BoSacks Archive

BoSacks Speaks Out: The New Yorker thrives on the iPad

2011-08-15T08:23:00.002-04:00

BoSacks Speaks Out: I find it very amusing that after all these years we are finally re-discovering that our franchise is actually built mostly on words and the thinking that those words provide, rather than on super-substrates of any type, be they paper or plastic. At the end of day, publishers are the providers of information, plain and simple. Bells and whistles are an interesting sidebar, but if the content isn't what it ought to be, the extra fluff is meaningless. If you build it (unique and valuable content) they will not only come, but will also pay for it.

By no means mistake this for an anti-technologic rant. All I'm saying is that sometimes we forget what it is that we do. We are our best when we get back to the simple basics of an informational platform that contains excellence on a constant basis. If you don't have the best words in your sector of publishing, you are living an increasingly shorter dream of sustainability.

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Thanks to simplicity, the New Yorker thrives on the iPad

BY Patricio Robles

http://econsultancy.com/us/blog/7848-thanks-to-simplicity-the-new-yorker-thrives-on-the-ipad#

As publishers and new media companies try to tap into the potential offered by the iPad, many have decided that offering richer, multimedia-laden experiences is the way to go.

Take Push Pop Press, for instance. Its vision for tablet publications: turn them into interactive applications. Its centerpiece, Al Gore's Our Choice interactive e-book, was heralded as "one of the most...impressive apps you've ever seen."

Yesterday, Push Pop Press was acquired by Facebook in what appears to be a talent acquisition. According to a post on the company website, "we're taking our publishing technology and everything we've learned and are setting off to help design the world's largest book, Facebook." By all appearances, there's a reason for this: Push Pop Press' vision for traditional publications, as appealing as it might be on paper, simply hasn't taken off.

At the same time, however, one traditional publication is thriving with a much simpler model. As revealed in a New York Times article, The New Yorker is doing quite well without turning its iPad version into a feast for the senses. Approximately 20,000 of the 100,000 readers who read The New Yorker iPad app paid $59.99/year for a subscription, and "several thousand more" pay $4.99/week for single issues.

As The New York Times' Jeremy W. Peters notes, "When magazine publishers began pouring their resources and hopes into the iPad, their thinking was that readers wanted something substantially more than just words on a screen. A simple PDF of a page just would not do." Such assumptions may have been wrong.

The interface of The New Yorker iPad app is closer to a PDF than it is to the type of multimedia extravaganza that other magazine apps are trying to provide. According to The New Yorker's deputy editor, Pamela Maffei McCarthy, there's a reason for this: "That was really important to us: to create an app all about reading. There are some bells and whistles, but we're very careful about that. We think about whether or not they add any value. And if they don't, out the window they go."

The key point: it's all about value. Traditional publishers thinking more about the iPad's capabilities than what their readers expect on the iPad are more likely to produce a tablet publication that produces more interest from industry folk than it does interest from actual readers. In many cases, attempts at impressing the critics leave readers dissatisfied.

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NYT: For New Yorker on iPad, Words Are the Thing

Author Khoi Vinh

http://www.subtraction.com/2011/08/01/new-yorker-on-ipad-words-are-the-thing

The New York Times reports that of all of Condé Nast's many splashy iPad magazine apps the relatively boring New Yorker is its most successful. It now boasts about 100,000 readers, 20,000 of whom bought annual subscriptions.

"...The figures are the highest of any iPad edition sold by Condé Nast, which also publishes Wired, GQ, Vanity Fair, Glamour and others on the Apple tablet... The New Yorker, a magazine that has always been heavy on text, took a different tack from its peers. Instead of loading its iPad app with interactive features, the magazine focused on presenting its articles in a clean, readable format."

This is part of the strategy that I've been advocating for in my various critiques of Condé's approach to the iPad. In short, the best way to serve a reading audience is to focus on providing a terrific reading experience and to de-emphasize the showy, buggy and difficult-to-use extras that have become synonymous with the 'iPad magazine app' format. And in fact, I'm a regular user of The New Yorker app, especially while traveling, because it gives me reasonably unfettered access to the only thing I'm seriously interested in: the text.

None of which is to say, though, that The New Yorker app is anywhere close to perfect. First, it could use a code refresh as it crashes so frequently as to be unusable; in my recent experience all it takes to induce it to unexpectedly quit is to launch it and let it alone for five to ten seconds.

Second, selling 20,000 paid subscriptions is fantastic, but according to the Times as many as 75,000 of the app's customers are, like myself, originally subscribers to the print edition. So in fact the majority of customers do not represent an expansion of the market at all. None of these numbers are to be sneezed at, of course, and even transitioning a print subscriber to the digital edition can be counted as a kind of win. But it strikes me that the whole lot of customers would be better served with an HTML5-powered app, rather than the current native app. That way, it would be significantly cheaper to service those 100,000 users and significantly easier to keep it from crashing so much.

BoSacks Speaks Out: How to Survive in Publishing

2011-08-10T18:02:00.001-04:00

Today's Publishing Career: We Are All Vulnerable
Talent and excellence are no safeguard against the winds of change.
By Robert M. Sacks
http://www.pubexec.com

I'm a lucky man, and I know it. I have had the privilege and honor of working with some of the brightest minds and leadership, in my opinion, in our industry, and in the best of both worlds: I have worked as a self-employed magazine entrepreneur many times over, and I have worked for the best and most sophisticated publishing houses in the world.

In my rounds as industry provocateur, I have the freedom to meet with all levels of management from the very top of our industry, through middle management, to entry-level personnel and students at journalism schools.

I am mentioning this because of an interesting conversation I had this week with a major publisher at a major publishing house. My trick question to him was pretty straightforward: "Do you expect to retire from your current company?" His response was quick, but not immediate; I saw the wheels turning and his pondering, and then the honest answer was delivered: "No."

I have talked about careers in this column before, and I will most likely do so again. It was fascinating to me to know this man and understand the varied career path that took him to top of the publishing food chain, and to see that he forgot, at least for a little while, that he replaced somebody and that somebody will replace him, too. It is not an "if" question; it is a definitive "when" question. And if it is only a "when" question, then we need to ponder on whose terms will the "when" be when it actually happens. Yours or "theirs"?

My reason for asking him was to remind him of one of the most basic and obvious lessons of 21st-century publishing-we are all subject to the winds of change. From a career perspective, it is true that we are most vulnerable when we are the most comfortable.

On the same topic, I received a résumé yesterday from a man in his 50s, who is now out of work. I can tell you that he worked for his last company for at least 20 years and that he was very good at what he did. Being good at your job and having longevity at it doesn't matter at all in the world of disposable products and disposable careers. In his note to me, he said the cardinal sin of all personal careerism, "I didn't see that coming."

What? You didn't see that coming? We all have it coming sooner or later. That is why we must all do two things at the same time: We all must be the very best at what we do today in our current job and always have the next job lined up, or at least in our sights and in our heads. This is a case where I promise you that holding two completely separate ideas in your head at the same time will not make your head explode nor your career implode.

With all this drama about our careers and the changing landscape of the publishing world, I also believe that this is a great time to rethink the unthinkable. I have in my notes an expression that someone said. I didn't write from where it came, and it could even have been my own scrawling, but it is worth thinking about and perhaps agreeing with. The expression is this: "This is a unique and historic period where the unthinkable has never been more possible. We live in one of the greatest periods of experimentation, innovation and entrepreneurism that the world has ever seen." I believe that it can and should be a very exciting time to be in this business, if you can keep your wits about you and pay attention to the many swirling forces of change.

To the publisher with whom I was talking or the circulator with whom I was corresponding, I ask the same thing: Where are you going to from here, because you can't stay where you are. You can't ever say, "I didn't see it coming," because it always is. You can't rest on your laurels, because they are never strong enough to support you for very long.

In a market that is reinventing itself on a minute-by-minute basis, are you doing the same thing?

Bob Sacks (aka BoSacks) is a publishing industry consultant and president of The Precision Media Group (BoSacks.com). He also is co-founder of research company mediaIDEAS (MediaIdeas.net), and publisher and editor of a daily, international e-newsletter, Heard on the Web.

BoSacks Speaks Out: The Color OK from Hell

2010-12-17T08:29:00.005-05:00

BoSacks Speaks Out: The Color OK from Hell
By Bob Sacks
I've been in the publishing business a long time. I have seen amazing technologic changes in our industry that have brought an exactitude to the printing process that was always wished for but hardly achievable when I got started in publishing. Registration problems were not only expected, but in a strange way almost accepted as an unavoidable part of the four color printing process.

In my time in the business I have been not on dozens, but on hundreds of color OK's. I have been with excellent and very creative art directors who know less than nothing of the printing process. I always considered traveling with the "creatives" to a press side experience both fun and challenging. The challenge was explaining the printing process and getting them to sign off when I told them in no uncertain terms that that this is really a terrific match to your proof and the best that printing science and the press can deliver.

There was an eight year period when I was at High Times that I would go to Quad Graphics, usually without an art director, and did the Color OKs solo. In those days I had the unheard of liberty not to have to match the proofs, but rather to do on press anything I wanted to, to get the best printed results possible in the shortest amount of time. In the old days I felt that I could achieve an OK faster than any man or woman alive. Now that I think about it, it would have been a fun challenge between Production Directors - the Super Bowl of press side Oks.

Anyway the following video is pretty damn funny even if you haven't been on a color ok.

My Favorite quote that I can recall about the printing process comes from my college roommate Ed Cobb. I am no doubt only paraphrasing him but it went something like this:
"A proof proves nothing"
I couldn't agree more.

My compliments to Sappi Fine Papers, for understanding the drama and the on-press dilemmas of the pressman, and the Production persons as they deal with the lovable creatives. Let's be realistic here and remember that without the creatives there would be nothing to print.

The New, Simple, Easy, Fool-proof Method for Any Magazine's Success

2010-07-13T11:49:00.001-04:00

The New, Simple, Easy, Fool-proof Method for Any Magazine's Success
By Bob Sacks

For some reason, the latest mantra in the print world is that we have finally been saved and we have proof that we are forceful and relevant as demonstrated by the success of one title. I actually love the magazine and look forward to getting it each month. But I am so sick of hearing about the salvation of the magazine industry based on the success of The Food Network Magazine that I am today, here and now, drawing a line in the sand.

Here, my friends, is a simple, absolutely fool-proof formula for starting any successful magazine:

Step 1: Have a successful TV show for 20 years.

Step 2: Make sure that this successful TV show has plenty of variety in both topics and stars

Sub Step 2a: The show must have plenty of celebrities. (Creating the long-term celebrity status on the show is more than permissible; it is preferable.)

Step 3: Wait 20 years for proof of concept and a mass audience.

Step 4: (This is the easy step.) Produce a wildly successful magazine based on the wildly successful TV show.

Step 5: Claim that this new, simple and easy approach to printed products is the foundation of the success of the magazine industry.

Step 6: Repeat as often as necessary. Just create another wildly successful TV show and go back to Step 1

If you follow these ultra-simple Bo-Steps to magazine success, you will be considered a veritable media genius.

BoSacks Speaks Out: What is a magazine?

2010-06-13T21:53:00.003-04:00

BoSacks Speaks Out: As most of you know I have been debating my friend Samir Husni across the country for almost a decade. He is an admitted tree hugger and I lean mightily towards a digital future for our industry. Our debates are great fun not only for the audience but for the two of us as well. We enjoy taking opposite sides of important magazine issues.

As you might expect when I saw the headline of his recent posting "So, What is a Magazine, Really?" I started reading with great interest. That is when I read the following lines by Samir "Without the ink, the paper, the touch, the smell, the look, the taste, it will not be called a magazine." ... And, if it is not ink on paper, please try to find another name to define that new medium, because in my book if it is not printed it is not a magazine."

From my perspective these words and thoughts couldn't be more wrong. I firmly believe that ink is not one of the major components necessary for a magazine.
In working with my partners at mediaIdeas five years ago we developed a set of criteria for the definition of a magazine. We believe that a magazine must be paginated, edited, designed, date stamped, permanent, and periodic. But it does not have to use either ink or paper to be an 'official' magazine. Ink and paper are an unnecessary restriction in the 21st century. Of course, a magazine can be printed with ink on paper, but to demand that it be so is unrealistic and would doom an otherwise vibrant industry to the monasteries of time long past.

The best-selling book of all times was originally written on a scroll. Then eventually printed on paper by our friend Guttenberg. The Bible is now available digitally. Does the digital delivery mean it's not a book? I think rather that the words and thinking that are important and not the substrate.
Of course, it may not be fair but I can't help pointing out that Samir delivered his article "So What is a Magazine Really?" in a digital blog and not in a printed magazine.
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So, What is a Magazine, Really? Read on…June 11, 2010
Being in the content business and being in the magazine business are two completely different worlds. While the magazine business deals with content, content is only but a fraction of what makes a magazine. The myth that is now sweeping our industry that we are content providers and it does not matter how our customers get their information may be the Trojan horse that will aid some publishers continue on their print suicide path.

Content is good and content will continue to be king and queen of our profession, but magazines are not going to live and survive by content alone. It never stops to amaze me how the majority of people jumped on the bandwagon of equating magazines to music and wanted to sell magazines like the iTune store sells music. I said that before and I will say again, the only similarity between magazines and music is the letter m. Everything else is different. As a child I listened to music on the little transistor radio. Later I listened to records, tapes and even listened to music on television. I listened to my favorite songs over and over. I used earphones, loud speakers, any and all the things created to help me listen to the music. The goal was always to listen to my favorite song over and over again. I did not care how the song was broadcasted or delivered. I was not holding to that radio or television set, because the medium did not matter in that case. It was the message that mattered. It was so easy to separate the message from the medium, and it did not matter what medium delivered that message to me, because my addiction was to the message that I kept listening to, time after time. It was not a message meant for a one-time use. The physical medium was just the vehicle to deliver the message and it was never part of the message.

That brings me back to the printed magazine. Like music, each and every magazine can be used as a medium to deliver a message, but if that was all what magazines do, than we would have been out of business long time ago and we would have one format, maybe an iMagazine that delivers all the content you need to select and choose from for your daily needs, wants and desires.

Magazines are much more than content. Magazines are much more than information, words, pictures and colors all combined in a platform that serves nothing but as a delivery vehicle. Magazines, each and every one and each and every issue of every one, are a total experience that engages the customers five senses. Nothing is left to chance. It is a total package. Without the ink, the paper, the touch, the smell, the look, the taste, it will not be called a magazine. Every issue is a complete new experience with a sense of ownership, showmanship and membership and is renewed with the arrival of the next issue. The total experience of flipping through the pages of a magazine, looking at the different dimensions, shapes, and other physical properties (including the colors we use on every issue whether it is the famous TIME red border or National Geographic yellow border) create a unique relationship with the customer issue after issue.

So before we close the book on this great technology we call ink on paper and start moving with the tide of this new digital world, stop and think for a moment on what makes a magazine a magazine and why in this digital age millions of magazines worldwide are still thriving in ink on paper creating daily experiences, one issue at a time. Magazines are much more than content and they are even much more than ink on paper. The total physical aspect of each “storehouse” to use the original meaning of what a magazine is include all of its properties, from the size of the store to the content of the store, seen and felt together.

Take time and think about it. The digital age is helping us create new platforms and new media, but do not fool yourself and think you can recreate a similar experience to that we have in ink on paper magazines. It is one of a kind and I if we only devote five percent of our time, money and energy in this digital age focusing on how to enhance this existing ink on paper technology and what it is delivering, our business will be in a much better shape. Magazines are not just content providers, they are experience makers, one printed issue at a time. And, if it is not ink on paper, please try to find another name to define that new medium, because in my book if it is not printed it is not a magazine. I am living the digital age (you name the gadget I have it, including the iPad) but I am not living in a dream world. I have yet to see anything comes close to what an ink on paper magazine can deliver and do for its customers at such a great feel, not to mention a great price too. Go grab a magazine, any magazine and then let’s start talking about experience making!

Enjoy.

The Future of Print: BoSacks Speaks at Summer Publishing Institute

2010-06-09T22:04:00.004-04:00

The Future of Print: BoSacks Speaks at Summer Publishing Institute
BoSacks gives the keynote speech Summer Publishing Institute
By Ryan Willard
http://nyupubposts.wordpress.com/2010/06/09/the-future-of-print-bo-sacks-speaks-at-spi/

In his animated and lively presentation, Bo Sacks, owner of The Precision Media Group, told the students attending NYU's 2010 Summer Publishing Institute that while print is not dead, it will not be the primary way to read in the future. His State of the Union address directed toward SPI's aspiring media professionals offered a glimpse into the blurring lines between print and digital media.

Sacks highlighted some of the problems the publishing industry faces when trying to interpret how readers absorb knowledge from mass media and contemporary culture. He explained that today, consumers know how to find a fact by researching their needs online, rather than knowing a fact. Moreover, magazines have a beginning, middle and end whereas digital platforms offer endless possibilities.

No matter what the medium, says Sacks-whether it is through newer and better versions of tablets that will contain Qualcomm's mirasol product debuting sometime in 2011, or some other light-reflective electronic paper currently on the market-superior content is the necessary tool for the survival of the publishing industry. Those left on the island will be swift, nimble, and niche scavengers. They will know how to monetize content and to use cutting edge technologies. And they will be adept at utilizing citizen journalism, social media and location-centric sites like Foursquare and Gowalla, not to mention understanding the importance of globalization. Sacks insisted that there must be accurate systems of accountability for all print products for a more sustainable environment.

Stressing the importance of a recurrence of ideas, Sacks invoked the popular TV-series Battlestar Galactica and declared: "All of this has happened before, and it will happen again." He urged publishers to build on ideas of the past, in order to succeed in the future. He noted that we are living a world where the growth of magazine newsstand sales came to a standstill in 1990 and Ashton Kutcher has more fans on Twitter than the entire population of Norway, Ireland and Panama combined.

The world, he explained, is rapidly progressing toward a digital future. In 25 years, Sacks predicts, only 15% of current print magazines will still exist. Ultimately, a question remains within the minds of publishers and SPI students alike: how do we get everyone on the same page during this moment of change? Will there ever be one source for all digital-print media that readers are able to access? Will the transformation from print to digital lose sight of the strong writing and voice of authority that makes up so much of what is currently published? Maybe, but as Sacks suggested, adaptation will inevitably push readers, writers and publishers into an exciting and rich new world of print and digital platforms.
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The students that are enrolled in The Summer Publishing Institute, is one of three programs run by The Center for Publishing at NYU-SCPS. http://scps.nyu.edu/areas-of-study/publishing

There will be a number of posts about The Summer Publishing Institute on the NYUSCPS blog this summer at http://NYUPubPosts.wordpress.com

MPA Officially Responds to BoSacks on PIB

2010-03-16T06:24:00.001-04:00

MPA Officially Responds to BoSacks on PIB
BoSacks Speaks Out: I am thankful to the MPA for responding to my vent of last week. It has always been my intended policy to start meaningful discussions. I do this in an attempt to have dialog about the consequential issues of the day and for the inevitable success of our industry. In that pursuit I attempt to present as many intelligent perspectives as I can. Without the ability to have cross-pollination we will not grow, prosper nor succeed in our endeavors.

MPA official response to PIB story
Your newsletter item from March 10 calls into question the veracity of PIB reporting. Let's be very clear. PIB is absolutely upfront that it is reporting rate card revenue. We state this in our quarterly press releases and on our website. The reason PIB reports rate card revenue is to offer a consistent and objective year-over-year comparison that can be verified. In fact, thanks to PIB, magazines are the only medium that provides fully verified reports for both units and revenue.

The primary use of the rate card revenue numbers is for publishers and agencies to track ad activity, and the way in which the numbers are presented makes it easy for them to do that by client. Since it is clear that the spending is based on rate card dollars, agencies and publishers can easily benchmark against them. Publishers and ad agencies fully understand what we report and they value PIB for its clarity. Anyone who has questions about our numbers or our process for generating the quarterly reports is free to contact me. My door is always open.

Wayne Eadie
SVP, Research
Magazine Publishers of America
President
Publishers Information Bureau

BoSacks Speaks Out: PIB and Big Ad Discounts In '09

2010-03-14T20:55:00.002-04:00

BoSacks Speaks Out: I have often ranted about the value of useless data. As we, as an industry continue to grapple with our future and the absolute need for true accountability, so too should we deal with the value of PIB reporting. It does have its place in ancient history and it does try to track some actual aspects of the publishing industry. The actual number of printed pages is hard to fabricate, and I willingly accept that those number are "close" to reality. But the value of posted revenue has become increasingly ridiculous and totally unreliable and unbelievable. Who are they kidding? I challenge any one from PIB to come on stage with me in an open public forum and defend those reported revenue numbers. Has that ever been done? If not, it should be. Exactly who is responsible for this?

The veracity of that kind of reporting is partly why our industry is in such dire straits. I postulate the following: What if we were actually accountable? What if agencies could actually rely on our reported results as gospel? What would happen if we actually told the truth instead of our continued subterfuge?

Pass-along readership numbers are an industry joke and totally unverifiable. PIB revenue based on posted rate card information is disingenuous at the very best.

It is time in the 21st century for the magazine industry to stand tall and declare the facts. We are a noble and honorable business. We don't need to lie to get the business we deserve, but rather we should deserve the business we get. The more the PIB data looses touch with reality, the more we will loose credence with the advertising industry. The future of our business is about undeniable truth and authenticity. Today or tomorrow, we will have no choice. Wouldn't it be better if we accepted the needs of the industry to expose the facts of who we are and what we can do, rather than just fade away as unreliable and irrelevant. Who will answer my call? Do you disagree? Let me know. Let the PIB know. If not now, When?
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Big Ad Discounts In '09: Mags Lower Rates 27%-57%
by Erik Sass
http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=123982

Bona fide advertising revenue figures for magazines are notoriously hard to come by, as it is common practice for publishers to give advertisers discounts off official rate cards, meaning that real revenues are often much lower than those reported by the Publishers Information Bureau.

However, you can get some idea of the average discount rate, and with it the general health of the industry, by comparing overall PIB figures with independent revenue estimates.

The official rate card figures compiled by PIB for 2009 put total consumer magazine ad revenues (including newspaper-distributed monthly and weekly magazines) at $21.1 billion, down 17.5% from $25.6 billion in 2008.

This figure is already a bit suspect, however -- considering that total ad pages fell 25.6% over the same time period, from 233,558 to 173,375. While it's not impossible, it seems unlikely that during one of the worst economic downturns in decades, magazine publishers actually raised the average price per page 11% from $109,801 in 2008 to $121,712 in 2009.

Independent analysts seem to agree that the medium's advertising revenues were quite a bit lower than the PIB figures. A recent overview from Outsell has total magazine ad revenues at about $9.2 billion in 2009, while Magna's Brian Wieser pegged them at about $15.4 billion in his January overview of 2009 and forecast for 2010.

Comparing these numbers with PIB estimates, it would appear the magazine industry as a whole is giving advertisers discounts ranging from 27% to 57% off the official rate cards.

It should be remembered that these figures are general, however, as some magazine publishers (like Conde Nast) have a reputation for offering few if any ad page discounts. By contrast, other publishers have reportedly offered discounts of over 70%.

BoSacks Speaks Out: On the Power of Print Campaign

2010-03-03T08:06:00.001-05:00

Once again into the valley rode the Fortune 500. Once again, into the breach they ride feeling the need to defend the pious honor and value of print. Once again, they completely miss the damn target, this time by a mile, a 90 million dollar mile. I am not saying that as an industry there aren't things that we should be doing to put a finger in the leaking dike. But the dike still has integrity and is still holding back a vast sum of print revenue and print advertising. I am saying that what we do needs to be smart and well targeted. This campaign isn't.

I guess my complaint is their marksmanship. There isn't any. The people who put this campaign together to protect print don't have a clue what they are doing and who to aim at. It is also clear that the instigators of this campaign don't use the Internet or any digital component therein. I say print has much integrity and life left in it, but you wouldn't know it by this desperate ad campaign.

The campaign claims to target advertisers, shareholders and industry influencers. Well listen up my friends, you just insulted them all. The media buyers live in a digital world. When you bellow in one of the ads that, "The Internet is fleeting. Magazines are immersive," every media buyer knows that is pure bunk. It is the Internet that is immersive, and the kids that buy the ads and spend the advertising money know it. They live on Facebook, twitter and hundreds of other social network sites and programs. You display an utter lack of contemporary culture and knowledge. You show your dotage at every opportunity. Don't attack your customers where they live. Media buyers live on the web and only visit magazines. And in my book, visiting is OK and can still be very profitable, but not if you try to tell them that they live in a fleeting, soon- to-be-evaporated world. That is a lie.

Oh, and the other tag line from yesterday's report – "We surf the Internet. We swim in magazines." Oh Really? Perhaps you missed the report that the web is now the 2nd most trusted place for news – second only to TV. Perhaps you missed the news that 57% of the webs social media users are over the age of 35. Perhaps you didn't know that Facebook has more than 400 million active users, and of those active users, 61 percent of Facebook's users are middle-aged or older.

All I am saying is that the campaign is a total waste. Exactly to whom is it directed and exactly what are your expectations on an ROI? Is this the campaign that will save the nation of print?

Look, I love print and have been deeply involved in it for over 40 years. It is a beautiful technology. It still has great merit and worth. We will survive by being what we are – useful, informative, reasonably priced and unbreakably transportable. We have the best editors and writers on the planet and have the ability to band together thousands and sometimes, hundreds of thousands, of like-minded readers to our brands on a regular basis.

More or less that is who we are. You may think I have over-reacted, and perhaps that is so. But I firmly believe that attacking the web and the future of information distribution is, at best, terribly misguided.
The Internet is not going to go away, get smaller, nor become irrelevant.

BoSacks Speaks Out: Why Print Will Survive

2010-01-03T14:35:00.000-05:00

BoSacks Speaks Out: Why Print Will Survive

As we close the year out, I wanted to take the time to wish you all a happy and prosperous New Year. I have specifically used the term prosperous because I think it is still a very achievable goal for many of us, if not all. I haven't held my punches in this newsletter in the past nor will I now. We are in a period of tremendous change and upheaval in an industry that was once king of its particular hill.

I have compete faith in the lucrative future of the printing industry and the paginated products we produce, which I continue to tell my many friends and associates, some of whom actually own the printing plants where you print the magazines that you work on. I continue to advise them that there is time to adjust to the new paradigms as we shift from what once was to what will be.

I think there are billions of dollars being made and yet to be made in print publishing. And those sums will be around for quite some time for the nimble, the quick and the niche .

There are and will be continuous forks in the road to all our future developments. Do I believe print will continue? Yes. Do I believe that the predominant readership and the predominant advertising dollars will be going digital? Yes, I do. But I predict no deaths, only multiple and various new avenues of content distribution. Some more profitable than others. The print industry has lost at least 10 billion dollars and there's a good chance we might lose more. Yet, I think we can still keep a reasonable amount of what is left for a considerable amount of time.

Just like newspapers and radio who were once king of the hill, they are still here and making billions. TV is still here and making billions, too. So will print be around and viable? Not only viable, but profitable. We can do this if we get back to the basics. The very basic position is that it is our editorial above all else that is of interest to the reader. Ads are nice for both the publisher and the reader, but it is our edit and our unique words that make for longevity and profitability. If we have something worth knowing, then it is worth paying for on any substrate. That is the formula we forget from time to time. The only thing we really have going for us is the knowledge we have that others, especially our readers, do not. All else is smoke and mirrors.

Digital reading and digital platforms are growing faster than anyone can keep track of. Digital will soon be totally ubiquitous and provide data that is perhaps more useful than print because of its ability probe deep into the depths of any conversation. But print is a buffer from the world around us, and that has a certain charm all its own. Many have postulated that it is that very lack of ability to "connect" that is the charisma of the printed product. But I wouldn't want to back a business plan on that concept as we move forward. Our children do not require nor covet a disconnection.

I believe that niche printed titles will continue to provide a strong platform. That those select readers will be the readers who are willing to pay for the product in their hands . I also believe that advertisers will still want to reach the niched "unknown" readers because they represent a very special and devoted "clique" of potential buyers of the advertisers' products.

So, as we proceed into the next decade, I wish you tremendous prosperity and happiness. No matter what happens, the written word will prevail and publishers will conjure a way to profit from the transaction and delivery of thought and creative thinking. It has ever been so.

I'll see you in the next decade. My best to you and yours.

BoSacks Speaks Out: Google Offers Digitized Magazines

2009-11-10T11:12:00.002-05:00

BoSacks Speaks Out: I have long held the theory and prophesized in this newsletter and elsewhere, that digital magazines will save our industry. Aggregated data and web sites are not the solution to our woes; paginated performance and delivery is. If there is a future for magazine publishers and you have a part in it, it is that simple.

There are many companies that provide digital magazines today and there might be many more on the horizon. Some will make the test of time and prosper and others will not. But those that survive will be part of our new infrastructure for a long time to come. In magazine geologic time, we are finally minutes away from the right-reading, easy-to-use digital substrate. When that happens, the brilliance of the digital magazine format will become clear to dullest of luddites. The magazine industry needs to be working on competent easy-to-read digital editions now that are built for the substrate that they live in.
There are good digital editions and there are terrible digital editions out there right now. The publishers that have retooled their content and designed their product for ease of use and ease of the reading experience are doing quite well.

One of the best examples that I know of is VIV magazine. They are pioneering the non-zoom-in digital edition. If you haven't seen it, please check it out. Look at the ads, look at the edit and look at the amazingly pleasant reading experience. Any topic can be covered this way. This just happens to be woman's fashion. Popular Science has done the same thing with their Popular Science Genius edition.

In the article below you see that Google is getting onto the digital magazine space. We had best as publishers prepare our own editions of paginated media before someone else takes that space away from us. If we don't do our best to absolutely own that turf, someone else will.
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Reaganhttp://www.observer.com/2009/media/google-books-whacky-magazine-archives
Google Books has just launched a digitized magazine stand. In their never-ending quest to archive all media, from Web sites to books, Google is taking on the publishing world and scanning entire issues of magazines, ads and all. Most issues are usually two or three years old--or even a few decades old. It's kind of like heading into your parents' attic and checking out all the yellowingLIFE issues--only online.

Jeffrey Pang, a software engineer at Google Books, built the new feature. He kept getting requests from friends and family to allow them to browse all the magazines available on Google Books. Before, they had to search for them individually. "Someone even created a Facebook group called Get Google Magazine Search to provide a list of indexed titles," he wrote on the Google Book's official blog yesterday. "The group has 45 members and growing, so before it reached millions of members and there were protests in front of my house, I decided that I better act fast."

Users can browse magazine covers or look at an alphabetical list of titles. There's also links on some issues' tables of contents, so users can go directly to specific articles.

Google announced last September that they would add more magazine archives and current magazines online. As they wrote on their blog, if someone searched for "hank aaron pursuing babe ruth's record" on Google Books, they'd find a link to a 1973 Ebony article about Hank Aaron, written as he closed in on Babe Ruth's original record for career home runs. You can read the article in full color and in its original context, just as you would in the printed magazine. "Explore other publications, like Popular Science, New York Magazine, or (for you physics enthusiasts) the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, to rediscover historical interviews, do-it-yourself articles, and even a piece on canine eyewear. In many cases, these magazines aren't just history as history, but history as perspective - a way of understanding today."

There's plenty to click through, but here are a few titles and issues we suggest you check out:
Mother Jones' January/February 2000 issue - Read Ian Frazier's tribute to pay phones and how they "recall a commonality in our culture." Or Richard Dreyfuss on how Agent Orange continued to affect the Vietnamese 25 years after the U.S. originally dumped the chemical weapon on their land.

New York Magazine's Dec. 22, 1997 issue - Oh, David Denby onTitanic! MOMA's expansion, Daniel Boulud's Daniel restaurant, Ted Turner's Media Magazine are all there. And, Janeane Garofalo, Leigh Feldman, Jerry Speyer, Stephen Stondheim are featured as New Yorkers of the Year. Ah, the good ol' days.

Best Life Magazine's November 2008 issue - Mark Zimmerman's big profile of Anderson Cooper.
The Rotarian Magazine's December 2008 issue - Judith Dimentuncovers the "British Schindler." How Sir Nicholas Winton saved nearly 700 Czech children from the Nazis.

BoSacks Speaks Out: The Future of Publishing Explaine

2009-10-27T08:35:00.001-04:00

BoSacks Speaks Out: The Future of Publishing Explained

In just the last few months, I have delivered many lectures to many groups involved with the publishing industry. I have been to Santa Fe to speak to the International Regional Magazine Assoc. and to San Diego to speak to RISI, representing the global forest products industry. I have been to Washington, DC to speak to ASBPE (American Society of Business Publication Editors). I have been to New York for the BPA and to Boulder for the MPA. And today I will be speaking at The Digital Publishing and Advertising Conference (DPAC 4) in New York City.

No matter where I go or who I talk to the essence of what everybody wants to know is the same thing - what is the future of publishing, and what is going to be my place in that future? Without all the details, my message is and has been that we are headed into the next golden age of publishing.

That being said, I wanted you to know that one of my other companies,mediaIDEAS, announced the launch of a new comprehensive report analyzing and quantifying the opportunities for e-paper e-readers over the next decade. This might sound like a plug on my part, but it isn't. What I want to do is share some of the broader insights of the report and key in on what I see are some of the opportunities of our industry.

My partner and the report's author, Nick Hampshire, stated that "E-paper e-readers will be one of the major disruptive technologies of the early 21st century." He said, "It will change the nature of publishing and related print industries forever, ushering in a host of innovative ways to present, market, and distribute content."

The report shows that since the first e-paper e-reader came onto the market in 2004, these devices, with their "green" credentials of reducing paper consumption, have already proved very popular with consumers, and the market for them is booming. By 2006, there were 3 types of devices available, by 2007, there were 5, and currently there are over 40. This number will more than double in the next twelve months. Unit sales are also booming. In 2008, 1.1 million e-paper display-based e-readers were sold. In 2010 that number will rise to about 6 million. And by 2020 global annual e-reader sales will reach 446 million units with a value of over $25 billion.

Therefore, if we can all agree that the digital universe that we now find ourselves embedded into is not going to go away, then I think we have to seriously consider what the primary reading substrate is going to be. If Nick is right in his research and there will be 6 million e-paper display-based e-readers sold in 2010, the publishing community has to stand up and take notice. We have to know and recognize that people will be reading on those platforms and they will be reading our words, thoughts, and ideas.

The questions that will obviously come to mind next are, how will we make money and what is the correct business platform? I will admit that like everybody else I am still working on the answers. I have proposed the Cable TV model of consortium publishing for a decade, and I have read that Time Inc. management is now focusing on that idea. We have all heard that Rupert Murdoch and all the newspapers are trying to develop a pay-for-copy model. I am not too certain of the success of that approach, but I am sure that people will write and people will read and that it will be a lucrative business to put the reader and the writer together.

So the platform will clearly be digital e-paper and any business model may have to follow the cart. But to think that there will be no successful business model for digital publishing is ludicrous. There are hundreds of billions of dollars for grabs in the information distribution business. I do not guarantee you a piece of the action, but I know damn well that plenty of people will do very well in the new digital age of publishing. Think fast, think courageous, and think digital.

BoSacks Speaks Out: Are More Shutdowns Expected?

2009-10-07T14:18:00.003-04:00

BoSacks Speaks Out: Are any of you actually shocked by this news of venerable magazine closings. Is this a repeat of the bible story of Joseph and the seven years of plenty and seven years of lean? Well, we have had our years of plenty in decades of successful profitability for the magazine industry leading to what appears to be an excess saturation and duplication of our product. I think that after some introspection we as an industry will arise healthy and perhaps a bit leaner as in the biblicalallegory, but also better able to move onward and forward. These cycles are, sad to say, normal. I think when we get a chance to look back at this point in time with the perspective of history it might even be perceived as good for the industry. That is no doubt incredibly hard to take right now if you have just been laid off and your magazine has closed. But five years from now when you will be doing something else, you will look back at your career and you will have the perspective of history to help you see that all this was inevitable and, in an odd sort of way, perhaps necessary.

"A man's life of any worth is a continual allegory - and very few eyes can see the mystery of his life - a life like the scriptures- figurative" John Keats (English Romantic Poet. 1795-1821)
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Conde Nast's closure of Gourmet shakes up magazine industry

By Walter Hamilton and Russ ParsonsReporting from Los Angeles and New York

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-conde-nast6-2009oct06,0,7266456.story

The end of the venerable publication and three others underscores the swift and brutal fall of the once highflying business amid a steep drop in ad revenue. Two years ago, Conde Nast's Vogue published its biggest issue, an advertising-packed behemoth that symbolized the prosperity of New York's glittering magazine industry as it rode the twin booms in the economy and luxury spending to dramatic heights. Generous expense accounts were de rigueur at glossy fashion and lifestyle magazines. Some top editors and publishers enjoyed clothing allowances and mortgage assistance. Even lowly assistants flitted about in chauffeur-driven town cars. But that culture has been turned on its head as the magazine business reels from the battered economy, the drop in advertising revenue and restraints on expenses. Conde Nast's unexpected closure Monday of venerable Gourmet and three other magazines underscored the swift and brutal fall of what had been one of the city's most elite and free-spending industries.

The folding of Gourmet, in particular, shook up the insular magazine world. The 69-year-old arbiter of culinary taste was edited by Ruth Reichl, a bestselling author and former restaurant critic for the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times. The closure caught Reichl herself flat-footed. "Like everyone else, I found out this morning," she said. "I can't talk about it now, it's too raw. I've got to pack up my office."

Reichl elaborated in a Twitter message to readers: "Thank you all SO much for this outpouring of support. It means a lot. Sorry not to be posting now, but I'm packing. We're all stunned, sad."

For Conde Nast, surviving the recession and a steep drop in ad revenue was paramount in the decision to close Gourmet, Modern Bride, Elegant Bride and Cookie magazines. "These changes, combined with cost and workforce reductions now underway throughout the company, will speed the recovery of our current businesses and enable us to pursue new ventures," Chief Executive Charles H. Townsend said. Among those new initiatives, to be detailed in the coming weeks, he said, are digital versions of the company's brands using "new devices and distribution channels."

There had been rumors that Gourmet might be in the cross hairs because Conde Nast also owns its chief competitor, Bon Appetit, based in Los Angeles. Bon Appetit has more readers than Gourmet, 1.3 million to 950,000, Conde Nast said. Gourmet also had a reputation for being expensive to publish, with long features by well-known writers. Bon Appetit was focused on recipe-driven content.

The industry contraction is being driven by the plunge in ad pages -- the lifeblood of the industry. Ad pages have slumped 22% industrywide this year, and some publications have suffered far worse, according to Media Industry Newsletter. Vogue is off 33%, Architectural Digest is down 49%, and Esquire has fallen 27%. At Conde Nast's two food publications, Gourmet saw a 46.9% drop in ad revenue and a 50% decline in ad pages in the second quarter from last year's April-June period, while Bon Appetit's revenue fell 36% and ad pages declined 40%, according to Publishers Information Bureau.

It's unclear whether the drop in advertising has hit bottom, but throughout the industry employees and experts are bracing for more job cuts. "There is fear everywhere," said Samir Husni, who heads the Magazine Innovation Center at the University of Mississippi. "Fear of losing jobs, fear of losing entire magazines." The culture and spending at BusinessWeek are far more subdued than at Conde Nast's glamour magazines, but employees' fear for their jobs is palpable. Owner McGraw-Hill Cos. put the well-regarded but money-losing magazine on the block over the summer, and its writers, well-versed in chronicling corporate America's downsizing, expect deep cuts regardless of who buys the magazine. "There's a sense of the inevitable," said one employee who did not want to be identified for fear of antagonizing bosses. "However this shakes out, a lot of people are going to be out of work."

The cutbacks carry a particular sting at Conde Nast because of the company's famous spending habits and the imperious manners of some top editors. The main character in the movie "The Devil Wears Prada" was a thinly veiled knockoff of Vogue editor Anna Wintour. And prized editors and publishers are as recognizable for their appearances at the trendiest restaurants and fanciest parties as for the stewardship of their publications. Conde Nast had hired management consulting firm McKinsey & Co. to review its operations, and McKinsey recommended roughly 25% budget cuts at some magazines.

More temperate spending has been showing up in ways large and small. At last month's Fashion Week in New York, a must-be-seen event for the glitterati of New York glamour magazines, some Vogue editors hailed cabs rather than hopping into waiting town cars as in years past, according to one observer. That's a far cry from the 1999 launch party for Talk magazine -- a flashy but short-lived publication headed by celebrity editor Tina Brown and bankrolled by a joint venture of Walt Disney Co. and Hearst Magazines. It was an extravagant affair for 800 guests at the Statue of Liberty. "It was one hell of a party," Garfinkle recalled. "You don't see that anymore."

Are any of you actually shocked by this news of venerable magazine closings. Is this a repeat of the bible story of Joseph and the seven years of plenty and seven years of lean? Well, we have had our years of plenty in decades of successful profitability for the magazine industry leading to what appears to be an excess saturation and duplication of our product. I think that after some introspection we as an industry will arise healthy and perhaps a bit leaner as in the biblicalallegory, but also better able to move onward and forward. These cycles are, sad to say, normal.

I think when we get a chance to look back at this point in time with the perspective of history it might even be perceived as good for the industry. That is no doubt incredibly hard to take right now if you have just been laid off and your magazine has closed. But five years from now when you will be doing something else, you will look back at your career and you will have the perspective of history to help you see that all this was inevitable and, in an odd sort of way, perhaps necessary.

"A man's life of any worth is a continual allegory - and very few eyes can see the mystery of his life - a life like the scriptures- figurative" John Keats (English Romantic Poet. 1795-1821)
Conde Nast's closure of Gourmet shakes up magazine industryBy Walter Hamilton and Russ ParsonsReporting from Los Angeles and New Yorkhttp://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-conde-nast6-2009oct06,0,7266456.story The end of the venerable publication and three others underscores the swift and brutal fall of the once highflying business amid a steep drop in ad revenue. Two years ago, Conde Nast's Vogue published its biggest issue, an advertising-packed behemoth that symbolized the prosperity of New York's glittering magazine industry as it rode the twin booms in the economy and luxury spending to dramatic heights. Generous expense accounts were de rigueur at glossy fashion and lifestyle magazines. Some top editors and publishers enjoyed clothing allowances and mortgage assistance. Even lowly assistants flitted about in chauffeur-driven town cars. But that culture has been turned on its head as the magazine business reels from the battered economy, the drop in advertising revenue and restraints on expenses.

Conde Nast's unexpected closure Monday of venerable Gourmet and three other magazines underscored the swift and brutal fall of what had been one of the city's most elite and free-spending industries. The folding of Gourmet, in particular, shook up the insular magazine world. The 69-year-old arbiter of culinary taste was edited by Ruth Reichl, a bestselling author and former restaurant critic for the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times. The closure caught Reichl herself flat-footed. "Like everyone else, I found out this morning," she said. "I can't talk about it now, it's too raw. I've got to pack up my office." Reichl elaborated in a Twitter message to readers: "Thank you all SO much for this outpouring of support. It means a lot. Sorry not to be posting now, but I'm packing. We're all stunned, sad."

The moves mark a new cover story: Cost cutting is suddenly in style. Publishers have closed numerous magazines this year, reduced the circulation and frequency of some publications and tossed dozens of journalists out of work. The result is a downsizing of the industry's larger-than-life character. "I don't think we'll ever see the heyday again," said Roberta Garfinkle, director for print strategy at TargetCast tcm, which buys advertising for large companies. "The business will come back as the economy starts to rebound, but certainly not to the levels it was once." The carnage at Conde Nast -- the queen bee of New York glossies with such marquee titles as Vogue, Vanity Fair and the New Yorker -- shouldn't have been a surprise given that Conde had two food magazines and three bridal titles. There had been rumors that Gourmet might be in the cross hairs because Conde Nast also owns its chief competitor, Bon Appetit, based in Los Angeles. Bon Appetit has more readers than Gourmet, 1.3 million to 950,000, Conde Nast said. Gourmet also had a reputation for being expensive to publish, with long features by well-known writers. Bon Appetit was focused on recipe-driven content. The industry contraction is being driven by the plunge in ad pages -- the lifeblood of the industry. Ad pages have slumped 22% industrywide this year, and some publications have suffered far worse, according to Media Industry Newsletter.

Vogue is off 33%, Architectural Digest is down 49%, and Esquire has fallen 27%. At Conde Nast's two food publications, Gourmet saw a 46.9% drop in ad revenue and a 50% decline in ad pages in the second quarter from last year's April-June period, while Bon Appetit's revenue fell 36% and ad pages declined 40%, according to Publishers Information Bureau. It's unclear whether the drop in advertising has hit bottom, but throughout the industry employees and experts are bracing for more job cuts. "There is fear everywhere," said Samir Husni, who heads the Magazine Innovation Center at the University of Mississippi. "Fear of losing jobs, fear of losing entire magazines." The culture and spending at BusinessWeek are far more subdued than at Conde Nast's glamour magazines, but employees' fear for their jobs is palpable. Owner McGraw-Hill Cos. put the well-regarded but money-losing magazine on the block over the summer, and its writers, well-versed in chronicling corporate America's downsizing, expect deep cuts regardless of who buys the magazine. "There's a sense of the inevitable," said one employee who did not want to be identified for fear of antagonizing bosses. "However this shakes out, a lot of people are going to be out of work."

At last month's Fashion Week in New York, a must-be-seen event for the glitterati of New York glamour magazines, some Vogue editors hailed cabs rather than hopping into waiting town cars as in years past, according to one observer. That's a far cry from the 1999 launch party for Talk magazine -- a flashy but short-lived publication headed by celebrity editor Tina Brown and bankrolled by a joint venture of Walt Disney Co. and Hearst Magazines. It was an extravagant affair for 800 guests at the Statue of Liberty. "It was one hell of a party," Garfinkle recalled. "You don't see that anymore."

BoSacks Speaks Out: New 'Pay As You Go' Online Magazine Sub Service

2009-09-02T18:22:00.004-04:00

BoSacks Speaks Out: New 'Pay As You Go' Online Magazine Sub Service

Sometimes I just sit in total wonder about our industry, and ponder how, if ever, are we ever going to get to the promised land? Here is an interesting idea by Contrix. If I understand this "new" service correctly, the intention in this digital age is to slow down the digital process, ignore the successful Amazon model and have new subscribers, pay two months in advance to wait like our grandparents did for about six to eight weeks to get their new printed magazines. Yes, I think that makes sense, don't you?

I also find it interesting that Contrix explains that they got the idea from Netflix. I'm OK with that, but perhaps they never actually joined Netflix. In most cases you get the damn movie the next day, not in six to eight weeks.

Both Maghound and MAGpass have the magic publishing formula only half right. The monthly format in the cable TV model for payments is spot on. The delivery system offered is not only counterproductive to success, it is an ancient formula that completely misses the expectation levels of today's consumers.

To add to that Contrix is offering no chance to experiment with multiple titles and is locking in clients to a full year subscription. I could be wrong, but I don't think so. This is a 20th century analog execution in a 21st digital world. I wish them the very best of luck, as I believe they will need it.

This is the third time; I hope good luck lies in odd numbers.... There is divinity in odd numbers, either in nativity, chance, or death. William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616), "The Merry Wives of Windsor", Act 5 scene 1

Contrix Inc. to Launch ‘Pay As You Go’ Online Magazine Sub Service
MAGpass will allow users to subscribe to hundreds of consumer magazines and pay a monthly fee.
By Chandra Johnson-Greene
http://www.audiencedevelopment.com/2009/contrix+inc+launch+%E2%80%98pay+you+go%E2%80%99+online+magazine+sub+service

Interactive marketing agency Contrix Inc., which operates magazine subscription Web site Magazine-Agent.com, recently announced that it will launch a new online magazine subscription service within the next few weeks called MAGpass, which will allow users to subscribe to hundreds of consumer magazines on a “pay as you go” basis.

Like Time Inc.’s Maghound service, which launched last year, MAGpass will allow registered users to browse and order multiple magazine titles from different publishers and pay one monthly fee. That is, however, where the similarity ends.

While Maghound’s titles are sold on tiered pricing levels and users are encouraged to swap titles whenever they like, MAGpass users will be locked into a one-year subscription rate (authorized by the publisher) that will be divided into 12 monthly payments. Customers can cancel their subscription at any time. At the time of renewal, the customer will lock in the next year at the current rate of the magazine listed on the Web site.

MAGpass sales will be classified with ABC as “individual net paid” subscriptions, while Maghound’s sales are classified as “single copy sales.” MAGpass and its partner publishers will retain co-ownership of subscriber names and addresses.

According to president/CEO Reha Kocatas, the idea for the MAGpass service came up in 2003, when the company was trying to find a way to get continuous service subscriptions to work online. “In the online space, price jacking is a problem,” he told AD. “A customer would order a subscription through a credit card program and then go online and find that the same subscription was being sold for less. Explaining how subscriptions are priced was futile. It was causing too many customer service issues.”

Inspired by the growing popularity of online movie rental service Netflix, Kocatas said he wanted to come up with a service that would bring magazine subscriptions more in line with other “pay as you go” services such as cable and cell phone. “The average Magazine-Agent.com customer buys 2.3 magazines a year,” he said. “If their yearly bill for those subscriptions is $46 and then a year from now they get a bill for $100, there’s an incentive for them to cancel. But by spreading those payments over a course of a year, the price is so negligible, that they won’t want to cancel.”

And unlike Maghound, which processes orders through its own fulfillment system, subscriptions sold through MAGpass will be processed through each individual publisher’s fulfillment center, therefore, users will not be given an actual date of when their first issue will arrive. Because of that, according to Kocatas, the company decided to have users pay for the first two months of the subscription up front. “It wouldn’t be good if we billed them today and then again 30 days from now and they haven’t received they first issue yet,” he says. “We want them to be in the fulfillment flow by the time they’re hit with the second charge.”

Kocatas declined to say how many publishers have signed up so far to have their titles sold on MAGpass.com, but he says that the goal is have 200+ magazines available by launch time, which should be “within the next two weeks.”

He added that there are no plans to shut down Magazine-Agent.com, but that MAGpass will serve as a compliment to the site and there will be cross-marketing between the two. “We expect that MAGpass users will skew much younger than Magazine-Agent.com,” he said.

Ad Spending Confidence Rebounds, Improves For Most Major Media

2009-07-21T10:52:00.005-04:00

Ad Spending Confidence Rebounds, Improves For Most Major Media
by Joe Mandese
http://www.mediapost.com/
Economic pessimism among marketers and agency media buyers appears to have bottomed out last spring and their ad spending plans are trending upward for most major media, according to the most recent data from an every-other-monthly tracking report surveying the "advertising confidence" of key media decision-makers.

The latest Advertiser Optimism Report, being released this week by Advertiser Perceptions Inc., shows plans are improving for every medium except for local newspapers, and that digital media such as online and mobile advertising are indexing well on the optimistic side of advertising spending plans. Cable TV and outdoor media also are improving and now have more media decision makers planning to boost their budgets than to decrease them over the next six months, and while broadcast TV, radio, magazines and national newspapers all are still negative on balance, they are also all improving from low confidence points earlier this year.

"Leading the way are marketers, who are more optimistic than their agencies," says Ken Pearl, a partner in API, which began tracking ad spending confidence levels bi-monthly this year following news of the U.S. economic recession last fall. API historically conducts big semi-annual surveys tracking the perceptions of advertisers and agency media buyers about the major media, including their confidence levels, but opted to conduct the confidence tracking more frequently this year to monitor an inflection point in the advertising economy.

That appeared to be the case in API's last optimism survey, conducted last spring, which showed little or no erosion from a survey conducted in February. At that point, Pearl surmised that advertising "pessimism" had "bottomed out," but said further tracking would be necessary before concluding that advertising economy was staging a turnaround. The most recent survey, which is based on the responses of more than 200 media decision makers over the past several weeks, indicates that their plans for most major media are once again ascending, especially among marketers who seem slightly more optimistic than their agency counterparts.

The Internet is not Free

2009-06-12T10:06:00.003-04:00

By Bob Sacks

There was an article posted by Jon Fine of Businessweek , titled “Barry Diller And I Don't Agree About Charging For Online Content” . This article, as you might expect, got me all riled up. I am so very sick of this false discussion.

Can we please just start at the beginning?

The Internet is not free. Depending upon your own special addiction, you pay a hefty fee for entrance alone to the World Wide Web. I pay between all my devices at the very least $300.00 a month. My guess is if I truly added it up, I would be shocked and it would probably much more. I choose sanity and I don't really want to know how much this free information is costing me. So I don't want to do the math. Where exactly do you define that as free?

Oh, you mean after I pay at the gate for entrance into the park, I have to buy tickets for each individual ride. Disney used to be that way in years past and they changed the policy and they ain't going back.

If we as publishers are to make a fair profit, it will be as some sort of consortium deal just like cable TV. Do we pay micro-payments to watch the shows we watch after paying the cable fee? Hell, no! We pay up front for anything we feel like watching at any given time. That is the simple answer.

So I am asking Jon Fine who wrote this article, to send this note to Barry Diller and get it done already. The rest of the discussion is just ridiculous. If we don't get it up front we aren't likely to get it at all.

Making Old Media New Again - Give Readers Insight into Tomorrow

2009-04-13T20:51:00.002-04:00

Making Old Media New Again - Give Readers Insight into Tomorrow
By L. GORDON CROVITZ
It's make-or-break time for many newspapers. Denver and Seattle recently lost dailies, the Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times are both in bankruptcy, and owners of the Boston Globe and San Francisco Chronicle threaten closure. One reader mourned the loss of her local newspaper in Connecticut by lamenting that she had gone from living in a city to living off just another exit on Interstate 95. As comedian Stephen Colbert put it last week, "The impending death of the newspaper industry: Where will they print the obituary?"

Creative destruction is blowing hard through the news industry, as digital technology gives readers access to endless sources of news but undermines the ability of publishers to support news departments. City newspapers are no longer the dominant way people get news or the main way advertisers reach consumers. The recession is accelerating these trends, with advertising so soft even Web-only news operations, which don't have the legacy costs of print, are now struggling to support journalism.

As the remaining city newspapers rethink themselves, editors and publishers might consult a road map for how newspapers can live alongside new media that was drawn up more than 50 years ago by Bernard Kilgore, outlined in a new biography by former Journal executive Richard Tofel, "Restless Genius: Barney Kilgore, The Wall Street Journal and the Invention of Modern Journalism."

Kilgore had remarkable judgment early about the journalistic issue of our day: how readers use old media, new media and both. When Kilgore became managing editor of the Journal in 1941, he inherited a business model that technology had undermined. Founded in 1889 to provide market news and stock prices to individual investors, the Journal lost half its circulation as this basic information became widely available.

Kilgore observed that then new media such as radio meant market news was available in real time. Some cities had a dozen newspapers that had gained the Journal's once-valuable ability to report share prices.

The Journal had to change. Technology increasingly meant readers would know the basic facts of news as it happened. He announced, "It doesn't have to have happened yesterday to be news," and said that people were more interested in what would happen tomorrow. He crafted the front page "What's News -- " column to summarize what had happened, but focused on explaining what the news meant.

On the morning after Pearl Harbor, other newspapers recounted the facts already known to all the day before through radio. The Journal's page-one story instead began, "War with Japan means industrial revolution in the United States." It outlined the implications for the economy, industry and commodity and financial markets.

Kilgore led the Journal's circulation to one million by the 1960s from 33,000 in the 1940s by adapting the newspaper to a role reflecting how people used different media for news. His rallying cry was, "The easiest thing in the world for a reader to do is to stop reading."

Business and financial news is different from the general news focus of city newspapers, but in 1958 the owners of the New York Herald Tribune approached Kilgore for help. Mr. Tofel uncovered a five-page memo Kilgore wrote them on how to keep city newspapers essential to readers. The Herald Tribune, he wrote, is "too much a newspaper that might be published in Philadelphia, Washington or Chicago just as readily as in metropolitan New York." Kilgore urged the "compact model newspaper." Readers valued their time, so the newspaper should have just one section, with larger editions on Sunday when people had more time to read.

His advice was clearly ahead of its time. The owners didn't heed it, and the Herald Tribune went out of business in 1967. But his observations on what readers want from city newspapers may be even more true in today's online world. Readers increasingly know yesterday what happened yesterday through Web sites, television and news alerts.

"Kilgore's first critical finding," Mr. Tofel wrote, was "that readers seek insight into tomorrow even more than an account of yesterday." This "may only now be getting through to many editors and publishers." Indeed, at a time when print readership is declining, The Economist, with its weekly focus on interpretation, is gaining circulation. The Journal continues to focus on what readers need, growing the number of individuals paying for the newspaper and the Web site.

If readers would prefer more-compact city newspapers, a less-is-more approach could help cut newsprint, printing, distribution and other costs that don't add to the journalism. Newspaper editors could craft a new, forward-looking role for print, alongside the what's-happening-right-now focus of digital news.

There's a lot of experimentation by editors around the country to find out what people want from their print and online news. For city newspapers on the brink, the Barney Kilgore approach might deliver some badly needed good news.

See BoSacks Speaking Out for Free:

2009-03-15T13:59:00.003-04:00

Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.
Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809 - 1892)

See BoSacks Speaking Out for Free:
I have been postulating and pontificating in this Newsletter for years, but I rarely mention to you that you can sometimes see me venting live. I have been delivering lectures on the future of publishing for more than 15 years. My presentation is never the same, because I rewrite it and update it on an almost daily basis from the pages of this publication and from my other publishing research company Media-Ideas.

The talk that I plan to deliver at the Publishing Business Conference, March 23-25, 2009 at the NY Marriott Marquis, simply put, is my best work ever. Really. It is detailed, informative provocative and, believe it or not, fun. It might even help you keep your job or perhaps give you the perspective to seek and get a new one.

What I did, in cooperation with Publishing Executive magazine, is make arrangements for my readers to be able to see my lecture totally for free. There are two ways this can happen. One is a discount code that will give you FREE access to any two sessions (plus the Keynote sessions that are open to everyone); the other will give you access to the entire conference at half price. Just for fun, and because one day I clearly had too much time on my hands, I've made this short video for your enjoyment. Click here

Here are the details to register to see me for FREE and get access to the conference Keynote sessions, an Expo Pass, plus 2 free Sessions. Click here and use the discount code: BOSACKS195
-- OR --
Attend the FULL CONFERENCE for half price: (pay only $437.50) with Discount Code: BOSACKS200.

I will be speaking at 2 sessions:
· The Digital Future of Publishing: Are You Prepared?
Monday, March 23, 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM

· Steering Your Company Through the Transformative Shift in the Media Industry
Tuesday, March 24, 8:30 AM - 9:30 AM
(NOTE: This is the Keynote Panel)

As an added FREE bonus, you're also invited to attend:
· Digital Magazine Symposium
Tuesday, March 24, 10:00 AM - 12:30 PM

MORE INFO: http://www.PublishingBusiness.com

REGISTER : http://publishingbusiness.cvent.com/event/register

The Key to Publishing's Survival

2009-01-21T06:29:00.008-05:00

The Key to Publishing's Survival
Bob Sacks www.bosacks.com

The key to survival in the near and far future is for everyone in the publishing business to embrace everything digital. That doesn't mean you should stop printing magazines, but it does mean that if you aren't comfortable in the digital world you won't/can't survive. It is that simple.

All publishing leaders must jump in with both feet, learn the new languages, join Facebook, have at least 3 e-mail addresses, and get a Twitter page. If your kids speak the digital language and you don't, how can you possibly lead your flagship publication or publishing association into the new world? The answer clearly is that you cannot. If you are fearful of the Web's Second Life or worse, don't know what that is, then you can't have one.

To survive you must embrace digital technology like there's no tomorrow, because if you don't, there won't be. No one should be spared this digital education. Let me repeat that so we are on the same page: No one can be spared this digital education. That includes everyone from the mail room to the executive boards. I mean the leadership of MPA to the ABC. I am including the membership of the PBAA, GCA, PIA and the AARP. If you can't upload a video file and are not subscribed to several RSS feeds, you should be fired. If you can't convert a word docx file to a PDF, you are history. If you can't do the voodoo, you sure as hell shouldn't/can't manage those that do.

The rate of change in digital technologies is accelerating at an inhuman pace. If you don’t use it and aren't comfortable living in it, you can’t understand the importance of adapting your flagship for the times ahead, and you won’t be able to stay on the curve, let alone ahead of it.

I have recently come to believe that too much of our leadership is either incapable or too fearful to understand the true future of publishing. I think that we have limitless opportunities before us - the chance to reach more people and more advertisers instantly and more efficiently than ever before.

It is ok to love and respect our past and yet be prepared for the prosperous adventures ahead of us in the new world. There are 4 billion people connected to the web right now. That number will only grow. This should make any publisher salivate with here-to-fore undreamt of possibilities.

The question is who is going to lead you there. The old adage has never been truer: lead, follow or get out of the way. You have no other option

BoSacks Speaks Out: The Terrible Burden of Destiny

2009-01-05T12:05:00.001-05:00

BoSacks Speaks Out: The Terrible Burden of Destiny
6 guidelines publishers need to consider while pondering their futures.
By Bob Sacks

As we move forward in this economic recession, it is important to remember that while some processes may be slowed, others will continue to fling us forward and create both unexpected opportunities and, depending on your perspective, unfortunate struggles to simply survive. We are faced with, some might say, "the terrible burden of a digital destiny." As an industry, we will adjust and adapt to the conditions at hand, not necessarily because we want to, but because we must.

The following is a series of guidelines or propositions that we must be aware of and be prepared to deal with as we move forward.

1. Advancements by the digital universe will never retreat, and will only improve and become more ubiquitous.
Digital publishing will continue to become a stronger platform that is easier and easier to use. The print-only world has not been able to hold its own, nor will it be able to do so against such formidable odds. If you can't accept this as a truthful premise, you will continue to struggle with your own destiny.

2. Our competition has been totally redefined.
While our publishing competitors used to be easy to identify, today almost any company, group or individual can become a future competitor. New technologies empower this and enable it to be done anywhere on the planet. There is a new and increasingly lower threshold of entry, which means new competitors are in abundance. They can come from anywhere and will come from well below the radar screen. They will be online, global, fast-moving and smart.

3. Content remains important.
A critical concept to understand is that content is more important than the delivery vehicle. This is a new concept for publishers rooted in tree fibers. The digital delivery of news, information, instruction or fiction has just as much validity as pulp-delivered products, and in many cases it has more creditability-the creditability to be timely and immediately fact-checked for accuracy.

4. New revenue models are required.
The new technologies of information distribution offer endless options to reach a world full of future customers. The shipping cost to reach this global market is exactly the same as it is to reach the girl next door. This empowers a style of publishing that I call "universal niche"-an idea, concept or hobby enjoyed by a few on a global basis. Basically, the scale of the available readership redefines small as big.

5. Our audience will increasingly demand to be treated as individuals.
Despite the growing trend of individualism in society, mass media continues to offer the same message to everybody while new media opportunities have the power to offer individual content based on our uniqueness rather than our sameness. This concept combines very nicely with the power of citizen journalism. The "screenager" generation wants to be involved and take part in news reporting. They have grown into a generation that has the ability to be in touch with each other immediately at earlier and earlier ages. This from-birth experience is fostering a new generation of readers who are naturally adept with technology and comfortable with having virtual access to friends, family and the world at large.

6. Advertisers will demand accountability more than ever.
Advertisers increasingly want to reach their customers directly. They want a one-to-one relationship that heretofore was not possible.

Today, that kind of science is not only possible, but perhaps mandatory as a part of doing business. Simply put, digital media offers improved measures of success. Digital publishing has an increasingly important advantage of being able to measure the impact of advertisements, clicks, transactions, etc. As the economy goes through the current parabolic curve of dipping south, flattening out and then starting the climb to profitability again, publishers need to adapt to the inherent changes before them.

Will publishing survive? Definitively yes. Will it survive with the old-school business models of our fathers? Categorically no. Every aspect of publishing has to be reevaluated and reexamined against the digital criteria outlined above and be reconstituted as an advanced publishing formula for the 21st century. It is never going to be the way it was, and sure as the sky is blue, it is not going to be the way it is. Your future is in your hands.

Bob Sacks (aka BoSacks) is a printing/publishing industry consultant and president of The Precision Media Group (BoSacks.com). He is also the co-founder of the research company Media-Ideas (Media-Ideas.net), and publisher and editor of a daily international e-newsletter, Heard on the Web. Sacks has held posts as director of manufacturing and distribution, senior sales manager (paper), chief of operations, pressman, circulator and almost every other job this industry has to offer.

New Magazine Launches Decline for Second Straight Year

2008-12-17T08:26:00.001-05:00

New Magazine Launches Decline for Second Straight Year

Just how many were launched in 2008?

It depends who you ask.

By Dylan Stableford

Folio Magazine

http://www.foliomag.com/2008/new-magazine-launches

There were 335 new magazines launched in 2008.

There also have been 634 new magazines launched in 2008.

Or, there were 191 new magazine launches announced in 2008.

Exactly how many, it seems, depends on who's counting.

According to MediaFinder.com─an online database of U.S. and Canadian magazines-335 were launched in 2008, with health titles accounting for 31 of them. There were 389 new titles launched last year, according to the site.

According to University of Mississippi professor Samir "Mr. Magazine" Husni, 634 new magazines launched through November. The "hot categories," Husni said, continue to be "crafts, homes, metro and sports-same as last year."

In the last four months, he said, there has been somewhat of a surge in launch activity.

But Husni, who tracks launches monthly on his Web site, noted that the number of magazines published with a frequency of four or more is 191, down from 233 during the same period in 2007. (Husni stressed he only counts consumer titles and only the ones he has physical copies of, in hand.)

From 'WSJ.' to Beer

According to the Magazine Publishers of America's "New & Noted" setion of its Web site, there were 191 magazine launches-with titles ranging from the Wall Street Journal's 'WSJ.' to Beer-announced in 2008, down from 271 in 2007.

If there's a number everyone can agree on, however, it's that print magazine launches are, not surprisingly, on the decline.

Between January and November 2006, there were 842 magazine launches by Husni's count, and 636 during the same period in 2007.

According to MediaFinder, the second "hottest" category was regional, with 24 new titles-such as Michigan avenue cropping up in '08. (Although regional was also one of the biggest decliners, down from 42 new launches a year ago.)

Despite the downturn in the economy, magazines serving health, regional, and food interests continued to show growth, "as there continues to be interest in topics close to home," said Trish Hagood, president of Oxbridge Communications, which publishes MediaFinder.com.

Noted Husni: "A lot of the new titles are being published twice or three times a year for some reason."

BoSacks Speaks Out: Surviving Publishing's Perfect Storm?

2008-12-08T23:38:00.001-05:00

BoSacks Speaks Out: Surviving Publishing's Perfect Storm?
By Robert M. Sacks
Let’s face it, traditional publishing is under serious attack. We are facing both the customary enemy of rising manufacturing costs and the nontraditional entry of strong digital competition where once none existed. And if that wasn’t enough, we have the increasingly evident disadvantage of a terrible carbon footprint. This is a perfect storm of tremendous proportions. What are publishers to do? How can we survive?

In the past few weeks, a couple of headlines have crossed my desk. Each alone is powerful enough, but when considered together they offer terra-forming, watershed moments for the magazine industry, and, if viewed correctly, financial hope and a foundation for a very successful publishing enterprise.

The first headline comes from a Media-Ideas press release that claimed that: “In 25 years, digital magazines will command 75 percent of the magazine market.” That is a powerful statement and, even if these calculations are off by 50 percent, it means that almost 40 percent of printed magazines will be gone in 25 years. Will yours be one of those missing titles? Are you gearing up for that kind of transformation?

Media-Ideas attributes this transition to the growth of new and more affordable, flexible e-reading technologies, some apparently ready for deployment as early as 2009. These devices will be full-color, flexible, e-paper-based reading instruments. There will be several stages to the development and release of these new products, but the results will be staggering. I believe that the 25-year time line is conservative, as technology notoriously proceeds much faster than anyone can predict.

The next headline is a statement from the United Nations communications chief, who predicts that more than half of the world’s population will be connected by some sort of mobile phone before 2009. That is a large number of people possessing Web-accessible, text-reading, communication devices. Can you imagine when flexible e-paper, digital-magazine-reproducing products get into that global equation?

The proliferation of powerful, handheld, supercharged communication systems changes everything, including our precepts and concepts of publishing. Technology is no longer only for nerds, or an indulgence for the rich. It’s who we all are and who we will be. It’s embedded in our lives and culture. It’s everywhere, it’s global, and there’s no going back to rolls of parchment, or mass-distributed, carbon-hogging magazine distribution.

Printed magazines will not disappear, but they will become the less dominant reading platform and perhaps exist only for those who can afford them. Of course, printed niche products will continue to thrive, though non-niche titles will not make it—according to Darwin’s law of survival of the fittest or, in this case, Bo’s law of survival of the most uniquely remarkable. And the subset of Bo’s law is that unique remarkability is in the eyes of the distinctive beholder (reader).
So, what am I getting at with this introduction of the new world order of communications? As new generations of e-paper reading devices enter the market, the relevance of digital magazines will take on a whole new importance.

If digital magazines have not made sense to you yet in the 21st century, they will with the advent and ubiquity of portable and flexible e-paper devices.

You can add to this conversation that digital magazines have the increasingly important advantage of being able to measure the impact of everything the reader does—the advertisements, the clicks, transactions, the reading time, the actual engagement of the consumer with the product itself. Publishers must act now on their digital-magazine implementation plans or risk irrelevance in the new media future. PE

Bob Sacks (aka BoSacks) is a printing/publishing industry consultant and president of The Precision Media Group (BoSacks.com). He is also the co-founder of the research company Media-Ideas (Media-Ideas.net), and publisher and editor of a daily international e-newsletter, Heard on the Web. Sacks has held posts as director of manufacturing and distribution, senior sales manager (paper), chief of operations, pressman, circulator and almost every other job this industry has to offer.

The Self-Publisher Who Invented Christmas

2008-12-07T17:52:00.002-05:00

How Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol Rescued His Career and Revived Our Holiday Spirits
By Les Standiford

In October 1843 Charles Dickens's "once unequaled popularity was at a nadir, his critical reputation in a shambles, his bank account overdrawn," Les Standiford writes. His first five books -- Sketches by Boz, The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby and The Old Curiosity Shop -- had made him "perhaps the world's first true celebrity of the popular arts" and "far and away his country's best-selling author, acclaimed as much for his themes -- the misery of the poor and the presumption and posturing of the rich -- as for his spellbinding powers as a storyteller." Yet as he sat on a stage in Manchester, preparing to give a speech to raise funds for the local Athenaeum, "the industrial capital's primary beacon of arts and enlightenment," he was deeply worried about "how rapidly -- and how unaccountably -- his good fortune had fled."

Those first five brilliant successes had been followed by three disappointments. The first was Barnaby Rudge, an ill-advised attempt at a historical novel, which sold respectably but considerably less well than its predecessors. The second was American Notes, the result of a trip he had made to the United States, one that was meant to increase his American readership and gain publicity in England. But the book was poorly received by British reviewers and readers, and the novel he was publishing in serial in 1843, Martin Chuzzlewit, was doing no better. He needed something to reverse his slide but seems to have had no idea what it might be. He was only 31 years old, but he had a large family to feed as well as other pressing financial obligations, and he feared that he was sliding toward oblivion.

However improbably, he found what he was looking for that October night in Manchester. After delivering his remarks, he walked the city's streets, thinking about his career. He "began to take stock of himself in a way that any accomplished and acclaimed writer would find extremely difficult, much less the most famous writer of his time." As he subsequently told his close friend, advisor and future biographer John Forster, perhaps he had begun to take his public for granted. He needed to return to plain storytelling, "without browbeating or scolding, or mounting a soapbox," as had been his tendency of late:

"And so, as he walked the streets that night, a new story began to form. His nightly walks continued, even after his return from Manchester to London, his mind still whirling . . . until bit by bit his tale took shape, and, as his friend Forster put it, with 'a strange mastery it seized him.' He wept over it, laughed, and then wept again, as bits and pieces swam up before him, including the vision of two children named Ignorance and Want, those 'wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable' creatures who would, with Tiny Tim and Bob Cratchit and Scrooge and Marley and all the rest, stamp themselves on Dickens's imagination, and that of the world, forever."

Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in a fever; it took him only six weeks to complete the 30,000-word manuscript. "I was so closely occupied with my little Carol (the idea of which had just occurred to me)," he told a friend, "that I never left home before the owls went out; and led quite a solitary life." It was the shortest book he had written -- the others were issued in multiple serials and then published as three-volume books known as "triple deckers" -- and the biggest financial gamble of his life. His publisher, Chapman and Hall, expressed little enthusiasm for the book, so Dickens decided to have the firm bring it out "for publication on his own account." All the risk would be his own: "He would be responsible for the costs of the book's production, which would be deducted from its sales. He would also oversee the book's design, hire its illustrator, and consult on its advertising. In essence, his publishers -- which would receive a fixed commission tied to sales -- had become merely his printer. In contemporary terms, then, A Christmas Carol was to be an exercise in vanity publishing."

The book has for so long been a central part of the Christmas season, and even more central to popular images of the Victorian British Christmas, that it is useful to be reminded by Standiford of one important thing: In 1843 Christmas was not even remotely similar to what it became and what we know now. Dickens himself "had always been greatly enamored of the holiday," but to the public at large it was a minor blip on the calendar:

"There were no Christmas cards in 1843 England, no Christmas trees at royal residences or White Houses, no Christmas turkeys, no department-store Santa or his million clones, no outpouring of 'Yuletide greetings,' no weeklong cessation of business affairs through the New Year, no orgy of gift-giving, no ubiquitous public display of nativity scenes (or court fights regarding them), no holiday lighting extravaganzas, and no plethora of midnight services celebrating the birth of a savior. In fact, despite all of Dickens's enthusiasms, the holiday was a relatively minor affair that ranked far below Easter, causing little more stir than Memorial Day or St. George's Day does today. In the eyes of the relatively enlightened Anglican Church, moreover, the entire enterprise of celebrating Christmas smacked vaguely of paganism, and were there Puritans still around, acknowledging the holiday might have landed one in the stocks."

Totally -- and correctly -- contradicting the title of The Man Who Invented Christmas, which probably is the invention of someone in his publisher's marketing department, Standiford says that "no individual can claim credit for the creation of Christmas, of course -- except, perhaps, the figure that the day is named for." No, Dickens did not "invent" Christmas. But he "played a major role in transforming a celebration dating back to pre-Christian times, revitalizing forgotten customs and introducing new ones that now define the holiday," including the turkey as the centerpiece of the day's feast. He gave us "a secular counterpoint to the story of the Nativity," and "complemented the glorification of the nativity of Christ with a specific set of practices derived from Christ's example: charity and compassion in the form of educational opportunity, humane working conditions, and a decent life for all. Just as vital as the celebration of the birth of a holy savior into a human family was the glorification and defense of the family unit itself."

Financial reward from A Christmas Carol came more slowly to Dickens than he had hoped -- Chapman and Hall, in the grand tradition of publishing, seems to have cooked the books against him -- but popular success was immediate and immensely gratifying, taking the book into its third printing before the end of 1843. Writing about himself in the third person, Dickens told a friend: "By every post, all manner of strangers write all manner of letters to him about their homes and hearths, and how this same Carol is read aloud there and kept on a very little shelf by itself. Indeed it is the greatest success as I am told, that this ruffian and rascal has ever achieved."

In the United States pirated editions of the book were quickly issued, including one from the ostensibly reputable Harper and Brothers, which infuriated Dickens, a passionate advocate of international copyright. A bogus edition appeared in England as well, but there he won his legal case against the offending opportunist. There also were dozens of unauthorized stage adaptations, but by and large he was less concerned about them. The practice was widespread, and the dramatizations provided free publicity for the book. In the 20th century "at least twenty-eight film adaptations" have been made, "the very best" having been released in 1951, starring Alastair Sim as Scrooge. And the beat goes on:

"According to a count made in the late 1980s, at least 225 live stagings, films, radio dramas, and television plays based on Dickens's 'little Carol' had been produced after 1950, and that number does not take into account the untold number of amateur and regional productions staged every year. Not only has A Christmas Carol become the most 'adapted' of all the author's works, but it would be hard to name any other work of fiction that has thereby become so ubiquitous a part of Western popular culture."

Standiford's account of A Christmas Carol relies almost entirely on secondary sources and probably will be dismissed by Dickensians as adding nothing new to our understanding of the writer, but it is a nice addition to the literature of Christmas. A small addition, to be sure, but then so was A Christmas Carol. ·

The Death of Print Magazines and Other Fairy Tales

2008-12-03T22:33:00.003-05:00

The Death of Print Magazines and Other Fairy Tales
by Samir Husni, Ph.D.
Insiders Bob Sacks and Samir Husni square off in the magazine industry's hottest debate: Will print magazines survive-or even thrive-in the next century? Here's what Samir Husni had to say.
Intro: Bob Sacks, better known as "BoSacks," is a 38-year veteran of the publishing industry whose e-newsletter, "Heard on the Web: Media Intelligence," reaches nearly 12,000 readers daily. Samir Husni, nicknamed "Mr. Magazine," holds a doctorate in journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia and is the author of Launch Your Own Magazine: A Guide for Succeeding in Today's Marketplace. Sacks and Husni have lengthy publishing résumés. Both run private consulting firms primarily focused on magazines and media. Both are well-respected experts in the publishing world. And both have strong opinions on where the magazine industry is headed.

We asked BoSacks and Mr. Magazine to share their views and let you be the judge. Here are Mr. Magazine's thoughts on the future of magazines.

I can see the future clearly. The future is e-paper and e-readers. Magazines and newspapers will be no more. The days of ink on paper will give way to pixels on a screen. Newsstands will become oxygen bars and coffee stands. There will be no more issues with distribution because digital books, newspapers and magazines will be automatically downloaded free of charge onto personal media organizers or your BlackBerry. Printing will cease to be. Large groves of trees will begin to spring up throughout the world because paper will be in museums, not on your coffee table. Air will be cleaner. Flowers will bloom brighter. And Republicans will bring soy lattes to share with Democrats during yoga class.

If you believe all that, we need to talk business because I have a few things to sell you: the Eiffel Tower, the Great Wall of China and a great three-for-one deal on some pyramids over in Egypt.

The big problem with all of this future talk is that I have no way to see the future or how the media world and media consumption will be five weeks from now, let alone five months or five years from now. The only two people who can tell you the future are God and a fool. I know I'm not the first, and I work every day to not be the second. So the only thing I can do is continue to track media trends and make predictions of possibilities and plausibilities.

When you look at the statistics, there's a definite relationship: Over the last 20 years, the number of new magazine launches has steadily increased in a near-direct correlation with the number of doom-and-gloom prophets. But those prophets have yet to say anything true.

Yes, the numbers from the past few years have been less than rosy for the magazine industry, but every road has a few bumps. To say the future of magazines is little more than a resting place in a graveyard full of Betamax and Laserdiscs would be ridiculous. The past year has said otherwise.

Before jumping to conclusions and fairy tale dreams about what the future has in store for us, take a look at what has recently happened in our industry. Most of the world is having no problem with media consumption. A brand-new, state-of-the-art printing plant just opened in the United Kingdom (thanks to Rupert Murdoch), a German paper mill was recently completed at a cost of €486 million, foreign newsstands are more crowded than ours, and still, European consumers want more.

But you don't even need to look as far as Europe to see that media is alive and kicking. Last year's new magazine launches totaled 715. That's an average of nearly two new magazines each day, which is substantially higher than the number of new launches in 1991, the first year that commercial use of the Internet was allowed.

And don't forget the golden goose. Condé Nast felt so sure about the current desire for good print that they fed more than $125 million into the launch of the monthly business magazine Portfolio. So far I haven't heard one whisper of disappointment concerning that investment.

The number of new magazine launches has fallen nearly 30 percent in the last two years. But you don't say a child is a failure because of one bad grade, or that a car should be traded in because it got a flat tire-and you shouldn't say the industry is irrelevant or dying because an average of "only" two new magazines were launched every day last year.

The future is bright, or at least the possibility for the future is bright. Europeans are proving this before our eyes, yet we sit in our offices with blinders on. We see the past and not the future. We should learn from the past and take it with us into a future where more magazines are created and the customer feels he's the single member of a highly niche-oriented audience.

Technology has been something we've struggled against when it comes to printed media. But just like fighting rapids in a river, the more you fight, the faster you get pulled under. Computers, the Internet and technology are the allies of magazines. Recent numbers show that the number of consumer magazine websites has increased 53 percent since 2004. Overall magazine readership has increased 5 percent in the last four years, while coverage has remained the same. These numbers are nearly the opposite of newspaper readership, which dropped 3 to 5 percent over the past few years.

More and more magazines are being launched every year with a single customer in mind. Publishers have veered away from the mass-market magazines of years past and are seeing the infinite market that is laser-targeted niche publications. This year, magazines such as Kayak Angler, Urban Ink, Bond and others continued to show that a concentrated focus on a niche dedicated to a topic may well be better than trying to reach everyone with your message.

There's hope. Money is being invested in our industry. Customers feel an attachment to print because holding a real magazine and tangibly feeling what you paid for is much more fulfilling than turning on your Kindle or e-reader and reading a digital-rights managed copy of something. Magazines provide ownership; magazines provide connections between advertisers, readers and products; magazines provide a vehicle for quality content and purposeful design; and magazines provide profit to those who can successfully balance it all.

Some prophets of doom and gloom may say magazines haven't had the best year, but try telling that to the 715 editors and publishers who introduced their newborns to the magazine world last year. They'll be quick to tell you that magazines are still the best form of media we have today, tomorrow or the next day.
Click here to read Bob Sacks' "It's a Digital World Now"

Where Mail Goes To Die

2008-12-02T17:02:00.002-05:00

By KITTY CAPARELLA & DAVE DAVIES
TWO WEEKS after the Boothwyn Fire Company, in Delaware County, mailed fundraising letters for its volunteer ambulance service last summer, director Tim Murray noticed that no checks were coming in.

The reason?

His fundraising appeals wound up in the U.S. Postal Service's Southwest Philadelphia distribution plant, where mail goes to slow down, and sometimes to die.

And it wasn't only the fire company. Customers throughout the region have complained of late deliveries and lost mail.

No wonder.

In interviews with the Daily News, postal service employees and a manager have described chaotic conditions in the chronically understaffed plant, which processes nearly six million pieces of mail a day on Lindbergh Boulevard near Island Avenue.

In recent months, a manager and several employees said, unsorted mail sat for weeks in overflowing bins on the plant floor or was stuffed into trailers in the parking lot and - in some cases - even shipped in desperation to other distribution plants, from where it often returned for sorting days later.

In some cases, the mail was destroyed, the employees said.

The postal employees and a manager spoke to the Daily News on condition of anonymity, saying they feared retribution if they spoke publicly.

The workers interviewed by the Daily News said the severe staffing shortages were the result of a year-long overtime ban.

A complaint filed by the postal workers' union with the USPS Office of Inspector General alleges that a senior manager and others ordered clerks to falsify the daily mail report, undercounting the volume by hundreds of thousands of pieces of mail, to save costs and overtime.

"The mail is here. You'd have to be blind not to see it," said a veteran employee.

"What really hurts me is the [possibility] that these [fake] numbers were used in determining how many employees were outsourced in Philadelphia," said Byron Murtaugh, APWU assistant clerk craft director and a 20-year postal employee.

In August, USPS officials here announced that 162 employees are to be transferred in January.

A lead senior manager and other managers received performance bonuses that were "fraudulently obtained, through the systematic falsification of official government reports, the diversion of mail, and the destruction of mail," the union complaint alleged.

"These [are] serious allegations of misconduct," said Nancy B. Lassen, the attorney who filed the complaint on behalf of American Postal Workers Union Local 89. "It is so systemic that it has become institutionalized at the Philadelphia plant."

The complaint also charged that the daily color codes on mail bins were changed to make it appear as if mail was not late.

Several veteran postal clerks told the Daily News that they were aware daily mail reports were being falsified and the daily color codes changed.

A union investigation, initiated by Gwen Ivey, Local 89 president, reached the same conclusion.

It appears the OIG has taken the complaint seriously.

After it was filed, investigators seized the computer assigned to a clerk identified in the complaint as having been directed by a senior manager to falsify the daily mail reports, postal employees and an independent knowledgeable source said.

Agapi Doulaveris, spokeswoman for the Office of Inspector General, said the OIG is conducting an audit of the plant "to see that service and performance standards are being met."

If auditors find wrongdoing, they would notify OIG investigators, Doulaveris said. An audit usually takes about two months.

Doulaveris declined to comment about a seized computer, and had no information about any bonuses managers may have received.

Locally, Postal Service spokeswoman Cathy Yaroski said the Postal Service is "proud of the service its employees are providing its customers," but declined to comment on the allegations of doctored records, and declined to make three managers available for interviews.

The Postal Service's high-tech, $300 million processing center opened on Lindbergh Boulevard in 2006, replacing the central sorting operation at 30th Street.

It was soon plagued with problems, exacerbated by the elimination of jobs and transfer of 656 postal workers.

Last year's delays were documented in a report by the OIG, which concluded that operations had improved earlier this year. The report was released on July 10, as the unsorted mail bins multiplied on the floor, blocking passageways, employees said.

Daily mail reports and corresponding handwritten worksheets reviewed by the Daily News support employees' claims that mail at the plant was being undercounted.

A majority of them showed that a lower volume of mail was processed than indicated by worksheets the reports were drawn from.

On Sept. 28, for example, the daily report understated the mail processed at the plant by about 750,000 pieces.

"In the past, the mail was curbed a little, but not by a million pieces," said an employee. Senior managers "are more concerned about their bonuses than the customers."

USPS records reviewed by the Daily News also showed a steep decline in overtime at the plant this year.

The backlog grew worse during employees' summer vacations, creating what a manager called "a snowball effect."

"I feel bad the mail is sitting there," said the manager, who was unaware of the alleged undercounting. "It's not fair to customers."

Veteran employee and union steward Nick Caselli, who worked on the dock, said some nights he's seen from two to four trailers parked, stuffed with mail that should have been unloaded and processed.

During the day, another employee said, as many as six to 13 trailers were parked on the lot. If mail is in a trailer, it's not included in the daily count.

In September, Caselli said, three 38-foot trailers of unprocessed mail were diverted to a distribution plant in Horsham, only to return unprocessed two days later.

In addition, some first-class mail was left in unsorted "waste bins" with second- and third-class, including time-sensitive periodicals and circulars, employees said.

After these sat for weeks, the mail was destroyed, say employees and a manager.

In a written response, Yaroski, the USPS spokeswoman, said the Postal Service has "procedures in place to ensure our mail is processed timely and delivery standards are met."

Yaroski noted that a study conducted for the processing center showed that 96 percent of first-class mail arrives within one day, though she acknowledged the survey didn't say how late the other 4 percent might be.

Asked about on-time performance of second- and third-class mail - the main problem at the plant - Yaroski said the USPS recently began collecting that data, but none is available for release.

While workers at the southwest plant struggled to cope with the chaos, customers in the 191- and 190- zip codes in the Philadelphia area were paying a high price, with late deliveries, delayed bill payments, missed department store sales circulars and even lost wedding invitations.

An Oct. 21 regional USPS memo reported that Philadelphia ranked dead last in the country in delivery times for J.C. Penney mail, for example.

Publications, such as Time, TV Guide, and the Catholic Standard and Times, were chronically late, and time-sensitive circulars from supermarkets and other businesses were sometimes destroyed, the manager and employees told the Daily News.

When the Boothwyn Fire Company's Tim Murray complained to the Postal Service about his missing fundraising letters in August, he got nowhere.

"It wasn't until after I contacted [U.S. Rep.] Joe Sestak's office that some of the mailing started arriving," Murray said. "It finally showed up five and a half weeks after we mailed it, but it was only part of it."

About the time the Boothwyn mailing disappeared last summer, overtime at the plant was virtually prohibited, despite 30 or more employees on vacation each week, according to a manager and employees.

Murray always includes a mailing to himself. It finally arrived in November, four months late.

The fiasco cost the ambulance company between $4,000 and $6,000 in lost revenue, not to mention the $500 cost of the mailing.

Others have reported mail problems: A Philadelphia plumber whose payment from a customer arrived a month after it was postmarked; a well-wisher whose get-well card was returned three months after it was sent; a lawyer who sent invitations to a reception that arrived eight days later, after the event had occurred.

A manager explained that "third-class, or standard, mail backs up mostly - sale circulars, advertisements, credit card offers . . ."

Companies "pay money to send time-sensitive offers, and they get discounts for bulk mail. But if the mail sits, that's false advertising," the manager said. "They are not getting the delivery standard they expect.

"A lot of times, it isn't getting to homes until two, three weeks later, and a lot of times [homes] are not getting it at all," the manager added.

Chip Lillie, a senior vice president at Elwyn-based Choice Marketing Inc., said he's become so frustrated with delays at the Philadelphia plant that he now takes mail shipments to the Postal Service Center in Bellmawr, N.J.

"Mysteriously, mail headed to Philadelphia-area addresses seem to get delivered from there without much delay," he said.

Some companies track their mail on a computer, the manager said.

"They throw a fit when it's not on time. Those companies know how to put a fire under somebody to get mail delivered." *

BoSacks Speaks Out: ASME Sets New Edit-Ad Guidelines

2008-11-30T17:43:00.002-05:00

BoSacks Speaks Out; As the article suggests, the jury is still out on whether ASME will tighten or loosen the rules for keeping ads and edit apart.

Here is a firm promise and a prediction from BoSacks: if they loosen the rules, I will go editorially and ferociously ballistic. The industry has been on the edge of having or not having integrity for years. If the American Society of Magazine Editors takes the low road and decides that honor and integrity need have no place in the magazine industry, then they will surely reap what they sow.

There are reasons for the separation of church and state in both government and publishing. Integrity is a simple thing, and I make it a practice not to do business with those to whom integrity is a missing component. It's a simple rule and one that the public understands as well. It seems that the various divisions of our beloved industry each has their own nail for the coffin of our demise.

What do you think? Should we loosen the rules? Should we at last finally become known as advertorial media?

I ran the wrong kind of business, but I did it with integrity.
Sydney Biddle Barrows, ''Mayflower Madam' Tells All,' Boston Globe, 1986

Mag Bag: ASME Sets New Edit-Ad Guidelines
by Erik Sass,
http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.san&s=95213&Nid=49647&p=263991

The American Society of Magazine Editors is tweaking the rulebook for keeping edit and ad content separate, according to a story in Adweek earlier this week. The new rules should be ready for approval by ASME's board by the middle of next year.

The exact substance of the changes--stricter or looser standards--is unclear. On the one hand, ASME's current chief executive Sid Holt conceded: "We've had situations where we've seen violations of the spirit of the guidelines, but not the guidelines themselves"--seeming to suggest that new stringency is in order. On the other hand, "we want them to be more industry-friendly in that they make sense to editors and advertisers alike."

So what "makes sense"? If recent moves by ASME members are anything to judge by, the new guidelines will loosen restrictions on integration of advertising into magazine cover art and headlines. This is one area where advertisers have been especially aggressive with their demands for more mingling of advertising and editorial content.

For example, the September issue of Esquire featured a blinking, flashing electronic display designed by E-ink and sponsored by Ford, although Ford was not mentioned on the cover. The high-profile cover led directly to a Ford ad spread in the front of the magazine that takes credit for the innovative front. The August 10 issue of The New York Times Magazine came with a cover wrap purchased by U.S. Trust, Bank of America's private-wealth management division, to promote its philanthropic financial products.

Last December, New York magazine sold a four-page cover wrap to the New Museum. Last year, Harper's Bazaar delivered 5,000 VIP copies that came embedded with "crystals"--courtesy of Swarovski, also an advertiser. In 2005, The New Yorker produced a single-sponsor issue for Target that incorporated the Target logo's distinctive red-and-white coloring on the cover as well as inside the magazine.

Requests for integration are attractive to magazines, given the drop in ad revenue. Through November, total ad pages are down 8.5% at over 200 weekly and monthly titles tracked by MIN Online.

BoSacks Speaks Out: Why I Don't Trust PIB's Ad Revenue Reports

2008-10-20T09:15:00.000-04:00

BoSacks Speaks Out: Why I Don't Trust PIB's Ad Revenue Reports
By Bob Sacks
Publishing Executive Magazine Blog
http://www.pubexec.com/blog/why-i-dont-trust-pibs-ad-revenue-reports-301000.html#

Media Daily News reported in the article printed below what most of us have been aware of, well, forever. That the Publishers Information Bureau (PIB) isn't quite worth the paper it is printed on. At least, not the revenue-reporting part of the report. I have never trusted the revenue "rate card" side of the reporting and rather focused my attention on the reported page count. At least that is based on science and not numeric, wishful alchemy.

It's sort of like a trip to the doctor. You can visually see if your family is growing, but only science with blood tests will confirm or deny the truth of the apparently, but not necessarily, obvious health. A visual appraisal based on size alone is not necessarily an accurate portrayal of health.

Media Daily reports, "So a periodic reality check can put the PIB revenue figures in perspective. Just how big are discounts on magazine rate cards nowadays? The short answer is: A lot. The long answer is: anywhere from 40 percent to 75 percent, depending on the publisher."

Wow! That is a lot of smoke and mirrors for an industry with limited accountability. A great deal of Media Daily's report is deduced from publicly traded companies who release actual revenue figures that permit comparisons as part of SEC filings. So let us just say, for the sake of argument, that they are wrong in their estimates by 50 percent (is that even possible?), so the range of the PIB misstatements of earnings is at least 20 percent to 35 percent. Would you/do you make serious business decisions with that kind of range of misleading or incorrect information? Media Daily says that some publishers are off rate card by 75%. What is the value to continually report such variable and suspect data?

Either way you look at it and either set of figures you want to believe, the high or the low, the PIB revenue is at best unreliable and at worst, and let's be polite, a sad deception of the uninformed. Is it any wonder that advertisers want and continue to seek truer accountability?

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

How Inflated Are PIB Revenue Figures? A Lot
by Erik Sass
http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticleHomePage&art_aid=92822

It's an open secret that big magazine publishers offer advertisers discounts on the prices listed on official advertising rate cards, especially when times are tough. As a result, media types tend to use the Publishers Information Bureau's figures for ad pages as an index for magazine health, rather than rate card revenue figures, which may be inflated.

So a periodic reality check can put the PIB revenue figures in perspective. Just how big are discounts on magazine rate cards nowadays? The short answer is: a lot. The long answer is: anywhere from 40% to 75%, depending on the publisher.

It's also important to note that only a few publicly traded companies release actual revenue figures that allow comparisons as part of SEC filings and earnings announcements. Two of the largest publishers--Conde Nast and Hearst--are privately owned, so figures for discounts at either company would be based on hearsay. Publicly traded companies will have to serve as proxies for the magazine business overall.

Three of the biggest publicly trade magazine publishers are Time Inc., a division of Time Warner, publisher of Time, Meredith Corp., publisher of well-known women's interest titles, and Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, purveyor of shelter mags espousing domestic wisdom.

Comparing the PIB ad revenue figures for the first six months of 2008 to their actual ad revenues, as disclosed in financial statements, reveals evidence of substantial discounts.

Time Warner reported total publishing advertising revenues of about $1.2 billion in the first half of 2008--of which 9% or $100 million was online advertising, leaving print ad revenues of $1.1 billion. That compares with PIB's rate card revenue figure of $2.14 billion, meaning that Time Inc.'s two dozen American magazines are collectively offering discounts of almost 50% off the official rates.

At Meredith, the discounts are even steeper. The company reported publishing ad revenues of $308 million in the first half of 2008, compared to PIB rate card revenues of $1.16 billion. This suggests that its 25 consumer magazines are collectively offering discounts of almost 75% off the official rates.

Martha Stewart Living is offering smaller discounts than Time Inc. or Meredith, but they are still in the double digits. In the first six months of 2008, MSLO reported print advertising revenues of $85 million, compared to PIB's figure of $142.4 million. That means MSLO's five main titles are collectively offering discounts of about 40% off the official rates.

Magazines Get Clever with their Advertising

2008-10-05T22:48:00.001-04:00

Magazines Get Clever with their Advertising
By Stuart Elliott
NEW YORK: A financial crisis, two wars, a presidential election - when there is so much for readers to think about, how do magazines aimed at thoughtful readers attract their attention?

In a new U.S. marketing push, one such magazine, The Economist, is spoofing the game Twister, distributing pizza boxes that improbably bear its name and sponsoring a performance of political satire.

Another such magazine, The Atlantic, plans to advertise on the muffin displays in New York City convenience stores, on restaurant menu boards and on the shampoo shelves of drugstores.

The Atlantic is also producing video clips that show what happens when people on city streets are invited to answer questions like "Is Google making us stupid?" and "Why do presidents lie?" - questions that, to make them stand out, have also been reproduced as neon signs.

In seeking readers and advertisers, publications like The Atlantic and The Economist - alongside competitors like Harper's, Mother Jones, The Nation, The New Republic and The New Yorker - have long tried to make up in cleverness what they lacked in wallet power.

The campaign for The Atlantic, with a budget estimated at $1.5 million, carries the theme "Think. Again." The campaign, which will also include a section of the magazine's Web site (theatlantic.com/thinkagain), is to begin Monday.

The campaign for The Economist is arriving this week in Philadelphia after stopping in eight other markets, including Boston and Washington. The campaign, with an estimated budget of $5 million, carries the theme "Get a world view."

Both campaigns are indicative of the increasingly unusual efforts by the traditional media to catch the wandering eyes of younger readers as well as younger employees of media agencies who help decide where marketers buy ads.

The theory is that they "should be jolted," said Justin Smith, president for consumer media at Atlantic Media in Washington. "We felt there was a great opportunity, right now, to further inspire our readers and advertisers."

His counterpart at The Economist, Paul Rossi, who is based in New York, echoed Smith's decision to seize the moment, fraught as it might be with uncertainty. "I think it's the best possible time" for a campaign, said Rossi, executive vice president and managing director for the Americas at The Economist. "What we have to say has never been more relevant. We write about the world, about connections between business and politics."

The questions appearing in the campaign for The Atlantic are from articles published in the magazine.

The ads are meant to reach media buyers where they eat, buy takeout food and shop. Those are "places where people's brains are most at rest," said Michael Fanuele, managing director for strategy at the magazine's creative agency, Euro RSCG Worldwide in New York, part of Havas.

The video clips, aimed at readers as well as advertisers, will be available on the Think Again section of The Atlantic Web site, and plans call for additional content to be added monthly.

Previews of the clips offer a variety of responses from the passers-by on the streets. On the question "Why do presidents lie?" the replies ranged from "Why do we let them?" to "There'd be more problems if we told the truth."

The neon signs, which also appear in print ads and posters, will decorate events sponsored by The Atlantic and eventually end up at the magazine's offices. "We hope to keep one or two for ourselves," said Jose Cabaco, chief creative officer for North America at Euro RSCG.

Other agencies working on the campaign for The Atlantic are Cleverworks, for media buying, and the Rosen Group, for public relations.

Several agencies are working on the campaign for The Economist: BBDO Worldwide, part of the Omnicom Group, for the creative content; PHD, also part of Omnicom, for media buying; Kinetic, a unit of the WPP Group, for outdoor ads; and Tentpole N.Y. for public relations and events like the satire performance, by the Second City theatrical troupe.

"It's always a good time to read The Economist," said Andrew Robertson, chief executive at BBDO, "but if there ever was a good time to be reading The Economist, it's now."

Originally, the ads run by The Economist in the United States were adapted from a popular campaign for the magazine created in London by the Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO unit of BBDO. Headlines from that campaign - called the "white-on-red campaign" for its color scheme, borrowed from the logo of The Economist - include "Great minds like a think" and Robertson's favorite, "Would you like to sit next to you at dinner?"

The idea behind the British campaign "is that if you read it, you'd be better informed, and therefore more successful," he said, "which evolved into, you'd be better informed, and therefore more interesting."

The new ads with the Twister parody and the like are from the BBDO office in New York, so they will more directly address American sensibilities, Robertson said, and provide "a more specific explanation of what you'll get from reading The Economist."

"If you look at some of the titles that compete with The Economist, their perspective is from the U.S. looking at the world," he added, "whereas with The Economist, the focus is the world view."

BoSacks Speaks Out: MPA Layoffs Vs. Executive Compensation

2008-09-29T15:28:00.003-04:00

BoSacks Speaks Out: MPA Layoffs Vs. Executive Compensation
By BoSacks
Last week I sent out what I thought was a calm and sensible article about the management salaries of publishing associations titled BoSacks Asks: What's a Pound of Flesh Worth These Days, Anyway? I was attempting to provide our industry a thoughtful dialog in these stressful and unprecedented economic times. There was nothing intentionally personal, nothing specifically actionable for or against a single person or association. I just wanted to present some overall logical questions and start a reasonable and thoughtful review of financial executive deployment of executive salaries in associations for the publishing business. Somehow it seems especially relevant with the ascendency of digital publishing in the 21st century.

Today, I feel I must alter that neutrality and zero in on a single association. The MPA, the Magazine Publishers Association has initiated an action that for me requires closer examination and strikes me on the surface as insensitive in its execution. Of course, I do not know all the details. So I only have conjecture to work with.

Media Week reported the following: "The pains affecting consumer magazines are trickling down to its lobbying association. Magazine Publishers of America layed off seven staffers, according to sources. A spokesman said that because of declines in its members' core print publishing operations, 'it was necessary to streamline operations.' After the cuts, MPA will have 36 employees. Rate-card reported ad pages for consumer magazines are down 3.1 percent in the first half of '08 and 8.2 percent in the second quarter, with particularly steep declines in the auto, technology and pharma categories, according to Publishers Information Bureau, a service of MPA. The cuts come during the run-up to MPA's annual American Magazine Conference, which takes place Oct. 5-7 in San Francisco."

With the country's $700,000,000,000 dollar bail out and a necessary focus on golden parachutes and executive compensation plans it seems to me to be somewhat disingenuous for 7 people to be laid off due to the financial conditions of the publishing industry while the MPA management sits unscathed in an untouched ivory tower, with compensations reaching as much as $740,000. (See full compensation chart here)
Were these workers not doing their job well enough? If that's the case then the layoffs should have been swiftly completed. If they had been doing their job well, then perhaps the association and the industry still needs them.

Is the industry no longer in need of the MPA's work as the largest publishing association? Are they lowering their goals and standards for the industry? I think we need competent magazine associations now more than ever, to do more than ever before. There is too much competition and too many advertising alternatives for us not to be at our peak performance.

What happened? Lop off the heads of the worker bees that actually help make the honey flow and let the royalty continue on with their compensation to the possible destruction of the entire hive?

Is there such a thing as a reasonable limit for executive pay? I suppose the best answer would have to be based on actual and identifiable results. What have been the actual results of the current administration of the MPA? Where are we as an industry and where do we need to be under the current conditions? Are we as an industry forward thinking enough and keeping up with the advent of multiple and ever changing competitive platforms? Has the MPA kept up with the needs of the industry? If it has, then the compensation may be warranted.

If the MPA's management indeed shared in the pain of these layoffs in some way, that is not apparent to this reporter. But if that is so, then I apologize for this errant conversation. Either way, as always, I leave my newsletter completely open for a public response from all.

BoSacks Asks: What's a Pound of Flesh Worth These Days, Anyway?

2008-09-23T08:56:00.002-04:00

BoSacks Asks: What's a Pound of Flesh Worth These Days, Anyway?
By Bob Sacks
Publishing Executive Magazine
http://www.pubexec.com/article/are-magazine-association-executives-salaries-out-line-160016_1.html
What's a pound of flesh worth? What's a fair wage? Is your day's labor in the publishing salt mines worth what you earn?

Here is another question, which seems particularly relevant and timely in light of recent reports showing that some executives at magazine industry associations earn annual salaries of $400,000 to $740,000: Do they think that - at a time when the industry is as challenged as ever - they have earned that pay in the same salt mines for a job well done?

I mentioned this line of questioning to my son, who proceeded to practically rip off my head. He asked what right I had to comment on another person's salary. Well, I responded, when I see General Motors, once the world's largest automobile corporation, driven willingly off a cliff by management that has been ineffective for more than four decades, the very same management that makes hundreds of millions of dollars in salary and compensation, I believe I have the right to an opinion.

What should we expect from an association officer in exchange for his/her compensation? I'm not looking to condemn or single out any one executive or association. I'm simply calling for an industrywide discussion. Is there, or should there be, a correlation between compensation, results and revenue at any industry association?

It was pointed out to me by a friend, whose perspective I sought for this column, that there is no such thing as "fair" in economics. His opinion was that people do not engage in an economic transaction unless they feel that they are getting a benefit greater than their costs. In this case, I am not so sure that concept can be applied. This is just not a typical business relationship of vendor and supplier.

So, it seems to me that the question comes down to this: What is the benefit to the association membership of paying association management the salaries they are being paid, and who determines this value? The obvious answer is that the associations' boards of directors decide both the criteria and the range of compensation packages.

But that answer has limitations and is complicated. Often, volunteers oversee associations. Also, there are no stockholders expecting a financial return for their decisions and managerial oversight. This is a system of limited accountability that creates potential problems or sometimes just simple overcompensation - or, if not overcompensation, then compensation based on no real, measurable data, unless you use the state of the industry as the de facto guideline. And if association salaries were based on the industry's condition, then we would see years of plenty followed by years of lean. But surely that's not the case here, because we are in a time of lean, and yet association salaries remain extremely generous.

Is it possible to actually measure the performance of an association? No, not really. Should associations be judged on how well their industry is performing compared to others? Can associations be measured on how healthy and robust their individual membership is at any given time?
Let me be clear: I don't think we can hold associations responsible for industry variations in circulation, ad pages and assorted revenue streams. But how else can it be measured? And the next logical question is, by what criteria should management's compensation be determined?

If your company was run using the same, nonspecific criteria that guide an association, how long would you expect to remain successfully in business? If your board of directors - which hired your publisher and other senior management - was managed by a series of non-paid volunteers, would you have confidence in long-term profitability? These questions seem worthy to discuss and ponder as our industry moves forward into the digitized 21st century. I am greatly interested in your opinions on this subject.

Bob Sacks (aka BoSacks) is a printing/publishing industry consultant and and president of The Precision Media Group (BoSacks.com). He is also the co-founder of the research company Media-Ideas (Media-Ideas.net), and publisher and editor of a daily international e-newsletter, Heard on the Web. Sacks has held posts as director of manufacturing and distribution, senior sales manager (paper), chief of operations, pressman, circulator and almost every other job this industry has to offer.

The state of publishing and digital media

2008-08-24T22:45:00.002-04:00

The state of publishing and digital media
Written by Gary Howes
Today PriceWaterHouseCoopers (PWC) releases their report on the current state of the global publishing industry with a focus on the ongoing debate as to whether digital has spelt the death of print.

The global consumer magazine market is currently worth about £43 billion - up from about £38 billion five years ago.

Advertising accounted for most of this rise. Between 2003 and 2007, revenues from print advertising increased at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 4%. Conversely,
circulation revenues grew by just 1.9%.

PWC Entertainment and Media Practice suggests that the consumer magazine market will reach about £51 billion by 2012, and that advertising will once again generate most of the increase.

It is however expected that revenues from digital advertising will grow at a very much faster rate than revenues from traditional print advertising.

Between 2004 and 2008, global expenditure on Internet advertising rose at a CAGR of 38.1%, whereas print advertising in consumer magazines and newspapers grew by just 4.4% and 2.4%, respectively.

The pace at which online advertising expands is likely to slow over the next five years. Even so, PWC believe that revenues will increase at a CAGR of 19.5% - three times more than the rate at which expenditure on any other form of advertising is projected to grow.

Consumer trends

PWC says the global publishing industry is undergoing major changes. A growing number of people are migrating from the printed page to the Internet for information and
entertainment. So what should consumer magazine publishers and media buyers do to succeed in the digital age?

The research shows that:

Most consumers still prefer to read hard copies of magazines, but many are also interested in reading digital content (by which we mean interactive materials, not
PDFs or other static formats which can be viewed online) - and younger consumers would rather access content digitally.

A significant number of consumers also express interest in using new digital devices to read digital content, once these devices are commercially available.

However, consumers expect to pay more for printed content than for content distributed electronically. Indeed, the research suggests that they are not prepared to pay more than half the sum they would pay for a printed magazine.

Moreover, many consumers see digital-only content as a substitute for printed content. So any magazine publisher which launches digital content connected to its brands risks cannibalising subscription and circulation revenues from its traditional print magazines.

However, there is no evidence thus far that consumer magazine print products have been cannibalized by the presence of digital versions of the magazine on the title's website. This fear may therefore be groundless.

A number of magazine publishers have responded to the digital revolution by reshuffling their portfolios through acquisitions, disposals and new launches, or by forming strategic alliances to get access to the skills they need.

As progress in developing digital media is being made in mainland Europe, Britain and in North America, Eastern European publishers continuing to build up their print portfolios, as this relatively new industry develops.

British and North American magazine publishers expect to generate as much as 20% of their total revenues from digital platforms within the next five years, whereas mainland European publishers expect to generate only 10% of their revenues from online activities. This reflects consumers' willingness to pay for digital content in these markets.

According to third party research, smaller publishers in Britain and in North America are far ahead of their mainland European counterparts in digital investment and development.

And it is those that have been able to leverage strong brands across multiple media platforms and generate revenues from online advertising, search-engine marketing and e-commerce that have proved most successful.

Finally Some Uplifting News From BoSacks?

2008-08-21T10:30:00.003-04:00

BoSacks Speaks Out: Finally Some Uplifting News From BoSacks?
www.bosacks.com
I received a letter from a reader who said that some of his friends have stopped reading BoSacks because of all the bad news. I wasn't shocked at the note, but I admit that I was a little disappointed. I thought that my position was clear. I wrote back that I did not think that the industry is in death mode, nor has that ever been the intent of my coverage. And I also wrote that I try my damnedest to find positive and uplifting news.

Indeed I am very upbeat about our industry, and I see a bright future for the industry and the people in it. But there are a few things that have to be stated. The industry is never going to be the way it was; it is not even going to be the way it is. But I think the stories I send out give our readers a chance to see how the future may bend, blend and re-form, and hopefully offer a place of steady employment, if you are smart enough to read between the lines.

The industry is radically changing. So what? Why do you find that so depressing? I do not. Change is an elixir, and should be treated that way. The possibilities of information distribution in the next few years will be nothing less than staggering. Quite possibly we could be heading into the great, golden years of publishing. Is that a downer? Not in my book. There is more reading material available now, to more people than ever before in the combined history of man.

There are no age qualifiers on my web site when you sign up, so I'll ask this question: What were you doing five years ago? If you were in the business, what were you doing ten years ago? Are you doing the same thing now that you were doing then? I doubt it. What do you think you will be doing ten years from now? Do you think it is possible your job description and responsibilities might change? What might they be?

Our technology is growing exponentially. What used to take ten technologic years to advance now takes five, perhaps even less. My advice is to be very prepared to face the future with full frontal aggressiveness and make it your friend, not your combative enemy. If technology and the future are not your friends, you are fighting a battle you can not possibly win. As I have said before, the future is here now; it is just not widely distributed yet.

There are two options -- we can stick our heads in the ground in denial and hope that the industry problems will somehow go away and we will be able to continue to do what we have been doing, or we can do our very best to stay informed about the industry as it changes and grow with it. The choice is ours. Information is our power. That is why I am bullish about the publishing industry. We own the content. I do not care how we distribute that content. Some of it will always be on paper and some will be distributed electronically. So what? Once writers needed quill pens to write. Many years later came fountain pens, and then typewriters. Now we have computers. Are my words typed on a laptop and distributed by electrons, any less important because of this method of delivery? The reading of the written word is what is most important, not the pathway to receiving them. The truth is those words are more important when they are as fresh as possible and only a few electronic minutes old.

The bottom line for us all is to try to stay employed as long as we wish to work. The only way to that end is to work hard and be as informed as is possible.

Oh, yes, and I might mention that I do try my hardest to find articles that are positive and uplifting about our industry. They do exist from time to time; it's just that they are very few and far between. When I find them, I send them. I also think most negative articles are not fully understood by the authors and are written with a very narrow perspective. But what I do send out is important to anyone in the industry. That is my criteria and the only reason I send anything out. I think it is important to know. Remember, this industry's future is your future. The world of publishing is not going to evaporate. I think it will grow and prosper, in fact, I guarantee it.

Well, there you go. Am I wrong? What do you think?

Discovering Magazine Profit in Sustainability

2008-08-10T19:53:00.003-04:00

Discovering Magazine Profit in Sustainability
Wal-Mart has saved billions of dollars-can't we?
By Bob Sacks
http://www.pubexec.com
Does the current magazine business model have anything to do with sustainability? Not the ability to sustain ourselves as a business, but rather the new-age definition of environmental sustainability as defined by Wal-Mart. You remember Wal-Mart-the conglomerate that distributes nearly 25 percent of all newsstand titles? Oh, yes, you remember Wal-Mart-the mega-discount retailer that recently cut 1,000 magazine titles from its roster. But did you ever wonder why it did that?

As I found on the Wal-Mart Web site, "through sustainability, Wal-Mart has saved billions of dollars in costs and has begun to drive profitable product innovation. Our goal: Offer our customers an increasing volume of affordable, sustainable products that help them live better every day."

Wal-Mart wants to improve the quality of life for people on a global basis. Wal-Mart is preaching and insisting on accountability for sustainability with all vendors.

This may sound like corporate rhetoric, but it isn't. Wal-Mart is serious. It has discovered profit in the new mantra of sustainability. It has saved $10 billion in improved, sustainable packaging. It has increased efficiency in its truck fleets by 15 percent. It is in hot pursuit for two reasons. One, it makes good business sense. The savings that it is experiencing are dramatic and have been achieved by many other companies as well. Two, the public has come around to the concept and now is starting to demand sustainability in the products it buys.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency states that sustainable development marries two important themes:

1. environmental protection does not preclude economic development; and

2. economic development must be ecologically viable now and in the long run.

What does this have to do with magazines? Everything! We are not yet a sustainable business under Wal-Mart's definitions. This is an important concept for us to recognize. I have been ranting for years about our inefficient distribution system. I have also said that if we don't fix it from the inside, outside forces will fix it for us. Well, there you have it; those forces are in action as we speak. Do you think this sustainability movement will just go away? Do you wish to continue with business as usual? Are you developing a distribution plan for the future? And by the future, I don't mean your next issue-I mean next year and the years after that.

Proven sustainability may be legislated and forced upon all businesses. There is legislation circulating in Washington, D.C. right now that demands an 80-percent reduction of carbon footprints. How would you accomplish that reduction? Wal-Mart, the distributor of 25 percent of our newsstand product, is demanding efficiencies, and now the government is, too.

The future of print publishing, if we are to have one, must address sustainability issues. How "green" or environmentally friendly is a publishing process that prints 10 magazines, sells three and then sends seven to landfills, or at best, re-trucks the unsold copies to a pulping facility to be re-trucked back to a mill, to be converted to paper and re-trucked back to a printing plant? Deleted digits (as in digital 1s and 0s) do not require diesel-burning trucks to haul them away, and old digits do not fill up landfills.

I hope you can agree that from a "green" perspective, publishing is not yet a sustainable business.

So with the rising costs and earth-unfriendly nature of our manufacturing and distribution of formerly living trees, and with the increased acceptability and functionality of digital products like e-paper, the path to successful publishing is very clear. To me, the quick route to a drastic reduction in our carbon footprint is adopting the philosophy of 100-percent retail sell-through-a no-return, newsstand-based business. This concept horrifies some professionals. (It's more the fear of the unknown than the actual facts of the process. Jobs will change, responsibilities will change and business models will change, and people abhor change.) But at the end of the day, and before the end of our business and our planet as we know it, it is an inevitable and eco-friendly distribution model. After the horror of this transformation is over, we will save billions of dollars and perhaps the industry as well.

Bob Sacks (aka BoSacks) is a printing/publishing industry consultant and president of The Precision Media Group (BoSacks.com). He is also the co-founder of the research company Media-Ideas (Media-Ideas.net), and publisher and editor of a daily international e-newsletter, Heard on the Web. Sacks has held posts as director of manufacturing and distribution, senior sales manager (paper), chief of operations, pressman, circulator and almost every other job this industry has to offer.

What if Ebooks Were the Dominant Platform?

2008-08-06T22:25:00.002-04:00

BoSacks Speaks Out: My friend Rex Hammock posted the following on one of his Blogs.
"What if Samir Husni & Bob Sacks Swapped Sides?
This post about trying out a "technology flip test" ( See Below) in which eBook advocates become defenders of paper and vice-versa made me think of the longest-running debate on the magozinosophere. Bob, Samir, give it a shot."

I responded back to Rex somthing like this:

I will take the challenge any time and any place. I love the whole concept of it. What a wonderful debate it could/would be. So long as Samir doesn't cheat. You know what I mean, we accept the challenge, we both do our homework and we both try to win . . . Except if Samir doesn't try to win too hard, I lose the long term real debate by winning the flip test debate. Not that Samir would do anything like that, you understand.
So, Samir, will you take the side that digital will win?
BoSacks
-30-
Insanity -- a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.
R. D. Lang

What if Ebooks Were the Dominant Platform?
Posted by Mac Slocum
http://toc.oreilly.com/2008/08/what-would-the-world-be-like-i.html
I recently came across an old blog post from Harvard Business School professor Andrew McAfee that discusses the utility of the "technology flip test". McAfee writes:

At a conference years back I was sitting on a panel that was asked to talk about future of the book. As the discussion was heating up about the inevitability of the electric media, someone on the panel (I wish it had been me) proposed a flip test. He said "Let's say the world has only e-books, then someone introduces this technology called 'paper.' It's cheap, portable, lasts essentially forever, and requires no batteries. You can't write over it once it's been written on, but you buy more very cheaply. Wouldn't that technology come to dominate the market?" It's fair to say that comment changed the direction of the panel.

The ebook vs paper flip test is intriguing for a number of reasons:

It inverts the offense and defense: Ebook advocates become defenders and paper-book supporters become disruptors. Shaking off the vestiges of a default argument is always a good idea -- think of it as a "debate cleanser."
It amplifies the strengths of each format . . . initially: When I ran through the flip test on my own, I at first honed in on the cost savings of ebooks (no paper, no printing, no shipping) and the sensory aspects of print books. But further review revealed deeper complexities to this debate. And that led me to . . .
It upends assumptions: Print's dominant position in the real world causes me to challenge pro-print arguments, most notably the tactile experience overreaction that often derails discussions. But placing ebooks in the hot seat gave me a new perspective on ebook defenses. For example, if my default reading environment was electronic and networked, would I want (or need) a disconnected outlet? Would I crave solitude and a languid pace? Does the upside of ebook economics supersede the other reading/storytelling experiences I'm looking for, or would I welcome a print alternative the way I now welcome an electronic option?
What's your take on the flip test? Does inverting the argument open the discussion, or is this a diversionary trick that detracts from the issues at hand? Please share your thoughts in the comments area.

(Original idea and McAfee link via Reading 2.0 list.)

Women's fashion mags use premiums as weapons in war for customers

2008-08-03T23:01:00.003-04:00

BoSacks Speaks Out: With all the talk last week of Esquire magazine and the "gimmick" of them putting e-ink on the cover for the first time ever by any publishing house. I thought his might be a fitting addendum. I guess it only fair to point out that this is not a domestic newsstand story.

When Alexander the Great visited Diogenes and asked whether he could do anything for the famed teacher, Diogenes replied: 'Only stand out of my light.' Perhaps some day we shall know how to heighten creativity. Until then, one of the best things we can do for creative men and women is to stand out of their light.
John W. Gardner (1912 - 2002)

Women's fashion mags use premiums as weapons in war for customers
Tomoko Nishida / Yomiuri Shimbun Staff Writer
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/features/arts/20080801TDY17003.htm

Have you noticed that women's fashion magazines have become very thick recently? It's because they come stuffed with various premiums, often brand name goods. They include handbags, hair accessories, fans and beach shoes. The freebies are a marketing strategy used by publishing companies in reaction to women reading fewer and fewer such magazines. But are they really effective in attracting more readers?

Shueisha Inc. added a minibag by an American fashion designer to the July issue of More. The issue sold 560,000 copies, or 10,000 to 20,000 copies more than usual.

The July issue of Sweet, published by Takarajimasha Inc., sold 460,000 copies. It came with a pair of makeup bags bearing a famous Japanese brand name.

Shueisha is planning to make Seventeen, now published twice a month, a monthly magazine beginning with the September issue. Editor in Chief Yoshiharu Koshizaki said the magazine will have a premium every month, partly in an attempt to "prevent readers from sharing one magazine between them."

The "premium war" is a result of publishers' ability to collaborate with brand names and companies in designing the premium goods. Most of these items are developed especially for the magazine promotions.

In the case of magazines that come with premiums as "main products," the giveaways included a camisole or even a collapsible umbrella.

Last spring's relaxation on rules on giveaways by the Fair Trade Commission also is believed to have accelerated the trend.

The relaxation doubled the 100 yen maximum value of premiums for magazines priced at less than 1,000 yen. But publishers are believed to have been able to keep the production costs lean since they can have giveaways made in low-labor-cost countries, even when carrying brand names, as they are collaboratively produced, original products.

Takarajimasha began adding premiums to all of its magazines last year. Thanks to the move, the circulation of In Red increased from the 100,000-level to the 300,000-level.

That of Sweet also rose from the 200,000-level to the 400,000-level.

Takarajimasha spokesperson Keiko Sakurada said the premiums are "a priority investment for increased circulation."

Kazuhiko Sato, the head of the editorial department at Shufunotomo Co., which publishes Mina and Ray among other periodicals, said the company wants to utilize the appeal of giveaways so that "readers can get something."

There was an earlier boom in luxurious magazine premiums in 2001, when the Japan Magazine Publishers Association relaxed rules on the material and size of premiums. But some magazines were suspended or discontinued after suffering from poor sales of issues that came without giveaways.

That's why publishers place high hopes on collaboration this time. But Sato admitted such projects require a lot of time and effort, and More Editor in Chief Junko Sugino said she wants readers choose the magazine because of its articles.

According to the association, sales of women's magazines decreased by about 30 percent last year from their peak 10 years ago. Association official Kenji Takahashi said: "Premiums are important elements that decide the sale of magazines in this era of weak sales.

"But it is ideal if the premiums are an extension of the content of the magazine."

BoSacks Speaks Out: Why Esquire Mag is your Future?

2008-07-29T21:11:00.001-04:00

BoSacks Speaks Out: Why Esquire Mag is your Future?

BoSacks Speaks Out: Please, let's not all get crazy at the same time. So many people are over-reacting to the announcement that Esquire is using e-ink on their cover that I almost don't know where to begin. But almost isn't don't know.

First and foremost, this is a clever magazine cover gimmick for a 75th anniversary cover. Period, end of story, except for all the brouhaha. They deserve to do something special. And e-ink is going to be something special. In this case it is underutilizing the power and the possibilities of e-ink, but what the heck? You have to start somewhere. And this year our industry starts here on the cover of Esquire with a flexible, magazine-bindable production of e-ink.

We as an industry have been inserting and on-serting for generations. Believe me I know, as I was partly responsible for the AOL onslaught of on-serting and inserting first fragile plastic diskettes and then CD's into magazines. The computer and music sectors have been doing this for years. The women's service groups have inserted hundreds of items including such nutty ideas as shampoo samples which in the course of palatalizing squished and squeezed the samples all over the printer's bindery floor. So ease off on the condemnation that gimmicks are something new or distasteful.

And the same thing is true for the carbon footprint. Why is Esquire being singled out?
I'm the first to admit that we have been reckless as an industry when it comes to carbon foot-printing and inefficiencies, but to single out a single publisher . . . . pure and absolute rubbish. Anyone who is starting to condemn a single gimmick in a single magazine doesn't know the industry, the history, nor the true story of magazine sales and magazine production.

E-ink or e-paper is special, in fact it is very special, and it is an integral part of the future of the magazine business. If we are going to have a big future at all, it is going to be digital. We will combine the ease of use of digital editions of magazines with the portability of brilliantly colored WiFi connected epaper, with a drastically lower carbon footprint than today and dramatically reduced manufacturing costs. What's not to like? What part don't we understand?
Publishers sell words and thoughts, not paper and printing? For those who need to hear me say it again, printing ink on paper is not going to go away; it is also not going to be the dominant distribution vehicle of information.
BoSacks
-30-

Esquire's Granger: Magazine Medium 'So Compelling We All Should Do More with It'
Editor responds to news of flashing anniversary cover.
Jason Fell
www.FolioMag.com

Since the report last week about Esquire's flashy e-paper October anniversary cover-and our follow-up on the technology behind it-I've been hearing/reading a lot of negative opinions about it.

One Web site called it obnoxious. Rex Hammock said it was "the worst use of technology by a magazine." Fast Company, in a blog post, estimated that the manufacturing process increases the issue's carbon footprint by 16 percent over other typical print publications. But, if you ask Esquire editor-in-chief David Granger, the technology could help revolutionize the way we read magazines, beyond the printed page and online.

"When I talk to groups I sometimes speak about the days I had when I'd get the new issue of Esquire and go through it and think to myself, 'Fuck, it's still a magazine,'" Granger said in a recent interview with FOLIO:. "What I mean is that the medium is so compelling that I and we should all be able to do more with it. The magazine experience is one of the last remaining opportunities to enter a hermetically-sealed world, an edited experience of our culture created by someone else. And, more importantly, it's an experience that encourages you to stay in it rather than constantly bounce in and out of it.

"We have an amazing medium, print, and if we can enhance the experience of it by putting new technology to use, then all the better," he said.

Bob Sacks, an industry consultant and frequent proponent of technology, says that Esquire's flashy cover may be a small step overall but offers a glimpse of what's to come in the next few years.

"It's not a representation of what e-paper was designed for, but doing the cover is the right thing to do," Sacks says. "It will be a demonstration of what it can be used for. In the near future we all will have flexible e-paper readers in our pocket and will be able to access all the magazine and books you want."

Right now, the technology is expensive and, if you believe Fast Company, not very green. Granger says that, with time, he hopes the technology will become cheaper. Maybe, after some refining, the application will become more realistic and environmentally-friendly, too.

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

The Real Cost of E-Ink
posted by Anya Kamenetz
http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/anya-kamenetz/green-friday/real-cost-e-ink

An article in the New York Times earlier this week described an effort by the legendary print magazine Esquire to make "a nod to the digital age" by using something called E Ink on its cover. That's pretty much what it sounds like: electronic ink, so the cover can blink like a Times Square billboard, as opposed to a staid old highway billboard.

One problem: Did anyone stop to consider the environmental implications? Check out this description of the process, from the Times article:

The batteries and the display case are manufactured and put together in China. They are shipped to Texas and on to Mexico, where the device is inserted by hand into each magazine. The issues will then be shipped via trucks, which will be refrigerated to preserve the batteries, to the magazine's distributor in Glazer, Ky.
Editor David Granger described it as "a 21st-century technology" combined with "a 19th-century manufacturing process." Can't argue with the second part, at least. The article goes on to note that this process is expensive, and hence requires sponsorship from a Ford SUV (not exactly a 21st-century technology itself). But what about the other cost . . . the carbon one? Some back-of-the-envelope calculations show it's not small, and Ford's not picking up the tab.

Let's start at the beginning. According to the article, "The batteries and the display case are manufactured and put together in China." The manufacturing phase is the biggest question mark in the life cycle of any product. According to life cycle analysis by Nokia, the manufacturing phase, alone, of another battery-powered electronic device, their 3G phones, is responsible for 12.3 KG of CO2 equivalent per unit. Granted, the E Ink display is a lot simpler and uses much less material than a cell phone, so let's say the carbon footprint is one-tenth as much-1.2 KG per user. That would be 135 tons of CO2 for the entire run of 100,000 devices.
Next, the devices will be shipped to Texas. According to E-Ink, a comparable prototype device weighs about 150 grams (5.3 ounces). According to the calculator on ShipGreen.net, shipping 100,000 of those overseas from Shanghai to Houston is worth another 2.6 tons -189 tons if they for some reason chose air freight.

From there, the little magic doohickeys will make their way to a Mexican maquiladora (where the work conditions are certain to be just lovely-ditto the Chinese factory) to be inserted by hand into the magazine covers (1.28 tons from Houston to Monterrey, Mexico), and from there, the completed issues, about one-third heavier than normal, will travel about 1,400 miles to the magazine's distribution center in Kentucky (11 more tons). Oh, and because of the delicacy of the electronics, they'll have to travel in refrigerated trucks. Certain kinds of refrigeration units can consume a half gallon of fuel per operating hour - that's an additional 10 gallons for that 20 hour trip-per truck. So for 5 trucks (let's say), the refrigeration adds about another half a ton. Then the blinking magazines go to their final destinations.

So . . . the total outlay in greenhouse gas emissions for this little experiment-again, this is based on loose estimates-comes to 150 tons of CO2 equivalent, similar to the output of 15 Hummers or 20 average Americans for an entire year, and a 16% increase over the carbon footprint of a typical print publication (based on calculations by Discover Magazine, Time, and In Style). The potential environmental impact of the E Ink covers increases even more when you consider that the units are designed to be disposable after one use and they'll make it more difficult or impossible to recycle the paper portion of the magazines.
Maybe Esquire should go back to the drawing board for a truly forward-looking concept of the possibilities of print. Fast Company would be glad to advise them on where to go to get printed on 100% recycled paper

News Flash From the Cover of Esquire: Paper Magazines Can Be High Tech, Too

2008-07-24T08:48:00.003-04:00

News Flash From the Cover of Esquire: Paper Magazines Can Be High Tech, Too
By TIM ARANGO
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/21/business/media/21esquire.html?_r=1&ref=business&oref=slogin

On the third floor of the Museum of Modern Art in Midtown Manhattan rests a tribute to Esquire's glory years - a collection of 92 covers from the 1960s and early 1970s that have become, in the museum's words, "essential to the iconography of American culture."

That illustrious history hangs over the magazine's effort to celebrate its 75th year. Its attempt to add to the annals of museum-worthy covers includes a nod to the digital age: an electronic cover, using admittedly rudimentary technology, that will flash "the 21st Century Begins Now," when it appears on newsstands in September.

"I hope it will be in the Smithsonian," said David Granger, Esquire's editor in chief, in a recent interview while showing prototypes of the cover - an early version has a cord sticking out that attaches to a battery pack.

If it does wind up in the Smithsonian, it will need a power source; on its own, the magazine will run out of juice after 90 days. Mr. Granger knows some will see the cover as a gimmick - but he says he thinks the technology behind it, which has been used for supermarket displays but never embedded in a magazine, speaks to the possibilities of print.

"Magazines have basically looked the same for 150 years," Mr. Granger said. "I have been frustrated with the lack of forward movement in the magazine industry."

Pointing to the prototype sitting on a conference room table, Mr. Granger said, "The possibilities of print have just begun. In two years, I hope this looks like cellphones did in 1982, or car phones."
The company that produced the cover, E Ink, has a track record of innovation - its technology is used in Amazon.com's e-book device, the Kindle. E Ink, a private company based in Cambridge, Mass., counts Hearst, Esquire's parent, as a major shareholder.
"In 2000 or so, we went to Cambridge to see if they could demonstrate the technology," Mr. Granger said. "They were doing store displays, so it was premature for a magazine."

Two years ago, at a Hearst management retreat, Mr. Granger again raised the idea. This time it would be possible, he was told, if Hearst invested seed money to create a battery small enough to fit in a magazine.
"This is really the 1.0 version," said Kevin O'Malley, Esquire's publisher. "Imagine when the consumer walks by a newsstand and sees that it is alive."

Digital technology holds the promise of making the dissemination of information much easier and cheaper - no paper, no trucks - but this experiment by Esquire was the opposite.
"The whole chain had to be reinvented," said Peter Griffin, the deputy editor. "The interesting thing is it has almost nothing to do with the normal way of putting out a magazine."

First Esquire had to make a six-figure investment to hire an engineer in China to develop a battery small enough to be inserted in the magazine cover. The batteries and the display case are manufactured and put together in China. They are shipped to Texas and on to Mexico, where the device is inserted by hand into each magazine. The issues will then be shipped via trucks, which will be refrigerated to preserve the batteries, to the magazine's distributor in Glazer, Ky.
"We are trying to combine a 21st-century technology with a 19th-century manufacturing process," Mr. Granger said.

All of this, of course, is expensive. Which is why it was necessary for Esquire to find a sponsor. In stepped Ford Motor, which will have an advertisement on the inside of the cover that will use the same technology to promote its new minivan-sport utility vehicle, the Flex.

"We wanted the marketing plan for this vehicle to include motion as much as possible," said Usha Raghavachari, communications manager for S.U.V.'s for Ford North America Marketing. "We had a desire to make our marketing launch as unique as the vehicle. This makes our print plan a little more energizing."

Esquire has exclusive use of E Ink's technology for use in print through 2009, and Mr. Granger said he hopes to come up with new ideas for it. "This is probably just a limited view of its use," he said.
The electronic cover will be used in only 100,000 copies that go to newsstands - its overall circulation is about 720,000.
What Esquire is doing harks back to a big splash National Geographic made in 1984 when it introduced holography to the mass market by placing a hologram of an eagle on its cover.
Holograms did become widespread in things like greeting cards, even if they did not upend the publishing world.

"Part of the iconic DNA of the magazine is our covers," said Mr. O'Malley, Esquire's publisher. "I fully expect that in 25 to 30 years, this cover will be in a museum."

I Read the News Today... Oh Boy

2008-07-21T22:07:00.001-04:00

I Read the News Today... Oh Boy
the liberal media
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080804/alterman
By Eric Alterman

This article appeared in the August 4, 2008 edition of The Nation.

Spend some time on the "future of news" conference circuit, as I have recently, and believe me, you'll need a drink and perhaps a Prozac. The flight of readers and advertisers to the web has led to an unprecedented assault on stockholder value, making newspapers the investment equivalent of slow-motion seppuku. For instance, on July 11 Alan Mutter's invaluable Reflections of a Newsosaur blog reported that in "perhaps the worst single trading day ever" for the newspaper business, "the shares of seven publicly held newspaper companies today plunged to the[ir] lowest point in modern history." When these losses continued to accelerate, Mutter calculated that newspaper stocks had shed an amazing $3.9 billion in value in just the first ten trading days of July, leading to the disappearance of more than 35 percent of these companies' combined stock price in 2008 alone.

It's been nearly two and a half years since the much-missed Molly Ivins observed of media moguls that, "for some reason, they assume people will want to buy more newspapers if they have less news in them and are less useful." And yet the strategy continues unabated. The Los Angeles Times just announced that it will cut loose another 250 people, including 150 in the newsroom--this on top of a series of job cuts by the previous owners, which led to a revolving door of resigning editors and publishers who could not in good conscience carry out the cuts demanded of them.

As a result of this avalanche of industrywide layoffs, buy-outs and firings, Mutter notes, the industry's age-old ratio of one journalist per thousand papers in circulation is about to disappear. But as a contributor to Romenesko pointed out, this is "a self-correcting mechanism. As subscribers find less and less to read because newspaper staffs are thinned too much to produce quality copy, subscriptions will lapse and the ratio will be restored--until, of course, additional layoffs refresh the cycle."

For those who embrace the now omnipresent mantra that the staff will simply have to "do more with less," blogger Kevin Roderick of LA Observed notes, "Yes you can put out a good paper with 700 staffers--but not a better paper than the one paying customers are already fleeing."

Corporate responses have also included: asking an already dispirited staff to take a 10 percent pay cut (the Boston Globe); raising the newsstand price by 33 to 50 percent (Gannett, the Wall Street Journal); drastically reducing the newspaper's news/advertising ratio (all Tribune papers); turning the paper's Sunday magazine over to the business staff (the Los Angeles Times); reducing the physical size of the newspaper and cutting down on the news hole (everyone); buying out experienced, knowledgeable staff members and replacing them with underpaid novices (everyone); and closing foreign and national bureaus (almost everyone). Virtually the only expense still intact is executive pay. On the Recovering Journalist blog, Mark Potts notes that the average compensation among the thirteen public-company newspaper CEOs was just under $6 million a year in 2007, according to corporate proxy filings with the SEC. These figures, one can only conclude, are entirely unrelated to performance.

The dearth of decent ideas designed to save newspapers--or reinvent them for the digital age in ways that preserve their crucial democratic functions--is curious and depressing. It's curious because some of the smartest, most ambitious and most civic-minded people in America are deeply engaged with the problem. It is depressing because the only ones with the self-confidence to undertake radical measures appear to be completely off their respective rockers.

Take the example of the Tribune Company's new owner, Sam Zell. Leaving aside his penchant for potty-mouth rejoinders for those who question his judgment, Zell has done nothing to slow the slide in the company's fortunes and much to accelerate it. Scrambling like mad for cash to service the company's debt, Zell sold off the profitable Newsday and borrowed $300 million against future earnings, a clear sign of panic. To advise him on long-term strategy, he has appointed as "chief innovation officer" Lee Abrams, a man who was apparently surprised to learn that reports datelined "Baghdad" are actually produced by reporters in Baghdad. His suggestion: "photos of the reporter with Iraqi kids" to advertise this fact.

Writing on his blog, Abrams mused that newspapers were "TOO NPR," (caps in original), which he found "a bit elitist." He would rather have newspapers "study the feel of a well honed All News Radio station," which he defines as "being INTELLIGENT... not intellectual."

The more one listens to the men and women at the top of the industry, the more it becomes obvious that the survival of the newspaper--the primary information-gathering and knowledge-disseminating instrument of American democracy--is going to have to come from somewhere else. Sure, the blogosphere makes some invaluable contributions and a few foundations are rising to the challenge of funding investigative journalism. Carnegie Corporation president Vartan Gregorian recently suggested to me that universities might attach a small fee to their students' tuition--like an activities fee--to pay for the newspaper subscription of their choice. This would improve the newspapers' bottom line, give their advertisers access to a coveted demographic and, if successful, would inculcate in the students the habit of newspaper reading as they approach maturity as voting citizens. It's a great idea, and unlike most of what one hears at these conferences, it is on scale with the problem. Unfortunately, young people do not appear to want to pick up a newspaper, even for free. They often leave them lying around, even at journalism schools, where they are distributed gratis.

I don't have a better idea, except to repeat, again, the following: the loss of daily newspapers is a significant threat to the future of our democracy. It is far too important to be left in the hands of a bunch of clueless media moguls and their "chief innovation officers."

About Eric Alterman
Eric Alterman is a Distinguished Professor of English, Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and Professor of Journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. He is also "The Liberal Media" columnist for The Nation, a senior fellow and "Altercation" weblogger for Media Matters for America, (formerly at MSNBC.com) in Washington, DC, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington, DC, where he writes and edits the "Think Again" column, a senior fellow (since 1985) at the World Policy Institute at The New School in New York, and a history consultant to HBO Films.

What Mainstream Publishers Don't Want You to Know About Door-to-Door Magazine Sales

2008-07-17T23:07:00.002-04:00

BoSacks Speaks Out: This is not a repeat of last week's magazine circulation story but an incredible in-depth journalistic article about many things. It is about teens, people, greed, rape, murder and the glue that binds this whole story together is the selling of magazine subscriptions. We all know that these kids could be selling anything and the story wouldn't change that much and there are probably other industries that parallel our own here in this tale. But I don't work for other industries. I work for the magazine industry.

This author is critical of our industry and especially the voice of the industry as represented here by the MPA. It discusses in good detail how CPMs are factored and how the door-to-door subscription business is lucrative . . . for some but not all. Definitely Not All.

The author also noted that some publishers and some other industries have completely stopped the door-to-door practice. Should we? I admit that I don't know enough of the real nitty-gritty, the genuine details to have a firm opinion, because I have never handled that particular part of a circulators domain.

Please send me your comments and any special insider knowledge you have on this subject to share with our readers.
BoSacks
-30-

What Mainstream Publishers Don't Want You to Know About Door-to-Door Magazine Sales
By Craig Malisow
http://www.houstonpress.com/2008-07-17/news/what-mainstream-publishers-don-t-want-you-to-know-about-door-to-door-magazine-sales/full

That kid at your door with a magazine order form will tell you a story -- part sad, part hopeful. The truth will be infinitely worse than you can imagine.

In the Ramada Inn, across I-10 from Ikea, dozens of young sales agents spill out of vans and head for the first-floor conference room. They're in their late teens and early twenties, tired from a long day of selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door, but excited about the money they think they're going to get.
In the conference room, a line of middle-aged managers sit behind folding tables and count the stacks of receipts and cash their agents place before them. It's a ton of money. The crews hit Houston in late February, it's near the end of March now and it's been a lucrative stay. Houston is always a windfall.

It's been a tough hop for this caravan of sales crews, though. Winding their way down from California, they lost a few agents. Two were arrested in Albuquerque after they allegedly forced their way into the home of an elderly couple and beat them to death, raping the wife first. A few weeks later, another agent allegedly raped a woman in Claremont, California, so he got picked up, too. Then, in West Texas, a van flipped, killing one agent and injuring three others. That's seven agents out of commission. That's about a $2,800 loss per day.

After they turn in their cash and receipts, two agents, a pudgy girl and a lanky guy, hit the parking lot for a smoke. Two Houston Press reporters are there, observing. Without knowing they're talking to reporters, the agents walk over and ask for rolling papers. When asked what they're doing in town, the agents explain their job and how much they love it. It's a blast, they say. You lie all day to sell subscriptions, and you unwind afterward with some smoke. You tell the customers that you live a few streets over, that you go to the local school and play on the soccer team, that you just sold subscriptions to their neighbor, and the idiots buy it because by now you've got it down to a science. And on to the next town. And the next.

In the eight months the Press investigated door-to-door magazine sales across the country, the industry has seen at least three murders, one rape, two attempted rapes, one stabbing, one attempted murder, one vehicle fatality and one attempted abduction of a 13-year-old girl.

Interviews with former agents reveal a constant party atmosphere where agents have easy access - often thanks to their managers - to drugs. The agents come primarily from two populations: reprobates who need to leave wherever they are fast, and vulnerable kids from unstable families who believe that hopping into a van full of strangers is better than what awaits them at home.
Crystal Mahathy is an example of the latter. In 2000, the 17-year-old crossed paths with a Texas-based magazine crew manager named Rick Senner.

Rick Senner got his start working for Russell Wood, one of the industry's biggest names. Senner started as an agent under Wood, who's based out of the hinterland of Pilot Point, Texas, about 50 miles north of Plano. Senner worked his way up from agent to crew manager, and later left to start his own company. When he's not on the road, Senner is with his wife and daughter at their home in Gainesville, just a few miles from Pilot Point.

Senner's crew was working Mahathy's hometown of Fort Wayne, Indiana, when he spotted her in an Arby's and figured she would make a good agent. Senner is six-one, blond, handsome and has the kind of confidence that allowed him to shrug off things like the warrant for his arrest out of Phoenix, where he was busted for weed and was a no-show at court. He offered a way out of Fort Wayne, and a way out of Mahathy's mixed-up family life. But first, because she was under 18, Senner wanted her mother to sign a permission slip. Because her mother is illiterate, Mahathy got an older cousin to sign for it instead. With that taken care of, she was able to hit the road. She made money for Senner, who made money for his boss, who in turn made money for major-league publishers.

Like many agents, the teenage Mahathy didn't know what she was getting herself into and how hard it was going to be to get herself out of it. Senner and his colleagues have a great sales pitch, and truth doesn't always close the deal.

Agents are often driven across the country by managers whose driver's licenses have been suspended or revoked. And while the industry's trade group says it encourages member companies to conduct background checks, the crews are overflowing with agents with open warrants, extensive criminal histories and probation terms that prohibit them from leaving their home state. Since its inception in 1987, the National Field Selling Association has not only done nothing to clean up the crews, it has lobbied against proposed legislation that would implement the most basic of safety regulations and prohibit the hiring of underage employees.

While mainstream publishers and their trade group, the Magazine Publishers Association, say door-to-door sales account for a minuscule percentage of annual sales, this seemingly small percentage still translates into millions. It's profitable enough to publishers like Condé Nast, Reader's Digest and others that they still consider door-to-door sales a worthwhile venture in the 21st century. And without publishers' participation, the industry would cease to exist. Which means, quite simply, that publishers have decided the collateral damage is worth the boost in circulation.
The following is a story of that collateral damage - of murder, rape, assault, overdoses and scamming - and the business decisions and lack of legislation that make it possible.
_____________________
In February 2000, Rick Senner, Crystal Mahathy and the rest of Senner's crew hit a rave party in Oakhurst, California, where they recruited an 18-year-old girl named Mandy Nixon.

When Nixon told her parents she wanted to drive around the country with Senner's crew, they were concerned. Nixon was a bit of a rebellious spirit. As a minor, she had trouble with drugs and alcohol and wound up on juvenile probation for a while. But Crystal Mahathy, who had turned 18 on the road, told the Nixons she'd look out for their daughter.

But a day or so after Nixon left, her parents read about the history of complaints online about All-Star Promotions, Senner's employer, and they grew concerned. They called Senner a few times to have him drop off their daughter wherever they were so they could bring her back home. But he ignored the calls. Deciding they needed more muscle, they had Nixon's former probation officer call Senner and tell him he had better get Nixon off his crew, so he dropped her off by a motel outside Medford, Oregon.
Although Mahathy said she'd look out for Nixon, Mahathy was having her own regrets about joining Senner Sales. She had called her Aunt Patsy a few times from the road, saying she wasn't getting the money she was promised, and she wasn't eating regularly. She wanted to come home. But Patsy never seemed to have the money for a Greyhound ticket.

On February 4, around the time Senner dropped Mandy Nixon off in Medford, Mahathy called Aunt Patsy from a pay phone outside a Wal-Mart. It had been a really long day; she hadn't made enough sales, and she felt really pressured. That time, Patsy told her to stay put. They'd get her a ticket. But the call was abbreviated; Mahathy had spotted Senner's rented Ford Explorer and she said he'd be mad if he found out she was calling home again. She'd call back later.

The next night, on their way to sell to Joneses in Eureka, California, Senner's crew was stopped by California Highway Patrol officers for driving 30 mph over the speed limit. Apparently unaware that Senner had a warrant for pot possession out of Phoenix, the officers gave him a citation and let him go on his way.
Less than an hour later, near Redding, Senner rounded an especially dangerous stretch of mountain highway running parallel to the Trinity River. With no guardrail, and with terrible visibility at night, the road had seen its share of accidents. Senner lost control of the Explorer and drove off the highway, falling into an embankment 80 feet below.

Passenger Scott Tarwater was ejected into the Trinity River, whose rapids carried him so far away his body wasn't found for three weeks. But a timely burial wasn't a problem for Mahathy's family, because she was right there in the passenger seat. Crushed to death.
_____________________
Whenever there's a tragedy tied to the industry, whether it be the death of one of the agents or of one of the customers, the industry mouthpieces issue impotent condemnations or reiterate the notion that door-to-door sales are just a sliver of the pie.

The Magazine Publishers of America will give a variation of the following, which is a statement it gave to the Press: "Magazine Publishers of America condemns any door-to-door business that preys on vulnerable individuals or poses a threat to the public. [MPA] has long urged its members to identify any subscriptions coming from these sources and recommends that its members cease doing business with any company that does not fully comply with the law. Our guidelines and relations with subscription agents are clear, and we encourage all our members to follow them."
Which, based on the Press's investigation, previous media stories and industry watchdogs, is complete nonsense. The object is to push subscriptions, and it scarcely matters how.

A customer is a "Jones." A sales pitch is a "spiel," and there are all kinds of spiels - a school-spiel, cancer-spiel, you name it. These lies are known as a dirty canvass, and they're quite successful. Of course, there are natural salespeople who don't have to dirty canvass and can write ten or 12 sales a day, but the agents who can't snow a Jones and who come back empty-handed are known as WABs, weak-ass bitches. A WAB occupies a stratum in the caste system right below circus freak and just above whore. No one wants to be a WAB, so sometimes you have to dirty canvass.
If the MPA is unaware of dirty canvassing, then its only other choice is to somehow believe that door-to-door companies are the country's single-biggest employer of college athletes in the marching band whose parents are dying of cancer and who are competing for a scholarship to study theater in London.

It's easier to understand the continued interest in door-to-door sales once you understand the financials.
Jack Hanrahan, a media consultant with three decades of experience in print advertising, publishes the CircMatters newsletter. He gave us a better understanding of how just a slight bump in circulation can mean serious money.

When magazines decide how much a page of advertising will cost, media buyers convert that into a ratio of cost-per-thousand.
Say the publisher of a magazine with a circulation of 1 million copies prices each page of advertising at $50,000. That's a cost-per-thousand of $50. Say the circulation jumps 50,000, which brings total circulation to 1.05 million. If the publisher keeps the cost-per-thousand at $50, that raises the single advertising page rate to $52,500 ($50 x 1,050).

If the magazine sells 100 pages of advertising per issue, then the total value of the 50,000 jump would be $250,000 per issue. ($2,500 per page x 100 pages). If the magazine runs 24 issues a year, that's 24 x $250,000 - $6 million, from an extra 50,000 copies.

That's enough incentive to keep using sales agents. Of course, publishers don't want to be linked to any of the kids knocking on the doors, so the system has been arranged to keep everyone at arm's length.

It works like this: Agents knocking on doors turn their sales receipts in to their managers, who send them off to clearinghouses. A clearinghouse submits the subscription orders to the publishers, who then mail out the magazines. The clearinghouses choose which traveling sales crew companies to work with; the heads of those companies usually have their managers do the hiring. This arrangement allows the publishers, clearinghouses and road crew company heads to pretend they have nothing to do with the kids pushing the publishers' product.

The real blessing for everyone, though, comes in a labor loophole: Even though a crew's agents ride in the same vehicle, are dropped off in the same neighborhoods, are returned at night to the same hotels and have commissions held by managers who dole out the cash when an agent wants to buy lunch or alcohol or a new pair of shoes, labor laws have allowed company owners to hire their agents as "independent contractors." Since the crews rarely have solicitation permits, if they are arrested for selling without a license or for any other matter, they are instructed to tell authorities they are not in fact employed by the company they're traveling with.

The companies that run the crews primarily hire through newspaper advertisements promising big money and free travel. The ads are generally placed when the crew hits a town; the prospective hires meet a crew manager at a hotel and are usually hired on the spot. Although they're promised about $500 a week, their money goes on "the book," a mysterious ledger kept by crew managers. Often, agents will start out in the red, already owing managers hotel rent money. Managers also dock pay for canceled orders or other so-called infractions.

Agents sell from a "hot-list," laminated brochures of magazine titles, usually provided by clearinghouses, that agents show their Joneses. The agents work on a point system; the hot-lists show the points each agent would get for a particular subscription. For example, a 2006 hot-list from the National Publishers Exchange, one of the country's largest clearinghouses, shows 40 points for Reader's Digest and 80 points for GQ. According to the titles on the hot-list, the agents were selling for - and NPE was clearing orders for - Condé Nast, Disney Publishing, Meredith and others. (While the list also includes titles from Hearst, a company spokesman told the Press, "A written directive was sent in January 2007, but most clearinghouses were alerted to our policy against accepting orders from door-to-door 'crews' years earlier." A Meredith spokesperson said the company de-authorized door-to-door sales in March 2007.)

Every link in the chain holds the door-to-door sales information close to the vest. Citing proprietary interests, publishers will not disclose their clearinghouses, and clearinghouses will not disclose their contracted magazine crews. Since there are only a handful of major clearinghouses in the country, publishers would have you believe that, after years in the industry, higher-ups are too incompetent to have figured out who their competitors clear through.

National Publishers Exchange was a member of the National Field Selling Association (NFSA), the trade group for door-to-door magazine sales companies. In 2006, the association stopped disclosing its membership, so it's difficult to tell if NPE is still a member.

The NFSA will not say why it decided to keep membership private, but that's not surprising for a trade association that doesn't even have its own office - instead, mail and phone calls are directed to the Philadelphia office of Fernley & Fernley, which prides itself on being "America's First Association Management Company."

And while Ellen Buckley handles preliminary media calls for the NFSA, she doesn't seem to know a whole lot, mostly because she wears a lot of hats. While she may be listed as the "director" of the NFSA, she is also, for example, Administrative Director of the North American Horticultural Supply Association, which means she doesn't just field calls about mag crews, but could probably also help with questions about mixed perennials and potting soil.
So for tough questions, Buckley refers reporters to the NFSA's Washington, D.C., attorney, Dan Smith. Smith has lobbied for the group, most notably in 2000, when legislators proposed the federal Traveling Sales Crew Protection Act. The bill was a response to a 1999 wreck in Wisconsin that killed seven agents and paralyzed another. It occurred when the 20-year-old driver of the van - whose Iowa license had expired and who previously had his Wisconsin driving privileges suspended - saw a police car and panicked. Not wanting to get busted again, he tried to change seats with a passenger while driving 80 miles per hour. The coordination was a bitch. Twelve passengers were ejected. The owner of the company the crew worked for never skipped a beat - she just hired a bunch of new kids and started up under a new name. Smith was the guy who handled the lobbying against the proposed safety act - lobbying that worked.

The bill called for making sure crews stayed in hotels that met certain safety guidelines, and making the companies keep an itinerary of where their crews were at any given time. Such a schedule would have helped when, in Houston in 2005, a sales agent raped a 17-year-old mentally retarded girl who answered the door of the apartment she shared with her mother. To gain her confidence, that agent acted as if he had a disability as well. If the Traveling Sales Crew Protection Act had passed intact, there's a very good chance authorities would be able to find out which crews were operating in Houston on June 5, 2005. As it is, the case remains unsolved.

Although Smith says otherwise, when it comes down to it, the NFSA doesn't appear to do much except hold an annual conference in Illinois where members gather to play golf. Smith says actual work is accomplished at the conference, such as the year a cop talked to company owners about driving safety, and another year when a CPA discussed tax preparation. Smith says he's also given talks about negligent hiring. (After 20 years, the NFSA members are still scratching their heads over this pesky "driving safety" thing. Seven years before the fatal Wisconsin wreck, an agent driving a van with only a learner's permit lost control in Des Moines, Iowa, hit a median, flipped the van and ejected nine passengers. Five were killed, six others injured.) (see "Cataloguing Grief").

In its newsletters, the NFSA is careful not to mention names of the sales agents, particularly those who die on the job. In its fall 1999 newsletter, the first one released after the Wisconsin tragedy, the lead article was the president's message on "Stating the Cause for Utilizing Prepaid Phone Cards in the Field," followed closely by "Small Wonders," a reflection on "the simple discoveries of the century." Sample passage: "Where would we be without the brassiere, first patented in 1914, or the zipper, patented in 1913? Could those inventions be related?" (For the record, the sales agents killed in Wisconsin were Peter Christian, 18; Cory Hanson, 22; Amber Lettman, 16; Crystal McDaniel, 26; Marshall Roberts, 16; Malinda Turvey, 18; and Joseph Wild, 21. Monica Forques, 16, was paralyzed from the waist down).

Of course, it's different if one of their own dies, as in the January 2006 newsletter's tribute to founding member Don Fish: "The next time you pick up a golf club, look up and say, 'Good luck, Don' - he will be playing with the greats of the game." (The NFSA named its annual golf tournament after Fish, who had the opportunity to die at age 74).

Smith talks in a sort of aw-shucks manner that would have you believe he wishes the NFSA could do more to ensure the safety of its agents and the Joneses they solicit. But don't think the trade group is just giving up - after 20 years of existence, the NFSA is toying with the radical notion of mandatory background checks. The bitch is, the NFSA has to be really careful about violating antitrust laws that limit the rules trade groups place on their members. So Smith says the NFSA probably has to stop just short of forcing members to conduct background checks.
"We can mandate that in order to be a member you must agree to do background checks," he says, adding that the NFSA would have no way of confirming if any of the companies ever did the checks.

"We can't force proof," Smith says. "The name of the game is, we're a trade association...the key is, you can't tell people how to run their business."

Furthermore, Smith was at a loss as to how someone might be able to confirm a company did the checks in the first place.
Citing privacy laws, he says, "You can't conduct background checks and send copies to a trade association to show you did it," apparently unaware of the fact that one of the NFSA's board members runs a service that audits companies' criminal background checks.

"The name of the game is whoever's doing the recruiting has got to run the background check," Smith says. "They've got to determine from what they see whether or not to put this guy out there or not. Now if they do it and screw up, then shame on them, but I'll find out after the fact, just like you do. Now can I do anything about it? The worst thing, the toughest thing I can do is to terminate their membership. I wish there was something else I could do, to be brutally frank, but there isn't any."

But if Smith has the power to jettison any owner who gets caught not running checks, he apparently hasn't been introduced to the NFSA's president, Vinnie Pitts. In 2000, after one of Pitts's agents murdered a woman in New York, the woman's family sued Pitts, who eventually settled for $1 million. The woman's sisters told local papers that they believed Pitts would now conduct background checks for sure. But in 2005, another of Pitts's agents - who was on probation for felony burglary out of Minnesota and was not supposed to leave the state - raped and beat a woman in Wisconsin (see "Sales Force").
_____________________
Back in the Houston Ramada, 79-year-old Diane Tork is in Room 301, smoking 100s, punching numbers into her calculator, taking calls on her pink cell and sifting through names and numbers of potential hires. Age has been kind to her body, but not so much her mind.

She'll get confused and send wrong birthdates back to the home office for criminal background checks, but of course it doesn't really matter anyway, because the checks are worthless. Only a formality. The kind of checks where you really don't want to find anything.

Tork says she started in the business on December 21, 1945, when she was 16. She eventually ran her own company, then took over for a company out of Spring when that owner died in the early 1990s. She worked alongside her now ex-husband, John Tork, who is 20 years her junior.

John Tork also had his own company, the Houston-based Tork & Associates. In 1992, the Federal Trade Commission sued Tork's company for violating the "cooling-off" period, which allows customers three days to cancel an order. After Tork failed to respond to the suit, a federal judge fined his company $50,000. A year later, Tork was convicted of larceny and sentenced to three years and six months in a Texas prison.

Diane says she and John, who share a home in Atlanta, Georgia, are semiretired. John has long suffered type 2 diabetes, and recently had a foot amputated. Diane has been off the road for a long time and only pops into hotels to check on things once the crews are about to hop.

Her company is called Prestige, which clears orders through a Phoenix clearinghouse owned by the late Robert Spruiell (see "Upper Management"). Joining Prestige on this hop are at least two other companies - it's not uncommon for supposedly distinct companies to travel together. And it's not uncommon for these groups to say they have no idea what the other is up to, which is what Diane Tork tells the Press.

She can't speak for Team-XTreme, which is run by a guy named James Scribner, who was described as an alcoholic by every ex-agent who spoke to the Press about him. Diane Tork doesn't disagree with that characterization, saying, "He's a drunk. I've heard that he will take his clothes off and run around the hotel naked - never around me." ("Scribs," as he's known, is just one of the industry's many middle-aged men whose jobs require them to travel around the country in vans loaded with women in their late teens and early twenties, something that apparently creeps out no one in publishing. A few former agents accused Scribs of getting a tad too friendly with them when he was on a binge. One former agent said, "If you're 18 years old, he wants to fuck you. He's a dirty, nasty old man. I do not like that guy.")

Diane says she runs a tight ship: Her agents aren't allowed to bring alcohol inside the hotel. She also says her agents are periodically drug-tested. And if she hears any of them are using a dirty canvass, they're out. She says she's had to fire about 15 agents in the past month for failing drug tests and lying to Joneses.
The kids can be a handful. Yet it's precisely these kind of troublemakers that Diane targets, mostly because, according to her story, she's a philanthropist at heart. Sure, she could hire upstanding kids from stable families who are maybe looking for a summer job before going off to Harvard, but that would just be too damn easy. She'd rather take in needy kids and nurture their self-respect by giving them a job and responsibilities.
"Kids today, their parents don't want to talk to them; they throw them out on the streets...sometimes these kids need help," she says.

So she can be stern, but maybe not as much as her ex-husband John, who, she says, is especially hard on the young women in his crew.

"He hates girls," she says. "You know why he hates girls? He thinks they're all sluts. And he gets so mad that girls go around with half of their body hanging out...he doesn't like his guys associating with the girls." (John Tork didn't return numerous voice mails).

But deep down, she says, he's a softie. And neither he nor anyone else in the mag crew business should be painted with the same brush, she says. There are good and bad in every line of work.
It's a sentiment that was echoed by a lot of people contacted for this story. The media always wants to focus on the negative. Why talk about things like agents on probation who beat, rape and kill people when you can talk about kids who are honing valuable job skills?

James Scribner originally agreed to speak with the Press, but ultimately changed his mind, because of his belief that the Press just wanted to focus on the "negative."

Of course, Scribs and Diane Tork have a point. Few media stories describe how fun life on a mag crew can be - if you're not a WAB. First of all (based on what ex-agents told us), there is nearly unlimited access to marijuana, cocaine, pills and meth. It's like an especially fun dormitory on wheels. A lot of these young adults were already using before they joined crew, and find it absolutely wonderful that there are jobs where you can be high all the time, and instead of your boss caring, your boss is getting high with you.

You also get to travel the country, which means you get to experience Ramadas and Holiday Inns from coast-to-coast, as well as seeing the country's beauty from a van window. Plus, you get to knock on doors in exciting tourist destinations like suburban Houston, suburban Phoenix, suburban St. Louis and suburban Minneapolis.

For the guys, there's potential to get laid like crazy. Since crews are constantly picking up new agents, if a guy isn't getting anywhere with the current batch of young women, he just has to wait about 24 hours before the new batch arrives.

For the female agents, there is the promise of finding a boyfriend. A lot of serious relationships start on the road, and many lead to marriage. There are drawbacks, though; the Press spoke with a few female former agents who say their managers coerced them into getting abortions because a pregnant agent can't be walking all that much, and, really, who wants to buy a magazine subscription from a knocked-up 18-year-old? The idea is to appear innocent, not coked-out and with child.

Sure, if sales are bad, you don't always get to eat, and if you complain, managers often remind you of your station in life, and how your own family didn't want you, and besides, what the hell else are you going to do with your life? The agents who do manage to leave often come back because the lifestyle has gotten in their blood.

An agent named Jenn (she asked that her last name not be used) told the Press about returning to her crew, even though she knew it was bad for her. Jenn was hired in 2006, when she was 22 and hiding from her abusive boyfriend in a North Carolina women's shelter. Traveling around in a van seemed like a nice change of pace, so she answered an ad in the paper for Sunshine Subscription Agency, and met up with the crew manager, a 34-year-old guy who had served time in a Florida prison for burglary. She left with him that day.

She enjoyed the constant partying but had disagreements with the company owner (Vinnie Pitts, the current president of the NFSA), so she left after only a few months. But when she got home, she was freaked out by how quiet and slow things were. Her thumbtack habit grew worse - on the road, she would steal thumbtacks from bulletin boards and poke herself. She didn't know why. Once home, though, she was driving the suckers all the way in.

"I had not been alone for two months," Jenn told the Press. "I was so used to - no matter where I was, whether I was going to the bathroom, whether I was walking to the ice machine, I was never alone. And then all of a sudden, I was."

She added, "Physically, I couldn't be still, because my body was used to walking miles and miles a day, that if I didn't walk anywhere in one day, I would have these muscle spasms all over my body. And so I would walk for hours."

So she went back to the crew and got what she needed; the excitement, the friends, the exercise, the drugs. All fun things. Which goes to show that there is a positive side to this story.
_____________________
A year after the Wisconsin wreck, that state's governor, Jim Doyle, sent letters to the publishers of the magazines sold by the crew.

In his letter to Condé Nast, specifically citing the magazine Allure, Doyle wrote, "Our complaints document a pattern and practice of illegal conduct and deception in the marketing of your magazine. Unfortunately, last year's accident in Wisconsin was not an isolated incident. Other young people and adults have been killed in other states while working for itinerant sales crews. Young people are recruited to sell your publication with promises of extensive travel, wealth and college scholarships. Once employed, they are treated like animals."

He then laid the final responsibility at the feet of Condé Nast: "As a major publisher, you have the ultimate responsibility for the way your magazine reaches the public. You also control the purse strings because you pay these companies for obtaining new subscriptions. Clearly, you are in the best position to ensure that these companies obey the law and do not risk the lives of the children representing your product."

To date, Doyle appears to be the only politician who has called the publishers on their complicity in the door-to-door trade. However, it appears his words didn't quite sink in.
Two months after his letter to Condé Nast, he got a response not from the publisher, but from a lawyer for the Magazine Publishers Association, displaying that organization's uncanny ability to speak out of both sides of its mouth.

Attorney John Hadlock wrote that, to the best of his knowledge, the company running the crew in the Wisconsin wreck was not authorized by the publishers or the clearinghouse the company used. (This, of course, is an unverifiable statement, since all of the information is closely guarded).

Hadlock continued: "...And substantially, all of MPA's member publishers have taken steps to disassociate themselves and their magazines from road crew agents known to have acted unethically...."

And then, "The publishers would like to work with state and federal regulators to have a central clearinghouse of agents that are believed to be unethical or that violate the law. For antitrust reasons, MPA has been unable to create such a list for fear that that would be deemed an unlawful boycott."

A careful rereading of those passages presents a paradox: How were MPA's members able to "disassociate" from agents "believed to be unethical," unless they knew which agents had bad records and which were kosher? Presumably, one would have to work from a list in order to make disassociation possible.
Yet, "MPA has been unable to create such a list" for fear of inviting accusations of antitrust violations. So which is it? Either there is a list or not. Apparently, the likes of Condé Nast are afraid of being sued by people like Rick Senner and Vinnie Pitts, which would indicate that Condé Nast doesn't have much in its budget for hiring decent attorneys.

Hadlock ultimately blamed these unfortunate situations on the industry's bogeymen, the nefarious bunch of unauthorized sellers known as "rogue agents."

"Magazine publishers see such unethical agents as a serious problem," Hadlock wrote. "Agents of that type are quick to disappear when they are under scrutiny, only to reappear later under a different name and at a different location."

Although Hadlock's letter acknowledged the Wisconsin wreck, the MPA never issued a public statement on the tragedy. It was a sensitive time for them - it was the same year the association got a new president, Nina Link, who came to the MPA from the Children's Television Workshop, where she was, among other things, a producer of Sesame Street.

Nine months after the Wisconsin tragedy, Link was interviewed by Folio, a magazine geared toward people in publishing.
The interviewer asked Link, "In television reports about the accident, the MPA refused to comment. Was that the right decision?"

"I don't know," Link is quoted as saying. "People here are so thoughtful, and that decision was made with a lot of consideration."

The interviewer tried again: "Would you refuse to comment?"
Link said, "I'd have to be in the situation. If I felt it wasn't in the best interest of magazines, then no."

A few questions later, the interviewer asked, "Should publishers be more aggressive in self-policing efforts?"

Link's answer: "We have some 'best practices,' and again, we have established guidelines. I think many members have been good about following those guidelines, but there are probably a few that haven't."

The thing is, neither Hadlock's letter to the governor, nor Link's position that publishers take the MPA guidelines seriously, appears to hold up under scrutiny.

At the time of Crystal Mahathy's death - 11 months after the Wisconsin wreck - she was working from a hot-list provided by National Publishers Exchange, one of the country's biggest clearinghouses, which cleared major magazines like Time, Rolling Stone and US News & World Report. Yet NPE did not sever ties with Senner after the wreck. He served six months in jail and was back on the road, still using NPE's hot-lists.

After the families of Crystal Mahathy and Scott Tarwater sued Rick Senner, Russell Wood and All-Star Promotions (the case was settled for an undisclosed amount), Senner split from All-Star and joined a company called Entrepreneurs Across America. (Mahathy's and Tarwater's families also sued Firestone Tires, which in 2000 had recalled a massive number of defective tires, many of which were fitted onto Ford Explorers, one of which Senner was driving. Firestone settled with the families for an undisclosed amount).

Entrepreneurs Across America also used hot-lists from NPE, which featured titles like Reader's Digest, Maxim, Forbes and Elle. And these titles were hawked by top-tier individuals like Jacob Kanupp, who, according to internal documents from EAA, was a top seller when he joined in 2005. At the time, the 23-year-old Kanupp had a warrant out for his arrest and had racked up charges (if not outright convictions) for possession of cocaine, assault with a deadly weapon, carrying a concealed weapon, felony possession of marijuana, contributing to the delinquency of a minor, credit card fraud, driving without a license, DWI, defrauding an innkeeper, drunk and disorderly conduct, and, oh, littering.

Representatives at the National Publishers Exchange ignored calls from the Press for weeks. It wasn't until we left a voice mail saying we had confirmation that NPE had subcontracted with All-Star Promotions and Entrepreneurs Across America that we got a call back. That was from a woman named Elaine Scanlon, who would only say that they do not disclose which road crew companies they work with.

A TV Guide representative was the only person who would admit to a relationship with National Publishers Exchange, and that was only because, according to the representative, TV Guide dropped NPE - and all door-to-door sales - in 2007.

A representative for US News & World Report stated in an e-mail, "...since U.S. News is a privately held company, we do not disclose individual vendor sales information."

Ellen Morgenstern of Reader's Digest also sent an e-mail, stating, "the vast majority of Reader's Digest subscriptions come from direct mail efforts, partnerships, and via the Internet. A very small percentage come from authorized subscription agents that comply with industry guidelines and practices."

Beth Jacobson of Wenner Media, which publishes Rolling Stone, seemed confused when told that the Press was looking into door-to-door sales agents. "Wenner media doesn't directly retain those companies," she said, which is precisely the point.

The Web site for the Pilot Point-based Direct Subscription Services includes Rolling Stone on its list of available titles. But it's much better for Wenner Media never to step into the same room with a top-selling DSS agent like Tim Heinecke, who joined the company after skipping out on probation for beating his three-year-old daughter.

Who wants to be publicly associated with that guy?
_____________________
In her short time on the road for Senner Sales, Crystal Mahathy got to meet all kinds of people.

The thing about a Jones is, you never know what you're going to get. Some male Joneses will buy any crappy magazine from an agent showing enough cleavage. Some will invite you in for a joint. Some will slam the door in your face or sic their dog on you.
Mahathy was so young and unassuming that she seemed to invite sympathy from her Joneses. A woman in Rio Dell, California, invited Mahathy in for some food and a rest. She wound up talking to Mahathy for two hours. She felt so bad about taking up Mahathy's time that she bought a subscription to Rolling Stone.
Before Mahathy went on to the next Jones, the woman made sure to get her address. Mahathy gave her the address to her aunt Shirley's house.

The following Christmas, Shirley Mahathy opened her mailbox and found a card from Rio Dell, addressed to Crystal. Shirley opened the envelope to find a Christmas card - a red background with pictures of little toys scattered about, and a bed with three sleeping tots.

Inscribed in the card was a message from the woman who had sat and talked with Mahathy months earlier.

"Hey little one," it read, "...please send a note and let us know you are safe and home."

Of course, the woman never got a note. By that time, Crystal Mahathy was ten months dead.

Digital Media Comes of Age

2008-07-17T07:44:00.002-04:00

Digital Media Comes of Age
By Vin Crosbie
http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3630189
A consumer magazine whose multimillion copy circulation has been declining for decades seeks a digital media chief. According to its recruitment ad, the digital chief's main responsibility "will be to develop and launch profitable new digital services that increase the circulation of the company's renowned publication."

Do you remember when you were a child and your parents dressed you up and asked you to open the door and greet guests at their dinner parties? Years later when you were a teenager, how would you feel about doing that? Would you like that to be your main responsibility now that you're an adult?

I'm amazed at how many magazines still focus on digital media primarily as a mechanism to drive traffic to print and reverse the inevitable decline of that traditional medium.

Using digital media primarily as a way to increase print circulation might have made a bit of sense in the Internet's early years, when it was opened to the public in 1991. Yet when public use of the Internet entered its teenage years and began to become a mature medium in its own right, all print media companies should have acknowledged that and stopped using digital as an adjunct, billboard, or child to the parent operation. Though many magazine companies have made that change, it's amazing how many still have not. (The same can be said about many broadcast companies' treatment of digital media.)

Public use of the Internet will be 18 years old next year. It can still be a bit reckless and uncertain, learning its way around, but it has certainly become a mature medium in all natural ways. It's about time that every media company began treating digital that way and acknowledging its full rights as a medium.

Moreover, when you were 18 years old, did your parents say that your main responsibilities were household chores? You probably weren't too happy about that, but at least it was better than being a cute little doorman whose role was simply to drive traffic to print. I mentioned that many media companies have begun to acknowledge that digital is maturing. I've noticed that many consumer magazines, broadcasters, and newspapers have lately rephrased their recruitment ads to say that digital will "be responsible for developing and launching profitable new digital services to enhance the company's stable of brands."

Although being responsible for new digital services that "enhance the company's stable of brands" is better than just "increase the circulation of the company's renowned publication," it's still not a happy role for digital. Using online to enhance the company's stable of brands means making the parent's household shinier and more attractive for a new kind of guest. It means dusting off the old place, trying to make the legacy brands attractive online, and convincing the digital audience that you're not a teenager driving your parents' Buick.

I sympathize with digital media executives who've been put in that teenage role. I can see some of the reasons they accept it. Life is less risky and more convenient under a parent's roof, and the allowance they get from their parents might be more lucrative than what they can get venturing out on their own.

However, the problem is that some -- probably many -- of those legacy brands don't make sense to operate online. Many are brands that developed as the best of what the print medium does and are unsuited for online media, no matter how much money the parents throw that way.

While it's OK for a legacy brand to have a digital presence, the purpose of digital shouldn't be to enhance traditional media brands, nor to leverage those brands' legacy goodwill online, when many are too old or can't naturally adapt for the online environment. Nor is simply rebranding old brands a good idea. Remember Pathfinder?

Business is business and not a place for the sentimental, even those sentimental about old brands. If the legacy brand is old and tottering in its own medium, there are probably natural reasons for it. It's not digital's role to give life-support to declining legacy media or legacy brands. Whenever a new medium comes of age, its primary role is to venture out on its own, not prop up its parents or legacy.

Digital media is coming of age. It's about time for digital media to venture out on its own. It's time for media companies to stop treating it like a child.

Is readership rising or falling?

2008-07-15T22:17:00.001-04:00

Is readership rising or falling?
By Simon Owens
http://bloggasm.com/is-newspaper-readership-rising-or-falling

Amid the countless stories detailing the blows the newspaper industry has taken in both advertising and circulation, one positive theme has remained constant: More people are reading newspapers than ever. Or, more specifically, more people are visiting newspaper websites. The New York Times, for instance, has a weekday circulation of just over a million. Its website - depending on which metrics you use - has somewhere close to 18 million separate people that visit it each month.
But according to a new study (pdf) released by the Readership Institute, a division of the Media Management Center at Northwestern University, even this one glimmer of hope for the industry may be overblown.

To complete the study, the Readership Institute hired a polling firm to conduct over 3,000 phone interviews in 100 "impact" markets. The questions focused in on how much time and effort was spent reading a person's local daily paper, making sure to differentiate between the print and online edition.

Based on the answers, the study concluded that website "penetration" is relatively low, with only a fifth of the respondents saying they visited their local papers' websites within the past month. Approximately 62 percent of the respondents said they have never once accessed the newspaper's website.

Mary Nesbitt, managing director at the Readership Institute, told me in a phone interview today that the level of website penetration has remained relatively the same since 2003.

"The penetration within the average impact area is not as high as most would like it to be," Nesbitt said. "It has changed a little bit over the last few years, picking up a little bit. But there's still a big opportunity to grow and engage an online audience."

As for the print edition of the newspaper, its core readership is showing a slow, steady decline. The Readership Institute developed a "Reader Behavior Score" to not only measure how often a person reads his local newspaper, but how much time is spent with it and the extent to which he reads it. The RBS is based on a seven-point scale, and this year the average score was 3.38, a drop from 3.55 in 2006.

Respondents that were ages 18 to 24 showed the sharpest decrease in readership, with a score of 2.40 (compared to 2.84 in 2006). Older readerships either stayed the same or actually showed significant increases.

So what accounts for the disparities between the website statistics boasted by most newspapers and the results of this study? Nesbitt wouldn't speculate much on this, but it's possible that many of those new readers are flowing in from outside the local impact area, either through search engines or links from other websites. Also, the study relied on the respondents to make off-the-cuff estimations of the time they spent reading newspapers, a fact that likely resulted in people making generalizations for reading habits that are often very complicated and sporadic. Readership has always been an incredibly complicated thing to measure, and even with the sophisticated analytic tools we have today to measure website traffic, there are still unresolved arguments over how to accurately gauge a website's readership.

But Nesbitt said one thing is likely certain: since the Readership Institute began conducting these surveys in 2000, readership is bleeding at a much slower pace than advertising and circulation revenue.

"What it tells us - contrary to what we read and see and hear - is that newspapers are not going to hell in a handcart," she said. "At least in terms of their audiences . . . They are read and used by a huge number of people on a regular basis. Truth be told that number has been declining slowly and what has been driving that is that frequency of reading has decreased."

And when I asked her whether there's any optimism for the industry that can be found from these studies, Nesbett was quick with one positive piece of spin.

"Something that's interesting is that even though website readership is very low, to me that says opportunity," she replied. "And the other thing is how the trust and credibility of the newspaper seems to be having a beneficial brand effect on the website as well. That's very positive to me."

But whether this brand will remain intact remains to be seen. The Newspaper Association of America reported recently that online newspaper advertising jumped 19 percent in 2007.

The flip side to that? Overall, total advertising revenue has dropped 12 percent from last year. Only time will tell whether newspapers online counterparts will ever catch up, or if this decade truly signifies the beginning of the end of the industry as we know it.

Contact me at simon.bloggasm@gmail.com

Trio recalls horror of magazine-selling stint

2008-07-14T21:24:00.001-04:00

BoSacks Speaks Out: We get these horror stories from time to time. This article was filled with more intimate detail than usual. It is a sad statement that this kind of old style practice continues even for the smallest or any percentage of magazine circulation.

The counterpoint to the story is, of course, the honest local high school or church groups which do good work and which are, in fact, actually local.

I think it is important for us all to acknowledge that these seedy situations are sadly still alive and well, thriving somewhere in our circulation systems and perhaps even in our own home towns. I acknowledge that it is not directly we who perpetrate the crimes and the offences, but it can't be denied we are involved, however distantly, in this process.

"He who profits by a crime commits it"
Seneca (Roman philosopher, mid-1st century AD)

Trio recalls horror of magazine-selling stint
BY RICK FOSTER SUN CHRONICLE STAFF
http://www.thesunchronicle.com/articles/2008/07/13/

When Sue Rodabaugh answered a help-wanted ad that turned out to be from an itinerant door-to-door magazine sales company, she hoped for fun, travel and an opportunity to see a bit of the country while making money to catch up on bills.

But Rodabaugh, who accepted an offer to travel to the Philadelphia area to join a street sales crew, along with her boyfriend and their roommate, said they found neither fun nor a bootstrap opportunity.

Instead, she said they were dropped off in unfamiliar locations, forced to walk up to 10 hours a day and were housed with up to 40 other young salespeople in a threadbare New Jersey motel.

The 19-year-old, her boyfriend, George Tibbetts, 23, and their roommate, Derek Isbister, 21, left before completing a three-day training period when Rodabaugh's grandmother agreed to wire them bus fare.

But along the way, the Attleboro trio said they witnessed lying and misrepresentation by magazine salespeople, rampant drug use and mistreatment of crew members.
In one instance, she said, one saleswoman stole checks from a residential mailbox and coerced her to sign them - presumably so they could be cashed.

"It was unbelievable," Tibbetts said. "We were all looking at each other, asking one another what are we doing here?"

Rodabaugh said she and her friends were desperate to earn money, all having lost their jobs within the same week. But she now regrets urging the others to take the chance.

"I can't believe I was so naive to go along with it," said Rodabaugh, who along with the men have since told their story to the FBI.

Rodabaugh and Tibbetts said that after agreeing initially to take a bus to Philadelphia, they were given tickets to Wilmington, Del., where they were picked up by a crew representative.

As trainees, each was given $20 a day to help them get started. Most of the time, however, they were broke.

Crew members and trainees performed daily calisthenics and attended meetings at which their handlers "amped up" their charges by having them repeat slogans and sales routines.

Nights were devoted to partying, punctuated with drug use and underage drinking, Tibbetts said.

During their days on the road, Tibbetts and Rodabaugh said they spent up to 10 hours a day walking and canvassing neighborhoods through 100-degree heat mixed with thunderstorms.

Crews were transported from neighborhood to neighborhood in vans whose drivers were sometimes so reckless that Tibbets said he literally had to hang onto his seat at speeds up to 80 mph.
Tibbetts said he and his friends weren't the only ones shocked by the conditions and business practices of the crew. Eight other prospects also dropped out over a three-day period.

Sadly, said Earlene Williams, director of Parent Watch, which tracks the activities of itinerant magazine solicitors, such reports are neither rare nor isolated to major metropolitan areas.

Labor abuses against crew members, mostly young and with few skills or job prospects, are widespread, she said.

In the past, sales crew members who failed to produce or stray from the rules have been beaten, had their commissions withheld , been abruptly fired and dropped off at the side of the road, she said.

Sometimes, members who make their team look bad by not selling enough subscriptions are subject to isolation or humiliating treatments, like being forced to run a gauntlet of jeering fellow sales people.

Often, young women end up sleeping with their titular managers or supervisors.

"It's one way to protect yourself," Williams said.

That's not the worst that can happen.

Phil Ellenbecker's teenage daughter worked for an itinerant sales crew for only two days in 1999 before a van, driven by a serial traffic offender, overturned in Janesville, Wis., killing her and half the 14 young salespeople inside.

Ellenbecker later formed the Dedicated Memorial Parents Group to expose abuses in the door-to-door sales industry.

Contrary to enticements found in advertisements, Ellenbecker said, most crew members earn relatively little in commissions. And with $20 or more a day deducted for hotel costs, many members end up heavily in debt to the operators.

"It can be compared to indentured servitude," Ellenbecker said.

It's different for those who run the crews. They reap the benefits of profits earned by the salespeople who work for them.

On his MySpace site, the supervisor of the crew that employed Tibbetts and Rodenbaugh claimed to earn from $45,000 to $60,000 per year.

Neither the supervisor, the company that employs him nor the National Field Sales Association, which represents door-to-door sales organizations, returned calls from a reporter.

Howard Polskin, a representative of the Magazine Publisher's Association industry umbrella group, said subscriptions obtained through door-to-door sales represent a tiny fraction - estimated at 1 percent or less - of the magazine business.

He said the MPA has established strict guidelines for solicitors that require background checks for sales personnel and ban false or deceptive selling practices.

A statement released by the MPA said the group "has long urged its members to identify any subscriptions" coming from organizations that prey on the vulnerable or pose a danger to the public, "and recommends that its members cease doing business with any company that does not fully comply with the law."

Nevertheless, salespeople are constantly under pressure from their bosses to make sales quotas, watchdog groups say.

Rodabaugh said that during her sojourn in a vehicle with three other women, salespeople frequently represented themselves as local residents to gain the trust of potential customers. She said one worker took a box of blank checks from one house's mailbox - a federal offense - and coerced her to endorse them.

Subscription orders are frequently paid by check.

Williams said crew members typically work as independent contractors to avoid minimum wage laws and other requirements for employees.

Workers usually bunk three to four to a hotel room and are dispatched on their daily rounds in vans driven by a car handler. Crews are usually dropped off and picked up four to five times a day, knocking on doors in different neighborhoods.

After two or more weeks based in a particular region, crews move on to other parts of the country.

Salespeople are usually given a quota of five sales a day or 30 sales a week, Williams said, which can be raised later based on production.

Those who fulfill certain sales criteria may be told they can earn points toward a $1,000 prize or a trip to Disney World.

A 2007 investigation by The New York Times, however, found that many crew members made little money, saved less and were subject to violence and taunting.

The report said the earnings of many members was kept on the books for later payment, rather than paid to them immediately.

Many states, but not Massachusetts, have attempted to control traveling crews by requiring permits for door-to-door solicitations. But even in those states, companies often flout the rules, moving their operations rapidly to stay ahead of law enforcement.

While riding with a sales crew as a trainee in New Jersey, Rodabaugh said her van driver was stopped several times for not having the proper permits, and then was yelled at when her crew did not make enough sales.

State Rep. Cleon Turner, D-Yarmouth, has been trying to push through a bill that would require door-to-door sales firms to register with local police before beginning sales campaigns. And citizens would be able to have their homes placed on a "no-knock" list if they don't want solicitors calling at their doors.

The bill, which was promoted by the Yarmouth Police, was occasioned by reports of crimes, harassment and intimidation during and after walk-up solicitations, Yarmouth police Lt. Steven G. Xiarhos said.

So far, however, the bill has made little progress. A few Bay State communities, such as Amesbury, have adopted local ordinances requiring salespeople to register with the police.

Crimes by door-to-door solicitors are all too common.

Ellenbecker's group, which often aids police in investigating crimes related to door-to-door selling, currently has 27 alleged felony cases on its books, including a woman customer who was raped and murdered by a salesman.

In May, Beverly police arrested a 25-year-old Philadelphia man on a charge of assaulting a 13-year-old girl near her home. Police, who said the man tried to grab the teenager, classified the incident as an attempted abduction.

Both the suspect and two companions working for a magazine-selling crew were convicted felons, according to the police report.

The same trio also visited several other Massachusetts communities last spring, including Seekonk.

Most sales crews are run by independent companies rather than magazine publishers. Selling organizations get their magazine supply either through contracts with publishers or through clearinghouses linked with individual sales organizations.

The third-party connection makes it possible for publishers to eschew any responsibility for sales crews or their tactics while still reaping the benefits of subscription revenue, said Parent Watch's Williams.

In most states, door-to-door salesmen are subject to little regulation, Ellenbecker said.

However, the National Field Selling Association maintains a code of ethics for sales organizations to promote fair treatment of salespeople and to keep out criminals.

For example, the NFSA code requires that blind ads for sales crews contain "sufficient information so that an individual may know the basic nature of the offer."

However, an advertisement placed in The Sun Chronicle by the sales group that hired the local trio made no mention of selling magazines or where or under what circumstances trainees would live or earn money.

A series of ads placed by the same company on Internet help-wanted sites carried the enticement, "Live Like A Rock Star."

The NFSA code also specifies that background checks are to be conducted to ensure that salespeople are of good character.

Tibbetts and Rodenbaugh said they were told about the background checks, but were not aware that any checks were actually conducted on them.

The NFSA, which did not respond to a Sun Chronicle reporter's phone call, does not publish a list of the members who subscribe to its code on its Web site.

Although disgusted with what they called abusive treatment, unsafe driving and deceptive practices, the Attleboro trio said they're happy about at least one thing.

"We're glad to be back," Tibbetts said.

Ellenbecker, whose daughter died under conditions similar to those endured by the local trio, said he hopes consumers who know the facts won't patronize sales crews whose members are likely to be exploited young people.

"If someone comes to your door, and you don't know them or can't be certain they're with a legitimate group, don't do business with them," he said. "You're just feeding the monster."

In India, Magazines That Translate Well

2008-07-14T21:20:00.003-04:00

In India, Magazines That Translate Well
By HEATHER TIMMONS NEW DELHI
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/14/business/media/14mag.html?_r=1&ref=business&oref=slogin

- Hairstyles to crave and hints on how to get over heartbreak. This month's must-have lip gloss and a new nine-iron that will make your golfing buddies jealous.

An explosion of Western magazines has hit newsstands in India in the past 12 months, pitching a familiar mix of consumption and gossip, relationship advice and expensive goodies.

Indian versions of Vogue, Rolling Stone, OK!, Hello, Maxim, FHM, Golf Digest, People and Marie Claire have all sprung up this year, and GQ and Fortune are soon to follow. They join familiar names like Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping and Reader's Digest.

Despite rising inflation and a slowing economy, India remains one of the world's bright spots for magazine publishing. Magazine advertising in India is expected to grow by 20 percent to $302 million in 2008, according to the International Federation of the Periodical Press. A whole new class of nouveau riche Indians has been created in recent years as the economy and real estate prices soared and two-income families became the norm in some upper-income urban areas.

"There are one million homes earning more than $100,000 each" in India, said Alex Kuruvilla, the chief executive of Condé Nast India, the only major foreign-owned publisher that has set up a fully staffed India division to write and print a fully owned title. In October Vogue magazine will have been in India for a year, and Condé Nast is introducing the men's fashion magazine GQ in September.

Most of the new Western magazines being published in India are not really Western at all - they are written, photographed, edited and designed almost completely in India. Many are published under licensing agreements with the media company that owns the name. Even though they are all published in English, their content may be completely different from their American or British counterparts.

While the name may be familiar to an American reader, the flavor is distinctly Indian. Instead of Heloise's syndicated household hints column, for example, Good Housekeeping runs "Ask Mrs. Singh." This month, Mrs. Singh tackles how to keep your home fresh during the monsoons that sweep through India during the summer (rubber mats and fresh flowers help).

Some, like Maxim, seem to pride themselves on pushing the envelope of good taste even further than they do in their home markets. The magazine's July issue includes the feature "48 Ways to Get a Gori" (gori is Hindi for fair-skinned woman, and is used in this context to mean a foreign white one). Some ideas the article offers: keep in mind most American women are extremely angry at Indians for stealing their jobs; don't ask an Italian woman if her family is part of the mob; to approach an Israeli woman, try a suicide bomber joke.

The July issue of Vogue carries the Annie Leibovitz photo shoot of the honeymoon of the "Sex and the City" characters Carrie and Mr. Big that appeared in the June Vogue in the United States; an underwater fashion shoot off the Indian islands of Lakshadweep; a cover story on the Bollywood debutante Asin Thottumkal; and a mix of international and local ads.

"We like to talk about 100 percent Indian content, where every piece would be relevant to an Indian audience," said Mr. Kuruvilla, though that means the magazine may pick up the occasional piece from another Condé Nast publication.
Most of the women's magazines, including Vogue, also carry pages of ads for an Asian cosmetic staple, whitening cream intended to lighten the skin. Many of these advertisements are from global companies like Estée Lauder and L'Oréal.

Even with a cover price of 100 rupees, or about $2.50, and a steady demand for imported paper, the 50,000-circulation Vogue India is close to break-even in its first year, Mr. Kuruvilla said, thanks to a steady flow of luxury advertising. "That is something we hadn't even planned for," he said. "We expected it in Year 4 or 5."

People magazine made its debut this month. While there are plenty of outlets for Bollywood gossip, from newspapers to blogs, "I was searching for a magazine with a lot of soul along with good packaging," said Maheshwer Peri, the president and publisher of Outlook Group.

Unlike Vogue India, People in India does not employ a single person from Time Inc., or Time Warner, he said, and the media giant has no stake in the Indian edition of the magazine. For its first issue, People India published 150,000 copies, and sold 70 percent of that number, he estimates.

The Outlook Group also markets and distributes BusinessWeek and Newsweek in India and has signed up two more news magazines that Mr. Peri said he could not yet disclose. The advantage with global news magazine are the "brands are known and the content is almost free," Mr. Peri said.

New opportunities are coming all the time. "The biggest challenge I have is to downplay the expectations about India," Mr. Peri said. He never gives a presentation that starts with India's one billion-plus population, he said, because then people's projections about the number of readers "go haywire."

India relies on an unorthodox street-side distribution system for more than half of all of its magazine sales. In major cities, packs of young boys stand in traffic islands in the middle of highways, holding up the latest copy of a glossy, and yelling "Vogue, madam? Indian Vogue! Golf Digest?" into the windows of stopped cars.

While many of these new magazines may cost 100 rupees an issue, these boys usually earn much less than that a day; they receive a commission from their boss, usually a middleman who gets a commission from what he sells from a magazine distributor, who in turn buys the magazines from the publisher for a fraction of the cover price.

Publishers in India say the system is something they have little control over, and liken street-side magazine distribution to the American paper route, a way for children to earn a little extra money. But the children selling the magazines tell a different tale.

"If on a particular day my sales are poor, then I am abused by my employer, at times beaten as well," said Sonu Kunar, a 12-year-old boy selling a variety of local and Western titles at the intersection of two busy New Delhi roads. Sonu says he works from 9 in the morning until 8 in the evening, and earns about 1,000 rupees, or $23.15, a month. He lives with 13 other children in a small room, and sends all the money he earns back to his family in the eastern state of Bihar.

Despite India's reputation for conservative attitudes toward sex, Cosmopolitan was one of the first titles to come to India nearly 12 years ago. Mala Sekhri, now Cosmopolitan India's publishing director, was approached by Hearst, which was looking for new markets at the time.

When she first brought copies of international editions of Cosmo to India, she could not even bring herself to show them to potential advertisers. "The few people who saw it turned the covers over" so they did not have to look at the explicit copy on the front, she said. "People said 'Are you sure? This is not what India is all about,' " Ms. Sekhri said.
They struggled for the first few years to create the right balance between Cosmo's international image and what would work in India, she said. Although Cosmopolitan's publisher, Hearst, wanted to be sure the brand was intact, executives there understood there were a lot of things that were not relevant in India at the time, she said. "For example, premarital sex - we had to skirt around that issue to begin with," she said.
Now "some of the features run in India have been racier" than those in the United States, she said.

Hari Kumar contributed reporting to this article.

Second Half Magazine and Media Industry Predictions

2008-07-08T07:57:00.003-04:00

Second Half Magazine and Media Industry Predictions
'Us will go to them. Radar will blink. OK! might not be.'Posted by Dylan Stableford
FolioMag.com
http://www.foliomag.com/2008/second-half-magazine-and-media-industry-predictions

Layoffs. Lawsuits. Shutterings. Salary freezes. Ad page declines. Budget reforecasts and slashings. Abrupt resignations. Oh, and that whole recession thing. In short, it wasn't a pretty first half for the magazine industry. Yet, judging by some of the 2008 predictions FOLIO: solicited back in December [0], it wasn't unexpected. We again asked people from all corners of the magazine (and media) world to weigh in with their second half predictions. Here they are, lightly-edited, in no particular order.

NAME: Larry Burstein
TITLE: Publisher, New York Media
[1]SECOND HALF PREDICTION: Those magazines that harness the tremendous power of the Web for their brands will thrive. But only if they build dynamic Web businesses. Many magazines believe simply having a Web presence is enough; a site for value add opportunities or subscription offers. It's not. Readers, visitors, and advertisers are demanding more.

NAME: Reed Phillips
TITLE: Managing partner, desilva + phillips
[2]SECOND HALF PREDICTION: We're not seeing a rebound in valuations yet. The demise of the credit market continues to depress the multiples buyers are willing to pay and now the U.S. economic downturn and higher costs of oil are also eroding confidence among buyers. I guess since my prediction was for year-end 2008 I might still be right, but I'm much less optimistic at this time.

NAME: Emily Gordon
TITLE: Managing editor, Print [3]; editor, Emdashes.com
[4]SECOND HALF PREDICTION: AOL repositions as AWESOMENESS OVERLOAD! All caps, exclamation point. Content from, and click-approved as awesome by, millions of 10-year-olds (there is also a portal for infants) uploads every second; as you might expect, there are plenty of baby hedgehogs. The new AOL has it all-news, shopping, sports, social networking, how-tos, tickets, casinos, messaging, radio, weather, polls, ads, apps, maps, dating, PSAs on STDs, candidate soundbites, horoscopes, music, video, ringtones, games, and e-mail. It just all goes by in one second. It's pretty painless, actually.

NAME: Bob Sacks [5]
TITLE: President/Publisher, Precision Media Group
SECOND HALF PREDICTION: As atoms get heavier and more costly to move the industry finally realizes that computerized digits do not need to be picked up by fuel burning trucks for either initial delivery or as the dreaded return and thrown into a land fill.

Us will go to them. Radar will blink, and OK! might not be.

B-to-B will move to make digital editions the default choice for subscribers. Production managers will change their job descriptions to Coordinators of Data Distribution, sometimes called the living D.E.A.D. ("Distributors of Edit & Ads Department") ending centuries of the need to understand putting ink on paper. More publishing dinosaur management who don't already have their own Facebook page, nor the knowledge of how to build one, will be asked to either jump from the executive terrace or take what's left of the money and run.

NAME: Henry J. Boye
TITLE: Publisher, Harvard Business Review
SECOND HALF PREDICTION: The economy will soften further (at least in the US) causing a continued drag on all of us that serve consumers. The staffs and budgets supporting advertising and marketing efforts will be pinched even further, greatly increasing the focus on effectiveness of spend. This will increase demand for integrated offerings that drive value in the practical and proven (versus simply intuitive) sense.

NAME: Mark A. Newman
TITLE: Editor-in-chief, Southern Breeze
[6]SECOND HALF PREDICTION: Sadly, I think it's going to get worse before it gets better. When salary and hiring freezes are the "good" news of the day, I feel that there's going to be a lot more closings, layoffs, buyouts, etc. And with Starbucks shuttering 600 U.S. stores, where are all of the out-of-work magazine staffers going to hang out and be bitter or work? Editorial types will have to update their skill sets and become well versed on the electronic aspects of publishing more and more by becoming the in-house web editors, web reporters, and bloggers. And I wouldn't be surprised if surviving staffers-especially at smaller pubs-are going to have to really expand their skill sets and become pros at everything from buying and pricing paper to IT. Those with secure jobs (as secure as they can be, that is) are likely going to stay put longer before climbing that corporate ladder or venturing to another company where you can find yourself out of a job in 6 months due to cutbacks. I also think that before the end of the year, a long-time big name consumer book publisher is going to undergo major overhauls that will send the industry reeling to the point that top editors will start considering the priesthood as a more viable option than publishing! And when it DOES start getting better, it will just mean no more layoffs or shutdowns; there will be new pubs launched hither and yon but not at the same levels as before.
NAME: Patrick Gavin
TITLE: Editor, mediabistro's FishbowlDC
[7]SECOND HALF PREDICTION: I predict that a white male will be selected to replace Tim Russert.

NAME: Bob Eckstein
TITLE: Cartoonist [8], New York Times, Time Out New York
SECOND-HALF PREDICTION: As magazines have officially become leisure items for seniors (eg. most healthy magazines have been AARP, Reader's Digest, Modern Maturity, Playboy, etc.), TV will follow suit and expect to see more shows for seniors this upcoming season:

NAME: Kyle du Ford
TITLE: Freelance writer
SECOND HALF PREDICTION: 10 Guaranteed 100% Accurate Predictions or Your Money Back! 1. Jann Wenner will fire somebody.2. Men's Health will put an actor on the cover with great abs.3. Jack Johnson will make another superfluous cover. Sans shoes. 4. Due to travel constraints, staff writers will change their titles to researchers, if only in spirit.5. Outside Go will replace Best Life on stylish men's coffee tables.6. Paper costs will increase.7. iPhone will make another superfluous cover. Sans shoes.8. Maxim will feature more breasts in 2008 than 2007.9. Readymade will make you feel stupid by introducing a product you could never build if you had 1,000 men and $500,000.10. FOLIO: will not even make mention of 1-9. Can you believe these guys?

'Buy Safe' Campaign Organizers Rebuke Criticism

2008-07-03T10:40:00.002-04:00

'Buy Safe' Campaign Organizers Rebuke Criticism
By Bill Mickey
http://circman.com
Publishers weigh in; BPA, ABC Defend Initiative.
Buy Safe Media, the BPA and ABC-backed campaign warning marketers against buying ads in non-audited b-to-b publications, has faced unusually harsh criticism since its launch last week.

Industry pundits, including consultant and noted columnist Bob Sacks, were among the first to weigh in on the program, calling the initiative "an attack at the heart of the entrepreneurial publishing business." Sacks wrote: "The new pathology actually disgusts me."

Samir "Mr. Magazine" Husni lamented "how low some folks in our industry are willing to sink in order to make their business flourish."

And it wasn't just pundits who were disturbed. At Access Intelligence, where several prominent titles remain un-audited, including CableFax and MIN, Sylvia Sierra, SVP, corporate audience development, downplays the need for an audit. "Some of our strongest brands are not audited and take advertising. It is hard to argue the $1,000-per year subscription value that readers place on the information and advertisers place on reach."

A 'Legitimate Beef'

Yet, Ted Bahr, president of BZ Media, and an official supporter of the Buy Safe campaign is more concerned about the publishers that fly under the radar and push inflated or inaccurate metrics.

"I am spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to acquire and maintain the circulation I am claiming, then I spend the money maintaining it in BPA required formats, then I pay BPA between $10,000-$15,000 to audit my books," he says. "That's the ethical standard for publishing in this industry. My competitors are therefore able to spend way less than I do, and compete with me by cheating and lying to our mutual customers. My only recourse is to try and educate the advertisers that they need to pressure these outlaws into auditing."

BPA CEO Glenn Hansen adds, "Publishers that have made that investment have a legitimate beef with those that cannot demonstrate from an independent verification that they have made that same investment."

Ditto for the Audit Bureau of Circulations, which also backs the Buy Safe program as a partner. "The campaign site specifically notes that auditing is not a necessity for all publications," says Neal Lulofs, ABC's SVP, communications and strategic planning. "I can't fathom why the promotion of media auditing would 'disgust' someone. We are an auditing firm and we are promoting the benefits of auditing-for publishers and buyers alike. We are not 'forcing' anyone to become audited. But in competitive environments, buyers usually insist on it. For instance, there isn't a single paid-circ newspaper above 25,000 in the U.S. that isn't audited. That's not because we force them to do that, but because audited newspapers attract more ad dollars."

A Question of Demand

Yet smaller ad buyers-as BPA confirmed when it was surveying client-side media buyers prior to launching the campaign-may not care or even know about audits. At Hanley Wood, which has several un-audited titles in its stable of more than 30 magazines, auditing is more of a case-by-case consideration. "It depends on the advertiser market," says Nick Cavnar, VP circulation and database development. "Advertiser markets dominated by small advertisers that don't work through agencies aren't that familiar with the statement format. They don't understand it so there's not a great demand for it."

This is precisely why BPA launched the Buy Safe Media campaign, but Cavnar focuses on the practicalities of auditing. "If we don't have advertisers asking for one, then we may not audit the magazine. We work according to what advertisers are looking for. We run the circulation the same way whether it's audited or not. It's a question of whether it's something that helps in the advertising sales."

Audit Landscape Getting Complicated

Sacks and Husni took the Buy Safe program to task because they say it's magazines attacking magazines, and that energy could be better applied to arguing the print medium's viability against other media-TV, radio, and online.

Yet Hansen circles back to accountability and the advertiser's demand for it. "In a perfect market, where all magazines are audited, I think Bob and Samir are justified in saying, 'Don't fight among yourselves, fight against other media. But in a market where we're not all yet at the same level playing field, I think that's an unfair expectation on their behalf. It's not the fact that it's BPA or ABC-it's the fact that they've made the investment in developing quality audience and they can prove that and that gives the advertiser accountability."

But, according to Access Intelligence's Sierra, there is a bigger picture to be focusing on-the mash-up of media platforms. "We are now media companies whose portfolios include print magazines and many other assets," she says. "Most of the other assets (Web sites, e-letters, trade shows, Webinars, paid information) are not audited, and yet, revenue is shifting from print magazine advertising to the other assets. Advertisers want to know 'Who are these people?' and the audit bureaus are not showing reach, only numbers. I can't think of a single reason to pay for the current audit offerings given their shortcomings."

The Real Viability of Digital Editions

2008-07-01T12:12:00.001-04:00

The Real Viability of Digital Editions
By Bob Sacks
http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?t=exjwyocab.0.5fadzocab.cuf4zubab.1&ts=S0350&p=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.pubexec.com%2Fstory%2Fstory.bsp%3Fsid%3D110150%26var%3Dstory

Resistance to digital magazines is futile. Here's why.
I've been inundated lately with e-mail requests about the viability of digital magazine editions. The letter that put me over the top was from an old and dear acquaintance, who is a senior production director, that said, "Digital editions of magazines will never get traction with the magazine-reading public." This is a ridiculous attitude. And if it is yours, too, bury it now with other ridiculous ideas like the world is flat and man will never fly.

Perhaps Jeff Gomez, author of the book "Print Is Dead," put it best when he wrote: "To expect future generations to be satisfied with printed books is like expecting the BlackBerry users of today to start communicating by writing letters, stuffing envelopes and licking stamps."

Do we expect magazine readers to become any less sophisticated as time and technology roll by? Things change, platforms evolve, business models adjust, and people's habits change, too. History is loaded with once-successful personal methodologies that are now nothing but antiquated dust.

This is not a discussion of whether or not print will survive. That is moot. What is important is how people will read in the future. Gomez's comment is spot on. How people read today gives us the smallest inkling of how people will read in the future. I'd be curious to know the number of words read on a computer screen (including PDAs, cell phones, e-readers, etc.) versus those read in print.

Digital editions will play a central role in the magazine business's future success. They are growing in popularity, and eventually will become ubiquitous. The only thing holding the format back presently is a perfect substrate. Computer screens are good for the task, but not perfect in their portability, flexibility and readability in various lighting conditions. What the industry is waiting for is a substrate that can match the robust nature and inherent abilities in digital editions.

The new technology is not far-off science fiction. The future is here now; it is just not widely distributed. Amazon's Kindle, Sony's Reader and several others are e-paper devices, and they are available now. These devices will not go away; they will only get better and more advanced at what they do-distribute content. In 2011, there will be full-color versions of e-paper products released. By 2025, e-paper devices will be the predominant way in which people read. And they will most likely be reading some formulation of digital-edition technology.

Perhaps we need to look at it this way: When will the digital page be more user-friendly than the printed page? Is it so impossible to foresee a future of comfort and ease holding a full-color, flexible screen that has the ability to project any book or any magazine with greater richness and depth of coverage than its printed predecessor?

Gomez hypothesized that, "It's not about the page versus the screen in a technological grudge match. It's about the screen doing a dozen things the page can't do." Digitized words should count for more. "What's going to be transformed isn't just the reading of one book, but the ability to read a passage from practically any book that exists, at any time that you want to, as well as the ability to click on hyperlinks, experience multimedia, and add notes and share passages with others," Gomez noted.

The same logic holds true for magazines. This is not a Hamlet-type argument, "to read or not to read." It is a question of what format/platform we will be most comfortable reading in the future. Nowhere in history do you find society willingly going backward. As Jerry Garcia is reported to have once said, "You are either on the bus or off the bus."

Bob Sacks (aka BoSacks) is a printing/publishing industry consultant and president of The Precision Media Group (BoSacks.com). He is also the co-founder of the research company Media-Ideas (Media-Ideas.net), and publisher and editor of a daily international e-newsletter, Heard on the Web. Sacks has held posts as director of manufacturing and distribution, senior sales manager (paper), chief of operations, pressman, circulator and almost every other job this industry has to offer.

BoSacks Speaks Out: BPA-ABC's Unwise Attack on Magazines

2008-06-19T19:18:00.003-04:00

BoSacks Speaks Out: BPA-ABC's Unwise Attack on Magazines

The new pathology detailed below actually disgusts me. There are over 18,000 magazines printed today and of that number 7,000 are newsstand titles. There are approximately 1,000 new titles started each year. This report and the campaign against legitimate magazines listed below is an attack at the heart of the entrepreneurial publishing business. ABC, ABM, BPA, and the Association of National Advertisers have a very minor fraction of the titles published in their bullpen, yet they wish to crush all who stand in their way or choose not join their exclusive clubs. I am not alone with these feelings. Samir Husni wrote to me in an email last night that:

. . . it is about time for magazines to start looking at customers who count and not just counting customers . . . those folks who publish great magazines like Good and Flaunt do not need an auditor to tell them how many people are receiving their magazine. Their customers, both the advertisers and the readers know the relationship that they enjoy between the reader and the magazine . . . It is a pure case of jealousy and greed to launch such a campaign. When are we going to learn not to attack each other and focus on other media. Advertisers who want to reach that unique upscale audience of V magazine are not interested to see either the ABC audit or the BPA audit . . . When are we going to learn . . . I have no earthly idea . . .

It is unconscionable to attempt to crush the rest of the industry. It is attacks and stupidity like this that will tear down the very industry that they are attempting to prop up with self-serving dogma. Like chastity, auditing is/and should be a choice. A pox on all your houses; but I cannot wish harm on my industry by wishing that ye reap what ye sow.
BoSacks
-30-

Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.
Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970), Unpopular Essays (1950), "Outline of Intellectual Rubbish"

BPA and Friends Turn up Heat on Un-Audited Magazines
By Bill Mickey
http://www.circman.com/viewmedia.asp?prmMID=4025&prmID=1

An educational campaign targets client-side, b-to-b buyers. BPA, along with about 10 other association and auditing bodies, including ABC, has ramped up a campaign to combat ad buying in un-audited titles. Called Buy Safe Media, the program targets client-side buyers in b-to-b markets that spend $250,000 or less on advertising. The program, initiated two years ago by BPA at the request of member publishers, has emerged from a testing and research phase and the 11 associations and auditing bodies have begun to reach out to their constituencies in earnest.

"About two years ago, our publisher members on the b-to-b side were telling us that more and more of the buying decisions were being made at the client level, not through an agency," says Peter Black, BPA's SVP, business development. "They were concerned that the person at the client company did not have an appreciation for audits or quality circulation data." BPA conducted a Web-based survey of about 500 b-to-b client companies across a variety of markets in spring 2007. The results turned in very low numbers for audit awareness.

The survey inquired about certain criteria upon which buyers based their purchase decisions-placement of editorial, price, audit, and so on.

"There was a choice for 'other,'" recalls Glenn Hansen, BPA's CEO. "We had over 300 written-in responses to the 'other.' When we analyzed that, about two-thirds were actual attributes that an audit would provide, but the respondent didn't associate with an audit. They wrote in things like distribution, quality circulation and proven audience." A personalized direct mail campaign was then launched last fall targeting CEOs, CFOs and, finally, media buyers at 1250 companies identified as having purchased ads in un-audited magazines across five b-to-b markets.

The mailing cited the number of pages that company had purchased over the year along with the dollar value of those pages. The letter also pushed the recipient to the Buy Safe Media program's Web site, which features a video and information on the pitfalls of buying un-audited media. "Insist on audited media, and be safe," urges the site. "Based on our tracking, we got a ten percent response rate to the direct mail [from the CEOs]," says Hansen. "Then we broadened it to CFOs and we got a six percent response from them." The third effort, however, targeted to the actual media buyer, squeaked out a .5 percent response.

"Maybe they just didn't want to be faced with the reality that they bought un-audited media and there were a lot of dollars at risk," says Black. Supporters backing the initiative include ABC, ABM, BPA, the Association of National Advertisers, and seven others. "Everybody is handling communications with their respective memberships," says Black. BPA, for example, has announced a Webinar on the subject to recruit more publisher partners.

Following that, another direct mail campaign targeting 3300 CEOs and 800 CFOs from companies that buy six or more pages annually in un-audited titles will be launched next week. "We will cite the number of pages they're running, the likely dollar value of those pages, and the message will be to drive them to the Web site to give them more information to better safeguard their investment," says Black.

Print Ads Come out Top of the Charts

2008-06-17T22:49:00.001-04:00

Print ads come out top of the charts with UK consumers
http://www.creativematch.co.uk/viewNews/?96125
Print advertising generates the most positive reaction with UK consumers and is seen as having the most relevance, according to a study.
Dynamic Logic's latest AdReaction study gauges consumer's opinions of advertising. Newspaper ads top the chart with 53% of consumers considering them as "very" or "somewhat" positive.
Christina Goodman, Director of Global Marketing & Business Development, Dynamic Logic, said: "When asked about their overall attitudes towards general advertising formats, consumers feel very differently about the various media platforms.
Certainly, if asked, most people will never say they would like to have more advertising in their lives. However, the results show that there are certain types of advertising that people may be more receptive towards.
"More interruptive or intrusive formats, such as telemarketing and SPAM (Non-opt-in email) are towards the bottom of the list in terms of consumer appeal. Print advertising (Newspapers and Magazine) as well as TV and Outdoor advertising rate most positively.
"What is surprising is the breadth of feelings about different advertising formats. This research shows there is a significant difference between how consumers feel about Mobile ads (70% negative) versus Newspaper ads (9% negative)."
Mobile phones
Mobile phones are considered extremely personal to the consumer and the perception may be that ads on mobile phones will be intrusive and interruptive - like SPAM, even more so than telemarketing and non-opt-in emails, according to this ranking.
Therefore, there is an opportunity for advertisers and brands to change this perception by connecting with their audience when the message is relevant. It is also likely that many of the people have not yet seen mobile ads, so this perception may vary with exposure.
Online ads
Online search ads fall among the middle of the list, perhaps because search remains a relatively new ad format compared to Newspaper and TV (where people are trained to expect advertising).
Search ads - designed to be informative within an information-seeking environment - tend to strive for relevancy, thus one might expect for that reason alone to see search higher on the list of consumer preference.
http://www.dynamiclogic.com/na/

Think Ad Revenue Is All Going Online? Think Again.

2008-06-09T07:54:00.002-04:00

Think Ad Revenue Is All Going Online? Think Again.
By Melissa Campanelli and Noelle Skodzinski
Publishing Executive Magazine
http://www.pubexec.com/story/story.bsp?sid=107635&var=story

The results of a new study about how the industry sees its future may surprise you. Plus: Industry revenue trends in print, webinars, events . . . and more!

While there is no denying the digital revolution, a new study by Publishing Executive, called the "2008 Publishing Advertising Trends Study," shows that online revenue is not exceeding print revenue for most publishers . . . and the majority of publishers don't expect it to-that's right, ever.

For the study, Publishing Executive worked with independent research company Readex Research to survey Publishing Executives from a variety of industry segments including business-to-business (b-to-b), consumer, association and professional publishing. More than 250 publishers participated.

What did the study's findings reveal? For starters, 89 percent of respondents said their organization's current online revenue does not exceed its print revenue. (In this case, online revenue included Web sites, e-newsletters and webinars/webcasts.) Nine percent of respondents said that their current online revenue already exceeds their print revenue.

While that may not come as a big shock (though the 9 percent whose online revenue already exceeds print may be higher than some of us would expect), this next finding might: More than two-thirds (68 percent) of respondents reported that they do not anticipate their organizations' online revenue will exceed their print revenue in the future. Twenty-eight percent said they anticipate their online revenue will surpass their print revenue.

However, as for the 28 percent of respondents who anticipate that their online revenue will exceed print, they seem to expect the change will occur fairly quickly-74 percent said they expect their organizations' online revenue to exceed their print revenue within the next five years.

The number of respondents who don't think their online revenue will exceed their print revenue may come as a surprise, especially since-at least among b-to-b publishers-magazine revenues were expected to post a 4-percent drop in 2007, while digital content revenue was slated to increase 20 percent, according to statistics from industry association American Business Media (ABM) that appeared in a February 2008 article in Publishing Executive, titled "Special Report: Your Guide to the 2008 Media 'Brandscape.' " ABM CEO Gordon Hughes also stated in that article that digital's growth rate puts it on a pace to surpass print magazines by 2011 at the latest.

Because ABM represents the interests of the business media only, and many larger publishing houses, Publishing Executive designed its "2008 Publishing Advertising Trends Study" to provide an expanded view of the industry. Publishing Executive wanted to find out: Do b-to-b, consumer, association and professional publishers share a common perspective on the future of their products in print and online? And, is the size of your organization a factor in whether you expect your online revenue to surpass your print revenue?

A Closer Look
Breaking the numbers down by type of publication, 93 percent of both b-to-b and consumer magazine publishers said their organizations' current online adverting revenues do not exceed their print revenue. Ninety-two percent of association publishers answered the same way.

What about their expectations for the future? B-to-b publishers' perspective of the future skewed slightly more heavily toward online revenues than the other industry segments. Thirty-six percent of b-to-b publishers said they anticipate that their online revenue will exceed print in the future. Twenty-four percent of consumer publishers and 27 percent of association publishers also expect their online revenue to exceed print.

Company size made a slight difference in respondents' replies, but perhaps not as you would expect. Mid-size companies (defined here as those with revenues between $1 million and $4.9 million) had the highest response rate to the question: In the future, do you anticipate your organization's online revenue will exceed its print revenue? Seventy-six percent said no. At larger companies (those with revenues of $5 million or more), 61 percent said they don't expect online to exceed print revenue. And of the smaller companies (with revenues less than $1 million), 67 percent said print will remain the larger revenue generator.

Tracking Revenue Streams
The study also asked respondents to reveal their sources of advertising revenue in 2007, including Web sites, e-newsletters, webinars or webcasts, print, event and event sponsorships, and reprint/e-print/rights sales.

According to the respondents, print advertising holds the biggest piece of the revenue pie for all types of publishers, bringing in an average of $2.78 million in revenue.

Events, touted by many companies in the industry as a significant growth area, contributed an average of $1 million.

The Web accounted for an average of $550,000 in revenue; e-newsletters, $350,000; webinars and webcasts $330,000; and reprint/e-print/rights sales, $290,000.

Keeping in mind those figures are averages across all survey respondents, the picture changes slightly when you focus in on specific magazine segments. For example, b-to-b magazine publishing respondents, when segmented out from the larger group, reported print advertising generating an average of $4.8 million in revenue in 2007, well above the total group's average. Association publishers followed with $1.8 million, and consumer magazines attributed an average of $1.7 million to print advertising revenue-both falling below the overall average of $2.78 million.

In all categories of publishing, events and event sponsorships followed print as the second-largest revenue source, making the biggest splash in b-to-b, with an average of $2.1 million in revenue being drawn from events and sponsorships-again above the overall group's average of $1 million. Consumer magazines generated an average of $180,000; and association publishers, an average of $560,000.

B-to-b publishers also outweighed other categories in terms of revenue from Web advertising. For b-to-b publishers, the Web accounted for an average of $1.24 million in advertising revenue in 2007-way above the overall group's $550,000 average-while it accounted for an average of only $180,000 in revenue for consumer magazines and $130,000 for association publishers.

E-newsletters were also significant revenue generators for b-to-b publishers, accounting for an average of $1 million in advertising revenue in 2007. Consumer publishers reported no revenue from e-newsletters, while association publishers reported an average of $30,000.

As for webinars/webcasts, b-to-b publishers again reported the highest figures in advertising revenue from this medium in 2007-an average of $900,000-while consumer publishers reported no revenue from webcasts, and association publishers reported an average of $30,000.

Great Expectations? Revenue Growth Predictions
The survey also asked respondents whether they expected their organizations' revenues for certain types of advertising to increase, remain the same, or decrease in 2008 compared to 2007.

Print: A Mixed Bag, but Almost Half Predict Growth. While print naysayers abound in the industry, it seems at least among respondents to this survey, many publishers anticipate print-revenue growth this year-44 percent of respondents said their print ad revenue would increase, while 30 percent said it would remain the same, and 18 percent said it would decrease. Seven percent of respondents said they don't know what to expect.

Looking at print expectations by segment: Almost half of b-to-b publishers (48 percent) said they expect their print revenue to increase, while 28 percent expect it to remain the same, and 23 percent expect it to decrease. For consumer publishers, 47 percent expect it to increase; 22 percent expect it to remain the same; and 15 percent expect print advertising revenues to decrease. For association publishers, 31 percent expect their print revenue to increase, 49 percent expect it to remain the same; and 16 percent expect it to decrease.

Web: Majority Sees Increasing Revenue. According to the study, however, more are optimistic about Web growth. Sixty percent of respondents expect advertising revenue for the Web to increase in 2008; 26 percent expect it to remain the same. No respondents said they expect Web advertising revenue to decrease, but 12 percent said they didn't know, and 2 percent gave no response.

B-to-b publishers, in general (74 percent), expect Web revenue to increase. Consumer and association publishers are slightly less optimistic, with 54 percent of consumer publishers and 49 percent of association publishers expecting an increase in Web advertising revenue this year.

E-newsletters: Predictions Say Growth or Flat, but No Decline. According to the study, more than a third (37 percent) of respondents expect their organization's revenue from e-newsletters to increase in 2008. A slightly greater number (39 percent), however, expects it to remain the same. No respondents expect advertising revenue in this area to decrease.

B-to-b publishers, in particular, expect to see growth here-60 percent of b-to-b publishers expect e-newsletters to bring in more revenue this year. Twenty-five percent of consumer publishers and 24 percent of association publishers expect an increase in e-newsletter revenue.

Events: Some Growth, a Bit of Decline, but Many Foresee a Flat Year. Twenty-seven percent of respondents indicated that they expect revenue from event/event sponsorships to increase in 2008 compared to 2007, while 41 percent expect no change, and 3 percent expect a decrease.

Broken out by category, 33 percent of respondents from b-to-b publishers said they expect advertising revenue from events to increase in 2008, while 25 percent of those from consumer magazines expect event revenue to increase, and 24 percent of association publishers expect growth in this area.

Webinars/webcasts: Not a Pot of Gold for Everyone. Perhaps surprising to some, most respondents do not expect to see increases in advertising revenue this year in webinars/webcasts (both terms were used to avoid exclusion of those who perceive a difference between the two). Just 16 percent of respondents expect to see webinar/webcast revenue grow, while nearly half (47 percent) expect a flat year. Only one respondent reported anticipated decline, but 27 percent said they didn't know what to expect from this revenue source this year, and 11 percent didn't answer the question.

While 28 percent of b-to-b publishers expect revenue in this area to increase, only 12 percent of association publishers and 3 percent of consumer magazine publishers shared this perspective.

The Acquisition Market
The study also examined publishers' immediate plans to expand by acquisition. One-third of respondents said they plan to acquire properties in either print, digital or events in 2008. Almost two-thirds (61 percent) do not have such acquisition plans.

Thirty-nine percent of b-to-b publishers plan to acquire at least one media property in 2008, while 27 percent of consumer and 14 percent of association publishers plan to do the same.

Melissa Campanelli is editor-in-chief of eMarketing + Commerce (eM+C), a Target Marketing Group publication, and a former deputy editor at DM News. She also is author of the books "Entrepreneur Magazine's Open an Online Business in 10 Days" and "Start Your Own e-Business."

Time Warner Tries Metering Internet Use

2008-06-03T22:55:00.002-04:00

BoSacks Speaks Out: I think there is much more in this story than meets the eye for every publisher. If we accept the fact that at least part of the future of publishing is digitally related, then this is a very important story. As we move our franchise into a digital broadband environment, then the process our readers use to get our material and the cost for them to do so becomes paramount. And especially so, if we are including our own videos or connections to other broadband services.

Do any of you remember paying for AOL by the minute? Is this a return to those heady days of yore? Ouch!

"I have ever been opposed to banks, - opposed to internal improvements by the general government, - opposed to distribution of public lands among the states, - opposed to taking the power from the hands of the people, - opposed to special monopolies,"
Sam Houston (American General, Lawyer and Politician, 1st president of Texas, (1836-38, 1841-44), 1793-1863)

Time Warner Tries Metering Internet Use
By Peter Svensson, AP Technology Writer
Time Warner Cable starts customer trial with metered Internet access in Texas
http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080602/tec_time_warner_cable_internet.html

NEW YORK (AP) -- You're used to paying extra if you use up your cell phone minutes, but will you be willing to pay extra if your home computer goes over its Internet allowance?
Time Warner Cable Inc. customers -- and, later, others -- may have to, if the company's test of metered Internet access is successful.

On Thursday, new Time Warner Cable Internet subscribers in Beaumont, Texas, will have monthly allowances for the amount of data they upload and download. Those who go over will be charged $1 per gigabyte, a Time Warner Cable executive told the Associated Press.

Metered billing is an attempt to deal fairly with Internet usage, which is very uneven among Time Warner Cable's subscribers, said Kevin Leddy, Time Warner Cable's executive vice president of advanced technology.

Just 5 percent of the company's subscribers take up half of the capacity on local cable lines, Leddy said. Other cable Internet service providers report a similar distribution.

"We think it's the fairest way to finance the needed investment in the infrastructure," Leddy said.

Metered usage is common overseas, and other U.S. cable providers are looking at ways to rein in heavy users. Most have download caps, but some keep the caps secret so as not to alarm the majority of users, who come nowhere close to the limits. Time Warner Cable appears to be the first major ISP to charge for going over the limit: Other companies warn, then suspend, those who go over.

Phone companies are less concerned about congestion and are unlikely to impose metered usage on DSL customers, because their networks are structured differently.

Time Warner Cable had said in January that it was planning to conduct the trial in Beaumont, but did not give any details. On Monday, Leddy said its tiers will range from $29.95 a month for relatively slow service at 768 kilobits per second and a 5-gigabyte monthly cap to $54.90 per month for fast downloads at 15 megabits per second and a 40-gigabyte cap. Those prices cover the Internet portion of subscription bundles that include video or phone services. Both downloads and uploads will count toward the monthly cap.

A possible stumbling block for Time Warner Cable is that customers have had little reason so far to pay attention to how much they download from the Internet, or know much traffic makes up a gigabyte. That uncertainty could scare off new subscribers.

Those who mainly do Web surfing or e-mail have little reason to pay attention to the traffic caps: a gigabyte is about 3,000 Web pages, or 15,000 e-mails without attachments. But those who download movies or TV shows will want to pay attention. A standard-definition movie can take up 1.5 gigabytes, and a high-definition movie can be 6 to 8 gigabytes.

Time Warner Cable subscribers will be able to check out their data consumption on a "gas gauge" on the company's Web page.

The company won't apply the gigabyte surcharges for the first two months. It has 90,000 customers in the trial area, but only new subscribers will be part of the trial.

Billing by the hour was common for dial-up service in the U.S. until AOL introduced an unlimited-usage plan in 1996. Flat-rate, unlimited-usage plans have been credited with encouraging consumer Internet use by making billing easy to understand.

"The metered Internet has been tried and tested and rejected by the consumers overwhelmingly since the days of AOL," information-technology consultant George Ou told the Federal Communications Commission at a hearing on ISP practices in April.

Metered billing could also put a crimp in the plans of services like Apple Inc.'s iTunes that use the Internet to deliver video. DVD-by-mail pioneer Netflix Inc. just launched a TV set-top box that receives an unlimited stream of Internet video for as little as $8.99 per month.

Comcast Corp., the country's largest cable company, has suggested that it may cap usage at 250 gigabytes per month. Bend Cable Communications in Bend, Ore., used to have multitier bandwidth allowances, like the ones Time Warner Cable will test, but it abandoned them in favor of an across-the-board 100-gigabyte cap. Bend charges $1.50 per extra gigabyte consumed in a month.

It's not all grim news in magazine land

2008-06-02T21:38:00.002-04:00

It's not all grim news in magazine land
Some titles are showing strong gains in ad pagesBy Diego Vasquez http://www.medialifemagazine.com/

It surely seems the worst of times for consumer magazines, suffering as they are from the ad recession and increasing competition from other media. Indeed, over the first quarter of 2008, consumer titles experienced their worst tumble in years, with ad pages down more than 6 percent. Still, a number of magazines are showing strong gains, in some cases double-digit increases in ad pages over the prior-year period.

They include The Economist, OK!, Every Day with Rachael Ray, Women's Health, Wondertime, Men's Journal, Guideposts and Parents, among others. One might write off some of those gains to good fortune, a title being in a category of magazines that's somewhat insulated from the spending cuts that have swept through media and magazines in particular. But that's only a small part of it, if at all. In fact in many cases the gaining titles are in some of the worst-hit categories. By far the bigger factor is what the magazines are doing for themselves. They're investing dollars, they're repositioning, they're creating new voices that reach readers in new ways, they're building staff, they're adding features to their web sites, they're selling aggressively, they're taking chances.

They're heeding an age-old maxim of magazine publishing: Invest during downturns, as others cut back, and you'll win market share. In some ways, the Economist best exemplifies this aggressiveness. The title competes in two of the roughest ad categories, newsweeklies and business titles, which were each down nearly 14 percent over the quarter, yet its ad pages were up more than 5 percent. For that, North American publisher Paul Rossi credits the magazine's ongoing push to build circulation in the U.S. market, which rose 13 percent in second-half 2007, to 720,882, over the year-earlier period, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. "Circulation helps push up our rate base, which is good, but what it really does is grow the readership numbers," he says.
That in turn had made the magazine more attractive to more advertisers. "It allows us to go into other categories. Historically we would get luxury import cars, but now we have more Detroit cars. We can now go deeper into personal finance." "People want to know why we're up in pages," says Rossi. "At the end of the day we have a product that's never been more relevant, and more and more people are finding it."

*** In the case of Women's Health, whose ad pages were up 51 percent over the first quarter, its growth comes from a different way of talking to its readers. If the old mantra of women's titles was to prey on their insecurities, the new mantra, exemplified by the Rodale title, is that it's just fine to be who you are, and we're here to help you be even more. "We're all about it's good to be you. We encourage women and give them all the information we can," says publisher Mary Murcko. "We empower them to challenge themselves a little bit and have the confidence to do what they want and not to be afraid." It seems to be the language women relate to. A sister publication to Men's Health, the title launched in October 2005 with a rate base of 400,000, and that was quickly bumped to 850,000 and then in January to 1.1 million. "We've found our voice and our perspective pretty early in the plot," says editor Tina Johnson. "We've been speaking in the same voice women use to speak to themselves."

***At Every Day with Rachael Ray, where ad pages were up 38 percent in the first quarter, there were several factors at work. Certainly one is that Ray is all over television, and yet viewers never seem to tire of her bouncy good humor. But also the title launched in late 2005 with a very practical approach to cooking: putting interesting meals together in little time, and that set it apart from the traditional culinary titles, where growth had slowed for the most part. But publisher Anne Balaban says it goes beyond that. "Rachael brought a different point of view to the marketplace. She's about 'have fun and if there's something you want to do, it doesn't have to be perfect, just go ahead and do it.'" Thus the magazine's tagline, "Take a Bite Out of Life" "In this economic environment, marketers want to align their brands with something that puts a smile on customers' faces, and that's what we do," Balaban says.

*** At Guideposts, ad pages were up nearly 37 percent in the first three months of the year. Publisher Amy Molinero says sales have slowed for second quarter but are still ahead of a year ago, and that's for several reasons. The magazine has pushed deeper into food, with editorial support, and it's added to its sales staff. "Also, we've done well in the travel category, which is also new," says Molinero. Though the magazine has published for more than 60 years, it only began taking advertising in 2001. It has a rate base of 2.345 million. Says Molinero: "People had never heard of us, and they couldn't believe how long we've been publishing. While everyone else was coming down we were going up. We only had up to go."

*** In the crowded celebrity category, conventional wisdom had OK!, the British import, failing without much ado. The feeling was that it had come too late to the market. Nearly three years later, OK! is still here, and it's showing strong growth, with ad pages up 38 percent in first quarter at a time when the category grew just 2.7 percent in pages. Publisher Tom Morrissy credits that growth to the staff-building that went on in 2007. "We hired 20 sales and marketing people, and we were building programs and planting the seeds. And now they're just starting to sprout. So a lot of the work you're seeing now was accomplished a year ago." He says newsstand sales are up 22 percent so far this year, and the title has now been measured by MRI for the first time. The title has also been adding special issues. That's created a momentum for the sales team. Says Morrissy: "Presenting growth is fun for both the seller and the buyer. It really resonates with buyers who are looking for rays of light in the market."

*** At Men's Journal, which was up 21 percent in pages in the first quarter, publisher Will Schenck credits several factors: "We made a decision last year to try to capitalize on all aspects of the lifestyle of the reader. We've done a good job of developing some new categories, financial services and pharmaceuticals in particular. We've also done well in Detroit." But also helping, says Schenck, is a new corporate department at Wenner Media. "We now have the power of Rolling Stone and the power of Us Weekly to benefit us." It's given the magazine momentum with marketers, he says. "Our magazine is for a guy who's confident, and that breeds sales. Marketers seem to appreciate that. You go into meetings and you talk about it from the perspective of momentum. At the end of the day they don't give a hoot if you're up in ad pages. You're defined by the company you keep."

*** For Diane Newman, publisher at Parents, which is up 19 percent for the quarter, it's all about staying current and in touch with the new moms as they come along. "If the brand doesn't stay current, people can go other places. So we really acknowledge the new mom. We literally target Gen-Y moms. She's very different from the Gen X moms who preceded her," says Newman. "We walked away from what might be traditional sentimental editorial and photography and made it much more relevant for this generation," she says. "Keep it fresh for readers and advertisers, and they totally get it."

Mass-Media Extinction Prediction 'On Target'

2008-06-01T21:34:00.002-04:00

Michael Crichton, Vindicated
His 1993 prediction of mass-media extinction now looks on target.
By Jack Shafer
http://www.slate.com/id/2192382/
In 1993, novelist Michael Crichton riled the news business with a Wired magazine essay titled "Mediasaurus," in which he prophesied the death of the mass media-specifically the New York Times and the commercial networks. "Vanished, without a trace," he wrote.
The mediasaurs had about a decade to live, he wrote, before technological advances-"artificial intelligence agents roaming the databases, downloading stuff I am interested in, and assembling for me a front page"-swept them under. Shedding no tears, Crichton wrote that the shoddy mass media deserved its deadly fate.
"[T]he American media produce a product of very poor quality," he lectured. "Its information is not reliable, it has too much chrome and glitz, its doors rattle, it breaks down almost immediately, and it's sold without warranty. It's flashy but it's basically junk."
Had Crichton's prediction been on track, by 2002 the New York Times should have been half-fossilized. But the newspaper's vital signs were so positive that its parent company commissioned a 1,046-foot Modernist tower, which now stands in Midtown Manhattan. Other trends predicted by Crichton in 1993 hadn't materialized in 2002, either. Customized news turned out to be harder to create than hypothesize; news consumers weren't switching to unfiltered sources such as C-SPAN; and the mainstream media weren't on anyone's endangered species list.
When I interviewed Crichton in 2002 about his failed predictions for Slate, he was anything but defensive.
"I assume that nobody can predict the future well. But in this particular case, I doubt I'm wrong; it's just too early," Crichton said via e-mail.
As we pass his prediction's 15-year anniversary, I've got to declare advantage Crichton. Rot afflicts the newspaper industry, which is shedding staff, circulation, and revenues. It's gotten so bad in newspaperville that some people want Google to buy the Times and run it as a charity! Evening news viewership continues to evaporate, and while the mass media aren't going extinct tomorrow, Crichton's original observations about the media future now ring more true than false. Ask any journalist.
So with white flag in hand, I approached Crichton to chat him up once more. Magnanimous in victory, he said he had often thought about our 2002 discussion and was happy to revisit it. (Read the uncut e-mail interview in this sidebar.)
Although Crichton still subscribes to the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, he dropped the Los Angeles Times a year ago-"with no discernable loss." He skims those two dailies but spends 95 percent of his "information-gathering time" on the Web.
He concedes with a shrug that the personalized infotopia he crystal-balled in 1993 has yet to arrive. When we talked in 2002, Crichton scoffed at the Web. Too slow. Its page metaphor, too limiting. Design, awful. Excessive hypertexting, too distracting. Noise-to-signal ratio, too high.
Today he's more positive about the medium. He notes with satisfaction that the Web has made it far easier for the inquisitive to find unmediated information, such as congressional hearings. It's much faster than it used to be, and more of its pages are professionally assembled. His general bitch is advertisements in the middle of stories, and he's irritated by animation and sounds in ads. "That, at least, can often be blocked by your browser," he says.
In 1993, Crichton predicted that future consumers would crave high-quality information instead of the junk they were being fed and that they'd be willing to pay for it. He's perplexed about that part of his prediction not panning out, but he has a few theories about why it hasn't.
"Senior scientists running labs don't read journals; they say the younger people will tell them about anything important that gets published-if they haven't heard about it beforehand anyway," he says. "So there may be other networks to transmit information, and it may be that 'media' was never as important as we who work in it imagine it was. That's an argument that says maybe nobody really needs a high-end service."
It will take a media visionary, he believes-somebody like Ted Turner-to create the high-quality information service he foresaw in his 1993 essay. In addition to building the service, the visionary will also have to convince news consumers that they need it.
Sounding like a press critic, Crichton criticizes much of the news fed to consumers as "repetitive, simplistic, and insulting" and produced on the cheap. Cable TV news is mostly "talking heads and food fights" and newspaper reporting mostly "rewritten press releases," he says.
Crichton suggests that readers and viewers could more objectively measure the quality of the news they consume by pulling themselves "out of the narcotizing flow of what passes for daily news." Look at a newspaper from last month or a news broadcast.
"Look at how many stories are unsourced or have unnamed sources. Look at how many stories are about what 'may' or 'might' or 'could' happen," he says. "Might and could means the story is speculation. Framing as I described means the story is opinion. And opinion is not factual content."
"The biggest change is that contemporary media has shifted from fact to opinion and speculation. You can watch cable news all day and never hear anything except questions like, 'How much will the Rev. Wright hurt Obama's chances?' 'Is Hillary now looking toward 2012?' 'How will McCain overcome the age argument?' These are questions for which there are endless answers. Contentious hosts on cable shows keep the arguments rolling," he says.
Crichton believes that we live in an age of conformity much more confining than the 1950s in which he grew up. Instead of showing news consumers how to approach controversy coolly and intelligently, the media partake of the zealotry and intolerance of many of the advocates they cover. He attributes the public's interest in Mike Huckabee, Ron Paul, and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright to its hunger for a wider range of viewpoints than the mass media provide.
He tosses out a basket of questions he'd like to see the press tackle, some of which I've seen covered. "What happened at Bear Stearns?" got major play this week, after Crichton answered my questions, in a Wall Street Journal series. And I know I've seen "How much of the current price of gas can be attributed to the weak dollar?" answered a couple of times but can't remember where. (Answer: a lot.) But such Crichton questions as "Why have hedge funds evaded government regulation?" and what specific lifestyle changes will every American have to make "to reduce CO2 emissions by 60 percent?" would be great assignments for news desks.
"I want a news service that tells me what no one knows but is true nonetheless," he says.

New study on digital magazine and newspaper editions: growth, trends, and best practices

2008-05-15T15:40:00.002-04:00

New study on digital magazine and newspaper editions: growth, trends, and best practices
CAMBRIDGE MA, US: The Gilbane Group announced the general release of Digital Magazine and Newspaper Editions: Growth, Trends, and Best Practices, a pioneering and comprehensive study of the growing market for digital editions of periodical publications, earlier this week.

The study features statistics that, in an industry first, unify audited data from two sources (BPA and ABC) with data from unaudited publications. Highlights from the statistics include:
The number of business-to-business (B2B) publications offering digital editions has increased over 300% from 2005 to 2007, with total subscriptions also increasing over 300%.

The number of consumer publications offering digital editions has increased over 200% from 2005 to 2007, with total subscriptions also increasing over 200%.

Digital vs. print penetration of B2B subscribers is up from 13.3 to 15.0%, while digital penetration of consumer publication subscribers is down from 2.2 to 1.4%.

The 130-page report includes 22 case studies of publishers, representing several dozen digital edition titles, which showcase a number of industry best practices identified by the study's authors. These span a wide range including big-name consumer magazines (Hearst, Playboy), leading B2B publishers (Reed Business Information, American Legal Media), daily newspapers (Toronto Sun, The Guardian), and catalog and directory publishers (Welco, Canadian Donors Guide).

Insights
The report also includes insights from five publishing technology visionaries on the state of digital editions and ideas for how to make them work for publishers. Visionaries include Gloria Adams of PennWell, Brent Lewis of Harlequin Enterprises, Mike Edelhart of Infovell, Peter Meirs of Time Inc., and Marta Wohrle, formerly of Hachette Filipacchi.

Digital Magazine and Newspaper Editions: Growth, Trends, and Best Practices presents data from leading digital publishing companies. Contributors include Nstein, Nxtbook Media, Olive Software, and Texterity (Platinum Sponsors); Advanced Publishing, YUDU Media, and Zinio (Gold Sponsors); and Audit Bureau of Circulations and BPA Worldwide (Data Sponsors).

Authors of the report are Steve Paxhia, director of publishing strategy and technology practice at Gilbane, and Bill Rosenblatt, senior analyst. Both are said to be recognised authorities on publishing business and technology strategy and have worked with many different publishing businesses and technology vendors.

Impressive growth
Said Paxhia, "Our study shows that growth to date of the number of digital publications and the number of digital subscriptions has been impressive. While this paradigm shift is still in its early stages, there are plenty of examples where publishers using today's best practices have generated impressive results. This is the most exciting time to be in publishing since Gutenberg invented the printing press."

Frank Gilbane, CEO of the Gilbane Group, said, "This new report on digital publications illustrates our continued thought leadership in the publishing market, which is embracing many of the content technologies that we have been following since 1993. At the same time, it's only one of several first-of-a-kind market studies that Gilbane Group is releasing this year."

The study is available for immediate download at http://gilbane.com/Research-Reports.html.

IPods, Printing and the Inquisition

2008-05-07T22:32:00.002-04:00

IPods, Printing and the Inquisition
Posted by Rupert Goodwins
An enduring question: what happened to Islamic science and philosophy? In early and mid medieval times, it was the best on the planet: any system of knowledge that encompasses algorithms, Algol and alembics gets my vote. But as the West clicked into overdrive, the Islamic traditions calcified and reversed; by the end of the 19th century, the Ottoman empire had gone rotten and collapsed under the pressure of expansionist Europeans and internal reformists. (Final outcome: to be decided.)

One of the more compelling arguments for this sea change is differing attitudes to the moveable type printing press. Although the technology certainly had its problems in the West - publishers still get burned these days through bad decisions, but not quite as literally as before - it became one of the major tools of reformation, gradually unhooking the fingers of church and state from the throat of those with other ideas. It was the primary tool of the Enlightenment.

Over in the Arabic-speaking world, the story was different. The printing press turned up, but failed to make much of an impact: as a result, documents of all kinds remained rare, expensive and tightly controlled. (It's probably wrong to say, as some have, that there was thus no reformation in Islam; Islam is, at least theoretically, non-hierarchical and eschews the sort of church structure that characterises Roman Catholicism. But that really is another story). From my reading, I thought that this rejection was due to a combination of suspicion at what might happen and a much better piece of good old-fashioned guild-style market control by the existing scribes than the Europeans managed.

Not so, says a (beautifully illustrated) article in Saudi Aramco World. The piece argues that the real reason was calligraphy: written Arabic, although composed from 28 basic letters much as is Latin script, is always joined up - with each letter having four ways to join to its neighbour, and each two-letter combination having its own unique shape. Moreover, the choice of which option to take was dictated by ineffable rules of beauty known only to the calligrapher, who choreographed his (oh yes, definitely his) words like so many dancers.

The mathematics of trying to combine all this with moveable type simply defeated the early printers, says the magazine, and the results were so clumsy and crude that the technology was rejected - quite rightly - as unsuitable to the task.

Now, it's true that early European printers managed to get their style together very early on, certainly comparable with hand-written script: did this help acceptance? Hard to argue that it didn't: the Gutenberg Bible went to great lengths to replicate the look of existing manuscripts. But as soon as the press got out into mass production, the quality went through the floor. Take a look at 16h and 17th century pamphlets, and you'll see all the horrors that DTP visited upon us in the 1980s. Nobody seemed to mind much.

But then, it's also true that there are cultural aspects of Arabic that just don't exist for European languages: it could well be that reading badly set Arabic is far more like having your eyeballs sandpapered than the effects of anything you could torture out of Ventura Publisher. And while it's certainly more agreeable to blame cultural lacunae on untransgressable beauty instead of reactionary conservatism, there's no doubt that Arabic is far more complex to set than the latinates.

Let's stay in the 1980s, and the arrival of another new world-changing technology: the microprocessor. It deals in the lingua franca of mathematics, of data represented as 1 and 0. If any rising tide should float all cultural boats, this was it: but apparently not. According to a pseudonymous post by "GT" on their Gatunka blog, the Japanese did remarkably badly from the early days of 8-bit microprocessors. (GT says they are a technical translator working in Japan: certainly seems to know their onions). While the West was busy enjoying the first wave of cheap word processors and general-use computing, the intricacies of entering and displaying Japanese ideograms were simply beyond what that technology could do. You could build a games console, where the few bits of Japanese you needed were represented as bitmaps alongside the rest of the game's graphics, but for text editing on a computer? Forget it. By the time cheap computer technology was up to the job - around 2000 - the West had had general purpose computers at home for long enough for them to have evolved into the central hub for an entire economy. The iPod makes no sense without a home PC: thus, argues GT, the Japanese could not have invented it. That's why Sony got stuck at the Walkman.

Obviously, the social, political and economic implications of being a bit behind with your iPods are substantially different to thoseof abandoning the printing press and the Enlightenment. But both stories illustrate how sensitive technology is to the culture in which it arrives - and how hard it is to avoid naïve assumptions about the interactions between the two (you listening, Negroponte?).

It's particularly important to bear these things in mind if you're an English-speaking jourmalist, finding oneself gifted with the most generally applicable language and (no coincidence) the most advanced technology on the planet. What else am I missing?

What CEOs Need to Know About the Social Web

2008-05-06T22:01:00.002-04:00

What CEOs Need to Know About the Social Web
Posted by Tom Weber
http://blogs.wsj.com/buzzwatch/2008/05/05/wisdom-on-crowds-what-ceos-need-to-know-about-the-social-web/?mod=WSJBlog

From blogs and Wikipedia to Facebook and Twitter, each new wave of digital communications generates more upheaval for businesses. In his recent book, "Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations," Clay Shirky explores the ramifications of a world in which people can find each other and collaborate with increasing ease. Mr. Shirky is a writer, consultant and faculty member at New York University (we recently highlighted his comments on the payoff from converting TV-watching time into more productive endeavors).

Buzzwatch recently caught up with Mr. Shirky to discuss how these technologies are changing the equation for companies, managers and CEOs. Read on for Mr. Shirky's thoughts-and don't miss his unusual approach for handling information overload at the end of the interview.

Buzzwatch: Sum up the basic changes you're talking about.

Mr. Shirky: My five word summary of the book is: Group action just got easier. The thesis is that humans are natively good at doing things in groups. We know how to share, collaborate, converse. So whenever you get a new tool or technology that makes it easier for people to share or collaborate, you're going to see a lot more of that going on. The Internet-and increasingly, mobile phones-have provided us with a platform of huge new tools and services to do exactly that. So we're seeing now the first phase of experimentation and people saying, "What can we build on top of these tools?"

Buzzwatch: What does a CEO need to understand about the ways collaboration is changing?

Mr. Shirky: There are two different big things. The first is: Inside your hierarchy is a network. This isn't about networks replacing hierarchies-we're still going to have managers and promotions. But particularly for large companies, there's a lot of value that can be unlocked by letting employees work with one another. There were two research groups at IBM separated by the Atlantic Ocean-one in Armonk and one in the U.K. They were working on the same problem, but of course they didn't know that. They employed a tool IBM built called Dogear, a tagging tool. These two groups discovered-without any managerial oversight-that they were working on the same problem. They said, "Why don't we get together and collaborate?" That's the kind of enterprise value that can't be driven by the manager. In any complicated field, the people you're managing know more about the problem than you do. This is a way of getting at that value.

The outside message is: Your customers, who have previously been relatively separated from one another, with their principal connection to you, may start becoming your competitors or your collaborators. CEOs need to be in the position of understanding what might happen and then try to work out strategies for the threats and for the opportunities.

Buzzwatch: If you could suggest one collaboration tool for businesspeople to get familiar and comfortable with, what would it be?

Mr. Shirky: There's no one tool that does everything. So that's the first thing to understand. That said, one tool I would pick is Flickr. The value of understanding Flickr is in seeing how completely simple participation can be. You take a photo, you upload a photo. Flickr has me-first value. The principal value is to the user. But then you start to see what happens when you add even a little bit of participation to the mix, letting people label photos and comment on photos. You will see how quickly the social component can form around these artifacts.

There's also something that CIOs rather than CEOs need to understand. It's almost universally the case with social software that the software that launches with the fewest features is the stuff that takes off. The shift is from thinking about the computer as a box to thinking of the computer as a door, and nobody wants a door with 37 handles. Twitter has six features, and it launched with only one. A brutally simple mental model of the software that's shared by all users turns out to be a better predictor of adoption and value than a completely crazy collection of features that ends up being slightly different for every user.

Buzzwatch: Apart from the broader business implications, do you see lessons for professional managers? What can a manager learn from self-organizing groups?

Mr. Shirky: What a manger can learn is that self-organizing groups don't stay self-organized very long. This is one of the great myths of this stuff, the hive mind. Go look at the talk pages of any moderately frequently edited Wikipedia entry. When you look at open-source projects, these are not non-hierarchical paradises. These are strongly hierarchically managed projects.

The lesson for managers is that the kind of social issues that create the need for management don't go away. They're going to surface in any large project involving humans. But the skills needed now are different from the ones we're used to. We have a world in which the two classic poles are the micromanager and the grand strategic visionary.

But when people are self-organizing, it requires a management skill that is much closer to facilitation. When you see the really good ones-a Linus Torvalds on the Linux project, or a Teresa Nielsen Hayden managing the comments on Boing Boing-you see people who aren't operating with an ironclad set of rules but are responding situation by situation. To the degree you start opening up to insights of people who don't work for you or you can't control in the same way, that facilitating function becomes a core management skill.

Buzzwatch: Crowds can be wise, but they can also be shallow. What are the downsides in this new environment? What can be done to minimize them?

Mr. Shirky: The downside is that if society does not have the ability to affect which groups do and don't form, it creates negative as well as positive repercussions. I have an example in the book, these pro-anorexia groups. In the past they could not have taken out an ad in the newspaper or met in a church group. The people who control the bottlenecks wouldn't have let them. Now there are no more bottlenecks. It's similar to the way the First Amendment says to society, we can no longer prevent bad speech, so we put society in the position of reacting to bad speech. We can't prevent these things, we just have to react to them. It just takes more attention and more work.

Buzzwatch: How do you personally cope with information overload?

Mr. Shirky: Here I think the lesson is, there is no such thing as information overload. Or rather, we've been in information overload since 1500. Which is roughly the year there was more written material to be read than a human being could read in a lifetime.

What we're dealing with now is filter failure. Imagine going into a bookstore that had no organization, with books being dumped into the street and the store saying, "Wade in and find the management book you want." The bookstore would be as broken as our sense of email is today.

So the single most important change is attitude. We are all having to abandon, a bit at a time, the idea of getting through our email queue. We have to instead say, I'm going to start at the top of my day with the most important stuff and work my way down. And I'm going to accept at the end of the day that I'm not going to be done. For people for whom a sense of completeness is vital, that's a painful shift.

Publishers on Redefining the Role of Print

2008-05-05T20:45:00.002-04:00

Publishers on Redefining the Role of Print
Outgoing ABM Chairman: If we don't change, we're 'in trouble.'
By Matt Kinsman
www.folio.com

LA QUINTA, California-The tagline for American Business Media's Spring Meeting is "New Paths To Success." And while much of the conversation revolves around expected topics of video and social media, the changing role of the print product is accounting for much of the conversation as well."There's a lot of talk about Web 2.0 but there is very little talk about Magazines 2.0," says Hanley Wood CEO and outgoing ABM chairman Frank Anton. "If the magazines published two or three years from now aren't different, we're in trouble. "The current magazine model won't take us into the next five years, let alone the next 100 years."

Magazines need to be rethought from top-to-bottom-editorial approach to circulation to folio size, Anton says. "We need to let readers decide the content-instead of one version for 100,000 readers but a lot of custom versions," he added.

"Circulation needs to be reviewed. It's bloated-in some cases by 60 percent or more. Maybe we need to move away from controlled circulation and have people pay for products."Nielsen chairman and CEO David Calhoun said magazines have to be approached in terms of how they complement other media. "I don't believe publications are going away but if they don't understand their role in relation to other media, they will lose," he said. "I hate reading about one form of media losing out to another, and print is always thought about in terms of competing with other media.

In the evolution of the magazine, print will have to assume a role in the bigger scheme. What are its interactions with other media? Each reinforces the other." Limiting Magazine Size and SponsorshipsThick magazines may indicate publication health but they may not be serving time-pressed readers, according to Anton, who says publishers should start thinking about limiting folio size."Our biggest magazines going forward will be 96 pages," says Anton. "Publishers should consider exclusive sponsorship to one advertiser rather than selling many window advertisers."

Brands are interested in becoming part of the conversation both online and in print, according to IBM vice president of marketing Edward Adams-who stressed that doesn't mean violating editorial autonomy but didn't offer an example. "Magazines are important from that independent, authoritative perspective," said Adams. "How do I get embedded in a way that's less an advertising approach? I'm not talking about crossing the church-state line but how do we participate?"

Why The Week is gaining on Time and Newsweek

2008-05-04T08:55:00.002-04:00

JON FRIEDMAN'S MEDIA WEB
Why The Week is gaining on Time and Newsweek
By Jon Friedman, MarketWatch
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/why-week-threatening-time-newsweek/story.aspx?guid=%7BDA1F8268%2D151E%2D4520%2DA71E%2DACBAF1712522%7D

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- Watch your back, Time and Newsweek.
The Week is here to stay.

This upstart magazine publishes a compilation of the week's biggest news events, culled from media outlets all over the world. Like many mainstream media people, I wasn't bowled over when it was launched in April 2001. It looked busier than a Bloomberg TV screen and seemed to be filled with mostly quick-hitting headlines.

But gradually, The Week grew on me, as it has caught on with the public. Its circulation is now a robust 500,000. Business travelers, a conspicuous segment of the busy and affluent readers targeted by The Week, appreciate the compact way that it presents the news. Watch related video.

These days, The Week, headed by its chairman, Felix Dennis, is also looking strong partly because of troubles at the headquarters of its primary rivals.

When I perused Time's latest issue, I wondered whether the 56-page edition was the smallest one in its modern history. (Time also had the chutzpah to carry a cover blurb for Joe Klein's column proclaiming: "The Incredible Shrinking Democrats.")

Speaking of Newsweek, its employees' hot parlor game is asking one another, "Did you take the buyout?" Enough said on the state of morale at the Washington Post Co.'s

The Week is gaining on its established rivals by subscribing to the most basic tenet in business: Give people what they want.

"The Week is written by a method," said General Manager Steven Kotok. "In 2001, we sat down and asked ourselves, 'What does a busy person want to read?'"

That planning is paying off. The magazine has built a strong readership "during a time when the category showed a net circulation decline," said Kotok. On the ad front, "The Week has grown and is barely down [in the first quarter], while nearly all competitors are down double-digits or worse."

What's the tipping point?
"It's about utility, not achieving an apotheosis of beautiful journalism," he said. "If you write for the reader, you'll always have a job."

That faint sound you hear right now is a thousand establishment journalists reaching for their Maalox. What Kotok brags about is exactly what unnerves many pundits about The Week. They see it as something journalistically unholy because, they conclude, it dumbs down the news to fit a business model.

If this seems familiar to you, merely substitute the words "USA Today" for "The Week." Since its founding in 1982, Gannett Co.'s USA Today has been criticized for making news more palatable to a mass audience who wants the publication to do its thinking for it.
Plus, the naysayers fret, The Week utterly disdains traditional tenets of the craft such as . . . original reporting.

The Week's Kotok, an affable fellow who seems to have a keen appreciation for great writing, makes no apologies. When he and I talked over lunch, he mentioned my recent series on the Economist. Read the column.

"I would cry if the Economist closed," Kotok said. "But The Week performs a different function. The Economist hears everything and gives you one perspective. The Week gives you all perspectives."

Kotok subsequently sent me an email that further points to The Week's DNA:
"My feeling is that The Week starts with what a busy, sophisticated person needs to be well-informed -- which we believe is multiple perspectives on today's current events. And we keep it to just that, and no more, because people today are busy. And because of our reader focus, our readers read every issue. The Economist and New Yorker put in all the content they think is important; in other words, they don't start with the reader's needs."

Easy entry
"We're a populist magazine," he explained. "We really are about the reader. The New Yorker is great to read and rightfully proud of great journalism -- but for its own sake."
The Week has a populist bent throughout its structure, too. "When I was 20, I had 50 people working for me," Kotok, 37, said of his entrepreneurial roots. In St. Paul, Minn., he started by managing a falafel shop and built it up to be a Midwest regional wholesale food business.

"After that, nothing seems hard," he said. "If I get a resume from a college dropout who has an achievement record, he or she definitely will get an interview. I want to hire someone who is hungry, has raw talent and business sense."

To understand where Time and Newsweek appear to have gone wrong with their audiences, you can find an answer in the April 25 issue of The Week itself.

On page 21, it quotes esteemed journalist Herbert Bayard Swope, writing in the Naples (Fla.) Daily News: "I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure -- which is: 'Try to please everybody.'"