Mr. Magazine

Meredith Corp., publisher of Better Homes and Gardens, Ladies’ Home Journal and Family Circle among other magazines, reintroduced itself to the media world last week via an ad campaign in the trade press by stating that “Today’s Meredith is designed for today’s media, combining all the channels with the marketing expertise you need to connect with consumers at the speed of life.”

What caught my attention is that the word magazine appeared only once in the new vocabulary of the company’s ad campaign. Magazines, as we knew them, are now referred to as “national media brands.” One of those “national media brands” is Ladies’ Home Journal. Well, I guess the magazine is also attempting to reintroduce itself. The September issue of the magazine is testing what seems to be a new name, or a new brand, or dare I say a new “national media brand.” LHJ, in bold blue color, replaces the Ladies’ Home Journal name on the cover. The test issue also reverses all the color from the regular issue. What’s blue in Ladies’ Home Journal is brown in LHJ and vice versa.

Now, the folks working at Ladies’ Home Journal may fondly refer to the magazine as LHJ, but do they really think the readers outside the magazine’s offices refer to the magazine as LHJ? If we are truly in the process of reinventing ourselves and reintroducing ourselves, should we make it easier for the readers to find our brand or should we make it harder? I hope that this test is not a sign of what “reintroducing Meredith” is going to be. Ladies’ Home Journal is a much bigger brand in the women’s magazine field to be reintroduced as LHJ… and so are the remaining magazines published by Meredith.

I hope that the word “magazine” is not going to be a “taboo” in the vocabulary of the “Reintroduced Meredith” and the same is true for Ladies’ Home Journal. There is a big difference between a “brand experience” and a “magazine experience.” Please do keep the “magazine experience” well and alive and the “brand experience” will follow.

… are the only two solutions for the American magazine publishing model. That was my message this morning on the Money for Breakfast show on the Fox Business Channel.

The show, hosted by Alexis Glick, focused on the news that only 12 magazines have witnessed an increase in their ad pages in the last six months. Eric Hoffman, Hoffman Media executive VP and COO, publisher of one of those 12 magazines, the highly successful, Cooking with Paula Deen magazine, and I were Alexis’s guests for the morning show segment “Turning A New Page?” Click here to watch the video from this morning show.

What do Teen People, Cosmo Girl and Elle Girl have in common? I know that you are going to say that they are all dead. You are right. That is a fact. However, for a brief shinning moment in the last few years, the aforementioned magazines were the darlings of the media folks and were predicted to be the “hot new trend” in magazine publishing for teens. They all aimed to de-throne the mother queen of teen magazines: Seventeen. Guess what! Contrary to the predictions of the media pundits and “prophets of doom and gloom” the mother queen is still well, alive and kicking at 65.

The magazine that carried the tag line “Young fashions & beauty, movies & music, ideas & people” on the cover of its first issue, back in September of 1944, is still offering its readers “pretty, fun and flirty” fashions, beauty, movies, music, ideas and people as “a relevant, trusted and fun resource for teens,” says the magazine publisher Jayne Jamison. So the next time you read about some upcoming new title that is taking the media pundits with a storm, stop, take a deep breath and do not lose faith in the good old established ones.

Magazines don’t age if they stay true to their DNAs. Magazine do age and die when you mess with their DNA. It is not the age that matters, but rather the DNA of the magazine. So, before you write off that old 60 something magazine, think twice and check its DNA. Seventeen is a shiny good example of a magazine at 65 that is still true to its DNA and thus still pretty, fun and flirty. It is necessary, sufficient and relevant. Read here my interview with publisher Jayne Jamison.

Happy anniversary and many many more!

I love ESPN, The Magazine. I was one of three media critics who spoke positively about the launch of the magazine back when it started. This introduction is more than needed because what I witnessed at the post office last week sent shock waves through my system and caused me to stop and question the wisdom of what ESPN, The Magazine is doing.

Here is the story: I went to check my post office box at the main Post Office in Oxford. I saw a middle aged man taking a copy of ESPN, The Magazine from his box, he looked at the cover and then dropped the magazine at the garbage can. My heart almost stopped. Throwing ESPN, The Magazine in the garbage without even looking at the magazine. I dove into the garbage can and picked up the magazine. I looked at the cover that was half covered with a flap offering the subscriber “Your subscriber thank you gift!” The cover line on this flap screamed “What can you get for $1 these days? See inside.”

What was inside scared me even more than the moment the guy dropped the magazine in the garbage can. The answer to the cover question was “26 issues plus FREE ESPN Insider for $1.” The magazine told the “active subscriber” that “At ESPN, we are committed to delivering top value for you hard-earned money — especially during these tough economic times. That why we are offering our currently active subscribers a Thank You gift they can’t get anywhere else. 26 issues of ESPN The Magazine for just $1… That’s an unbelievable savings of $128.74 off the newsstand price!”

An entire year of the magazine for $1. Keep in mind, this is not an offer to new subscribers, or a trial offer. This offer “is valid for current subscriber renewals only and this offer is nontransferable.” My active subscriber did not even take the magazine home. Is the magazine really trying to help its subscribers in hard economic times? Or is the magazine committing publishing suicide by continuing to follow the dead American magazine publishing model: counting numbers rather than finding customers who count?

I do not believe that selling a one year subscription for $1 is the right answer to the hard economic times. It is, in my humble opinion, yet another example of a print publication committing publishing suicide.

If these hard times are not forcing the magazines to start selling to customers who count, rather than counting customers, I do not know what some publishers need to wake up and change their circulation methods. I do not know when the Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC) will go back to the good old days when they only counted the “customers who count.” Now is the time to change. Tomorrow is too late.

What if some one tells you that the 21st century starts on Jan. 1, 2010? Well, you have to be stupid not to stop and listen to what that some one has to say. That is exactly what happened during my breakfast with Bruce Brandfon, Vice President and Publisher of Scientific American magazine, in New York City earlier in the week. Bruce’s comment reminded me with what Charles Overby said in his speech at the AEJMC’s convention last Friday that the last decade in the newspaper business was the lost decade.

Bruce told me that the reason he believes the 21st century starts January 1, 2010 “is because this first decade has been like stumbling in the dark clinging to the 20th century behavior. We woke up collectively when our 401k lost a major chunk of their value; when our kids graduated from college to find no jobs, and our business model collapsed…”

So I asked him, what do we need to do to prepare for the 21st century? His answer was three fold:

1. Deliver the most highly desirable, differentiated and satisfying content… If you are not different, the consumers will have harder time making a decision to pick you up… We are changing from nice to have, to must have.
2. Need to be able to justify for the other revenue stream, i.e. the advertiser, that you can deliver prospects who are involved in the content and not tricked into getting the content (like getting a one year’s sub for a dollar or five dollars). Your value proposition must be very clear.
3. You should be able to justify a premium price of whatever and wherever we are selling content…digital, print, etc. In your subject area you have to be dominant…no room left for middle of the way.

So what is needed to do all of the above? In Bruce’s book, we need two main ingredients:

1. Innovation: How to do every thing better… we have not innovated enough.
2. Sustainability: How to sustain the businesses we are involved in?

On the news front, Bruce told me “that starting with the January issue Scientific American is dropping its rate base to 450,000 from 575,000. The drop is 100% based on the decision to stop the direct mail method of acquiring new subscribers. It used to take 2 to 3 years to make any money on a new subscriber, now it is 7 to 8 years. Our new rate base will represent the loyal subscribers who renew at a phenomenal percentage and our 100,000 copies we sell at the newsstands.”

In addition to that, as of September 1 all feature articles on line will go behind a pay wall. People visiting the magazine’s web site via Google or other search engines will be able to see the first article for free, a synopsis of the second article and an invitation to subscribe or buy the digital edition.

His final words of wisdom for the day were, “We need to be THE THING for our audience. We need to create the BEST Scientific American yet.” Amen to that!

The last decade in the history of American newspapers is in fact the lost decade, so says Charles Overby, Chairman and CEO of the Freedom Forum and CEO of the Newseum. Mr. Overby, a journalist, editor and publisher was the recipient of The 2009 Gerald M. Sass Award for Distinguished Service to Journalism and Mass Communication at the Association for Educators in Journalism and Mass Communication annual convention this past week in Boston. Mr. Overby, in his acceptance speech, outlined the problems facing newsrooms and newspapers in today’s market place, and offered his views on how to reverse the declining trend facing the industry today. (Picture: Charles and Andrea Overby with the Gerald Sass Award)

Here are Mr. Overby’s “great dozen” ideas for the problems and solutions of today’s newsrooms and newspapers:

1. Free is not a business model:
Free is not a business model, certainly not for newspapers and news is and always has been a business. A free press does not mean free news. The survival of the free press, as we know it, depends on the public paying for it. If we want newspaper-size newsrooms, people have to pay for it. If we don’t, then forget it. It does not matter. But the idea that profits for newspapers are designed for greedy newspaper owners, I think, is missing the point. We need a revenue base that will support robust newsrooms and robust journalism.

2. Internet cannot replace the newspaper-sized newsroom:
We must resist the notion that the Internet, social networking and twitter can adequately replace newspaper-sized newsrooms. This doesn’t mean that you have to be against those new media. That is not the case at all. They are nice add-ons, but they are not a substitute for newspaper-sized newsrooms.

3. Preservation of the newsroom:
The issue is not narrowly the preservation of newspapers; it is the preservation of the adequately funded newsrooms.

4. Charging for content does not make you technically illiterate:
Rupert Murdoch announced this week that News Corp. plans to start charging for news content on the Internet at all his properties worldwide. Immediately Murdoch was labeled as technically illiterate. It is interesting to me that when cable companies charge fifty dollars or more a month to consumers they are not seen as technically illiterate.

5. Publishers are waking up:
I believe newspapers publishers are waking up to this reality and I think you will see many other legacy media outlets charging for their content. It is about time they did so. Not everybody will choose to pay for content. That’s OK, ten, twenty years ago not every body chose to subscribe to a newspaper. But many people who value substantive serious news will pay.

6. Publishers are to blame for their papers’ demise:
If people in the future asked the question who lost the news people, if traditional media disappeared as we knew it, whose fault will it be? I think the answer will be it was the fault of those who worried more about extending their brand for free on the Internet, than those who focused on preserving the value of their brand. Let us hope it will not come to that.

7. The underline principle of news has not changed:
The changes for the most part have involved the delivery of the news from drawing on cave walls, to smoke signals, to the pony express to satellites. But the underline principle of news has not changed; seek the truth, tell the story as fully and fairly as possible. There has been one other constant until recently. Over the years people have understood that you pay for news. That was true in the days of the colonial press; it was true even in the days of the penny press. But now it seems to be a debatable concept. For those who think that people should pay for the news, now incredibly, are often characterized as luddite, hopelessly out of touch. The dilemma has brought newspapers to the edge of a cliff. The future of newspapers, and I would say journalism as we know it, hangs in the balance. I recognize that some people have already written off newspapers and some of you may have already compared newspapers to dinosaurs. I believe that is a mistake.

8. The last decade is the lost decade
It is difficult for me to comprehend how steep the decline of newspapers has been in the last decade. I consider the last decade as the lost decade for newspapers. Virtually every thing about newspapers has gone down in the last decade. Circulation is down, advertising is down, profits are down and in some cases gone, news hole or the amount of space available for news stories is down, the number of editors and reporters is down.

9. Negative trends are the result of publishers’ disastrous decisions:
These negative trends are largely the result of the disastrous decision about ten years ago of newspaper publishers to put virtually all the newspapers’ content on the Internet for free. The thinking ten years ago went like this; we have to be on the Internet. We can’t miss this opportunity. We will figure out the business plan as we go along. The optimist thought the move to the Internet might ultimately allow newspapers to eliminate the two biggest expenses printing and distribution. The optimist also thought the Internet will bring in many new readers that will result in major profitable advertising.

10. Free is a trendy thing:
This move to free content is a very trendy thing, very seductive particularly with young people…there is even a book called Free. I point out that the book is not free it cost me $26.99.

11. Newspapers can’t survive if they continue to give their content for free:
Newspapers publishers are only now beginning to recognize that can’t survive if they continue to give their content free. If the free content trend continues you can bet the size of the newsrooms will decrease even more. That is bad for local communities, it is bad for journalism and I think it is bad for our democracy.

12. Reversing the trend:
The question is can this trend be reversed or stopped? Will people now pay for news content after growing accustomed for decade for getting this for free? I believe the trend can be reversed and that people will pay for news, perhaps in combination with print and the Internet. Readers have to see and understand substantive value for what they are paying for. They will not pay for a newspaper, or its equivalent, that continues to shrink in size and resources.

If someone calls you and says, “We are going to be to the magazine industry what iTunes is to the music industry,” you can’t but stop and listen. Three investment bankers, Ryan Klenovich, Jian Chai, Steve DeWald, left Deutsche Bank to establish Maggwire. “The team’s mission is to establish the leading media distribution company for magazines online similar to what iTunes accomplished for music.” Two of the founders Ryan and Jian told me that “the Maggwire vision began with their passions for reading magazines and the need for an online magazine community.” The founders have a video that explains how Maggwire works and a plan to become the new distribution channel for great magazine content. Check below to see the video and read my interview with the founders below.

An ambitious plan that aims to be the target destination for any one interested in magazines and magazine articles. What follows is the phone conversation that I had with the folks at Maggwire explaining and expanding on their vision and the future of Maggwire and the magazine industry.

SH: What’s Maggwire?
Maggwire: We’re trying to become an online destination for reading magazines, similar to YouTube where users associate YouTube as the online destination for viewing videos. We’re not trying to replace print, but I’m really baffled by how there is no central online destination for reading magazines. That’s really what we’re trying to accomplish. In a lot of ways I think our website will never replace the print magazine itself, but what we can do is offer users a different avenue to look at a broad range of articles. A user typically has three or four favorite magazines and for that user to spend the money and subscribe to more than a dozen magazines is not really practical, because the person doesn’t really have enough time to read all the magazines. So what we can offer to the user is a range of magazine titles. Currently we have over 650 magazines and we’re pulling about 10,000 articles a week. A user can read articles from business to tennis, to automotive as well as outdoors, food and dining and we have many lifestyle magazines such as aviation, boating and so forth.

SH: How would Maggwire work and why should publishers be excited about this new website?
MaggWire: Our goal is to establish that brand name to become an online destination for reading magazines, and what we want to do is reach a critical mass with these free articles so we can start building a learning algorithm. This learning algorithm is very similar to the Genius play list in iTunes and also very similar to the Netflix movie recommendation engine. Once we reach that critical mass, we can truly become a distribution channel for the magazine publishers in that they can distribute premium digital content to the user. You have all these mobile e-ink devices coming out such as the Kindle and the Sony E-book reader, I expect in two or three years, these e-ink devices will have color capability, so that you can actually look at a magazine in color. Our goal is to be on the forefront of that technology shift and once we have this critical data on user reading preferences, we can use all the user data on behavior and trends and develop the software to sync up all this digital content directly into the users e-ink devices to be allowing both an online and offline experience.
Why would the publishers be excited about Maggwire? Initially, the excitement is going to come from the added traffic I believe we’re going to add to their site. Most magazines have a website, and they all have different levels of content they provide, everything from cover stories to blogs. Initially, we are trying to eliminate blogs from our site. We only want to aggregate the high quality print content that publishers decide to offer for free in the public domain online, and they’re making money by us driving traffic to their websites and now their serving more ads to more users and securing new subscribers. We’re trying to help expose these brands and articles to a wider audience.
Additionally, using our reader data and trend analysis, publishers will be able to deliver highly personalized advertisements based on a complete understanding of how each user behaves, which will help to raise online ad rates. Advertisement delivery has to be relevant, smooth, seamless, and user targeted for readers to actually enjoy beautiful digital ads as they enjoy print magazine ads. This level of real time targeting can not be accomplished with static “digital editions.”

SH: So what your are doing is scanning the web for the free articles that the magazines are posting up on their websites…
Maggwire: As of right now, yes. You can call us the Google of magazines, where we crawl the web for these great magazine articles, the users go on there to read and rate the articles, and the idea is that the best ones will come to the top. Users can simply come here and easily browse magazines. Obviously these new mobile E Ink devices will enhance the whole state of mind experienced when reading. Nobody likes to read on a computer as compared to holding a print magazine. But as these mobile devices come out, we believe that will change. As far as the publishers we have not spoken with any of the big publishers directly. We spoke with some smaller publishers about it, but not the big guys that host a bulk of the magazines we have.
Magazine publishers are putting this content out there and that’s how we came up with this idea. We realized there was so much great magazine content for free on the internet, and it was just, “How do you access that?” It’s very, very difficult. You literally have to go to your URL and think to type in Time.com, Cosmopolitan.com, etc. So the long term plan for Maggwire is to provide a central destination, so you can have one user ID, your Maggwire ID, and we can even hold your credit card and all the information about you. If you want to make a premium purchase such as a commemorative edition magazine, or maybe it’s a premium article, perhaps an instructional video series, all it takes is a single-click and the transaction will be executed. The ideality is to create this marketplace using one ID. Because our initial platform only requires a basic computer screen and an internet browser we feel we have a huge advantage as compared to the Zinio’s of the world. The Zinio’s of the world are not a convenient way to read a magazine; it’s not an enjoyable user experience until you have these large form color e-ink devices, which as you know, are a couple years away at least, and affordability is still in question.

SH: What are you trying to do to establish Maggwire as the central location for magazine lovers, magazine searchers, and people who read magazines?
Maggwire: I want to go back a little bit and finish up telling you how we’re going to add value to the magazine publishers. Another thing we’ve not mentioned is that we can help readers discover magazine titles that readers would never otherwise come across. Every user has 10 or even 20 magazine titles that they know of, but I’m pretty confident that there are at least another dozen magazines and magazine articles that they are not aware of and that they would be interested in reading. So, in that way, we do help the reader to discover new magazine titles and give more exposure to the magazine publishers. As we become more of a distribution channel for the magazine publishers, we’re definitely looking into sharing the revenue with the magazine publishers, because at the end of the day, they are the content creators and we realize that they have to be successful so we can be successful.

SH: How far have your conversations gone with magazine publishers, and magazine companies regarding what you’re doing? Where do you see Maggwire heading as a future business entity?
Maggwire: We actually just went public less than two weeks ago, so we had been developing this quietly for several months and we’ve just sort of opened the door. So we have not spoken directly with any large publisher. I’ve spoken with a couple small publishers who do regional magazines that have one or two titles.
Like I said, we’re not going to replace print, what we’re trying to do is compliment the print magazine. The magazines online offer a unique perspective in terms of having a discussion forum around the article you just read and on top of that, I think nowadays magazine publishers have very exclusive behind the scene video and other interactive features that kind of complements the reading experience.
Ultimately, what is our goal, three years, four years, five years down the road? Where do we see Maggwire as a business? What we’re really hoping is that these mobile ink devices are going to come out. Are you familiar with the iTablet that is going to come out soon? With those types of devices we really believe there’s going to be a shift in the state of mind experienced when reading. Everyone has been locked to their desktop or their laptop for the last couple decades and all of a sudden all this content is out there and you’ve got a lightweight portable device that you use your finger to make intuitive inputs on what to do, what article to read… We’d like to see Maggwire become the ultimate destination to read magazines because it’s customizable. You can say, I only want to see these 15 magazines and of those 15 magazines, I don’t have time to read all the articles, but present them to me in the most relevant order to me based on my historical rating pattern or my historical reading preferences.
The idea is to create another level to magazines, another level of efficiency to see the best content. There is so much great content out there and no one has time to read all of it, and they just want to see the best stuff for them. That’s what we see long term could be. We see more niche magazines can clearly charge for their content, especially when these mobile ink devices are at the right price point for mainstream America. That’s the idea. A lot of these magazines we aggregate offer 100 percent of their table or contents from their print edition online for free. It’s possible that they’re just experimenting with that theory and it may not work in the end and they may choose to put it behind a pay wall and Maggwire will make it easier for a user to signup. Providing the user the ability to use one user name to manage all their magazines and digital asset purchases will undoubtedly make them more comfortable to make that purchase. Another thing that we have thought about is, after we do reach a certain critical mass, we believe people will be willing to pay a nominal subscription for our service especially as the publishers continue to expand their offerings and partner up with us and our site will just get better and better and better. Imagine if you charged a dollar a month initially and it could go up to three, four, or five dollars a month depending on what premium titles you had or how we had it set up, but let’s say we were charging people five dollars a month, and all these mobile e-ink devices are in people’s hands and people are really using Maggwire a lot, they might not mind paying five dollars to have access to several hundred magazines and we can share a substantial portion of that revenue with the publishers on a percentage used method, based on how much time a user is spending with Time magazine or TeenVogue, we would share it with the appropriate publisher.

SH: Can you imagine with the advances in printing on demand, like MagCloud or other printers, readers can select the articles of interest and you will provide them with a printed product if so they wish, like what Time Inc. is doing with Mine magazine?
Maggwire: People in the younger generations are really in the “screen-ager” generations. Especially as these mobile devices are coming out, they are comfortable reading on the computer. It’s sad to say, but I don’t have too many friends who subscribe to The Wall Street Journal or any newspaper anymore because they read it online. Most of them have gotten rid of their magazine subscriptions and they’re either reading it online or reading elsewhere. It is sort of a scary time for publishers today. It’s hard to say where these mobile devices are going to go. Are they going to be richer than what MagCloud can output? You can’t have your video on MagCloud, you can’t have your user discussion on MagCloud and you can’t easily, quickly share that article with a friend or post it on Facebook or Twitter. If you don’t have a 100 percent digital experience, you’re limiting yourself on these features. It’s hard to fathom this, but I believe there will come a time five years, 10 years down the road, when the digital reading experience will be more rich than print.

SH: So, how do you see the future for you and the magazine industry?
Maggwire: What the magazine industry will go through might be similar to what the music industry went through when you think about the proliferation of the mp3 and the iTunes store. In the beginning, what really made mp3 and iTunes reach mainstream America was the iPod. It took Apple several years to perfect the iPod and make it cheaper for the consumer, but now you have iTunes commanding 60 percent of all the digital downloads for mp3’s. I think now we’re really in an interesting phase where you have these e-ink devices and iTablets coming out so the hardware will be there, so you need some kind of central destination to back that up. Over the years as the hardware gets better and better the software needs to be there to connect that missing link.
What really makes our strategy different from Zinio and Amazon Kindle and even Google’s magazine initiative; we’re not requiring any control over the magazine’s content. We’re not saying we need to host it, we’re not saying we’re going to handle the content. All we’re saying is, if you put the content on a public domain, we’re going to help users locate this information. That allows us to expand a lot quicker because over the next couple months we could add another 500 magazines. There are another 500 magazines with a lot of content on the internet that we can add because we’re not requiring any control. We hope the publishers will feel more confident in that strategy initially as we establish a critical mass and a brand name for reading great magazines online.

SH: Thank you.