Last Gasp or Blast of Insight: Video in a Hard Copy Magazine
August 21, 2009
Short honk: I made notes for a longer write up. I decided that my two or three readers do not need me making observations about the problems traditional magazine publishers face. The bankruptcy of the Readers Digest speaks more eloquently than this goose can honk. Navigate to the Slashdot post “A Video Ad, In a Paper Magazine”. Read the story and answer these questions:
- Will those who do not buy traditional paper magazines buy a magazine with a video insert AND like the experience enough to subscribe?
- Will the magazine be able to recoup the costs of producing content in a non print form and generate sufficient cash from the adverts to pay for development, production, and public relations?
- Will the new hybrid become the method for pumping up revenue in a traditional media sector under duress for 18 months or more?
- Is the content repurposed electronically and, thus, a lower cost output or is the content new and a cost multiplier?
- How will the environment first crowd react to a print publication with its non green inks, tree cutting, and old fashioned distribution method enhanced with electronics, a battery, and plastic?
I did not buy the Esquire with the plastic rich content gizmo. Will this bold new play work? I am not a betting goose. I think I will sit on the fence and let the quarterly reports whether this video play is a last gasp or a blast of insight.
Stephen Arnold, August 21, 2009
Wall Street Journal Spam Update August 20, 2009
August 20, 2009
The Wall Street Journal continues to spam me. This deal is for two weeks free. As a subscriber, I find this type of bush league, stock pushing approach amusing. I have concluded that the Wall Street Journal, like many traditional newspaper and magazine publishers, are unaware of the impact of their marketing to * paying customers *. If you start getting these WSJ emails with the headline “To lock in this special rate”, you may want to follow my lead and [a] call attention to the spam as a nuisance and [b] contact appropriate state and Federal consumer protection agencies. I think that some governmment entities may struggle with their tasks, but you never know. So far I have called, emailed, sent snail mail to the Wall Street Journal, and posted notices in this Web log which is — alas! — read by two or three people. I hope to meet with a WSJ executive at some point in the near future and ask about governance, marketing methods, and customer service. My hunch is that I am going to get a blank stare and a nervous smile. Par for the golfers at that outfit I suppose.
Stephen Arnold, August 20, 2009
Commercial Textbook Publishers Faces Pressure from the Open Source Crowd
August 20, 2009
Open source once meant software that most humans could not locate, convert to an executable, and use if and when the human was able to get the software on a computing device. No more. Open source continues to push its snout into the bedrooms and under the covers of the enterprise. Nothing makes a commercial vendor more uncomfortable than the wet snout of open source sniffing in some very private regions.
To get a feel for how open source may push traditional publishers over the cliff, you will want to read “Advice On Creating an Open Source Textbook?” Let us assume that the author Occamboy is spot on. When I take this approach, the following comment strikes me as important:
Poking around on the Net, I’ve found several intriguing options for distributing open source texts, such as Flatworld Knowledge, Lulu, and Connexions.
When I add Google’s creative commons publishing effort to Occamboy’s three links, I see a way for subject matter experts to create textbooks. Taking this a step further, combining online video with open source textbooks, I see a way for some instructors to cover a subject without requiring students to pony up big money for textbooks and course materials. If I am correct, the screams and splashes one hears will be traditional textbook publishers being pushed off a financial cliff to the river ???? (Styx) below. Some will find opportunity in open source textbooks. Good for them. The publishers who fail? I think the Wal*Mart in J’town is hiring greeters. More along this line appears in Google: The Digital Gutenberg. Click the ad at the top of any Beyond Search Web page. How is that for subtle marketing, dear journalists? I am selling my new Google study! Right here! Now!
Stephen Arnold, August 20, 2009
Readers Digest Enters Intensive Care
August 18, 2009
The Readers Digest, according to the Baltimore Sun’s “Reader’s Digest Bankruptcy Report”, did not surprise me. This outfit had a clever business model and some very confident executives. I interacted with the Readers Digest when it bought the Source, one of the early online services. For me, the Readers Digest had a money machine with its “association” model when my grandmother subscribed to the chubby little paperback-book-sized monthly stuffed with recycled content. I liked the “digest” angle. The notion that my busy grandmother could not read the original article amused me. She was indeed really busy when she was in her 70s. What she liked was that the content was sanitized. The jokes were clean and usually not subject to double entendre.The Readers Digest recognized that the Source was a harbinger and made the leap to get into electronic information with the now moribund Control Data Corporation. The step was similar to an uncoordinated person’s jump off the high dive. The Readers Digest knocked its head on the Source deal and dropped off my online radar. Now the Readers Digest is blazing a new trail for magazine publishers: chopping the number of issues published per year, cutting its circulation guarantee, and learning to love bankruptcy attorneys. Which magazine will be next? Oh, I know the leadership of the dominant magazine companies will chase crafts, home decoration, and Future Publishing’s book-a-zine model. New thinking and methods are needed to save the traditional magazine, a group eager to turn back the clock to the glory days of the Saturday Evening Post. Like Babylonian clay tablets morphing into Home Sweet Home on ceramic wall hangings, magazines will survive. The market is moving beyond the old information delivery vehicles, and the 1938 Fords are struggling to keep pace with Twitter “tweets”. Here’s a quote by Charlie added to the Baltimore Sun article: “Still interesting to thumb through, but reprinting articles that were already published – how long ago? – is not a good model for those who make regular use of the Internet.” Well said.
Stephen Arnold, August 18, 2009
Young at Heart Advise Newspapers about Survival
August 17, 2009
I enjoy the Mashable write ups. The coverage of my area of interest is tangential, but I like the approach taken by the publication. The article “12 Things Newspapers Should Do to Survive” is what I call outputs from the peanut gallery. The author is a student, and he does not have decades of travail trying to generate revenues, deal with staff benefits, and mud wrestling with printers, paper suppliers, and – yikes – syndicators. Students have a freshness that azure-chip, blue-chip, and try-too-hard-to-be-brilliant consultants lack. Let me give you an example. Mashable recommended to newspapers that a newspaper should develop a start up culture. Stop right there. Newspapers think that many of their actions are entrepreneurial. Newspaper managers are knee deep in new technology, innovations that require high-power publishing systems, and wallow in programmers, consultants, and information technology professionals. What Mashable’s advice overlooks is that the meaning of start up to a Mashable writer like Vadim Lavrusi means one thing. Start up to a newspaper executive in Peoria, Illinois means something else. You can work through the shopping list of recommendations. One or two may resonate with newspaper publishers. Most won’t. As a result, the financial challenges the newspapers face seem to be outside the newspapers’ span of control. Paper is getting more expensive. Ink is an environmental issue. Distribution is both a management headache and a money pit. On the other side where new media thrives, outfits like Google as “publishing” creative commons books. Aggregators are becoming more sophisticated. Check out Surchur.com, for one example I reviewed today. New competitors are springing from the ranks of journalists fired by newspapers as they try to control costs by killing off their expensive professionals. I agree with most of Mashable’s suggestions. I fear that many of them are beyond the grasp of newspapers. I subscribe to four traditional newspapers. I find about two thirds of the information “old”; that is, I have seen the topics in my electronic tools. The other one third does not interest me. One of these newspapers spams me to become a subscriber, oblivious to the fact that I point out that their policy reminds me of Nigerian email scammers. With “time” an issue, I think that newspapers struggle with real time because time for many is running out.
Stephen Arnold, August 16, 2009
Google Pushes over the Book Shelves
August 17, 2009
If there is one thing I admire about Google, it is the company’s craftiness. Craftiness is not a negative. I refer to the art of execution, a skill in doing what is needed to advance the company’s interests and achieving its goals with little effort. A good example is “Bringing the Power of Creative Commons to Google Books.” If I were a traditional publisher, the Google announcement will not make much sense. “Real” authors have agents and understand the New York publishing game. However, the individuals who want to create material and get it distributed by the Google now have a way to achieve this goal. I explain some of the tools Google has at its disposal in my Google: The Digital Gutenberg. You can find a link in the ad at the top of this Web log’s splash page. I heard about this program and I comment about Google’s platform as a new type of text and rich media “River Rouge”. What will interest me is watching to see which publishers understand that the math club has put a cow on top of the building where the writing and journalism faculties have their offices. How will publishers top creative commons content available via the Google with few financial burdens placed on authors, students, or Internet users with an interest in longer form content? The third quarter is now beginning. Google kicks off. Publishers receive.
Stephen Arnold, August 14, 2009
Content Wins in the Traffic Game
August 16, 2009
One of my clients was excited to learn that his original content was pulling more hits than content pulled from RSS sources. I agreed. Original content, about a specific topic, frequently updated, and correctly tagged acts like a magnet. This “secret” was revealed by Hitwise in a report by Robin Goad’s write up “Hitwise Intelligence.” This discovery and chart will get quite a bit of attention in the traditoinal publishing sector. My take, however, is that the horse is out of the barn and it has been converted to a bed and breakfast. Web sites with original content will be the winners. Traditoinal publishers have not solved the business model challenges that makes Web publishing such a difficult undertaking and one that returns less cash than some organizations expect.
Stephen Arnold, August 16, 2009
AP Craves Wikipedia Allure
August 15, 2009
For some reason the Nieman Lab write ups keep plopping into my RSS reader. Today’s story is “How The Associated Press Will Try to Rival Wikipedia in Search Results”. I have a tough time figuring out if the writer (Zachary M. Seward) is for the AP’s plans or against them. What I found most interesting was this statement:
Google juice goes in, swishes around, doesn’t come out.”
I don’t know what this means, but Mr. Seward has worked long and hard on his articles. The addled goose will sit on the sidelines and wait to see what happens to the AP’s revenues. With traffic, the AP gets revenue if it plays its AdSense cards correctly. Without traffic, the AP will have to find another way to generate the type of money that it enjoyed during the salad days of the newspaper, radio, and TV businesses. Wikipedia? Honk.
Stephen Arnold, August 15, 2009
Tweets Are Mostly Pointless Babble
August 15, 2009
I enjoy Mashable. The articles come at topics in a way that is youthful, enthusiastic even. I noted Jennifer Van Grove’s “40% of Tweets Are Pointless Babble.” I was surprised that * only * 40 percent of the message traffic was pointless. However, I think Ms. Van Grove reveals that she has not spent much time in monitoring traffic for intelligence and law enforcement entities. With that experience in her bag of tricks, she might reach a different conclusion about the “noise” in the Twitterstream. “Pointless” to one person might be evidence to another. Youth has its advantages but understanding the value of filtering traffic may not be apparent to an avid sender of Tweets.
Stephen Arnold, August 14, 2009
PageSuite and Its Digital Newspaper
August 14, 2009
PageSuite Ltd., http://www.pagesuite.com, is powering the new http://mydigitalnewspaper.com, the “world’s first” digital newspaper aggregator and search suite. Now you can search for and read stories from online papers from all over the world, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and more. A marketing e-mail from PageSuite alerting us to the service highlighted the search function. It can be segmented by country, publication, date and even the type of title in publications ranging from daily, weekly, monthly, free and paid for newspapers. The site is fairly simple and easy to use. It’s a great idea, although the newspaper industry is still torn on digital access issues, which led to this problem we ran into that was mentioned above: A simple story link to guardian.co.uk was blocked, requiring site registration.
Jessica Bratcher, August 14, 2009
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