Mr. Magazine

In yet another magazine example of offering different single copy covers in different areas of the country, Reader’s Digest in its August issue took the Obama’s campaign slogan “Yes, You Can” and used it on one of the two covers being sold on the newsstands. I wish I can say the other cover is a page from the McCain’s campaign, but by its looks I doubt that.
Which brings me to a completely different academic topic, have you noticed how many covers Senator Obama has been on compared with Senator McCain. It will make a nice academic study to compare the two senators and the number of times they have appeared on magazine covers. Whether on the cover of American magazines or European magazines, my theory is that Senator Obama has appeared on more magazine covers than Senator McCain. It is just a hypothesis for now, but I bet you it will not be hard to accept after some research. A graduate student waiting in the wings for a master’s thesis topic can take this challenge and start the research. Please keep me posted, or just let me know whether you agree with my hypothesis or not…

Remember the old saying, “the freedom of the press belongs to those who own the press!” Well, the folks at MagCloud want you, not only to own the press, but to write, edit and design your own press. A product of years of research at the HP Labs, MagCloud wants to “ease the pain” of magazine publishing and give the opportunity to everyone with an idea, any idea, to become a magazine publisher. MagCloud’s own take on things is as such,

“MagCloud is an HP Labs research project evaluating new web services that will provide small independent magazine publishers, online content owners, and small businesses the ability to custom publish digitized magazines and economically print and fulfill on demand.”

Derek Powazek, whom I first interviewed when he helped launch JPG magazine, serves as a consultant to HP Labs on this project. I have asked him few questions regarding MagCloud. After a brief intro, Derek answered my seven questions regarding this new venture that wants to make YOU a magazine publisher overnight…

He wrote, “Before I begin, I want to stress that MagCloud is a project by HP Labs, currently in beta, to which I am a consultant. It was not my idea – it’s been percolating for years within HP, actually – but it happened to dovetail wonderfully with my interests, and I came on board to help guide it forward. The core members of the team are Udi Chatow, Andy Fitzhugh, and Andrew Bolwell – all brilliant HP Labcoats. I can introduce you if you like. With that in mind, here are some thoughts….”

1. MagCloud promises to make magazine publishing as easy as
photocopying at Kinko’s. Is this the future of magazine publishing or
the return to old memo-graphed underground publications?

I’ve run a magazine out of Kinko’s. It’s not that easy!
My personal hope is that MagCloud kickstarts a new generation of zinesters, people raised on the ease of publishing on the web, but who still hunger for the beauty and permanence of print. The last creative explosion in zines was kicked off by copy machine. The next will be powered by print-on-demand coupled with the internet.

2. Do you view MagCloud as a publisher, printer or distributor?

If I had to pick one of the three, MagCloud would have to be a distributor, because we partner with printers, and our goal is to enable our members to become publishers themselves.
But, really, MagCloud is is a connector. We connect publishers to their audiences, printers with magazines, readers with magazines, etc. We see an enormous opportunity to breathe new life into the magazine biz, if only publishing was as easy and accessible as the web.

3. When would a magazine produced by MagCloud reach the status of a
real magazine (i.e. mass distributed magazine)?

We’ve got a pretty loose definition of what a magazine is. But, in general, if you print on paper, on a schedule, to subscribers, we think you’re a real magazine.

The whole idea of mass distribution comes out of embedded expectations about the economy of magazines. You can only make money in traditional magazines at scale, because it’s just not cost-effective to do small print runs. But that’s a technology problem – traditional offset printing is just too expensive to do in small batches. But what if it wasn’t?

If you look at the cost per page of printing, traditional offset printing is actually getting more expensive because of rising paper costs, but the cost per page of print-on-demand is getting cheaper/better/faster ever year. As price points merge, and it will cost just as much/little to print a single copy as a thousand. That change is happening now, and the industry is just beginning to notice.

4. After your experience with JPG and moving it from lulu.com to a
regularly published magazine, are you looking for an encore with the
titles coming through the pipe line at MagCloud?

Absolutely, only this time, we want to empower other people’s magazines. The math here is simple: If it was easier to make magazines, more people would do it. More magazines means more potential breakout hits. Too many great magazines don’t get made today because the business of printing and distribution is so hampered by inefficiency.

5. How do you view the future of magazine publishing and what is the
biggest challenge you think it is facing?

Young people are abandoning print magazines for the web – they have been for years. The way to bring them back is to put them in charge and see what they make. It’s easy for the pros to scoff at this idea, but remember that groups of amateurs have made some pretty amazing things online (insert inevitable Wikipedia reference here).

And remember, MagCloud is not just for the amateurs. The pros are bound by the same difficulties. Show me a dozen editors and I’ll show you a hundred magazine ideas that would exist if only it was a little easier. Not to mention all the content remixes and short-run editions professional publishers could put together on a system like MagCloud.

6. Will technology help print and add more printed products to the
marketplace or technology will replace print?

I think that we’re still figuring out what kind of stuff belongs in print, and what doesn’t. Remember that, for years, if you wanted to find out what the weather was like in a certain place, you bought a book. A Farmer’s Almanac. Putting that kind of variable data on paper seems crazy now, because we have a better way to do it.

So, yes, technology will drive some print products to their grave. Personally, I would not want to be running a traditional news weekly right now.

But I we both know that print is not dead. There’s content that really belongs in print. Look at the success of Make Magazine, photography journals, recipe books. We just need to figure out how print and web can stop competing and start collaborating.

7. What do you consider the single most important selling feature of MagCloud?

That someone who’s fanatically into a topic area could create a magazine, build an audience, and actually make money selling it, without ever having to stuff envelopes. Hasn’t that always been the dream of independent publishing?

So, magazine dreamers of the world there is no need to unite anymore for each and every one of you can have his own “cake” and eat it too… you are indeed on cloud nine with your ideas now, or should I say you are on MagCloud.

“Is God Dead?” was the question on the cover of the April 8, 1966 Time magazine. My late brother Khalil was three years ahead of me in our high school, Tripoli (Lebanon) Boys School. Time was required reading for the 11th and 12th grade students at the school. When I saw his copy of the magazine I could not wait for him to finish reading it so I can read it. (I was not allowed to touch it until he is done with it). That issue and that cover left quite an impact on me back then.
Well, last week, visiting the newsstands in Memphis, I had a big flash back to 1966. I saw what looked like the cover of Time from 1966, but it was, in fact, Christianity Today (another magazine I got to know during my high school years in Lebanon thanks for a visiting pastor from America to our Presbyterian church in Tripoli). The cover of the July 2008 CT had the answer for the 42 year-old question Time magazine asked in 1966. In a similar take on Time 1966 cover (same color and design) the CT cover answered the burning question Is God Dead? CT’s answer “God Is Not Dead Yet.” Issue settled for now… but that “Yet” may make room for a more definitive answer in the future, so stay tuned…maybe for another 42 years. At least we are making progress.

My friend Rex Hammock has promised on his blog today that he is going to offer his opinions on the issue of split covers between single copies and subscribers copies of the same magazine. Just for the sake of giving him more examples and points of reference for his comments, here are the two editions of Harper’s Bazaar for July. A stunning and sexy Gwyneth Paltrow image graces the subscribers’ cover that jumps from every mailbox and coffee table (always keeping subscribers on their toes, so to speak), and a run-of-the-mill single copy cover that reflects the habitual look of the magazine so newsstands’ buyers will not be confused whether it is the same magazine they buy every month (Think Cosmo, same cover design for how many years now?)…

However this ever expanding trend is not only limited to the newsstands vs. the subscribers, but also continues to spread among different newsstands’ geographical locations testing different covers and different images. Ladies’ Home Journal’s July issue offers a split newsstands distribution with two cover photos, that of the celebrity Kathie Lee Gifford and the hot and sizzling summer cookout. It is fun to note that the ribs image did not make it to the Gifford cover, but Ms. Gifford was able to make it, albeit, in a very small inset on the ribs cover…go figure!

The summer double issue of National Geographic Adventure lives up to its tag-line: Dream It, Plan It, Do It. The subscribers’ cover is a relaxing beauty to look at; an invite without words to get you into the magazine. The newsstands’ cover, with its usual cover lines, maybe un-relaxing in its design and typography, but extremely relaxing with the choice of topics. Whether you are a single copy buyer or a subscriber this issue of NG Adventure is a must to have, to enjoy, to relax and to live it up. It also adheres to the basics of human memory recall skills: people see and remember color first, pictures second and type third… That is why I always tell my clients not to change the color and pictures when having a split edition between the single copy and subscribers’ editions so the readers will not be confused….as for the type, by the time our memory cells are at work, the color and the photo image already tell us it is the same magazine, so there is no room for confusion.