Will Print Die? Not Today.

Will Print Die? Not Today.
Noelle Skodzinski
Editor-In-Chief
Publishing Executive Magazine
http://www.pubexec.com/

In his column on page 42 [seePart 1 in today's Newsletter], columnist Bob Sacks writes: "The only thing holding [digital magazine editions] back presently is a perfect substrate." That's sort of like saying, "The only thing holding me back from a fabulous singing career is my voice."

The key to any new medium seems to be the benefit to the user. When cassette tapes came out, I never wondered whether they would replace vinyl. Cassettes wouldn't scratch, they took up less space, and you could play them in the car.

When CDs came out, did anyone wonder whether they would replace cassettes? CDs didn't get "eaten" or melt in the sun, and you didn't have to fast forward to find the beginning of the next song.

Then came the iPod-it's teensy-tiny, it won't scratch or melt, it's easy and inexpensive to download music, and it can do many things a CD, cassette or record can't. With each new medium, the benefits to the music fan increased dramatically.

But e-books' and digital editions' future is under debate. Will they be the future? Bob Sacks says yes. Many disagree.

E-editions and e-books do save on space. But are books or magazines really that cumbersome compared to laptops or even e-readers? How often do most people carry them around anyway, and particularly several at once? Students, along with frequent travelers (who Sony initially targeted with its Reader), may be the exception. Are print pages difficult or time-
consuming to flip? Print publications are already quite cheap and convenient (delivered to your door).

But there are benefits: archives and searches available with many digital editions; rich media enhancements and live links; timeliness-you can eliminate printing and distribution time. But what about magazines where time isn't a factor? As Alex Brown points out in her "Master Manufacturer" column (page 18), some magazines are meant to be in print, some are not.

Saving trees is a growing consumer priority and may be a significant contributor to wider-scale adoption of e-magazines.

But at this point, most benefits are to the publisher-saving on manufacturing and distribution costs, which publishers are striving desperately to tame. This is pushing publishers to push digital editions. Is that in the consumers' best interest?

Digital editions are being adopted in growing numbers (see "Digital Editions' Growth Spurt," page 33). For others, reading for pleasure on a computer screen at home isn't appealing. Sacks even acknowledges this.

But, he writes, "The future is here now," with the Sony Reader, Amazon Kindle and other e-readers. The price of e-readers will likely come down. And, as Sacks notes, "These devices will not go away, but rather will only get better and more advanced at what they do-distribute content."

Will screenagers be the tipping point? Maybe. They want the latest gadgets and are used to reading on screens. But they also are used to reading in bytes. So the question may not be whether they'll read a book or magazine in print or digital form, but whether they'll read them at all in their current format.

You should offer a digital edition if your readers want it. Should you offer only digital editions? Sacks writes, "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." That's 17 years away, so you've got some time, even by BoSacks' standards.

E-paper-if developed to truly mimic real paper, and to be cost-effective and benefit-driven-seems a promising alternative to paper. But I can't help but be reminded of the fact that the first e-book was created more than 60 years ago, and people have predicted the death of print since at least the '60s. Marshall McLuhan, an English professor, media analyst and book author, predicted print's demise 46 years ago.

In 1999, Princeton University history professor Robert Darnton wrote in the New York Review of Books: "Marshall McLuhan's future has not happened. . . . The electronic age did not drive the printed word into extinction . . . . . . . We have heard that prophecy repeated ever since the first e-book, a clunking monstrosity known as Memex, was designed in 1945. By now, the conventional book has been pronounced dead so often that we shouldn't be surprised to find that it seems in excellent health."

The media world is changing-no denying that. Readers' habits are changing. Business models are changing, and online media empires are being built as we speak. But will print die? Not today.


BoSacks Replied thusly on the Web Site
That was a brilliant and wonderful treatment and overview of the "current" publishing situation. Key emphasis is on the word current. The technology and the sociology is changing faster than anyone can possible keep up with, and yet I try to do so. Our researchers at Media-Ideas.net continue to focus on emerging technologies, and they have forecast some interesting data and reading utilization curves. Predicting that an event will happen and concurrently predicting when it will happen are two different sets of prescience. 600 years ago Leonardo Da Vinci forecast and actually designed, the tank, the car, the automatic transmission, hydraulic pumps, reversible crank mechanisms, several flying machines, including a helicopter, a light hang glider, and the parachute. He wasn't wrong. But the "current technology wasn't up to the task and his vision.

Today, for publishers, the technology is not in some far off distant future, but present and on sale right now. Each month there are new and improved additions to the ereading marketplace.
At the next Publishers Executive meeting let us forget about inviting Samir Husni. I would be delighted to debate you in his place on this very subject. It would be fun and informative for everyone. You represent the hopes and the real fears of the editor in us all, while I represent . . . well something else.

Th-Th-Th-That's All, Folks! No More Talk of Media End-Times Yeah

Th-Th-Th-That's All, Folks! No More Talk of Media End-Times Yeah, the Sky Is Falling. But It's Time to Stop Mourning the Demise of the Golden Age of Easy Media Profits

By Simon Dumenco

http://adage.com/mediaworks/article?article_id=127893

In Medialand, the sky is falling, the sky is falling! No, really, it's totally falling, for real. Every last bit of it -- the sun, the stars, the clouds, the rainbows. And somebody (Google, I think) has even made off with the pots of gold that used to anchor those rainbows. 10 years: Google's anniversary is coming up in September.

We've been getting the news, in dribs and drabs, about the disintegration of traditional media models for how many years now? The chorus of death rattles -- all that gruesome gurgling and gasping! -- is getting to me. So I propose a moratorium: Let's stop obsessing about the lost golden age of easy media profits and just get on with inventing the media future (which will, let's face it, involve lower margins for just about everybody -- except Google!). I'll go first. I'm going to do my best, from now on, to stop writing about any of the following Top 10 Media Death Memes. Wish me luck.

The end of Madison Avenue hegemony. Thanks, Sergey and Larry! (By the way, did you realize the 10-year anniversary of Google is this September? That's right, 10 years ago today, there was no Google Inc. AMC should make a "Mad Men" spinoff about how sexy and awesome things were in the summer of 1998!) The end of (duh) newspapers. Honestly, I can barely stand to read Jim Romenesko's journalism-industry blog anymore because it's like reading the obits.

Actually, the end of all print. Tip of the hat (of course) to Romenesko for giving big play to Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer's pronouncement (to The Washington Post) that "there will be no media consumption left in 10 years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form."

The end of the album. The iPod forever trashed our musical attention spans, and no matter how much full-length album auteurs such as Radiohead expect that we'll listen to their Complete Works start to finish, life has become one big random mix tape.

The end of the rock star. Nobody will ever again sell 100 million copies of a record (like Michael Jackson did with "Thriller") or even 25 million (like Nirvana did with "Nevermind"). Ever. Ever ever! Rapper Lil Wayne sells a measly million records in a week and there's practically dancing in the (record-label) suites. With easy money no longer propping up rock-star lifestyles, what will we be left with? More multimedia moguls like Kanye West, for whom music making is just one part of the equation.

The end of broadcast TV. In the future, everybody gets their own on-demand, internet-delivered viewing experience with custom-tailored ad insertions (for when they're not watching the "American Idol" finale on Fox).

The end of media civility. Thanks, apparently, to bloggers. And blog commenters. And bad parenting. The end of journalism in general. Seriously, who's gonna bankroll the bulk of it once the newspaper industry collapses and network TV throws in the towel on the evening newscast? (Watch for CBS to go first, after Katie Couric's successor also sinks in the ratings.)

The end of objectivity. With the death of journalism and the rise of millions of pro and semi-pro opinionists on the web, in the future every media person will be an insufferable partisan.

The end of paid content, period. Wired Editor in Chief Chris "The Long Tail" Anderson has a book in the works that will expand on his recent cover story, "Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business." (Basically, nobody's going to pay for content anymore, so you have to give it away and figure out how to merchandise and monetize everything that surrounds the content.) Cue chorus of the Smiths' "Shoplifters of the World Unite."

Th-Th-Th-That's All, Folks! No More Talk of Media End-Times Yeah

Th-Th-Th-That's All, Folks! No More Talk of Media End-Times Yeah, the Sky Is Falling. But It's Time to Stop Mourning the Demise of the Golden Age of Easy Media Profits

By Simon Dumenco

http://adage.com/mediaworks/article?article_id=127893

In Medialand, the sky is falling, the sky is falling! No, really, it's totally falling, for real. Every last bit of it -- the sun, the stars, the clouds, the rainbows. And somebody (Google, I think) has even made off with the pots of gold that used to anchor those rainbows. 10 years: Google's anniversary is coming up in September.

We've been getting the news, in dribs and drabs, about the disintegration of traditional media models for how many years now? The chorus of death rattles -- all that gruesome gurgling and gasping! -- is getting to me. So I propose a moratorium: Let's stop obsessing about the lost golden age of easy media profits and just get on with inventing the media future (which will, let's face it, involve lower margins for just about everybody -- except Google!). I'll go first. I'm going to do my best, from now on, to stop writing about any of the following Top 10 Media Death Memes. Wish me luck.

The end of Madison Avenue hegemony. Thanks, Sergey and Larry! (By the way, did you realize the 10-year anniversary of Google is this September? That's right, 10 years ago today, there was no Google Inc. AMC should make a "Mad Men" spinoff about how sexy and awesome things were in the summer of 1998!) The end of (duh) newspapers. Honestly, I can barely stand to read Jim Romenesko's journalism-industry blog anymore because it's like reading the obits.

Actually, the end of all print. Tip of the hat (of course) to Romenesko for giving big play to Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer's pronouncement (to The Washington Post) that "there will be no media consumption left in 10 years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form."

The end of the album. The iPod forever trashed our musical attention spans, and no matter how much full-length album auteurs such as Radiohead expect that we'll listen to their Complete Works start to finish, life has become one big random mix tape.

The end of the rock star. Nobody will ever again sell 100 million copies of a record (like Michael Jackson did with "Thriller") or even 25 million (like Nirvana did with "Nevermind"). Ever. Ever ever! Rapper Lil Wayne sells a measly million records in a week and there's practically dancing in the (record-label) suites. With easy money no longer propping up rock-star lifestyles, what will we be left with? More multimedia moguls like Kanye West, for whom music making is just one part of the equation.

The end of broadcast TV. In the future, everybody gets their own on-demand, internet-delivered viewing experience with custom-tailored ad insertions (for when they're not watching the "American Idol" finale on Fox).

The end of media civility. Thanks, apparently, to bloggers. And blog commenters. And bad parenting. The end of journalism in general. Seriously, who's gonna bankroll the bulk of it once the newspaper industry collapses and network TV throws in the towel on the evening newscast? (Watch for CBS to go first, after Katie Couric's successor also sinks in the ratings.)

The end of objectivity. With the death of journalism and the rise of millions of pro and semi-pro opinionists on the web, in the future every media person will be an insufferable partisan.

The end of paid content, period. Wired Editor in Chief Chris "The Long Tail" Anderson has a book in the works that will expand on his recent cover story, "Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business." (Basically, nobody's going to pay for content anymore, so you have to give it away and figure out how to merchandise and monetize everything that surrounds the content.) Cue chorus of the Smiths' "Shoplifters of the World Unite."

8 simple rules for succeeding on the Web

8 simple rules for succeeding on the Web
Commentary: Magazines should find opportunities, not obstacles
By Jon Friedman, MarketWatch
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/

Magazines are squandering a golden opportunity.
That was my message last week when I spoke at the annual meeting of City and Regional Magazines here in this charming city on the banks of the Mississippi River. In fact, many media folks beyond magazine editors are blowing it.

I encountered magazine editors and publishers who bemoaned the state of publishing today. Advertising is down. Circulation remains stagnant. Costs are rising. It's impossible to fully embrace the Web.

Huh? Give me that last one again.

Here's a rundown of their gripes:

Their writers don't want to write exclusively for the Web because it isn't as glamorous as a glossy magazine.
They have a hard time devising easy-to-navigate sites.
Their publishers won't commit funds to the Internet business.
They don't know what kind of content to publish on their sites.

Hogwash. There is no excuse for magazine editors and publishers to be uneasy about the Internet. They talk as if it's some strange, exotic instrument that nobody quite understands.

Here are my eight simple rules to ensure success on the Internet:

Have an attitude. If you have a good time presenting the content on the Web, your audience will likely enjoy reading and using it.
Make it easy to read. It doesn't matter how much great stuff you pile on your site if people can't find it, don't know where to look or feel overwhelmed. Readers should be able to navigate your site easily.

Stress interactivity. The Web offers you an enormous opportunity to reach and keep readers as long as they feel part of your "Internet experience" (not to be confused with the Jimi Hendrix Experience). On the Internet, a person can read a story, watch a video, listen to an interview and, presumably, work up enough of a reaction to send a comment. Building a community of readers and customers is a big step toward success. Interactivity is the magic word.

Entertain. Know your audience. These are curious, busy, easily bored people. Don't be afraid to entertain them while you inform them. The Web shouldn't have the tone of the Nuremberg Trials, after all. People like to see creativity and wit. Heck, by now, the public all but demands originalityon the Web. Let them down at your peril. Reading a Web site should not be something akin to doing geometry homework.

Maintain an identity. Your site should stand for something and reflect the tone of your magazine. If your magazine is sarcastic, your site should be sarcastic. If you intend to come across as highly intellectual on newsstands, do the same on the Web.
Live in real time. Refresh your front page at least once an hour. Your readers exist in real time and so should your site's most important component -- or else you will look dated and inconsequential.

Be true. Accuracy is key. When you print an error, correct it as quickly as possible and make it clear to readers that you have done so. If a factual error appears in a magazine, it must stay there until an editor can print a correction in the following issue. The Web is more nimble.

Experiment. Don't make every single headline the same size or feature the same, endless black-print-on-white-page style. You have an opportunity to look different, as well as to present an alternative style of journalism to your readers.

Again, if you have fun creating a Web site, the readers will have fun. I promise.

Make Your Marketing Useful

BoSacks Speaks Out: Jonah Bloom is spot on in this vent to the advertising/marketing industry. It is a retelling of a story I wrote about last year, but one worth revisiting. The concepts here are just as relevant for large publishers as they are for smaller publishers. Just as relevant to local magazines as to national titles. With a little creativity we can market ourselves with unique applications to reach our public in humane and genuinely appreciated ways.

"It is not what we read, but what we remember that makes us learned. It is not what we intend but what we do that makes us useful. And, it is not a few faint wishes but a lifelong struggle that makes us valiant." Henry Ward Beecher (Liberal US Congregational minister, 1813-1887)

Make Your Marketing Useful, Like Samsung and Charmin
Take a Small Chunk Out of Those Billion-Dollar Budgets and Help Provide a Free, Helpful Service
By Jonah Bloom

After about half an hour of staring at the space where a plane should've been, we're granted the announcement we knew was coming: The 3:30 p.m. out of LAX is now the 4:50 p.m., which we all know means it's really the 6-something p.m. There's a brief period of eye-rolling before everyone goes back to their business, which in my case means huddling with a dozen other worshippers around the Samsung totem pole to which our BlackBerries and laptops are attached.

If you have the misfortune to run the gauntlet of America's airports with any regularity, you're all too familiar with this scene and may even know the totem I'm referring to. It's an eight-foot, electrical charging station with a little shelf about halfway up its length where devices rest and recharge. It was Samsung that came up with the idea to pay for and install these life savers, hence having its brand name emblazoned on the side.

There are now more than 50 of them in both LAX and New York's JFK and a bunch in Dallas-Fort Worth, too. Earlier this month Samsung announced plans to bring them to LaGuardia and Orlando, where they'll undoubtedly be the most functional thing about two airports that vie for the title "grimmest travel hub" with Uzbekistan's Tashkent International Airport.

Do I think charging stations sell phones? Unlikely. But they're way more likely to leave me feeling affection for the brand than some mind-numbing airport billboard that has nothing to do with the frustration and boredom I'm experiencing. They're classic examples of marketing as service, a concept worthy of more attention and dollars than it's getting.

Marketing as service is where brands actually give consumers something they want or need. It's also been tagged "brand utility," while WPP's Bridge is giving it a slightly more altruistic, cause-centric slant and calling it "marketing with meaning."

One of my favorite examples came from Metro newspapers in the U.K., which spent some of its launch marketing budget repairing and improving inner-city sports facilities. It was a good way to get the Metro name emblazoned into the very fabric of the cities in question and a clever way to give the brand a bit of "history" within the city.

There are other examples: the oft-quoted Nike Plus and, just as brilliant, the Charmin restrooms in Times Square. But they're too few and far between. Drew Neisser, CEO of interactive shop Renegade, collects them on thedrewblog.com and is responsible for executing one such program, the HSBC BankCab, which ferries the bank's customers around New York free of charge. But he admits he hasn't been able to find that many and believes that's because "frankly, even if a few people talk about it, too few really get it."

My suggestions: AT&T, for example, how about you spare a few million from the billion you spend shoving your bars in my face, and help the MTA fix its Subway intercoms? Or Citi, how about you take some of the hundred million a year you spend telling us how friendly you are to construct a wireless network for New York? (Hell, I can even see an adaptation of the umbrella in your logo as a wireless signal.) BP, you really want to convince us you're green, how about putting together a borrow-a-bike system in a few U.S. cities, like the ones in Paris, Berlin and Munich?

Don't get me wrong. Consumer affection and interaction can be won through extremely entertaining advertising. But for brands who don't believe their mission in life is to entertain or have tried and repeatedly failed at that exercise, marketing-as-service offers an option that doesn't involve thrusting your mission statement in our faces every time we turn a corner.

Coffee and the papers. Yes, papers
By Anita Diamant
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/05/12/opinion/eddiamant.php

Monday, May 12, 2008
For me, the morning begins with the newspapers, which arrive somewhere in the vicinity of my front door, every day of the week. This fact brands me as a bit of an anachronism, and certainly a demographic cliché: middle-aged, middle-class, blahblahblah.

According to a 2006 survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, only about 4 in 10 Americans get their news this way anymore, down by 18 percent since 1993, a trend that continues. I am not among the 57 percent who watch TV newscasts. And while I am glad to know that between 1993 and 2006 National Public Radio nearly doubled its audience from 9 to 17 percent, I will never quite forgive "All Things Considered" for what I swear was a 20-minute segment about Indian cooking that included a lingering sound-clip of garlic hissing in a frying pan.

I have friends who long ago canceled their hard-copy subscriptions and pick up the news from a laptop. My reluctance to join them has something to do with the fact that I already spend far too many hours staring at a screen. The computer is my work station, a place where I frequently pull at my hair and wish I could be somewhere else. The last thing I need is to start my day there, too.

I know that my morning newspaper is on its way into the museum, along with the model T and the whalebone corset, perhaps within my own lifetime. And while that prospect makes me a bit wistful, I am not convinced that the end of newsprint signals the death of literacy, reporting, language or civilization itself. The daily paper is, after all, only one of many news delivery systems. And some of the new systems are way cool.

Recently, I have taken to reading novels and works of nonfiction from the screen of an ebook - an electronic book - a paperback-sized, 10-ounce wonder that enables me to lightly lug a whole library in my carry-on luggage and to change the font size if I misplace my reading glasses. In the interest of full disclosure, you should know that I acquired this nifty little reading device as payola for taping an endorsement of the herein unnamed product. That said, I do love my new toy, which means I'm never stuck for reading material. Well, almost never.

I get all peevish when a title I want is not available in electronic form; what's the matter with that publisher, that writer? Are they quill-and-parchment Luddites? Get with the program already.

But when I settle into my airplane seat and fire up my ebook, I am one very chill Cheshire cat. The young man who sat beside me on recent flight admired it and asked if I worked in high tech. I glowed, feeling a good 20 years younger than I am, and precisely the sort of person who gets her news online, too.

And yet I cling to my paper. I'm biliterate, and proud. If I lost my ebook, I'd buy another. But cellulose is part of my morning ritual, a song-and-dance that starts when I open the front door to make sure it's been delivered. Will I need to put on shoes to retrieve it? Is an umbrella called for? Generally, I just sneak out in my robe and slippers, regardless of weather, studiously keeping my eyes on the ground, which makes me invisible to the kids walking past on their way to school.

Back at the kitchen table, I inhale the reviving aroma of coffee and open her up. First, I peruse the headlines and check in with the presidential campaign. But after that, it's pure chance what catches my attention. I flip through the sections: city, business, arts, sports. I wander and meander, finishing my grapefruit over a movie review. I pour a second cup and sigh about the situation in Israel, or Zimbabwe, or in a local public school. I glance at the ads and wonder who buys those "Sex for Life" books. I read all of the comics.

My husband wanders in and I say, "You've got to see this."

Anita Diamant's most recent novel is "The Last Days of Dogtown."

Print is not a burden, Useless drivel is the burden.

BoSacks Speaks Out: Rex Hammock is one of my favorite bloggers. I picked up this rant today from his site. It covers a lot of ground worth discussing with a style and grace we should all emulate. Rex and I have e-chatted for years and he is a top shelf observationist.

"There is no lighter burden, nor more agreeable, than a pen"
Francesco Petrarch (Italian Scholar, Poet and Humanist, 1304-1374)

Print is not a burden.
Useless drivel is the burden.
So ignore this post.
Posted by Rex

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

Frank Anton of Hanley Wood, says:

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

Colin Crawford of IDG says:

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

Jeff Jarvis responding to Colin's post, says:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Condé Nast Eyes Eye-Tracking

Condé Nast Eyes Eye-Tracking
By Jason Fell
http://www.foliomag.com/2008/cond-nast-eyes-eye-tracking-ads
Publisher to monitor effectiveness of ad campaigns; others wait on technology.
When the thought of "eye tracking" comes to mind, one may invariably picture some amalgamation of popular sci-fi flicks-the Matrix, Minority Report, Total Recall-with test subjects wearing cumbersome, Robocop-style headgear to trace eye and head movement.

Today, the clunky headgear has been replaced by cameras that are built into computer monitors. By collecting and analyzing data like "first gaze" and a person's vision path across a page or screen, publishers can use the information to help design covers, monitor the effectiveness of advertisements and help plan Web site redesigns-and they are beginning to do so. Condé Nast recently partnered with eye tracking service provider MediaAnalyzer to analyze the effectiveness of its clients' ads, especially for its long-term advertisers.

According to Scott McDonald, Condé Nast's senior vice president of marketing research, the partnership enables the company to offer "a unique value add to advertisers in our publications." Using MediaAnalyzer's methodology, he says, "helps our advertisers maximize their ROI and determine whether readers are engaged with their ads."

MediaAnalyzer's Web-based "AttentionTracking" technology tracks the path of eye movement while a print or online ad is being viewed. This, combined with a questionnaire, allows MediaAnalyzer to quantify the ads that leave the most lasting impressions. Or attempt to, anyway.

"In an increasingly competitive magazine market-with publishers fighting declining circulation numbers and a shift in ad dollars to other media-it is important that publishers continue to differentiate their products and offerings from the competition," says Charles Boyar, MediaAnalyzer's vice president of U.S. operations. "Research can help publishers create better-looking and more compelling magazines [and Web sites] and can aid them in helping their customers to create ad campaigns that will best address readers."

Are Other Publishers Buying It?

Despite some of the stated benefits, magazine publishers so far have been slow to buy into eye tracking technology, even online. So far, Condé Nast is MediaAnalyzer's only magazine client.

"Most of the eye tracking technology science is used for video and Web work," says veteran magazine consultant Bob Sacks. "When we start to get into digital editions, then the science becomes more meaningful and important, e-paper, eye tracking technology and a Web connection changes everything."

"When used appropriately, eye tracking studies have the most immediate impact for magazine publishers as they relate to Web sites," says Tim Kauffold, director of business development at Oneupweb, an integrated online marketing firm that provides eye tracking services. Kauffold says studies can cost as little as $4,000 or "well into six figures." Oneupweb does not have any magazine clients.

"The demands for user attention online are huge, and it's critical for sites to maximize all the opportunities they have to interact with their users," says Kauffold. "Poor navigation, cluttered content, and unnecessary confusion can force users away. This is a huge loss for publishers, especially in the relationship with their advertisers."

But as print magazines continue to see their business move online, Sacks says more publishers will start turning more to eye tracking services. "When we as publishers adapt to the next level of digital information distribution, and abandon a print-only mentality, we will have to use all the science and technology at our command," says Sacks. "Our use of eye tracking technology will grow as we do."

Google CEO Foresees Advertising, Technology Cozying Up

Google CEO Foresees Advertising, Technology Cozying Up
by Laurie Sullivan
http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.san&s=81589&Nid=42154&p=204904

Look for the advertising and the technology industries to grow cozier in a move similar to one experienced by the financial industry during the 1970s.


That's when a set of scientists and mathematicians developed new metrics, and suddenly a generation of employees focused on analytics joined financial firms to maximize efficiencies and profits, Google chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt told attendees at the 90th annual American Association of Advertising Agencies Leadership Conference on Tuesday in Laguna Niguel, Calif.

"There is every reason to believe marketing will go through a similar transition--but the principles of marketing, which are around storytelling, entertainment, targeting and selling--will be augmented by analytical tools," Schmidt said.

The goal for Google is to develop technology that delivers actionable metrics, making it easier for advertisers and agencies to optimize and measure campaigns. More advertisers will have the tools to expand into multiple markets that can test consumer interest in products and services.

Take, for example, Cadillac's click-to-play video ads. The car manufacturer had its ad agency create 13 versions of an ad, testing them in multiple markets to gauge consumer impact and the correlation between viewing the ads and the actual sales. Chrysler allowed consumers to customize the Chrysler 300, but the carmaker did it as content to draw in consumer engagement.

Honda sponsored a concert. Google engineers built technology that allowed concertgoers to ask the band questions and get responses. Schmidt says these will become the defining models for advertisers over the next 10 or 20 years.

For Google, advertising nirvana occurs when the search giant can return the exact answer for each query, accompanied with one perfectly targeted ad. "Eventually, maybe what we can do is guarantee advertisers who pay us money--and this is my fantasy, the sale," Schmidt says. "If we can get to that level of that specificity, advertising will no longer be a marketing expense. It becomes a sales expense."

Schmidt also addressed the challenges of finding ways to compensate content producers and issues of finding advertising content on YouTube when the consumer does not have a specific destination in mind. He acknowledges that financial compensation from one minute of online content brings in much less than one minute on television, but says the solution should focus on creating more compelling and targeted ads that command higher rates.

Nearly 400 attendees signed up for the conference, which runs through today.

Vancouver's Magpie Magazine Gallery to close

BoSacks Speaks Out: Here is an interesting story of a small eclectic magazine store going out of business. I thought that the response of the owner interesting and quite telling.

Such as this remark:
The effect of industry consolidation was to reduce competition. The way so many wholesalers competed with each other was to offer good terms and lengthy lists of titles including many low-circulation, specialized magazines. After consolidation, the remaining wholesalers learned to respect each other's turf, reducing competition more. They tightened up terms with retailers considerably. And they reduced their lists of titles by expelling the kind of low-circulation specialty magazines Magpie thrived on.

Well industry . . . What do you have to say to that? Decreased competition and a reduction of magazine titles. Is that the way for our continued sustainability and success? Or do you think it is a good thing for us to be at the mercy of Wal-Mart who at any moment can lop off another "unnecessary" printed 1,000 titles.

Business is a good game - lots of competition and a minimum of rules. You keep score with money.
Atari founder Nolan Bushnell

Vancouver's Magpie Magazine Gallery to close
http://canadianmags.blogspot.com/
Running a proper magazine store, one that reflects the owners' sensibilities and carries offbeat, quirky and hard-to-find titles is not an easy job and sometimes the job just gets too much. Hence, one of Vancouver's most engaging magazine stores, Magpie Magazine Gallery, is closing this Saturday after 15 years in business. The reasons given are sobering.According to a heartfelt tribute by Chad Christie in the Vancouver Sun and a personal note to his readers by Magpie owner Kevin Potvin, the store was done in by the usual suspects: Amazon, the internet, changing public tastes. As Christie put it:

It offered not the facade of intelligence -- a fake fireplace, decorative library ladders, a comfy "leather" chair -- but rather its own raw eccentricities.

Magpie was perhaps the only bookstore in the entire country that didn't play the same euro-centric classical music all day long. There, one could negotiate the sounds of Gracie Fields one minute and Public Enemy the next, Zhou Xuan and Madonna, Yma Sumac and Nine Inch Nails, Emmett Miller and Rodney Graham, among others.

Almost instantly Magpie became a community resource, the nexus of something new. In 2000 the owner of the store, Kevin Potvin, published a manifesto for the area in the Vancouver Courier entitled the "People's Republic of East Vancouver."

The article drew so much attention that I designed a logo for it, the merchandise of which -- stickers, magnets, T-shirts -- remained popular sale items to this day. Several local festivals and even realty brochures now refer to the area as such, and Potvin soon established the at times infamous Republic of East Vancouver newspaper, copies of which are subscribed to from all over the world.

Kevin Potvin, the Magpie's owner, writes in the current issue of The Republic of East Vancouver:

I am sad to be closing Magpie, but I'm very happy to have operated so long on this wonderful street bringing to residents of my community such a wide array of interesting magazines and good books. It was always a delight, and it remains one now.
Potvin says that changing public habits (staring off into space on the bus with ipods in their ears, rather than reading books, using laptops in coffee shops, staying home and surfing the web) were one of the blows. Another was the consolidation of the distribution industry.

Where once the store had magazine supply contracts with up to 42 wholesale distributors, today only three remain after a serious round of mergers, takeovers, consolidations and collapses.

The effect of industry consolidation was to reduce competition. The way so many wholesalers competed with each other was to offer good terms and lengthy lists of titles including many low-circulation, specialized magazines. After consolidation, the remaining wholesalers learned to respect each other's turf, reducing competition more. They tightened up terms with retailers considerably. And they reduced their lists of titles by expelling the kind of low-circulation specialty magazines Magpie thrived on. Just as supply of these types of magazines became harder, demand dropped as well, as particularly those readers who sought out specialized content were among the first to discover the internet as a source.... But there are things the periodical industry could have done had they perceived the changes in time and had they imagined solutions that were available.

For example, it is well-known in the magazine and newspaper businesses that the proceeds from sales of single copies at stores have never more than covered the accounting, collections, distribution and wasted copies costs of supplying stores. The only benefit to publishers of single copy sales in stores has always been the chance to attract new subscribers. The real business of periodicals is in advertising, a business that requires eyeballs at almost any cost.

Publishers could have perceived the same changes already sweeping the digital music business and switched their way of doing business by offering stores directly-shipped free copies of their products, sill with a cover price, with the stores responsible for paying for shipping only. The result for publishers would have been the same neutral cost they already accept by employing the lecherous distribution industry, but they would have helped create many more flourishing stores happy to make space to push sales of what would then be very high profit margin products. I wrote an article seven years ago for the leading magazine-industry magazine explaining this solution. The article was rejected. That magazine itself went out of business the following year due to the same pressures.
And, finally, it was finances that finished the quirky independent off:

Magpie itself had developed intractable business problems. Around 2000, after operating for six years and arriving, as expected, at a time to re-capitalize, the unexpected arrival on the scene of Chapters Bookstores, with its predatory schemes-successfully executed-to wipe out most independent bookstores, made it suddenly impossible for any remaining bookstores to negotiate ordinary business re-capitalization loans at banks. The only financing available was through credit cards. Rather than close after six years, I made the choice to take credit card money, the crack of financial markets.

Since then, the amount the store has paid in interest rates on credit cards is equal to almost two times the capital borrowed against them. Credit card interest rates, though at a period of historically very low Bank of Canada overnight borrowing rates, were such that Magpie had in seven years paid the borrowed capital back twice over and yet still owed the total amount again. Pleas for lower more reasonable rates fell on coldly deaf ears.

New Rules of Custom Publishing

Hell, there are no rules here-- we're trying to accomplish something.
Thomas A. Edison (1847 - 1931)

New Rules of Custom Publishing - New Complimentary White Paper: Nine Strategies to Create a World-Class Content Marketing Company
Posted by Joe Pulizzi
http://blog.junta42.com/content_marketing_blog/2008/04/new-rules-of-cu.html

The web and a continuing modification of buyer behavior (among other things) have changed the rules of what most people call the "custom publishing" industry. Traditional custom publishers, who profit from the creation and execution of customized content solutions for clients, must understand the new rules of custom publishing in order to survive. To help, I put together this complimentary white paper titled: The New Rules of Custom Publishing: Nine Key Strategies for Creating a World-Class Content Marketing Company.
Although this white paper is clearly targeted for publishers, or the providers of content services for marketing professionals, there is tremendous value for both marketers and publishers. This is especially true, since it doesn't matter if you make your money off of publishing or not. We are all publishers . . . so we all need to understand what is going on in the marketing/publishing world in order to compete in it (with content).
Unfortunately, most custom publishers are still hanging on to older business models and, as such, are getting plowed down by those abiding by the new rules of custom publishing. That said, there is a huge opportunity for those organizations that do choose to adopt the new rules as part of their overall business strategy.
The nine strategies highlighted in "The New Rules of Custom Publishing" are:
Understand the Changes That Are Leading the Content Marketing Future - A comprehensive overview of the changes in technology, publishing and marketing that are driving the custom content revolution.
Be Active in Social Media: It's Mandatory for the Future of Custom Publishing - From blogs to LinkedIn to Facebook, the new landscape of social media is an essential part of any strategy.
Acquire Expertise in All Forms of Content - Forget about focusing on one custom product; these days publishers need to be masters (or access to expertise) of everything from print magazines to Webcasts.
Walk the Talk - Don't expect a client to have confidence in your expertise if your company is not its own best content marketer.
Position Yourself as Both a Marketing and a Publishing Expert - Only companies that understand - and work with - both sides of the business are going to thrive.
Have a Clear Value Proposition - At some point the custom publishing field will become glutted. What's going to differentiate your company from the masses?
Price Your Services According to What the Customer Values - From industry standards to client specifics, everything a company could need to know about pricing.
Value the Role of the Project Manager - No project is going to manage itself. Don't underestimate the importance of good oversight.
Use Questions, Not Answers: Five Steps to Closing the Deal - How to make the client knock on your door...
Download this complimentary white paper The New Rules of Custom Publishing: Nine Key Strategies for Creating a World-Class Content Marketing Company and take your content company into the new world of publishing. I hope you enjoy it!

Ad buying goes digital

Ad buying goes digital
By Eric Pfanner
The International Herald Tribune
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/04/20/technology/ad21.php

For all the talk of "digital this" and "2.0 that," one part of the advertising world remains defiantly analog: the buying and selling of ad space and time in traditional media like television and print.

Eschewing online auctions and other digital-age transactional tools, owners of offline media and the agencies that allocate marketers' ad budgets often turn to an older negotiating forum: the bar.

There, over a beer, they can run through the available ad space in, say, a newspaper, and determine how much an advertiser is willing to pay. They can haggle over how much of a discount the advertiser should get, compared with the media owner's published ad rates. And, in some cases, they can decide how much of that discount should go back to the media-buying agency as part of its compensation for brokering the deal.

Advertisers sometimes complain about the lack of transparency in this arrangement, though media buyers say their clout helps them negotiate better deals than their clients would be able to strike otherwise.

Digital evangelists say there is greater clarity online, at least when marketers use systems like Google's AdWords, which places text advertisements alongside search results, using an online auction to allocate a keyword to the highest-bidding advertiser. Google has moved to extend its services to offline advertising in the United States, with agreements to sell newspaper, radio and some television spots.

Now an online media buying venture based in London is trying to do something similar in Britain. The firm, called MediaEquals, was set up by Martin Banbury, a marketing executive and entrepreneur, who described it as an "online stock exchange" for advertising.

The exchange allows media owners to list their available advertising space or time slots online; they can choose from a variety of pricing methods, including an auction system that allows agencies to bid competitively for the ad opportunities. Media buyers can go online and get a clear picture of what is available.

"When there's more transparency, people are able to spot greater value," Banbury said. "That opens up markets for additional trading."

Several media buying agencies said they would participate in the MediaEquals pilot. These agencies are eager for alternatives to Google, because its online auction system essentially cuts them out of the deal. MediaEquals, by contrast, keeps them in the loop; its system essentially moves the existing media buying process online.

"They aren't looking to replace the traditional buyer-seller relationship," said Jim Marshall, chairman of one of these agencies, the British unit of Starcom MediaVest, which is owned by Publicis Groupe.

MediaEquals plans to begin operating in a few weeks in Britain. If it succeeds, Banbury said, the goal is to expand the service to other markets, including Continental Europe and the United States.

Some media buyers are skeptical about the benefits of automating the process, noting that the planning of marketing campaigns has grown more complex, given the proliferation of new, digital media formats.

The biggest challenge for Banbury may be to persuade media owners to make attractive ad slots available on the system. MediaEquals is not the first online ad exchange, but previous initiatives have tended to focus on subprime advertising niches, like selling late-night space on cable television. A U.S. service, Bid4Spots, for example, allows radio advertisers to buy unsold radio air time.

Banbury said several media owners, including the magazine publishing arm of the British Broadcasting Corp. and the billboard owner CBS Outdoor, along with radio stations and newspapers, have agreed to join the system for the pilot program. Media owners will be charged a commission to sell their ads on MediaEquals.

"If I can get my inventory across more eyeballs, then I've got nothing to lose," said Matt Teeman, ad sales director at BBC Magazines. "The challenge will be to see how it can coexist alongside personal relationship. I don't think people will stop making phone calls or seeing each other in person."

New Research Into Why People Read

New Research Into Why People Read
Posted by Tom Weber
http://blogs.wsj.com/buzzwatch/2008/04/15/habit-forming-blogs-new-research-into-why-people-read/?mod=WSJBlog

The question of what drives people to read blogs is a big one for traditional media losing time with their audiences to the Internet and companies looking to tap the Web for marketing. It's also of more than passing interest to bloggers themselves (including us here at Buzzwatch).
One view suggests that, with such a broad smorgasborg of blogs and posts to choose from, readers will only dine on the most compelling content. But some researchers who studied a group of blog readers say one factor may be unappreciated:
Habit.
When University of California at Irvine researchers delved into usage patterns, they found study participants who labeled their blog-reading time as "chilling out" and "doing nothing," with one describing his impulse to read blogs as similar to his cigarette habit. Another talked about following through on her blog-reading routine even when she wasn't interested in some of the content.
In other words, when it comes to some blog readers, keeping them may be much easier than getting them in the first place-a finding that suggests the importance of good marketing for blogs. The study, "Exploring the Role of the Reader in the Activity of Blogging," was presented last week at a conference on human factors in computing.
There are some caveats to the research-most notably, that the study examined just 15 blog readers. The researchers say their results point to areas worthy of bigger studies-and note how little academic research has been done on blog reading.
One interesting finding: the blog readers typically professed little stress about information overload in trying to keep up with their favorite blogs. When they got behind on reading posts, they just skipped the old ones. (Blogs apparently are not like the pile of New Yorker magazines you intend to get to-someday.)
We asked two of the study's authors, Eric Baumer and Bill Tomlinson, to answer a few questions. Mr. Baumer is a doctoral candidate at the University of California at Irvine. Mr. Tomlinson is an assistant professor there. Here's the interview:
Q: Your study suggests that regular blog readers are reading out of habit, rather than making content-oriented decisions about whether to read. Do you think blog reading is becoming more like TV viewing, to which some people devote hours while complaining that they can't find anything good to watch?
Mr. Baumer: While blog reading often becomes habitual, that does not mean it is not about the content. Motivations for reading are highly multifaceted, and while routine is one motivation, there are many others, including finding current news, fostering a personal connection with the blogger, fulfilling social obligations by reading a friend's blog, entertainment value, etc. While blog reading is often habitual, that habitual nature interacts with many other varied motivations.
With respect to the comparison with television, the form of the habitual activity is different from TV viewing. With few exceptions, TV limits the viewer to being a mostly passive participant; it is not a medium that facilitates much audience interaction. On the other hand, blogs enable interaction in a number of different forms: comments, email, trackbacks, etc. Thus, while blog reading might in part be habitual, those habits include interaction and engagement by the reader in a way not possible with television.
Q. People told you that they don't get stressed out if they're not up-to-date with their blog reading-which you point out is at odds with the pervasive notion of information overload. What are the implications? And does this ring true for you personally?
Mr. Baumer: In the paper, we actually reference a quote that describes the excessive amount of information available and that people will soon be completely overwhelmed by it; that quote is from 1613.
There are a number of important implications here. First of all, this rhetoric of information overload is not new, and is certainly not only a product of digital information technologies (keeping in mind that books are a sort of analog information technology).
Second, I think this finding helps to open up the design space in terms of tools to support blog reading. Rather than focusing on helping readers wade through a deluge of information content, one could envision tools that focus on the reader's relationship with the blogger or allowing more fluid, nuanced interactions between bloggers and readers.
Does it ring true personally? Yes. Shortly after I started reading blogs regularly, I gave up on trying to stay completely up to date, as it was a futile effort. When I have a chance, I'll skim through titles and maybe glance at some interesting looking posts, but I'm not trying to get to everything in my RSS feed reader.
Also, one of the biggest ways I find items of interest is through other people I know. If another student in our lab or a friend of mine finds something interesting, they're likely to share it. Lots of online sites, such as del.icio.us, are built around this idea of social filtering, but that sort of filtering happens through casual offline conversations, too.
Q. What are the signs that someone's own reading of blogs has become habitual? Also, you say that tools to raise self-awareness could be needed. What might those be, and what problems would they address?
Mr. Baumer: Habits aren't necessarily bad; reading the same blogs in the same order at the same time every day can help make it easier to remember which blogs one wants to read.
However, habits aren't necessarily good, either. Habitual reading can become potentially detrimental when people disengage mentally and don't think very critically about what they're reading. Many of our participants were reflective about why they read blogs, but not as reflective about how or what they read.
In terms of self-awareness, there is an interesting potential for tools that encourage critical thinking and reflection about what a person is reading. We want to encourage and enable people to ask questions about what is being said on the blogs they read, not just by the words themselves, but between and behind the words. Encouraging this sort of critical reflection may be an interesting and compelling way to make blog reading a more engaging experience.
Q. Your results are based on 15 respondents-all under age 40, and many of them bloggers themselves. What are the limitations of that sample?
Mr. Tomlinson: In the early stages of research into a topic, it's often helpful to begin with small qualitative studies such as this one in order to figure out the key issues. Quantitative studies with larger sample sizes are then useful for refining the understanding of these issues and developing statistical analyses of specific phenomena.
While the small sample size in this study does limit the generalizability of the findings (i.e., not everyone will have the same perspectives as the 15 people in this study), it nevertheless allowed us to go into much greater depth with each participant and develop a nuanced understanding of their way of approaching the blogs they read. This study has helped us to identify behaviors and perspectives for this particular group; further studies can then help see if these findings hold across broader samples and different communities.
Q. Many bloggers are obsessed with-and depend financially on-the size of their readership. What do you see as the most important takeaways from your results to bloggers? How might they be used to improve blogs?
Mr. Tomlinson: One of the most important lessons for bloggers from the study is that readers are heterogeneous - they're coming from different backgrounds, and have different expectations and motivations. Even among the participants in this study, there was a wide diversity of perspectives on several key issues.
Being aware of this heterogeneity in their readership can help bloggers think more carefully about the content they are providing, and how it will be perceived by their audiences. Blogs as a medium are highly varied and give rise to a broad range of interactions between bloggers and readers; understanding a bit more about the dynamics of these relationships was one of the core goals of this study.

Cheapskate Journalism

Cheapskate Journalism
What went wrong at JRC
Posted by Alan Mutter
http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/

Teetering near default on a tower of debt and days from being booted off the Big Board, Journal Register Co. shows how strategic missteps and bad luck can imperil even as good a business as this highly profitable chain of community newspapers.

For all that's wrong with JRC - and there is a quite lot, to be sure - the company's 19.3% operating profit not only compares quite favorably with those of several of the largest Fortune 500 corporations but actually surpasses the margins of such giants as Chevron (18.5%), Wal-Mart (7.5%) and General Motors (3.5%).

The ability of JRC to continue generating rich profits at a time of unprecedented contraction in the newspaper business is the direct legacy of the rigorous expense management enforced by Robert Jelenic, the chief executive who ran the company for two decades until he resigned in November to undergo cancer treatment.

In addition to leaving JRC with some of the leanest-running newspapers in the land, Mr. Jelenic also left the company with the hefty $628.4 million in debt that now threatens to force it into bankruptcy. Most of the debt results from one bold, but less than successful, acquisition he undertook in 2004 in an effort to keep the company's sales, profits and stock price growing.

Not only did the transaction prove over time to be a serious miscalculation, but a steep drop in JRC's sales in the last two years has made it increasingly unlikely that the company can generate enough profits in the future to service its ponderous debt.

Between 2005 and 2007, JRC's sales tumbled 20.2% to $463.2 million, a drop nearly 2½ times greater than the over-all industry decline of 8.2% in the same period. (Some revenue was eliminated in JRC's sale of a few modest operating units, but the volume of the discontinued operations comes nowhere close to accounting for the disparity between the performance of the company and the industry as a whole.)

Caught between high debt and declining sales, the company today finds itself in a world of hurt:

JRC's share price has fallen by 99% from a high of $21.84 in 2004 to $0.265 Friday at the New York Stock Exchange. The Big Board plans to ban the shares from trading this week, because the value of the company is too low to meet the minimum listing standards.

:: The company's debt, which amounts to an untenable seven times its operating earnings for the last 12 months, is now rated at Caa1 by Moody's Investor Services, which means the rating agency believes the company has better than a 1 in 3 chance of default. Moody's is concerned that the company cannot generate enough cash to cover the debt repayments scheduled for 2009.

:The largest portion of the debt that threatens to force JRC into bankruptcy resulted from the acquisition for $415 million in 2004 of a group of community papers concentrated around economically distressed Detroit. To date, the company has been forced to write off $215 million, or nearly 52%, of the value of those assets.

:: An investment banker has been hired to explore the sale of some or all of the company's assets, but few parties are interested in acquiring newspapers these days, given the the unsettled outlook for the industry. Further, it is questionable whether a buyer, if one materializes, would pay much more than the 7x earnings necessary to extinguish the company's debt. This fear has caused investors to hammer the stock to the point it is all but worthless.

Ironically, JRC, which owns 22 daily newspapers and more than 300 non-daily publications in six geographic clusters, got its start as the reincarnation of a newspaper empire that was run off the rails in the 1980s by Ralph Ingersoll II, a buccaneering publisher who built his eponymous empire by overpaying for newspapers and financing them with junk bonds.

When Ingersoll Publications collapsed under its debt in 1990, its investors turned to Bob Jelenic, Mr. Ingersoll's protégé, to restart the company as Journal Register.

The strategy for JRC, which went public in 1997, was essentially the same as that of Ingersoll Publications: Build the company by aggregating neighboring newspapers into ever-larger clusters that would make it possible to sell advertising more efficiently while lowering the costs of producing the publications.

It's a terrific idea, so long as you don't overpay for acquisitions and have a plan to build sales while judiciously cutting costs. But the execution didn't prove to be much better at JRC than it was for Ingersoll Publications.

As JRC pursued its rollup strategy, Mr. Jelenic sought to boost his company's stock by aggressively reducing expenses to increase earnings as much as possible, thus earning the reputation as the most zealous cost cutter in the newspaper industry. "Nobody cinches the belt tighter than . . . Journal Register Co., where cost-cutting has become an art," reported Forbes Magazine in a 2001 article titled "Cheapskate Journalism."

Beyond shrinking staff, benefits and newshole, JRC was known for such practices as printing on ever-thinner newsprint and requiring executives to check the odometers of journalists before reimbursing them for driving to their assignments. A former JRC publisher told the American Journalism Review in 1999 that Mr. Jelenic sometimes demanded the instant firing of an employee, any employee, if his paper missed its weekly revenue target.

JRC produced some of the highest operating profits ever seen in the newspaper industry when its earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) hit 29.1% in 2001. But it is hard to replicate annually such one-time savings as downsizing a newsroom or consolidating two printing plants into one. In the absence of significant sales growth from 2001 to 2003, JRC's profitability, though still ample, began faltering.

To boost the company's growth and potential for future profitability, Mr. Jelenic in 2004 bought 21st Century Newspapers in what it called "affluent markets" in Michigan for $415 million, paying a generous 11.5x EBITDA. But the domestic auto industry was facing a decline that, if anything, has accelerated since then.

The Michigan acquisition not only failed to produce the hoped-for sales and profits, but also saddled JRC with substantial debt at the same time revenues began falling at its properties and most other newspapers in the United States.

Now, JRC is caught in a squeeze it may not be able to survive. Unlike newspapers owned by other publishers that are trying to tough out the tough times by paring expenses, most JRC newspapers have little left to cut - and limited resources to build sales with new print and online products.

Despite its straitened circumstances, JRC in 2007 did manage to pay Mr. Jelenic more than $6.3 million in salary, severance and other compensation, which represented a fourfold increase over the nearly $1.5 million he received the prior year.

As part of his severance arrangement, Mr. Jelenic got an extra 192,000 shares of JRC to add to the nearly 2.3 million shares he already owns. Unfortunately, his stock, like mine, isn't likely to be worth anything near what it used to be.

What's Next for Newsmagazines?

What's Next for Newsmagazines?
Fading Publications Try to Reinvent Themselves Yet Again
By REBECCA DANAApril 4, 2008; Page B1
http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?t=7n4krlcab.0.sgjdylcab.cuf4zubab.1&ts=S0331&p=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle_email%2FSB120727766116988719-lMyQjAxMDI4MDA3NDIwNzQ3Wj.html
The weekly newsmagazines have been declared dinosaurs as far back as the late 1980s. But now that 111 employees at Washington Post Co.'s Newsweek have taken buyouts, including many longtime editors, it's clear that their cultures are finally being blown up and reinvented. And some say that's not such a bad thing.

The employees at Newsweek, making up around 20% of the staff, last week accepted a buyout offer that includes months of salary, years of health insurance, and in some cases, a contract with Newsweek. However generous-sounding, the buyout marks a significant round of bloodletting in the newsmagazine business, which in recent years has seen Time Warner Inc.'s Time and Newsweek wage staff-attrition campaigns in search of long-term economic viability. Shedding employees, particularly older ones that earn higher salaries, is a quick way to offset depressed advertising and newsstand sales.
The most recent cuts are more than just attrition, however. These magazines are changing dramatically, and losing chunks of institutional memory along with the exiting employees, many of whom never worked anywhere else.
Newsweek Editor Jon Meacham offered the buyouts to around 150 employees mainly as a way of cutting costs, but also because it fits into the broader strategy he said he has been putting in place at the magazine since taking the reins 18 months ago.
Mr. Meacham's strategy involves increasing the quotient of serious news in his magazine by bringing in energetic, often younger and frequently lower-earning talent while keeping Newsweek's stable of brand-name writers intact. Some of those writers, including Cathleen McGuigan and film critic David Ansen, accepted the buyout offer but will likely return on contract.

"Like any managers anywhere, we looked at a revenue picture that could be more thrilling and said, 'How can we accomplish two or three things?,' " Mr. Meacham said in an interview. " 'How can we control costs? How can we have money to rebuild and hire new voices and new reporting talent? And how can we do that in the service of what we've been trying to do with the magazine of the last year-and-a-half, which is make it more serious and try to make ourselves indispensable to the conversation?' "
While circulation for both Newsweek and Time has remained flat, at around 3.1 million and 4 million per issue, respectively, the number of advertising pages has declined in recent years and major retailers, including Wal-Mart Stores Inc., are reducing the number of issues they stock in stores.
Time, along with several of its sibling magazines, endured its own round of buyouts just over a year ago. Editor Richard Stengel assumed his post shortly before Mr. Meacham did and made sweeping changes, redesigning the magazine and Web site, cutting the advertising rate base and changing the delivery date to Friday from Monday.
"My whole view was there's more information out there than any time in human history. What people don't need more of is information," Mr. Stengel said. "They need a guide through the chaos."
This appears to contrast with Mr. Meacham's strategy of upping the news content in his magazine. However, both men share what could be called "Economist-envy." In 2007, the Economist newsmagazine, published by U.K.-based The Economist Newspaper Ltd., saw an 8.5% increase in advertising pages compared with 2006, according to the Magazine Publishers of America. By contrast, Newsweek's advertising pages dropped 6.7% and Time's fell 6.9%.
Cable news and the Web have sapped Time and Newsweek of much of their audience in recent years, crowding out their exclusive hold on certain kinds of stories, including analyses and detailed retellings of major news events. As the Internet has also given rise to a new generation of multiplatform, self-branded news personalities. It no longer takes two decades at Newsweek to be a brand-name pundit.
The newsmagazines' first response years ago was to increase their focus on softer, user-friendly stories on topics such as health, science and technology. The content appealed to baby boomers; advertisers liked it, too, seeing it as a better environment for their pitches than wars and political scandals. Meanwhile, having well-known columnists became a way these magazines could distinguish themselves amid the increasing competition.
"What's happened in the business as a whole is talk is cheap and reporting is expensive," said Newsweek writer Jonathan Alter, a 25-year veteran at the magazine who qualified for the buyout but declined it. But he adds, some of the change in culture is welcome. "In general, the office politics are at a much lower volume than in the past because the old fight of space is different than it was. If there's not room in the magazine for something, you can just do it online," he said.
Mr. Meacham said that since he took over, Newsweek has 30% more text and fewer pictures.
Time and Newsweek have both used targeted voluntary buyout packages to help trim the budget in recent years. Time has also closed some bureaus to save on real-estate costs, replacing them with roaming "laptop correspondents," and removed some of the layers of intermediate editors.
Those who survived rounds of buyouts at both titles are adapting to new job descriptions. "We have to have stories that have original reporting and are well-written and that you can actually remember," said Newsweek Editor-at-Large Evan Thomas.
At a recent speech at Columbia University, Mr. Meacham delivered a blistering response after he asked who reads Newsweek and none of the 100-odd students in attendance raised their hands.
"It's an incredible frustration that I've got some of the most decent, hard-working, honest, passionate, straight-shooting, non-ideological people who just want to tell the damn truth, and how to get this past this image that we're just middlebrow, you know, a magazine that your grandparents get, or something, that's the challenge," Mr. Meacham said. "And I just don't know how to do it, so if you've got any ideas, tell me."

Murdoch: Technology Driving Vast Changes in Media

Murdoch: Technology Driving Vast Changes in Media
http://explore.georgetown.edu/news/?ID=32589

Media Magnate Discloses Desire to Add Another Newspaper to His Stable of NY-based Publications

Media mogul Rupert Murdoch warned that "technology will continue to destroy all of the old ways and old assumptions, especially in the media" during an April 2 speech on "Creative Destruction: News for the 21st Century," sponsored by the McDonough School of Business.

"We have one certainty - we can never be sure where the industry will end up," Murdoch said in a Gaston Hall address about the changing face of media. "It is true that technology is changing accepted ways of doing business. It's making us work harder for our customers."

The ultimate effect, Murdoch predicted, is more access to news and entertainment for people who cannot traditionally afford it.

Murdoch is the chairman and chief executive officer of News Corp., one of the world's most extensive media conglomerates. Its holdings include TV and radio channels, movie studios, Internet sites and newspapers. In his speech, he said technology's effects have permeated every aspect of News Corp., from the social networking on MySpace to the type of articles printed in local newspapers.

Consumers, especially the younger generation, have a chance to shape the inevitable changes by demanding content based on personal preferences, he added.

"Unlike traditional media, choices in the future will be generated from the bottom up, not top-down," Murdoch explained. "A 13-year-old girl in Delhi is not going to want the same news and entertainment as a 50-year-old executive in Chicago . . . Our challenge is to personalize the experience for these people so we can reach them both."

Murdoch foresees the end of traditional mass media with consumers receiving news and entertainment from limited sources. Media companies need to diversify to survive, which is one reason his company purchased MySpace in 2005, he said.

The CEO claimed News Corp. is at the forefront of providing individualized content. His company's news media outlets reached three-quarters of the world's population and are published in more than 30 languages.

Murdoch hinted for the first time publicly that he is looking to extend that reach by acquiring Newsday, a Long Island-based newspaper owned by Tribune Company. That, Murdoch said, could bolster another News Corp. holding, The New York Post, and compete for revenue against The New York Times.

However, he acknowledged the U.S. Department of Justice might stand in the way based on antitrust concerns, because News Corp. also owns The Wall Street Journal.

When asked about bias in the media, Murdoch dismissed claims that his outlets show biases, saying that his personal opinions are not reflected in the news cycle.

"People laugh at Fox News because we call ourselves fair and balanced . . . The fact is that CNN was always extremely liberal and never had a conservative, Republican voice on it. The only difference is that we have equal voices on both sides, but that seems to have upset a lot of liberals," he said. "We believe the more voices, the better and let's have variety and opinions coming from all sides. Society is growing more intelligent and people can absorb this, they can accept or reject it."

Murdoch also denied that his company wants to create a news monopoly by saying, "We're just a tiny fraction of the media landscape. There are millions of voices out there. Everything we've done, in my opinion, is to create competition , , , We think that's a public service. We want to give people choices. The more choice there is, the better it is."

The Most Notable Launch of 2007

The Most Notable Launch of 2007
Posted by Samir Husni
http://mrmagazine.wordpress.com/

Drum roll please . . . from a field of 715 new magazines launched in 2007, Condé Nast Portfolio is our choice as The Most Notable Launch of the Year. 2007 will be remembered as the year that saw the return of the prophets of doom and gloom and at the same time as the year folks like David Carey and Joanne Lipman showed the world that print is and can be alive, well and kicking. Our hats off to the folks at Condé Nast Portfolio and the 714 other magazines that showed the doubting Thomases that print is still a very vibrant medium in this day and age. A recent Dutch newspaper adopted the tag-line "News is free but information you have to pay for." And that is exactly what CN Portfolio has done as it approaches its first anniversary issue. The magazine has provided in depth information on business issues ranging from food, gender, oil, media . . . you name it. The information in each issue is presented in an in-depth fashion merging the power of words and images to deliver the best visual impact of print (VIP). This VIP enhances CN Portfolio's addictive, exclusive and timely, yet timeless content.
With the power of print alive, well and kicking on the pages of CN Portfolio magazine, the same can be said about Portfolio.com website. CN Portfolio provides a complete package of information that makes it a must to today's movers and shakers. Whether ink on paper or pixels on the screen CN Portfolio deserves the honor of being named the Most Notable Launch of the Year. A well done job in the midst of a very rough year both on the business and media fronts.
Indeed, 2007 has been a rough year for media across the board, but what we have seen in the last 12 months isn't new. It has happened before. In just one short year we have seen overseas news bureaus shutdown, a television and movie writers' strike that has altered viewing habits, a move to free internet media content by some big name papers, the slashing of approximately 1000 titles from Wal-Mart's newsstands and now you see that we have the lowest total number of new magazine launches in five years. So what should I do? Should I say some of you were right? That we are actually a dying industry?
I can't and I won't.
If I were to say those things and side with those who believe media is doomed I would not only be ignoring some key events that happened this year, but I would be ignoring what happened when new mediums burst on to the market in the middle of the last century. Newspapers and magazines were supposed to die after radio wowed the world. A few decades later radio, newspapers and magazines were all agreed to be dead after we fell in love with television. And today the talk seems to be that everything will suffer because of the internet. Just for a quick historical piece of information newspapers and magazines, like any other product, have a time to be born and a time to die. That was true in 1690 when the first American newspaper was born and the same was true when it died after the first issue was born. There is nothing new under the sun when it comes to the life cycle of all things that have a time to be born and a time to die.
Well here we are: it is 2008, we still have television, we still have radio, we still have newspapers and we still have magazines. That will not change. Most of the world is having no problem with media consumption. Newspaper circulation and readership is up all over the world with the exception of the American market (that is the subject of another blog), a paper mill was recently completed in Germany at a cost of €486 million, a printing press was also recently opened in the United Kingdom unlike any we've seen before and 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 print is well, alive and kicking. The 2007 new launches totaled 715. That is, still nearly two new magazines launched each day on average. And while 2007 count is nearly 200 titles fewer than 2006, it is still substantially higher than the number 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 of the current desire for good content that they fed over $125 million into the launch of CN Portfolio, our Most Notable Launch of the Year. So far I haven't heard one whisper of disappointment concerning that investment, except of course from the prophets of doom and gloom.
I've been saying this for some time now, we are in the midst of a market correction. We saw the market correct itself in 1999 and we are seeing it again this year. What we are seeing is, in some ways, similar to what the housing market or national economy is doing. Anything involving money has a tendency to be a roller-coaster ride of ups and downs. There may be those that are complaining as we are at a low point, but be certain, those same individuals will be praising our industry when the numbers swing back up like they have time and again over the 20+ years I have been tracking new launches. Enjoy.

BoSacks Readers Speak Out: Evil Mantra, Scan Based Mags and Husni

BoSacks Readers Speak Out: Evil Mantra, Scan Based Mags and Husni
www.bosacks.com


RE: Is the Real Mantra? Be Evil. Very Evil
What happened to words like trust, ethics, civility, common courtesy, or morality (not to be confused with "religious")? Articles like this make me want to quit my job and live in a small cabin in the middle of nowhere.

Thanks for sharing this, I needed a little fire in my belly this morning to get the juices flowing.
(Submitted by an innocent bystander)

RE: Is the Real Mantra? Be Evil. Very Evil
Google has me scared . . . really scared. I am fearful as a publisher, as a father, and as a citizen in an open democracy. Where does this intrusion end? Can it actually end? The genie is out of the bottle. We have willing given out information everywhere to everyone. I can't see a way to stop this and at the same time I am fearful of it, even though my business does it's best to collect the very same data.
(Submitted by a Publisher)

RE: Is the Real Mantra? Be Evil. Very Evil.
Privacy. Hm. What's that?
Well let me give another example of a "time bomb".
Let's say you sign up with Earthlink.net for an email address. You use it for a couple of years and then something better comes along. So you cancel your Earthlink.net account and signup with your new subscriber. You take the time to make all the changes to all your accounts, you think, so they send messages and newsletters to the new account.
Then one day, a year or two later you get an email from a stranger. They have randomly chosen your old email account. An account that Earthlink.net conveniently re-activated as an available email name since you were not using it. This stranger tells you he was able to access your Classmates.com account using your old email address. How? Well, since he now has your email address, he can conveniently say he lost his password and they'll send him a new one, to the email address! Voila! Access to an account and ANY information, credit card info, personal data, that may be there. And, the stranger says, that any email list that you were on that hasn't updated their list, he is now receiving. Oh boy, you'd better not let you Mom/Wife/co-workers see THAT newsletter. That could be embarrassing. If the stranger wasn't an honest person, well let's just say that blackmail and identity theft from an old email address pops into mind.
So what do you think? How many of you dropped your dial-up email address for a new DSL email address? Did you know that your email address is being recycled?
Just something to think about.
(Submitted by a Paper Person)

RE: Jerry Seinfeld quote
"There's very little advice in men's magazines, because men don't think there's a lot they don't know. Women do. Women want to learn. Men think, "I know what I'm doing, just show me somebody naked.""
Jerry Seinfeld quotes (American television Actor and Comedian, b.1954)

I love this quote! And it's pretty much exactly what Mike LaFavore was told when he presented his pitch more than a decade ago for a new magazine idea: Men's Health.
Fortunately, Men's Health has proven Jerry's comment to be largely -- but not entirely -- incorrect. Men's Health does have a lusty "Cex & Relationships" section - and Cex is always a top-ranking Web feature as well.
Men DO want advice. They just don't want to admit it.
(Submitted by an Editor)
(BoSacks has intentionally changed the word CEX to hopefully bypass silly corporate filters that have no understanding or sense of proper usage and propriety)


RE: Scan-Based Trading's Hold-Up
A couple of comments . . . .
SBT is a way of the future - no doubt about it. Why in your whole story on SBT was the term "Issue code" not mentioned? (I searched) Simple scan based trading is logical and can apply to gum, except we change our product every week/every month and want to know if Angelina outsells Posh Spice. Retailers have not come to grips that requirement. Shall we change the manufacturing code every week as I believe People does? Then there will be 10,000 bar codes in the system. Also - not all retailers scan . . . will wholesalers have 2 classes of retailer. Many independents will likely never afford SBT.

It was also amusing when in the same set of BOSACKS emails, one had advertisers demanding magazines be more environmentally friendly then in the second email they we being suspicious of any audience calculations. The fastest way to efficiency in the use of magazines is to count pass along. To demand inflated circulation for the sake of rate bases is environmental hypocrisy - and a poor business model as well.
(Submitted by a Director, Consumer Marketing)


RE: Husni Vs. BoSacks - The Whole Experience vs. the Hole Experience
Bob, I've been a long reader, studier, and huge fan of print magazines. I've tracked their successes, their failures, I've tried to educate my customers about their trends to better serve the needs of publishers and mag advertisers. I've been fiercely loyal to print. I've purchased hundreds of newsstand copies to the tune of thousands of dollars (and NOT on an expense report). My very livelihood depends on the success of magazines. I've
worked to convince advertisers of the importance of the tangibility of that printed piece.

You know what? I haven't bought a magazine for 10 months.

I realize now that I didn't buy them for the paper, or the convenience. I bought them for the content, and I found a better way to get much higher quality content. Jezebel.com has replaced any random women's title (my intro was from an ADAge. Com article). I've literally replaced every bit of content that I once got from mags with free content on the web.

Now, I still buy print. Mostly books (lots of engagement hours for the money) and newspapers (lots of info for the amount of money) when I travel. Magazines fill neither niche . . . high cost for the time of engagement provided. The exception, of course are magazines like Vanity Fair, New Yorker, Esquire and Atlantic Monthly. And I feel THIS is the category of mag that will survive.
Keep up the good work!
(Submitted by an unknown Publishing Professional)


RE: Husni Vs. BoSacks - The Whole Experience vs. the Hole Experience
Bo, Your on-going debates are a joy to be a part of. You and Samir are both passionate defenders of your particular points of view and both unyielding of your turf. I think Samir is on the wrong side of the equation, but I applaud his last man standing approach. Having seen you both several times, you both make terrific and convincing arguments. I would see you again at any given moment. But Bo, is more correct than Samir. Magazines will be around for a long time as Samir says, but it will be the digital world where all the action and the advertising dollars will be. And that is coming from a multi-title print publisher. But in my niche, my readers are saying they prefer the digital path 2 to 1. I will not argue with my bread and butter as they pay the bills and the digital subscription fees.
(Submitted by a Multi-Title Publisher)