This idea has come up before, but I was reminded of it when I read a Nieman Journalism Lab post about some research being done by Lee Humphreys, looking at the way that communication — and particularly personal communication, through letters and diaries and other pre-digital tools of expression. Although this doesn’t seem to have much to do with how we use ultra-modern services like Twitter or Facebook, there is a lot more to it than you might think.

Media has always been personal and social

As Humphreys describes it, her research shows that if you look at human communication over a longer period than just the past generation or two, it becomes obvious that one-way, broadcast-style “mass media” isn’t the norm at all — instead, the norm is interpersonal or multi-directional communication that shares a lot more with social media such as blogs, Twitter and Facebook. Rather than creating a new communication style, we are actually returning to one.

“Humphreys said one of the early conclusions from her research is the possibility that the mass media of the 20th century was in fact a blip, a historical aberration, and that, through platforms like Twitter, we are gradually returning to a communication network that indulges, without guilt, the individual’s desire to record his existence.”

For example, Humphreys says that the idea of diaries or journals as private things — which their owners hide underneath a mattress or keep in a secret place under lock and key — is a fairly new one. As recently as the late 19th century, it was common for people to read each other’s journals as a way of catching up with what they had been doing, and in many cases this was done with the author of the journal taking part in the discussion. In that sense, journals were a mix of private and public, in much the same way that social media is.

Although the Nieman Lab post doesn’t mention it, there was also the idea of a “commonplace book,” which was a kind of paper version of a blog, a place where people would keep snatches of text or ideas that they came across, and then share that with others. Famous writers such as John Milton and Ralph Waldo Emerson kept commonplace books, and the phenomenon is seen by many as a prelude to what would become the “remix culture” of today.

The era of mass media is over

The idea that mass media was a kind of historical accident has been raised by others as well, including Tom Standage of The Economist — both in his upcoming book, called “Writing on the Wall,” and in a series of pieces in the magazine about the nature of digital media. The latter described how the interconnected qualities of social media and “networked journalism” mirrored the way that media used to function before newspapers were invented, when the local tavern or coffee house was the center of the information ecosystem. The title of his book, Standage says, also refers to:

“The ominous implications of the rebirth of social media for mass-media companies that arose in the industrial era, predicated on the high cost of delivering information to large audiences. The conclusion of the book is that the mass-media era was a historical anomaly… indeed, it might better be termed the ‘mass-media parenthesis.’”

If this is in fact what we are experiencing — that is, the unbundling or dismantling of a mass-media infrastructure that was constructed to serve the needs of readers (and advertisers) at a specific time in history — then what can we expect? Among other things, probably further downsizing and layoffs and bankruptcies of media companies whose size and cost structure and print focus no longer corresponds to the needs of the marketplace.

And on the positive side, we are also likely to see the growth of new entities that take advantage of the networked, social and smaller-scale nature of the media ecosystem — startups like Circa, for example, or algorithmic players like Prismatic, along with larger entities like The Huffington Post and BuzzFeed. In a very real sense, it is both the best of times and the worst of times.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / Feng Yu and Flickr user Rosaura Ochoa

The site, which is run by founder Mike Masnick through a company called Floor 64 (Full disclosure: I consider Masnick a friend) has had an online store for some time now where readers and fans could come and buy the usual type of swag many publishers offer, including e-books based on the site’s coverage. But the store has now been updated with some new features, including the ability to buy lunch with Masnick (for $250) and to do a Google Hangout with him.

There’s also a couple of humorous offerings aimed at critics of the site — including one that allows the buyer to shut the site down completely for 24 hours, for only $1 million (shutting it for a year will cost you $100 million).

Techdirt has also expanded an interesting offering called Crystal Ball: originally launched in 2009, it gives readers who sign up for a specific level of membership access to blog posts before they are published. The new version expands the amount of time they have to read — and even comment on — these posts, to two hours instead of one. And readers who pay can now see posts that are in draft mode, before they even reach the stage where they are ready to be published. Do many readers sign up for this feature? Masnick says there have been about a thousand since it was first offered, which isn’t huge but is still noteworthy.

I criticized a similar idea that Felix Salmon of Reuters came up with earlier this year, which was that the New York Times should charge hedge funds for early access to market-moving news stories — but the crucial difference is that Techdirt provides almost exclusively commentary and analysis, not breaking news. So why couldn’t the NYT take a page from Techdirt’s playbook and offer expanded access to things from writers like Nick Kristof or Paul Krugman? I think there could be a pretty big market for membership-level access to that kind of thing, and the NYT has already moved in that direction by offering enhanced commenting features to members.

Members get credits for voting on comments

Techdirt also launched a new commenting feature for paying members: called “First Word/Last Word,” it allows members to acquire credits with which they can vote up comments that they think are worthwhile and vote down those they don’t. Reinventing comments is something plenty of publishers are trying to do, including Gawker publisher Nick Denton — who tried a membership-based voting model and then more recently abandoned it for something he hopes will turn the site upside down and make comments the most important part of the content, as opposed to the posts from writers and editors.

As Masnick notes in a blog post announcing the new offerings, the site is trying to follow the advice that it often gives to musicians and other artists (copyright and the death of traditional content business models being one of the site’s favorite topics). That advice is to connect with fans, and then give them a reason to buy — so instead of relying on CD sales or record deals, Masnick advises artists to take an approach like independent musician Amanda Palmer did recently, in which she Kickstarter-funded a new album and tour with a campaign that raised over $1 million in a matter of days.

In a lot of ways, what Masnick is offering readers is a similar kind of model, but without the help of Kickstarter. It’s the complete opposite of the approach most traditional media companies take, which is to charge their readers a blanket fee for their content, regardless of what that reader might be interested in. Some publications take a membership-style approach, including magazines like the Economist, and The Guardian — which is adamantly opposed to paywalls — has been experimenting with offering certain features for pay, such as a new “freemium” approach to photos as my paidContent colleague Robert Andrews described in a recent post.

The new CEO of the New York Times may not want to offer Google Hangouts to readers any time soon, but I think there is a lot of value in treating your readers like members of a fan club rather than just a homogenized sea of faceless readers whose only option is to pay a monthly fee. Offerings like Techdirt’s may not generate billions in revenue, but they help to cement the bond between a content producer and his or her fan base — and that can be a very valuable thing indeed.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Montecruz Foto and Giuseppe Bognanni

Udini provides access to 150 million articles from 12,000 publications — including magazines, newspapers, trade journals, scholarly journals and wire feeds. Participating publishers include Springer, Nature Publishing Group, the Economist, New York Times, Washington Post, World Health Organization and Cambridge University Press. Users can also access ProQuest’s dissertation archive.

“Research libraries play a critical role in our knowledge economy, but not everyone who needs serious content is connected to a scholarly library. Research for these unaffiliated users is confusing and inefficient unless they know exactly what they’re looking for,” ProQuest SVP and GM Rich LaFauci said. “Premium information — when it’s accessible at all — is distributed behind many different paywalls all over the web. Udini curates and licenses high-quality content and makes it incredibly easy to discover, acquire and use.”

Most individual articles cost $0 to $3.99, with some “specialty materials” like books and dissertations $4.99 and up. Users can pay as they go or choose a “project pass,” $30 for 14 days with unlimited standard articles included and specialty articles 20 percent off, or a subscription for $30 a month.

Influenced by Evernote and Instapaper

As with Evernote, users can store articles and projects in Udini for free in a cloud-based personal, searachable library. They can store their own PDFs and other documents there along with any articles they buy from Udini. Taking a cue from services like Read It Later and Instapaper, Udini strips ads and banners from stored content to provide a “distraction-free” reading experience.

Oscar Grut, who was formerly digital editions managing director, has been promoted to the new role of managing director for “Economist Digital” as a whole.

A spokesperson tells paidContent it is “a role which has been created to reflect the change of business strategy within The Economist Group”.

The Economist’s tablet app editions and the website were previously run as two separate strands. Nick Blunden has run Economist.com since online EVP Ben Edwards left to be IBM’s digital strategy VP in 2010. Blunden will now report to Grut rather than to Economist UK managing director Nigel Ludlow.

It is a sign that, after years of struggling to make money and native products on the web, publishers increasingly view digital editions – familiar reversioning of their core legacy titles – as their primary digital products.

The Economist launched its iPad app edition in November 2010 with a mostly bundled strategy – free to print-and-web and to web-only subscribers, or £3.49/$5.99/€4.99 per single copy. It claimed a million monthly tablet and smartphone readers in November.

The title is now bullish about the “rebirth of leanback media” thanks to app editions. Just like with many publishers, the relative audience and commercial success in migrating magazines to tablets prompts The Economist to recontextualise its web strategy – what is Economist.com for anymore?

Although The Economist’s print circulation bucks industry trends by rising, the publisher believes that, at some point in the near future, this will go down as more and more readers choose the tablet or e-reader format, a spokesperson tells paidContent.

Grut’s background is law. He joined The Economist in 1998 and became general counsel within three years.

On Monday, Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) approved an iPad app edition of The Economist’s World In Figures statistics book, free with sponsorship from Grant Thornton.

The first five Penguin/Economist titles go on sale in the UK tomorrow, March 1, for £1.99 apiece, and focus on topics like video games, women and work and digital technology. All were previously published in the Economist.

Penguin UK launched Penguin Shorts, an ongoing digital series of fiction and nonfiction titles, in November. The press release says the e-singles published in partnership with the Economist are “Penguin Specials, the sub-brand of Penguin Shorts which concentrates solely on contemporary journalism and essays.” (When Penguin Shorts launched, I noted that the company’s branding of all this content is somewhat confusing, especially as it plans to merge the U.S. “eSpecials” under the “Shorts” banner.)

In its earnings earlier this week, Pearson reported that e-books now make up 12 percent of its global sales and 20 percent of U.S. sales.

Electionism, as the new product is called, includes content from The Economist, its niche Washington, DC, sister title Roll Call, tweets and links to other web election writing.

It was built by Toronto software design firm Nulayer on its Pressly platform for web tablet publishing, which already hosts a similar service for the city’s The Star newspaper and which will soon do same for Canadian Living magazine and Transcontinental.

Despite being built for the web, The Economist says specifically: “Electionism is currently available on the iPad, the Samsung Galaxy and the Kindle Fire and will be available shortly on the Blackberry Playbook. It is optimised for tablets.” So much is it optimised for touch, it doesn’t display at all on the desktop web.

It looks and feels just like Flipboard – that is, rather slick. As close to the bone as the comparisons might be, it shows what can be accomplished with HTML.

“We built Electionism between launching two other iOS/iPad apps, the World in 2012 and the World in Figures,” Ron Diorio, The Economist’s online business development and innovation VP, tells paidContent.

“So we aren’t giving up on the native app experience. We were eager to experiment with a web/HTML5 app and Pressly offered a platform that allowed us to develop and move quickly on.

“We also continue to see reported significant browser usage on tablets and determined we should move to discover how best to serve readers in this format.”

The Financial Times, which owns half of The Economist Group, last week acquired the development firm that built its web application, which has replaced its executable iOS apps.

Electionism is free. Economist.com, from which some of its content comes, requires a subscription for older content.

Another publishing platform that tries to inject tablet apps with HTML is PugPig, developed by the team which once worked on a tablet news aggregation project for News Corp.

In this fascinating presentation, the publisher says it mostly gets engagement times of about 90 minutes per week from iPad readers, which it reckons are a new “psychographic” it calls “the mass intelligent”…

The prediction was delivered by David Carey, president of Hearst, during the Reuters (NYSE: TRI) Global Media Summit today. Currently, Hearst has close to 400,000 digital subscribers covering its portfolio of magazines, which include Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Good Housekeeping, Harper’s Bazaar and O. The number of subscribers is growing at a rate of 10-15 percent every month, Carey added.

He did not break out, however, how well individual titles are doing, or how those subscriptions break down by region: Hearst publishes in multiple countries, including the U.S. and UK.

While some publishers like the FT are investing now in developing web-based apps for their content, Hearst has chosen to take the native app route, and offers paid subscriptions for the iPad, the Kindle Fire and the Nook. While its editions keep a lot of the look of the printed magazines, the apps, which are made by Pixel Mags, also incorporate some of the bells and whistles you get with digital apps, such as video and interactive elements.

The prices Hearst charges for apps are separate to those it charges for print subscriptions — something that has raised the ire of at least some print subscribers, judging by the comments from app reviewers in the iTunes store. The apps are free to download and then users can buy either single editions or longer subscriptions using in-app purchasing options.

Subscriptions, however, will not be the only revenue stream Hearst is developing for these apps: there is also advertising, which could become more targeted to specific readers over time: Carey today also noted that on the iPad, some 60-65 percent of subscribers have opted in to share personal data such as location with the publisher.

Hearst may be one of the first big publishers to come out with a million-subscriber prediction for its magazine app portfolio, but it probably won’t be the only one reaching that tipping point: in September Conde Nast said it already had 500,000 subscribers to its apps, at a time when Hearst was only reporting 300,000. Their number will likely be growing, too.

“The demand for digital editions has exceeded our expectations. Readers have downloaded the Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) and Android versions to more than three million tablets and smartphones, and The Economist is read on more than one million of these devices every month.

“That figure includes those who read the editor’s weekly choice of six free articles, which allow potential subscribers to sample the newspaper. The Economist online is also growing strongly. The number of monthly visitors has risen by 45% since September 2010, to more than seven million.”

Extracts from Roy Greenslade’s interview with Economist Group CEO Andrew Rashbass, who says tablet publishing is more akin to print than web.

“‘When I was struggling to position the website, I made a mistake, which turned out to be a positive mistake. I thought we should do the same online as we did in print, simply transferring from one platform to the other. But we carried out research around the world among educated people who didn’t read the Economist and discovered, to our surprise, that it wasn’t what they wanted.’

“(Rashbass) says they came to realise that there was a distinction between what he calls the ‘lean-back, immersive, ritual pleasure’ of reading the Economist in print compared to the ‘lean-forward, interactive’ way people used the site.

“It was, says Rashbass, the difference between ‘snacking on the net as against the gourmet meal of reading in print‘. That convinced him and his team to offer an entirely different experience to website users. Rather than lecturing the audience, they set out to build a community of people eager to participate in discussions with the magazine’s journalists and with each other.

“Then along came the e-readers and tablets. ‘We suddenly realised that if we were making a distinction between lean-back and lean-forward, here was lean-back digital or lean-back 2.0. We made a conscious choice to avoid the web-style interactive approach. Instead, we saw the potential of delivering a better lean-back experience than we have ever achieved in print.’”

“He argues that the Guardian cannot hope to secure enough advertising revenue to create content through its traditional commissioning model, while the Times cannot attract subscribers who are one click away from free content elsewhere. Claiming that both loss-making papers survive by cross-subsidy, and therefore have the same business model, he argues, predictably, that he speaks from a unique position of business strength.”

“Unfortunately, we have been providing you with full digital access in error,” the journal emailed users to say (see below). Some of those users had been getting a free ride for up to five years, according to tweets. The scale of the error is not clear.

“There was an error in our database which resulted in a number of people being assigned full subscription rights by mistake,” Economist digital editions publisher Oscar Grut tells paidContent.

The Economist‘s digital-only, multi-device subscription package costs £119.99/$110 per year, even though combined print and digital subscription is cheaper in the UK at least, at £102/$126.99.

The Economist would not be the first media company to get its customer database in order. In 2006, a Virgin Media (NSDQ: VMED) data cleanse resulted in it removing around 60,000 phantom customers from its books.

Having done its cleansing, The Economist can now move forward with a revised iPad app that both takes subscriptions through iTunes and grants access to existing, legitimate subscribers.

Grut says features inside its iOS apps that were made buggy by iOS 5 have already been fixed.

“We are asking readers to move to a new app. The main difference (as you spotted) is that it provides for iTunes subscriptions,” Grut says. “We will probably take the old one off the App Store, eventually. With the latest update, we have removed the subscription capability from this old one.

“I’m not sure forcing an upgrade to the new app would be a very nice way to do it, though we are strongly encouraging it! The thought of a web version (ie, HTML5) is intriguing, but we’re going to keep producing and supporting apps.”

Economist.com visits grew by a third annually to 140 million in 2010/11. Payment is required for web articles older than 90 days and for the digital editions of the magazine.

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