Research from McKinsey seems to suggest that print-based media still commands a large proportion of time spent by consumers of news — but that is just part of the larger picture media companies have to understand. Read more »
There are plenty of reasons for pessimism about the state of the media and journalism, including repeated layoffs, bankruptcies and so on. But there are also many reasons to be optimistic about the current environment. Read more »
LinkedIn has been making some significant moves towards becoming a media entity focused on business news, and the launch of new magazine-style channels of content is just the latest example of this. Read more »
Evan Williams sees Medium, the blogging platform that he and Biz Stone launched last year, as a modern-day magazine. While Medium will eventually open to everyone, Williams said he wants the site to be “a great place for professional writers.” Read more »
The Week surprised the publishing industry by carving out a profitable place in the competitive world of magazine news. Now, it is building up its operations for the digital long term. Read more »
Flipboard has become a leading player in the digital news-consumption field, and now it wants to hand the same filtering and curation tools employed by its editors over to users of the app, to create their own magazines. Read more at GigaOM »
Time Warner will put its magazine titles, including People and Sports Illustrated, into a separate company later this year. The move is a surprise as the publishing world had expected the company to sell most its publications to Iowa-based Meredith. Read more »
Time Warner is reportedly looking to sell off most of its magazines to Meredith, the publisher of titles like Better Homes and Gardens and Ladies’ Home Journal. Read more »
Hundreds of traditional publishers have erected paywalls around their content, but there is much to be gained by focusing monetization on individuals rather than an entire newspaper. Here are a few suggestions on how publishers could do this. Read more »
Until now, the Atlantic has been the poster child for traditional media entities that have succeeded online, but the New Yorker looks to be planning some major moves of its own to boost its online presence. Read more »
Hammered by declining print advertising revenue in much the same way newspapers have been, Time Inc. announced that it is laying off about 500 of its staff. But are the cuts the end, or just the beginning? Read more »
Magazine publishers will have to adopt more nuanced digital pricing strategies as tablets take off. They can look to book publishers — who are a lot further along in the digital revolution — for some help. Read more »
The Atlantic caused a furore this week with a piece of sponsored content about the Church of Scientology, which raised a host of questions about the risks of “native advertising” — which many see as the future of online media. Read more »
Blogging superstar Andrew Sullivan dropped a bombshell on Wednesday by saying he is leaving The Daily Beast and setting up his own subscription-based website. Can he become the first prominent success story in what some have called the move towards “post-industrial” journalism? Read more at GigaOM »
Hearst Magazines president David Carey says the company has nearly 800,000 monthly digital subscribers in the U.S. across platforms, and over 80 percent of the digital subscribers “are new to our files.” Read more »
A new survey from the Alliance for Audited Media (formerly the Audit Bureau of Circulations) finds that newspaper and magazine publishers’ digital businesses are gradually becoming profitable, and 63 percent say “tablets are the most important digital channel for their publication’s future.” Read more »
The business success of digital news sites has led more of them to apply their technical wizardry to long-form journalism. BuzzFeed is the latest example. Will its style of feature one days replace magazines like the New Yorker? Read more »
Many publishers seem to assume that the best way to publish their content online is to try and recreate the look and feel of the printed product they are trying to replace, but a better approach is to strip away everything that isn’t absolutely necessary. Read more at GigaOM »
The Houston Chronicle and Crain’s New York announced new paywall initiatives, while Newsweek editor-in-chief Tina Brown suggested that the now digital-only magazine is heading in that direction. A news roundup. Read more »
Many startups like Tumblr and Airbnb have become successful because they focused on filling a need that their founders had, and then turned that into a business, and there are a number of important lessons in that kind of approach for traditional media companies. Read more at GigaOM »
Facing declining advertising pages and the need to emphasize digital as audiences turn away from print, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia announced it will stop selling “Everyday Food” as a standalone monthly magazine and will sell off “Whole Living.” It is also laying off 70 employees. Read more »
New York magazine is doing better than ever, with outstanding reporting and a healthy bottom line. Is the publication an outlier or can other city magazines imitate its strategy? Read more »
Critics of a Newsweek cover story by historian Niall Ferguson say the piece should never have been published because of the errors and flawed logic it contains. But isn’t it better if those kinds of mistakes are corrected in public view instead of behind closed doors? Read more at GigaOM »
Digital-replica magazines doubled their share of the North American market in the last year, while printed titles shed a tenth of newsstand sales. But lectronic editions remain just a sliver of an industry that, when it comes to subscriptions, is holding up fine. Read more »
The Huffington Post has dropped the price of its iPad magazine to zero, and News Corp.’s The Daily has chopped almost a third of its staff — more evidence that the dream many publishers had about the iPad being their savior is still far from reality. Read more at GigaOM »
Trapit, an AI-based discovery engine for Web content from the group behind Siri, is releasing its iPad app Thursday after launching a Web version last November. Trapit wants to compete against news reading apps like Flipboard by offering better content. It’s planning publisher partnerships, too. Read more »
Publishers may see Next Issue Media’s virtual newsstand as a solution to their digital problems, but it doesn’t fit the way growing numbers of people consume content. For them, the newsstand is already an anachronism, and recreating it in digital form isn’t going to help. Read more at GigaOM »
Los Angeles-based entertainment blog network Buzz Media, which owns over 40 sites including Stereogum and Just Jared, has acquired music publication Spin, including its print magazine, website, iPad app and events business. It’s unclear whether Spin will survive in print. Read more »
Next Issue Media’s tablet magazines are finally available for the iPad, three months after the platform launched on Android 3.0. Users can read popular magazines like People, Vogue and the New Yorker for a flat monthly fee. So is the cost worth it? Read more »
Troubled Boston-based publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which restructured and emerged from bankruptcy last month, is apparently back and ready to make its books available on all devices, including those that are not available yet. Is that a smart strategy? Read more »
Google now activates one million Android devices per day and has 400 million devices in the wild, but its media store efforts have lagged. Google Play now has more digital content types, so here’s a look at how it compares to iTunes and Amazon’s digital store. Read more »
News-aggregation services Flipboard and Pulse have both signed deals this week to distribute content from a mainstream outlet — one the New York Times and the other the Wall Street Journal — but they are taking very different approaches when it comes to monetizing those relationships. Read more at GigaOM »
The 12-year-old digital magazine newsstand Zinio is putting itself up for sale, according to a Fortune.com report. Read more »
Plagued by declining ad pages and dollars, SmartMoney, the Wall Street Journal’s twenty-year-old personal finance magazine, is ceasing print production and going online-only. Twenty-five print staffers are losing their jobs while the digital editorial team expands to 15.. Read more »
Huffington Post now looks less like a blog network and more like a traditional media entity, having launched its own weekly digital magazine for the iPad — but is launching a subscription app a smart way of branching out, or a sign of old-media thinking? Read more at GigaOM »
To Zinio and iTunes Newsstand, now add another iPad magazine aggregator. LeKiosk, which launched in France in January 2011, is now launching in the UK on Monday, and is seeking funding for further internationalisation. Read more »
In an interview with GigaOM, the editor of MIT’s venerable Technology Review talks about why he has decided to take a “digital first” approach to publishing the magazine, why he doesn’t plan to implement a paywall — and what he sees as an alternative. Read more at GigaOM »
Many media outlets still think of the story or the article as the atomic unit of journalism — but with so many competing sources of information and the real-time nature of the social web, is that still the case? And if not, what replaces it? Read more at GigaOM »
Forbes has been reinventing itself ever since it acquired Lewis DVorkin’s media startup in 2010 — and while there have been some stumbles, the magazine has shown how a traditional media entity can take advantage of the social web and the way that content works online. Read more at GigaOM »
The biggest challenge for a media company like Meredith is shifting focus to consumer engagement across platforms, Meredith’s Liz Schimel said at paidContent 2012. Part of that means making the brands available on the right platforms, but not all platforms. Read more »
