazines was "broadly flat".

Emap's consumer magazines, meanwhile, have seen an estimated four per cent fall in circulation revenue between April and September, but a number of "efficiency initiatives" had reaped "earlier-than-expected benefits".

"We anticipate that trading conditions in our consumer magazine markets will continue to be challenging for the rest of our 2008 financial year, although, based on current forward bookings, the second half should show some improvement," the company said this morning.

Radio revenues were up two per cent overall - with improved performances outside of London offsetting a slump in revenue in the capital.

The company said it "continues to be encouraged" with the progress of its strategic review, announced in May this year following the abrupt departure of chief executive Tom Moloney.

The search for a new chief executive continues in tandem with the review process, with an update expected from Emap when it announces its half-year results in November.

"The board remains focused on examining all options to maximise shareholder value, including a possible sale or demerger of some or all of the constituent parts of the group," Emap said this morning.

Emap has invested £14m in new product development since April - a large part of which has been directed at the relaunch of First magazine under new editor Jane Ennis.

The group expects to have invested a total of £25m in new product development by the end of the financial year, including digital initiatives in consumer and B2B magazines.

One of those initiatives will be the launch of a new women's web portal, pooling content from weekly titles such as Grazia, Heat, Closer and First.

The company will announce its half-year results on 13 November.

'Don't Budget by Medium'

'Don't Budget by Medium'
And Other Words of Wisdom on Erasing False Distinctions Between Digital and 'Old' Media
Posted by Scott Donaton
http://adage.com/whentrainsfly/article?article_id=120712


Buried in a keynote presentation by Yahoo Chief Marketing Officer Cammie Dunaway was this advice to marketers: "Don't budget by medium." And as Tony Weisman, Digitas Chicago president, pointed out, they may have been the wisest words spoken during Advertising Week. (Cammie appeared at a MasterClass event presented by the folks who brought you the Venice Festival of Media, and co-hosted by Ad Age.)

It strikes me as kind of funny (odd funny, not ha-ha) how seemingly every speech by, or conversation with, an executive in the marketing, agency or media business, invariably touches on two themes that are absurdly obvious and contradictory at the same time: 1) digital has got to be at the core of everything you do, and; 2) an idea or consumer insight has got to be at the core of everything you do.

My first inclination is to dismiss both as empty buzzphrases. But they come up so constantly it's worth a deeper exploration into the psychology of the business to determine the root of the obsession. It may simply be fear-based, a mantra from those over 40 who may "get" digital but know they don't feel it in their bones the way the 25-year-olds gunning for their jobs do.

What bothers me most is how often the phrases are articulated in the same conversation without the speaker noting that they can't co-exist because they cancel each other out. If a technology or platform is at the core of your strategy, then an idea or insight isn't, and vice-versa.

My second favorite phrase of the week wasn't spoken in front of an audience, but over lunch with Carat CEO David Verklin, who was offering a deeper dive into his recent decision to merge Carat's offline and online operations. Said David (by way of explaining why keeping the units separate but forcing them work together wasn't good enough): "Synchronization isn't integration." Amen.

I've touched on this topic before, but if there's one thing that makes me want to scream, it's the false lines otherwise-intelligent people insist on drawing between digital and everything else. It creates a deep split down the center of the business, fosters an atmosphere of fear on one side (traditional media) and smugness on the other (cough, digital), confuses clients, distracts from more urgent priorities and ultimately ensures that ideas and insights are forced to the side.

And it's meaningless. Andy Von Kennel of PHD North America, another MasterClass speaker, pointed out the absolute absurdity of a statement such as the following: "We want to use traditional media in non-traditional ways." For anyone who's ever bought or sold a creative media concept in any non-digital format, the sentence is a slap in the face, as insulting and condescending as the words "old media."

It doesn't matter whether an idea is executed via a social-networking site or an ad on the side of a bus. It matters whether the idea is good. I mean, really, why do I even have to say something that obvious? Yet, sadly, it seems necessary not only to say it but to hammer home the point repeatedly.

Rather than reinforcing an artificial divide, agencies, marketers and media owners need to alter their structures, business models, compensation incentives and strategies. Then, perhaps, they can bridge the gap, or, better yet, make it disappear.

Wednesday, September 26, 2007

BoSacks Speaks Out: Americans have skewed view of ad industry

BoSacks Speaks Out: I'm very curious about the title of this piece. It claims that Americans have a skewed view of the advertising industry. Skewed? According to whom? The author? The editor of a direct mail advertising magazine? I ask again, the article is skewed according to whom? Seems to me the Americans polled in this survey have an un-skewed and honest point of view. Feel free to send your comments? What do you think?


We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in 'reality.' And reality has a well known liberal bias.
Stephen Colbert, Speech to White House Correspondents' Dinner, April 30, 2006



Americans have skewed view of ad industry
By Giselle Abramovich
http://www.dmnews.com/cms/dm-news/research-studies/42504.html
The American view of the advertising profession could use repair, according to a J. Walter Thompson study titled "Ad Industry Perception Survey."

When asked about respect for the profession, only 14 percent of those surveyed say their fellow Americans respect ad people. The top three most respected are military personnel (79 percent), physicians (75 percent) and teachers (71 percent).

The study is an assessment of the line between the media-created perception of the industry and the real opinions held by American adults. JWT conducted a random online survey of 966 Americans, 18 years and older, with a 50/50 balance of male/female ratio, from September 5 to 12 .

Only 12 percent of those surveyed noted improvement of ad people's status. Ad professionals are seen as a "necessary good" by 31 percent of the population (besting politicians and car salesmen).

Other key findings include:

· 84 percent agree (strongly/somewhat), "Too many things are over-hyped now."

· 74 percent agree, "The Internet helps me make better product choices."

· 72 percent agree, "I get tired of people trying to grab my attention and sell me stuff."

· 52 percent agree, "There's too much advertising - I would support stricter limits."

· 47 percent regard "Advertising as background noise."

· 42 percent agree, "American advertising has improved in recent years."

· 38 percent believe "The advertising industry understands Americans in general and connects with them."

· 22 percent believe "The advertising industry understands and connects with me."

· 24 percent "resent advertising."

· 82 percent indicate a positive engagement with media overall.

· 59 percent consume "traditional" media.

· 41 percent consume "interactive" media.

· Two-thirds claimed, "Advertising is an important part of the American culture."

"The study significantly uncovers a basic disconnect between the ad industry's 'world view' and that of its audience," JWT's report said. "When asked to pick the word that others would use to describe them, 42 percent of the sample ranked themselves as ' pragmatists ' - justifying the feature-centric and end-to-end benefit ad approach resonating most with consumers today."

Associate Editor Giselle Abramovich covers search engine marketing, list news and postal news. Reach her at obfuscate('giselle.abramovich', 'dmnews.com', '', ''); giselle.abramovich@dmnews.com. To stay on top of these categories, subscribe to our e-newsletters at http://www.dmnews.com/subscribe.php

BoSacks Readers Speaks Out: Printing, Publishing, Spirals? and Paper

BoSacks Readers Speaks Out: Printing, Publishing, Spirals? and Paper


RE: Magazines: How 'Vogue' and the other cool prints stay ahead

None of the magazines I subscribe to, and read, could be called "cool" by any stretch of the imagination. If advertisers follow "cool" and "hot" titles because some marketing person describes them as such, my bet is the client will be hiring a new agency within six to eight months. For the zillionth time, it's about compelling editorial on subjects the reader is interested in, and will pay full price for - subscriber or newsstand. For example, The Economist is the only remaining newsweekly that is gaining subscribers and advertisers, because they give their educated readers great content. Now, THAT's cool!
(Submitted by a Senior Director of Manufacturing and distribution)



Re: BoSacks Speaks Out: Is Anyone in Control Here?

Bob, to a degree the consumer is in control. What you fail ro recognize is that the large chains have taken control of the wholesalers distribution channel. This is who dictates what is going to be on the newsstand racks. it has been that way since 1996-97. They are telling the Anderson's, Source?Levy & TNG what they want. Unfortunately these big guys let this happen. They are the ones who lost control of the marketplace.
(Submitted by a Distributor)



Re: BoSacks Speaks Out: Is Anyone in Control Here?

Bo, Longtime reader and big fan, but I have a hard time believing that I am reading columns about newsstands and rate bases in 2007. Publishers worried about newsstand efficiency and the balance of crap (excuse me) vs real subs on their file are long since doomed.

I love magazines, I read magazines and spent most of my career in magazines. Unfortunately they are the equivalent of trains in the transportation industry, I will take one to boston or dc once in a while, but flying is always better.

We should just all admit we are in the wind down phase of print publishing and manage that part of our media mix as such, and get on with the continued proliferation of our products on the web.
(Submitted by an Industry Supplier) Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile



Re: BoSacks Speaks Out: Is Anyone in Control Here?


I was taught that publishing was like flying a 747 with 4 engines - very difficult to get them all in sync, but when you did, the plane flew like a dream for years and years.

1.Identify and serve the consumers you need to 'round up' for advertisers.

2. Build an audience advertisers want (whoever they are), and be able to prove who they are.

3. Build them on a sustainable basis - look at Vogue, or GHK or Time, good for years and years and years, as long as the audience keeps up with the advertisers changing needs. This means invest in edit not bleed it! This means invest in readers who are in the target group and will come back for the length of time you need, not the necessarily the cheapest path.

4. Build a profit model which is stable, not one based on flipping the company every 2 or 3 years.

Over the 100+ years of some of the titles I have worked on (mostly privately owned) we had good years and bad years, but we never messed with the core edit or audience, and guess what, they are still around and still have good years. I would hope that advertisers and agencies are after the same thing, but sometimes you have to wonder.
(Submitted by a Senior Distribution Consultant)



Re: BoSacks Readers Speak Out: On Death Spirals? Jobs, Printers, and PR

Both Publishers and printers have done disservice to the world of words. Neither one of us realized that we were in the same business. Delivering Content. We became adversarial and we allowed outsiders (accounting type people) to marginalize a creative and interpersonal business.

Yes, profit is very important. Yes, readership is important. But what we allowed to occur in our business is allow profiteers to think that they could increase profitability to commoditize the industry. We took pennies and nickels off the printers table and we eliminated the partnering that has been going on forever. We eliminated competition in print and paper.


We did not look at technology as the initiative to get our content to the readership (only happening now).

Now we are all struggling to survive. What a mess.
(Submitted by a Printer)



Re: BoSacks Readers Speak Out: On Death Spirals? Jobs, Printers, and PR

I thought the comment, from a printer, that prices are set just like the airline industry, by the stupidest competitor was very naive. It's no accident that the most consistently profitable airline in the U.S. is Southwest, which has the lowest prices because they have better and more rational costs than any of their competitors. It's amazing how many people believe that lower prices are always the cause of various ills. When you have superior costs to your competitors, it can be a tremendously effective weapon that can be used against them. It's no accident that Southwest, AirTran and Europe's RyanAir are the only airlines that are surviving profitably, and growing.

It's also the case that prices are always out of control of management; marketplaces always determine whether or not the prices management sets make sense. The only thing management can control is its costs and how those costs are constructed to deliver a product that prospective customers will find of interest.

Whether or not a competitor is viewed as stupid has consistently been the view of the old guard whose old costs are constructed in such a way that they cannot respond to new competitive threats.
(Submitted by an Industry Consultant)

Re: Stora Enso sells its North American paper operations to NewPage

Translation of Stora Enso CEO's statement: "The paper business stinks, we found a private investment group willing to buy us with other people's money, so we're folding and cashing in our chips. Thanks for the memories, good bye and good luck".
(Submitted by a Senior Director of Manufacturing and Distribution)



Re: Stora Enso sells its North American paper operations to NewPage
remember, newpage is the co with the request for paper tariffs against china.
newpage is owned by cerberus. it's chaired by former treasury secy john snow
if china is hurting their business so much, how'd they'd get the money? :)
in my mind the china thing is an attempt to hold on long enough despite their incredible debt load to make an ipo. can this pass antitrust muster? i would assume so
(Submitted by an Industry Analyst)



Stora Enso North American Market Report.

bob- it's an interesting sign when paper companies start sending their literature out via e-mail!
(Submitted by a Senior Director of Manufacturing)



Re: Americans giving up friends, sex for Web life

From 8:45am to 8pm I live in cyber space. That leaves twelve hrs. and fifteen minutes for the bedroom. I guarantee one can strike a balance!
(Submitted by a Production Manager)

Monday, September 24, 2007

In defense of media cross-ownership

BoSacks Speaks Out: Mr. Sturm tries to make some compelling arguments in this article. Too bad they are all self-serving, inherently misguided and wrong. But, please make up your own mind. I think it is an important subject.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye.
Miss Piggy




In defense of media cross-ownership
By John F. Sturm
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2003894543_naa21.html

It's said that nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come. I would also argue that few things are more destructive than an idea whose time is past - but refuses to yield to reality.

Those who continue to support the 30-year-old ban on cross-ownership of newspapers and broadcast stations in the same market are living in a curious time warp - where a community's communications consisted of a newspaper and, at best, a handful of local television and radio stations. Yes, the so-called "Golden Age" of television gave consumers only three choices - the polar opposite of today's rich, multimedia world.

Incredibly, as new information technologies have sparked a global revolution in how we live, work, learn and form opinion, cross-ownership is the only communications rule that has never been updated to reflect the present.


It is stuck in the bygone times before cable, national newspapers, the Internet, satellite television, satellite radio, podcasting, cellphones, blogs and all the other ways information now flows around the world and through the lives of consumers.

When you look at all the sources of information available to every citizen of every community, the original intent of the rule - to prevent any single corporate entity from becoming too powerful a single voice in a community - is laughable. Could any single company or entity tell the people of Seattle how to think?

We have unlimited access to news, information and opinion from millions of sources. For the first time in history, control of media has moved from the center to the edge. Anyone with a laptop and some rudimentary software can be a publisher - and is.

Those fighting furiously to keep an outmoded rule from bygone times on life support have much to ignore.

They are ignoring a transformation in communications that constitutes the greatest shift in information since the advent of movable type.

They are ignoring the positiveexperiences of 40 communities - from small towns to Chicago - that were grandfathered when the rule was adopted and have enjoyed better service from the cross-owned stations than their fellow citizens elsewhere.

Studies show that television stations co-owned with local daily newspapers provide more local news and nonentertainment programming than other television stations. And, the last time we checked, citizens in these grandfathered towns and cities were making up their own minds, making informed decisions and participating in a working democracy.

And, while they are fixated on raising fears about an information monopoly that modern technology makes impossible, the ban's supporters are ignoring the opportunity for traditional media to provide more and better programming in a newly - and brutally - competitive media landscape.

The pro-ban response: "No worries." Newspapers and broadcasters are still the most popular local media, an argument that says we should look at the competitive landscape today and 30 years ago as the same. The Internet, if you follow that logic, is still a hobby.
In arguing that broadcasters and newspapers are financially healthy and in no need of a change in rule-making, they are both right and very wrong. Media in many local communities are, in fact, healthy. But, the trends clearly do not favor "traditional" media.

This question is not whether traditional media can "survive" with the cross-ownership ban in place. It's whether they have the resources to offer the very quality and diversity that pro-regulation camps say they want to protect.

In communities where both newspapers and broadcasters are making adjustments in the face of competition, allowing cross-ownership will enable local media to leverage their news operations across new and wider audiences - to allow those audiences to access local news when, where and how they want to.

Anyone who argues that it will lead to a simple repackaging of content across mediums is selling short media consumers. They have choices. If the value in content isn't there, they won't be, either.

Someone said the key to happiness is the ability to look reality in the eye - and deny it. Happiness, maybe, but not a vibrant and viable local media market.

The reality is that if we can finally delete this last, useless rule from ancient media history, local newspapers, television and radio will be stronger, and consumers will be assured the quality and the diversity of programming they want and deserve.

For that to happen, we must stop trying to see the future by looking out the back window. Folks, it's not 1975 anymore. We must not allow a handful of dissenters with a narrow agenda to prevent us from what logic, studies, technology, majority opinion and great opportunity for better and more local coverage say that future can be.


John F. Sturm is president and chief executive officer of the Newspaper Association of America, located in Arlington, Va.

Time Inc. Gives In to Issue-Specific Guarantees

BoSacks Speaks Out: This is an inevitable and correct move on the part of Time Inc. I have been prophesizing its necessary introduction for years. This is one part in a series of new business models that will actually help our industry. Some will be threatened by this move, but fear not, it is an intelligent and unconditionally important decision for the vitality of ink on paper.

The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.
Robert R. Coveyou, Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Time Inc. Gives In to Issue-Specific Guarantees

Orders All Its Publishers to Sign Up for Rapid Report
By Nat Ives

http://adage.com/mediaworks/article?article_id=120608



NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Publishing giant Time Inc., breaking with long-held conventions of the magazine industry, has agreed to report circulation sales figures in nearly real time and give advertisers circulation guarantees for each issue in which they buy an ad.

Time Inc.'s new plan, which executives proposed to publishers earlier this month and settled on this week, protects magazines from taking hits on the smallest shortfalls.



It's a sign of the power that marketers have accrued during the rise of digital media; there are simply too many options beyond traditional advertising for media owners to set the agenda any more.



Likely to end old system

The industry has traditionally only provided circulation data to its advertisers twice a year and guaranteed a level of circulation averaged across multiple issues. That standard has looked increasingly brittle as digital media delivered new options for advertisers as well as almost instantaneous results. But Time Inc.'s defection from the norm seems likely to effectively end the practice of a rate base based on a six-month average.



"This is what the advertisers really want," said one Time Inc. publisher, who, like others at the company, discussed the new plan on condition of anonymity. "So at the end of the day what are you going to do?"



That's a departure from the position Time Inc. and other publishers held in May, when the powerful media agency MediaVest publicly threatened to pull its clients' ad spending from any magazine that wouldn't give an issue-specific promise.



Time Inc. wasn't eager then to adopt the more stringent standard. Publishers would have to pump up print runs to make sure not one issue falls even a percentage point shy of its rate base, John Squires, senior exec VP at Time Inc., said in an interview that month. "They want all guarantees and all protections at all times," he said. "That just kind of forces a completely unrealistic expectation on our business. We do have to concentrate on some efficiencies."



No credit for overdelivery

He and many others also pointed out that publishers don't get any credit when they sell more copies of an issue than they promised their advertisers. "Penalties for underdelivery without bonuses for overdelivery is untenable," a rival publisher would later say. Issue-specific guarantees are a waste of industry time and capital anyway, some said, because missing rate base is so rare in the first place.


But MediaVest argued that as long as averages remained the benchmark, magazines looking to make up one shortfall had an incentive to make it up next issue by increasing the copies left around doctor's offices, hair salons and other public places. Although that kind of circulation has strategic value, advertisers don't like to see its use rise abruptly in the middle of their ad buy.

And Time Inc.'s new plan, which executives proposed to publishers earlier this month and settled on this week, protects magazines from taking hits on the smallest shortfalls. The revised policy will only credit advertisers when an issue misses its promised circulation by more than 2%.

To get its circulation figures out to advertisers more quickly, Time Inc. is ordering all its magazines to join Rapid Report, the online service introduced last summer by the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

What others are doing

Adoption of both Rapid Report and issue-specific rate base until now has been uneven at best. Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S., which publishes magazines such as Woman's Day and Elle, has chosen to enter all its titles into Rapid Report but to set a general policy of guaranteeing only averaged circulations. Condé Nast has two titles in Rapid Report and doesn't want to talk publicly about its approach to rate base. Rodale has most of its books on Rapid Report; but when the publisher of one, Men's Health, said he was giving some marketers issue-specific guarantees, Rodale quickly made clear that he spoke only for himself.

Alpha Media, under the new management of CEO Kent Brownridge, is adopting both issue-specific guarantees and Rapid Report for Maxim and Blender. (Just last week, Mr. Brownridge went so far as to call other publishers "wimpy" and "pathetic" for not adopting issue-specific guarantees and Rapid Report.)

Now Time Inc.'s sheer size is likely to tilt the landscape irrevocably toward the faster, more precise metrics advertisers have asked for in negotiations. Its two dozen magazine brands in the U.S. include People, Time, Sports Illustrated, InStyle, Entertainment Weekly, Real Simple, Golf, Money, Sunset, Essence and This Old House.

Reached for comment, a Time Inc. spokeswoman confirmed that the company was entering its titles into Rapid Report by the end of the year. "We look forward to offering our advertisers the most up-to-the-minute circulation data as it becomes available," she said.

She declined to comment on the issue-by-issue circulation guarantees.

NYT Has Seen Future: It's All the Blogging That's Fit to Print

NYT Has Seen Future: It's All the Blogging That's Fit to Print

Move to Republish Bits in Biz Section Shows How Lively and Trenchant Paper Could Be if It Expanded on Idea
By Simon Dumenco
http://adage.com/mediaworks/article?article_id=120450

I have seen the future of The New York Times -- in the Times itself.


Last week, technology editor/reporter Saul Hansell had a short item in the business section that began, rather shockingly, "If there was ever a measure of how little traction Sir

Truth lives here: In blogs, Times reporters don't suppress what they really know, feel.

Howard Stringer is having as chief executive of Sony, it is the company's comical inability to find a coherent approach to delivering content online to its wide range of digital devices."


That sentence kicked off a blunt, smart, informed -- and mercifully brief -- assessment of Sony's performance in the video space. And it was a far cry from the matter-of-fact, straight-laced approach Hansell took the last time he wrote about Sony's video initiatives back in July in a standard business-section report. (That piece began, innocuously enough, "Sony is trying to edge into internet videos with a website to be introduced today.")

Why has Hansell been unmuzzled? Not, as you might suspect, because he's been named a columnist -- that vaunted designation (and headspace) that has traditionally given license to Timesmen, such as outspoken media columnist David Carr, to take their gloves off. No, Hansell got to swat at Sir Howard because his item about Sony was technically a reprint -- from a blog. The Times, you see, has been running a new weekly teaser section in print (about third of a business-section page) that it labels Bits, which consists of "Highlights from Bits, the technology blog updated daily at nytimes.com/bits." Hansell edits that blog and, along with other contributors, writes for it.

The first time I read Bits in print it was jarring not only because of the informal, frequently first-person approach, but because it unselfconsciously references the reporting of competitors, including The Wall Street Journal. Now, though, I love it. And it makes me feel happy for Hansell and his tech-news colleagues because it's thrilling when smart reporters get to tell it like it really is.


And what a pleasure it is to see that the Times is beginning to regard the realm of blogs as more than just a trendy sandbox for its most restless, enterprising writers -- such as Carr, whose raucous, nutty Oscar-season Carpetbagger blog (full disclosure: David's a friend and former colleague of mine) paved the way for the Times to loosen its starched collar online.

Seeing Saul Hansell's liberation reflected not only online but in print suggests to me nothing less than the future of the Times. It's increasingly clear that the paper -- most papers, actually -- can no longer maintain the artificial stylistic and cultural divide between its buttoned-down inky incarnation and its surprisingly freewheeling (but still generally serious-minded) bloggy side.

Imagine a Times business section -- indeed, any Times section -- that consists largely of brisk, pithy briefs that originally broke, in slightly rougher blog form, online.

Imagine a Times that respects readers' time poverty (and, yes, web-addled attention spans) with its directness and brevity and offers a higher level of honesty and transparency -- meaning Hansell and his colleagues no longer have to suppress what they really know and feel just to keep up appearances -- i.e., to maintain the vaunted journalistic lie, the self-delusion, of objectivity.

And then imagine, a number of years down the road, a radically smaller, vastly more compact Times (in my too-ambitious fantasy, it's ultraportable -- about the size of Teen Vogue) that functions as a sort of executive summary of all the original reporting and link aggregation the Times first published online. Somebody needs to invent a paper like that. The Bits blog-to-print experiment in the Times suggests that maybe, just maybe, the Times can.

Sunday, September 23, 2007

Future of Mags Explained - RECAP: BoSacks vs. Mr. Magazine

Brouhaha in Philadelphia: BoSacks vs. Mr. Magazine
http://www.pbaa.net/pbaa/uploads/PBAA_21st_Convention_Recap.pdf

Magazine industry observers Samir Husni and Bob Sacks may not be as entertaining as

Muhammed Ali, but they come pretty close when they put on their "dead trees versus electronic paper" debate. Actually, Husni and Sacks resemble a long-married couple

more than Ali and, say, George Foreman. The two share a mutual regard, agree about many things, and no one delivers a knock-out blow at their debates. They just really

like to disagree. So, they did plenty of that as they highlighted the challenges of the magazine business today and offered some prescriptions and predictions for the future.

Samir Husni, Chair of the Journalism Department at the University of Mississippi and the selfstyled "Mr. Magazine," came out of his corner first, and recounted how he's been hearing about the end of print journalism since he started graduate school in 1980. His main point was that magazines, as a medium, are alive and well.

The industry's problems stem from not delivering the right message through the magazine medium to the right audience. That's a problem with us - publishers, editors and circulators - and it's one that can be solved. He challenged the audience to set about solving this problem forthwith, instead of pondering about what the media environment of the future might look like. If you're not solving your immediate and near-term problems, Husni cautioned, you won't be around to see the brave new world of media fi ve or ten years hence. Oh, and one thing, don't call anything that isn't ink on paper a magazine. Nothing makes Mr. Magazine madder than that.



Bob Sacks or BoSacks for short, the magazine industry veteran and publisher of the electronic newsletter "Heard on the Web," didn't directly contradict Husni. He simply said that he would tell another side of the magazine story, whereupon he began outlining why it was a more important side than Samir's paean to the printed page. "Print isn't dead," Sacks said, "but it has a sibling" in the form of electronic distribution. Sacks likened the print and digital formats to parallel universes with content serving as the bridge between them. To this point, Sacks brought special zeal. Today, when information is available in multiple formats, he maintained, it is vital for publishers to see that their franchise is content or thought and that their business is information distribution. To capture the business of publishing today, Sacks has coined the phrase El-Cid, which stands for Electronically Coordinated Information Distribution. He doesn't discount a

continuing role for printed magazines - they are "electronically coordinated," too, after all - but his outline of "screen-agers" as a generation that doesn't know a time without cell phones and the web strongly suggests where he thinks the publishing industry is heading.


Really, the disagreement between Husni and Sacks comes, not from the head, but from the heart. Sacks revels in surprising the audience with just how many major corporations are working on the development of electronic paper and how our best efforts today are not even as refi ned as the Model T of the automotive world. For Sacks, it is a brave new world of wonderful ways to share content. Husni, by contrast, displayed during his

presentation a cartoon of an information consumer surrounded by electronic gizmos that looked like a whirlwind collection of junk.

The next slide depicted Husni broadly smiling and sitting, Indianstyle, in front of a mainline magazine rack. It was the Professor's very idea of the good life. He doesn't discount the growing importance of electronic information dissemination, even if he

scoffs at the primitive nature of some web content today. And BoSacks foretells a reduction in dead-tree-paper magazines, not their disappearance. Still, Husni's main argument (printed magazines are alive and well) leads him to one set of insights and

Sacks main argument (content is king; format doesn't matter) lead him to another. Considering them both is a pretty useful exercise for anyone in the magazine business today.

In support of his main argument about the vitality of printed magazines, Husni makes a number of other claims. Among them: the pace of change and the flow of information has quickened, but all the new media hasn't really changed what's on offer to consumers. Blogs, for instance, are merely the modern-day equivalent of newspapers' invitations for readers to write their own news. Web content is not so different from television. It's

suited for delivering nuggets of information to passive viewers. Printed magazines retain their special ability to deepen stories by delivering detailed narrative to active readers. One, important lesson print publishers should learn from their media cousins is in the area of taking payment. Cable TV companies and internet service providers don't go begging for subscribers with after-term renewal solicitations. They cut them off.

That magazines retain their special purpose (in spite of their subscription pricing anomalies) can be seen in the evolution of the celebrity news category over the past seven years, according to Husni. People has been joined by more than half-a-dozen, direct competitors - not to mention countless web sources - and still the title thrives, as do its biggest competitors. Husni sees other signs of magazines' health - from an almost doubling of new title introductions over the past 20 years to the proliferation and greater specialization of titles to Condé Nast's lavish launch of Portfolio just this year. "Book-a-zines," "mooks," and custom publishing are also testimony to the medium's strength and versatility. But we should be doing better.

Despite its successes, Husni seems to think American periodical publishers are too timid. He characterizes the American scene as "static, stubborn and sad" while our international competitors are "smart, sexy and surviving." The most glaring contrast is between

newspapers. While newspaper readership and circulation in North American continues to decline, it's growing everywhere else. "In the rest of the world newspapers are becoming daily magazines and have even begun incorporating daily and weekly magazines in their editions." They are creating and strengthening addictive relationships with their readers, in other words, not shutting down the presses and waiting for a technological solution just over the horizon.

Husni ended his presentation by delivering kudos to one magazine that is using technology to good effect. JPG is a plucky, new title that accepts photographic submissions via the web and subjects them to on-line peer review before editors

make fi nal selections and assemble theme-based issues. It's published six times annually - on paper.

Though he didn't comment on it, BoSacks would likely approve of JPG as the kind of niche, small-print-order publication well suited to dead-trees-paper form. He certainly would approve, along with Husni, of the title's straddling of the print/digital divide. (Photographers can submit their work at (www.jpgmag.com) But the big story, according to Sacks, is the migration of content, advertising spending, and people - especially young people, under 30 - to digital delivery formats. He recounted ten headlines from 2007, such as "Online Ads Have Overtaken Magazine Advertising," to underscore this point. He also reminded audience members that U.S. magazine sales, which grew from 245 million to 366 million in the 20 years leading up to 1990, has stagnated in the 17 years

since. The story for newspapers is even worse, with household penetration and daily circulation numbers showing precipitous declines. These trends pre-date, and seem to have been little affected by, the growth of the internet. They owe their origins to a proliferation of media outlets dating back to the advent of radio.

BoSacks sees the digital delivery of printed content, not as the continuation of print's decline, but rather as its savior, a trend that holds the potential to usher in a new golden age of publishing. Technological advances that Sacks believes are coming in the near future will " . . . make all of the world's information . . . available for immediate distribution in any format." Chief among these advances is electronic reusable paper, which will combine the virtually limitless storage capacity of computers with the low-cost portability of traditional paper. Model T versions of the concept, like the Sony EReader, may be clunky and costly, but global technology giants, including Hewlett-Packard, BASF, Bridgestone Corp., and Eastman Kodak, are working on improved versions that will allow commuters to read web content during their train ride, and then toss the device into the trash can like a rolled-up newspaper.

BoSacks ticked off current, early-adapter uses of electronic ink and paper, from restaurant menus to hospital ID bracelets. He allowed how widespread use of the technology depends upon easy access to the web - and then he reminded people that that

was already taking place. Philadelphia is creating a city-wide web hot zone. Georgia has committed to making the entire state WiFi accessible, and rural areas everywhere may soon benefi t from Broadband over Powerline (BPL) service, which will enable devices to access the web through their electrical power cords. The key point is that the costs for all of these technologies are coming down, while the cost of traditional paper, printing and postage is going nowhere but up.

Printing on paper is a 600-year-old technology, and "all technologies are eventually replaced or at least superseded by newer and more efficient technologies," BoSacks reminded audience members. He is terribly excited about exactly what form that technology will take. Samir Husni really isn't all that jazzed about it, and may well be the sort to pay a premium so that he can receive his content on good ole paper, thank you very much. He perks up when discussing all the exciting things happening in print right now - even if many of them are happening outside the U.S.



Though their academic interests differ and they may be loathe to admit it, key observations and recommendations from both Mr. Magazine and BoSacks were strikingly similar. Both see the trend of increasing numbers of more narrowly focused, special interest titles continuing. Both regard "addictive content" as critical to the health of any print journalism outlet. Both caution magazine publishers to eschew the example of American newspapers, who have allowed their offerings to become less addictive over time. Lastly, both lament the continuing newsstand policies that result in more than a Billion Dollars of waste each year, although they did so without offering immediate solutions. While their pugilistic natures make them well-suited for their role as conference debaters, Husni and Sacks might also make a good pair atop a masthead as co- CEO's of the "BoSacks Mr. Magazine Publishing Company." Any takers?

Impact of ABC/BPA Auditing Changes

Impact of ABC/BPA Auditing Changes
By Kristina Joukhadar
http://www.circman.com/viewmedia.asp?prmMID=3413


Yesterday's ABC/BPA Update session at FMA Day in New York opened with a question: how have auditing rule changes over the past five years impacted circulators? This led to an animated panel discussion involving ABC president and managing director Michael Lavery, BPA Worldwide president and CEO Glenn Hansen and Nina LaFrance, group circulation director, Forbes Inc.

Change in the 50 Percent Rule

The 2001 change in the 50 percent rule [the ABC requirement that for a copy to qualify as "paid" it must be sold for at least 50 percent of the basic price] to paid at any price was significant, said Lavery, but "it didn't cause the sky to fall."

LaFrance pointed out that ever since the change in the rule, there has been a profound change in the way circulators do business. It had an impact on the use of Public Place and Sponsored circulation-particularly because the change took place at a time when technology advertisers were actively pressuring publishers to increase rate bases in order to drive advertising sales, she said.

Use of Verified Circ

What about the effect of the ABC Verified circ category, which was initiated in January 2006 for inclusion on June 2006 Publisher Statements?, asked moderator Lynn Reinicke, VP, chief of staff, CDS.

The volume of Verified circ has not really changed since then, said Lavery. Verified has been reported for 230 titles, totaling about 14 million subscription copies. This represents about 7 percent of total subscriptions or 4 percent of total circulation.

Whether the volume of Verified used has changed or not, there is a fear in the industry that some advertisers will not accept these copies as part of the rate base. So far, agency spokespeople have said that some Verified circ is acceptable, as long as it is not used specifically to make rate base.

Fluctuating levels of verified circ on an issue-by-issue basis has been flagged as a particular problem.

What About B-to-B?

In b-to-b publishing, there are only two buckets, said Hansen, "paid and nonpaid." It's like a pendulum, he said, with paid direct by consumer moving to one side and everything else being pushed to the other (like sponsored, nonpaid, verified and controlled).

Hansen pointed out that there is an opportunity here to help sales people talk to media buyers about the makeup of a title's circulation-to demonstrate the vitality of the audience. "Why worry about how you got the eyeballs if you can identify who they are and why you have the right audience?," he asked.

He added that if the audit report contains "one little line [to define a type of circulation]," it can be "dismissed out of hand." You need to explain in demographic terms who the audience is, so the media buyer "gets it."

Quality of the "Eyeballs"

It's similar in both b-to-b and consumer, said LaFrance, who has worked in both. "You watch the consumer circulation marketers struggling with free circulation as 'qualified.'" It goes back to the evolution of Verified, she said. Whether it's consumer or business [circulation], the importance is the quality of the reader, their match with the content and responsiveness to the advertising message.


The business is moving there, said LaFrance. "The characteristics of b-to-b and consumer audiences are blending. In consumer, paid circ has been the be-all metric, and now in dealing with Public Place, it's a culture change."


Circulators Need to Educate Others


On the consumer side, circulation has been sold on the basis of paid circ and not on other factors," said Lavery. Public Place and Verified circ have value and extend reach. Circulators need to talk about the value of Verified circ and give voice to explain the business tactics for using this type of circ over other channels, he said.

Big Media: TV, Print Important, But Digital Must Grow

On Media
Big Media: TV, Print Important, But Digital Must Grow
by Diane Mermigas, Wednesday
http://publications.mediapost.com/?fuseaction=Articles.san&s=67740&Nid=34535&p=204904

MAYBE YOU CAN HAVE IT both ways, at least for now.
Media company chief executives participating in the opening day of Goldman Sachs' annual Communacopia conference widely acknowledged the vulnerability of conventional television and print advertising, while hedging big bets on online target marketing, which has the potential of generating more wealth and sustained value across all of their platforms and businesses.

Clearly, the industry's massive, unsettling schism has Time Warner, News Corp., Walt Disney and Viacom gingerly walking the fence between the destabilizing old-line mass media and the emerging consumer-centric media economies--advertising being central to both in very different ways.

InterActiveCorp CEO Barry Diller does not mince words about the fate of 30-second TV spots and quarter-page print ads priced on estimated mass eyeballs. "Those businesses just absolutely have to be challenged," Diller declared at Tuesday's conference in New York.

"Are they still going to be mass engines of communications that are going to sell on a good spot basis and take revenues in? Yes. [But] there is no question that more and more will move over to the Internet. I can give you so many examples of ... the slow take of people in advertising because they have been essentially buying mass wholesale and it's been a fairly easy business," Diller said. "All of this is going to crack and change over the next few years because efficiency demands it."

However, all the media chief executives participating agreed that targeting the audience in precise ways to collect premiums from advertisers, which must be re-acclimated to their own radically changing business, is complex and challenging.

Time Warner CEO Richard Parsons conceded his company's struggle to monetize AOL, noting that it's now giving the fifth-largest Internet brand the advertising-support base it should have had initially. If you can't accomplish the transition from a subscription to an ad network in the midst of an online advertising explosion, when can you?

"The game is ours to lose," Parsons said of AOL's latest turnaround strategy. Parsons also dismissed concern voiced by Goldman Sachs analyst Anthony Noto and Liberty Media CEO Greg Maffei that the advertising and ratings for general entertainment cable networks (like Time Warner's TBS and TNT) could go the way of mass-oriented broadcast TV networks in an era of special interests and targeted consumers.

Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman simply stated his advertising transition strategy as "focusing on our top 200 to 300 advertisers ...with a tie-in to online programming" from the company's MTV, Nickelodeon and Paramount franchises. But that doesn't take into account the distinct differences in the interactive pitching of products and services, as well as relating to target consumers online--or the reticence, if not sheer ignorance, on the part of so many advertisers to even tread there.

Walt Disney CEO Bob Iger underscored his company's dependence on advertising for only 23% of its total revenues, before explaining the self-sufficient marketing interdependence of its core TV, film, online, theme park, consumer products and branded evergreen content businesses. It is the ultimate economic hedge. "We are not looking to grow advertiser-supported businesses as a company," Iger said. But there is no question that Disney's finely honed, targeted interactive strategy these days is all about new-wave marketing and advertising. Disney is the eighth-largest advertiser in the U.S. just behind media fellows Time Warner, Verizon Communications and AT&T.

News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch also declared his company more recession-proof than ever "because our revenues are increasingly non-advertising." For example, 60% of the more than $1 billion made from cable channels last year was generated from subscriptions and that will double over the next three years. All the same, he was quick to note that Fox's CPMs are up an average of 8% across its media platforms this fall, and that Fox Interactive Media is on target to generate more than $800 million in revenues this year on a doubling of targeted advertising clickthroughs.

While still milking old media advertising for all it is worth, News Corp. is feverishly working on more richly and broadly defined new media advertising models on its MySpace platform. "Hyper targeting this enormous audience we have ...has limitless possibilities. You can just see the money growing, and it's exactly what advertisers want, ..." Murdoch exclaimed at the Communacopia conference.

Driven by the new mantra--the more specialized the target, the higher the advertiser premium--News Corp. is preparing to monetize 110 million MySpace users by hyper-targeting their special interests, ZIP codes and any other common denominator that will sell Madison Avenue. Even an old-line media company like Dow Jones, which News Corp. is set to acquire for $5 billion, has untapped targeted value to advertisers, given its core affluent and influential readers, Murdoch said.

With the accelerating trend in online advertising shifts from premium ad inventory purchases to non-premium performance-based display ads, coupled with the fall-off in traditional media ad spending, media chieftains clearly recognize the need to straddle their core revenue from new and old sources. And that means going after advertising dollars everywhere they can, every way they can, by any name they want to give it.













Diane Mermigas is editor-at-large at MediaPost.

Brouhaha in Philadelphia: BoSacks vs. Mr. Magazine

Brouhaha in Philadelphia: BoSacks vs. Mr. Magazine
http://www.pbaa.net/pbaa/uploads/PBAA_21st_Convention_Recap.pdf

Magazine industry observers Samir Husni and Bob Sacks may not be as entertaining as

Muhammed Ali, but they come pretty close when they put on their "dead trees versus electronic paper" debate. Actually, Husni and Sacks resemble a long-married couple

more than Ali and, say, George Foreman. The two share a mutual regard, agree about many things, and no one delivers a knock-out blow at their debates. They just really

like to disagree. So, they did plenty of that as they highlighted the challenges of the magazine business today and offered some prescriptions and predictions for the future.

Samir Husni, Chair of the Journalism Department at the University of Mississippi and the selfstyled "Mr. Magazine," came out of his corner first, and recounted how he's been hearing about the end of print journalism since he started graduate school in 1980. His main point was that magazines, as a medium, are alive and well.

The industry's problems stem from not delivering the right message through the magazine medium to the right audience. That's a problem with us - publishers, editors and circulators - and it's one that can be solved. He challenged the audience to set about solving this problem forthwith, instead of pondering about what the media environment of the future might look like. If you're not solving your immediate and near-term problems, Husni cautioned, you won't be around to see the brave new world of media fi ve or ten years hence. Oh, and one thing, don't call anything that isn't ink on paper a magazine. Nothing makes Mr. Magazine madder than that.


Bob Sacks or BoSacks for short, the magazine industry veteran and publisher of the electronic newsletter "Heard on the Web," didn't directly contradict Husni. He simply said that he would tell another side of the magazine story, whereupon he began outlining why it was a more important side than Samir's paean to the printed page. "Print isn't dead," Sacks said, "but it has a sibling" in the form of electronic distribution. Sacks likened the print and digital formats to parallel universes with content serving as the bridge between them. To this point, Sacks brought special zeal. Today, when information is available in multiple formats, he maintained, it is vital for publishers to see that their franchise is content or thought and that their business is information distribution. To capture the business of publishing today, Sacks has coined the phrase El-Cid, which stands for Electronically Coordinated Information Distribution. He doesn't discount a

continuing role for printed magazines - they are "electronically coordinated," too, after all - but his outline of "screen-agers" as a generation that doesn't know a time without cell phones and the web strongly suggests where he thinks the publishing industry is heading.

Really, the disagreement between Husni and Sacks comes, not from the head, but from the heart. Sacks revels in surprising the audience with just how many major corporations are working on the development of electronic paper and how our best efforts today are not even as refi ned as the Model T of the automotive world. For Sacks, it is a brave new world of wonderful ways to share content. Husni, by contrast, displayed during his

presentation a cartoon of an information consumer surrounded by electronic gizmos that looked like a whirlwind collection of junk.

The next slide depicted Husni broadly smiling and sitting, Indianstyle, in front of a mainline magazine rack. It was the Professor's very idea of the good life. He doesn't discount the growing importance of electronic information dissemination, even if he

scoffs at the primitive nature of some web content today. And BoSacks foretells a reduction in dead-tree-paper magazines, not their disappearance. Still, Husni's main argument (printed magazines are alive and well) leads him to one set of insights and

Sacks main argument (content is king; format doesn't matter) lead him to another. Considering them both is a pretty useful exercise for anyone in the magazine business today.

In support of his main argument about the vitality of printed magazines, Husni makes a number of other claims. Among them: the pace of change and the flow of information has quickened, but all the new media hasn't really changed what's on offer to consumers. Blogs, for instance, are merely the modern-day equivalent of newspapers' invitations for readers to write their own news. Web content is not so different from television. It's

suited for delivering nuggets of information to passive viewers. Printed magazines retain their special ability to deepen stories by delivering detailed narrative to active readers. One, important lesson print publishers should learn from their media cousins is in the area of taking payment. Cable TV companies and internet service providers don't go begging for subscribers with after-term renewal solicitations. They cut them off.


That magazines retain their special purpose (in spite of their subscription pricing anomalies) can be seen in the evolution of the celebrity news category over the past seven years, according to Husni. People has been joined by more than half-a-dozen, direct competitors - not to mention countless web sources - and still the title thrives, as do its biggest competitors. Husni sees other signs of magazines' health - from an almost doubling of new title introductions over the past 20 years to the proliferation and greater specialization of titles to Condé Nast's lavish launch of Portfolio just this year. "Book-a-zines," "mooks," and custom publishing are also testimony to the medium's strength and versatility. But we should be doing better.


Despite its successes, Husni seems to think American periodical publishers are too timid. He characterizes the American scene as "static, stubborn and sad" while our international competitors are "smart, sexy and surviving." The most glaring contrast is between

newspapers. While newspaper readership and circulation in North American continues to decline, it's growing everywhere else. "In the rest of the world newspapers are becoming daily magazines and have even begun incorporating daily and weekly magazines in their editions." They are creating and strengthening addictive relationships with their readers, in other words, not shutting down the presses and waiting for a technological solution just over the horizon.

Husni ended his presentation by delivering kudos to one magazine that is using technology to good effect. JPG is a plucky, new title that accepts photographic submissions via the web and subjects them to on-line peer review before editors
make final selections and assemble theme-based issues. It's published six times annually - on paper.


Though he didn't comment on it, BoSacks would likely approve of JPG as the kind of niche, small-print-order publication well suited to dead-trees-paper form. He certainly would approve, along with Husni, of the title's straddling of the print/digital divide. (Photographers can submit their work at (www.jpgmag.com) But the big story, according to Sacks, is the migration of content, advertising spending, and people - especially young people, under 30 - to digital delivery formats. He recounted ten headlines from 2007, such as "Online Ads Have Overtaken Magazine Advertising," to underscore this point. He also reminded audience members that U.S. magazine sales, which grew from 245 million to 366 million in the 20 years leading up to 1990, has stagnated in the 17 years

since. The story for newspapers is even worse, with household penetration and daily circulation numbers showing precipitous declines. These trends pre-date, and seem to have been little affected by, the growth of the internet. They owe their origins to a proliferation of media outlets dating back to the advent of radio.


BoSacks sees the digital delivery of printed content, not as the continuation of print's decline, but rather as its savior, a trend that holds the potential to usher in a new golden age of publishing. Technological advances that Sacks believes are coming in the near future will " . . . make all of the world's information . . . available for immediate distribution in any format." Chief among these advances is electronic reusable paper, which will combine the virtually limitless storage capacity of computers with the low-cost portability of traditional paper. Model T versions of the concept, like the Sony EReader, may be clunky and costly, but global technology giants, including Hewlett-Packard, BASF, Bridgestone Corp., and Eastman Kodak, are working on improved versions that will allow commuters to read web content during their train ride, and then toss the device into the trash can like a rolled-up newspaper.

BoSacks ticked off current, early-adapter uses of electronic ink and paper, from restaurant menus to hospital ID bracelets. He allowed how widespread use of the technology depends upon easy access to the web - and then he reminded people that that was already taking place. Philadelphia is creating a city-wide web hot zone. Georgia has committed to making the entire state WiFi accessible, and rural areas everywhere may soon benefi t from Broadband over Powerline (BPL) service, which will enable devices to access the web through their electrical power cords. The key point is that the costs for all of these technologies are coming down, while the cost of traditional paper, printing and postage is going nowhere but up.

Printing on paper is a 600-year-old technology, and "all technologies are eventually replaced or at least superseded by newer and more efficient technologies," BoSacks reminded audience members. He is terribly excited about exactly what form that technology will take. Samir Husni really isn't all that jazzed about it, and may well be the sort to pay a premium so that he can receive his content on good ole paper, thank you very much. He perks up when discussing all the exciting things happening in print right now - even if many of them are happening outside the U.S.



Though their academic interests differ and they may be loathe to admit it, key observations and recommendations from both Mr. Magazine and BoSacks were strikingly similar. Both see the trend of increasing numbers of more narrowly focused, special interest titles continuing. Both regard "addictive content" as critical to the health of any print journalism outlet. Both caution magazine publishers to eschew the example of American newspapers, who have allowed their offerings to become less addictive over time. Lastly, both lament the continuing newsstand policies that result in more than a Billion Dollars of waste each year, although they did so without offering immediate solutions. While their pugilistic natures make them well-suited for their role as conference debaters, Husni and Sacks might also make a good pair atop a masthead as co- CEO's of the "BoSacks Mr. Magazine Publishing Company." Any takers?