An I-Tunes for magazines

According to the New York Times,

A consortium of magazine publishers including Time Inc. and Condé Nast are plan to jointly build an online newsstand for publications in multiple digital formats, according to people with knowledge of the plans.

which adds that

In the face of slumping print circulations for many magazines, the publishing houses are eager to exert some control over digital readership, said people at the companies, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about the plans. Some newspaper owners have also expressed interest in the joint venture.

An elegy for magazines

I love magazines. Not all magazines, I suppose, but the good ones. My magazine love is not rooted in the fact that I write for them, the fact I write for them is rooted in my love for them. I love them because they are both more ephemeral and immediate than, say, Michelangelo's "David" or Welles' "Touch of Evil," but art just the same.

writes Brian Alexander over at the Huffington Post

Imagine what you get for your money. You can travel to places you aren't likely to visit, meet people you are not likely to meet, learn about some topic you may never have wondered about but there you are, reading about it, because a magazine has delivered it to your eyes and packaged it in such a way that you wind up enlightened or amused or outraged

And as for the web it

does some things well, but the best magazines are simply not translatable to the Web because they lose their essence when they are sliced and diced. A magazine is not just the one story you might want to read, it's the story and the images you didn't know you wanted to read, but that thing is in your hands and you're flipping pages and you are arrested by a picture, or a headline or a first sentence.

How Magcloud put together a magazine in less than two days

Great story via Nieman Lab of the magazine that came to fruition in 31.5 hours.

The magazine called Strange Light came at of last week's events in Sydney when the populus was subjected to a dust storm.

It was put together using Magcloud

From the idea to the final product — which featured 54 photos of the storm, each use with the permission of its photographer — took less than two days.

The potential for this is great with events being able to be turned around and published quickly and it will be an interesting exercise in seeing whether this concept takes off

Reader's Digest to undergo a makeover

Reader's Digest has been struggling recently with its American enterprise being forced into bankruptcy earlier this year.

On the back of that,it is undergoing an overhaul with the FT reporting that it is going to

attract a younger audience to a brand suffering from its associations with doctors’ waiting rooms and elderly readers.

Its website is leading the way reports the paper

Starting with the Netherlands and China, where a redesigned website goes live this week, the group is planning to replace a patchwork of international sites, each designed separately by local teams and carrying a different selection of content, with a single, coherent platform.

There are so many ready to die-Jeff Jarvis on magazines

We have been led to believe that the magazine sector with its unique selling points may have been more immune to the rampaging changes going on in the newspaper world.

Well think again if Jeff Jarviss has anything to do with it.

Reflecting on the closure of portfolio magazine,he writes that

We’ll see magazines fold and it’s going to be a lot riskier to start new ones to replace them — riskier because, just as on TV and in movies and music, it’s harder to create a blockbuster and consumer magazines depend on the blockbuster economy. Magazines don’t make money until they hit magic numbers of circulation (which comes only after renewals reduce marketing costs) and advertising (which is sold at heavy premiums and that market is bound to suffer both in a recession and against unlimited competition from online).

and he continues

there are so many ready to die. Who needs newsmagazines? Business magazines are suffering the tragic irony of being at the same time more necessary and less supportable because of the financial crisis. Men’s magazines have been folding. Entertainment magazines are dicey. Trade magazines are dropping. And the list goes on and on.

Some positives for the magazine sector

Over at Paul Bradshaw's online journalism blog there is a guest post from Alex Lockwood who reports on a very upbeat "What happens to magazines conference in London."

You could call 2008 the Year of the Niche title as people look to do things at home, cheaply, or the things they love most during the economic downturn.

says Alex before giving six industry examples of how the sector can be positive:

1. Andrew Davies of idiomag, the music content personalisation site, emphasized the possibilities for each unique user building their own magazine of content through companies, like his, using software sophisticated enough to be ultra-niche; and the advertising opportunities that provided were unrivalled for consumer relationships.

2. Mike Soutar, founder of Shortlist Media and “pioneers” in quality free magazine content, was confident that print magazines had found a model (brand-to-hand distribution and outsourced costs, keeping magazine teams very small) that would mean print magazines could continue to be there where a screen wasn’t.

3. Sarah Clegg, chief executive of John Menzies Digital and provider of magazinesondemand.co.uk, delivering digital editions of top brands, believed they had passed the tipping point and, critically, persuaded publishers that they couldn’t charge their normal cover price for a digital magazine that had no transport, printing and retail costs attached to it.

4. Ashley Norris of Shiny saw a future of 20-30 blogs in a network doing the work–and replacing–the work of 2-3 magazines, and brokering creative sponsorship between brands and social media as central to the business model for producing great experiences online.

5. Simon Wear of Future, perhaps the most positive and persuasive, believed that his magazine company would be growing as they had a) remembered they weren’t software companies, and also b) had remembered how to write really strong, probing news around their niche interest sectors, which translates well online, and meant their nice-to-have content had found its way back to need-to-have status.

6. Finally, the most hopeful and most sceptical at the same time, Louise White of Incisive said their b2b titles were not magazines any more, but information providers that found their way into their audiences’ work flow–”platform agnostic” content that was as important to be on someone’s Blackberry than online or in print.

Of all the comments perhaps Louise's is the most potent in the current climate-information providers that found their way into their audiences' work flow is a very good description of the role of the B2b magazine.

The demise of the weekly news magazine in the US

A sign of the Times as the American market for weekly news magazines melts away

The New York Times (ht-Jay Rosen) reports how the popular newsweekly once the home to three seperate titles now has but one and the reason that may leave Time magazine as the only one is simple.

The internet has filled the gap for news so

The business of telling people what happened in the last week is just about gone, in favor of telling them how to think about the news

Which is why the economist is closing in on the American market

Unable to compete with the immediacy of television, cable and then the Internet, newsmagazines have been moving for decades in the direction of analysis, commentary and news-related feature articles. That trend has accelerated in recent years, driven by financial pressures. The magazines’ editorial staffs are about half as big as they were in the 1990s, and they have shuttered many of the bureaus they once had around the world.

Why read Press Gazette when you can read John Slattery

Having just finished a work placement at a B2B magazine,I was interested in reading Neil Thackray’s Business Media Blog.(Ht-Martin Stabe)

He discusses the future for the B2B sector and he says that besides the budgetary constraints that practically all B2B's are experiencing
the growth of the Internet has had two pernicious effects on the future editorial viability of business magazines.

1.First the news, the lifeblood of a weekly mag, is available 24/7 and immediately.

2.As journalists get laid off, there will be more and more lone writers. They are often pretty good too.

And here is an interesting point that he makes

Read the Press Gazette web site and then read Jon Slattery (a former PG long term staffer). Which is better?

A very good example.Personally I tend to read John Slattery more than I read the Press Gazette site,it used to be one of my first point of calls but no longer is.

An industry decimated

No doubt that everybody is talking about the pessimistic report out by Deloittes on the newspaper industry this morning.

The FT reports that

The newspaper and magazine industry could be “decimated” in 2009 with one out of every 10 print publications forced to reduce publication frequency by more than half, move online or close entirely

adding that the outlook for both the newspaper and the nmgazine industry has gone from difficult to impossible and forecasts that

Advertising revenues may fall up to 20 per cent with classified advertising, traditionally one of the most lucrative elements of a newspaper, particularly badly hit,

How the printed mag is now under threat

The threat to print is coming from all sides and this morning's Independent will not allay the fears.

It is the magazine sector that is now under attack as the paper asks

Yet do we really need to carry our favourite mag around with us at all? Asda suspects not, having adopted the idea of a digital newsagent, which might be among the gravest threats to print media yet.

The system will work as follows

consumers pay a fixed monthly subscription for a magazine which is then downloaded on to their PC. Unlike a website, which has a loading front page that directs users to different links, this scheme aims to recreate digitally the shape of a magazine, with pages arranged in sequence to induce a "click and flick user interface".

The system has a number of advantages over traditional models.The most important being flexibility

Regular readers of a particular publication can choose to buy a month's subscription to their favoured title but for a generation that has grown up with the luxury of free content from a plethora of different providers, there is an opt-out from that rigidity.