Audience Development

Time in Which Content Retains Value is ‘Rapidly Compressing’

Last week, I attended the Fulfillment Management Association’s annual President’s Panel, which features the leaders of the major fulfillment houses talking about the business. It’s always a great and informative session.

I was particularly struck by comments from Ray Butkus, CEO of ARGI. Media companies are in crisis, Butkus acknowledges, and because of that, their supplier partners are as well. But the crisis, he said, has nothing to do with readership and circulation. Online or off, the readership is there. “The crisis has to do with the ability to make money off [readership and circulation],” Butkus said. “You create content, but the time within which content retains value is rapidly compressing.”

According to Butkus [pictured], database and fulfillment partners need to facilitate a media company’s ability to create content products based on knowledge of what the market needs, and the traditional two-week window for reports and other information is no longer good enough.

Butkus’ point is important. Fulfillment providers need to think differently about what they do for media companies. They need to help media companies generate revenue in the new world of digital media. And that means providing real-time intelligence on the audience, and creating a software infrastructure that enables transactions based on content.

Butkus said it this way: “Bringing the financial transaction together with the person who wants it, when they want it, requires a moment of truth. It’s altogether fitting and proper for that to reside with us.”

Rolling Stone Rolls Dice on Restaurant Business

Move over Hard Rock Café. Watch out Planet Hollywood. A music magazine is leaping off the printed page into the frying pan.

Rolling Stone founder/editor/publisher Jann S. Wenner announced late last week a partnership with the principals of real estate developer the Lucky Rug Group to launch a 10,000 square-foot restaurant/bar/lounge/private event space next summer at Los Angeles’ Hollywood and Highland Center—situated along the Hollywood Walk of Fame and home to Grauman's Chinese Theatre and the Kodak Theatre.

Details were sparse concerning the forthcoming mega venue’s food menu and drink list but Wenner, et al., said it would feature “exposed black brick, tufted leather and vaulted ceilings throughout the location, as well as a stunning antique iron staircase.” There won’t be any music industry memorabilia (read:  bric-a-brac) like you see plastered all over the walls at a Hard Rock, though.

“We are both excited and determined to bring the spirit of the magazine to life—the edginess, the coolness, the classiness and the timelessness—in making this venue a place to see and be seen,” Lucky Rug Group co-owner and Rolling Stone stakeholder Niall Donnelly said in the announcement.

Cool? Edgy? Sure, it’s had its moments, but those aren’t words I’d necessarily associate with the granddaddy of music magazines, at least not for the last several years.

At any rate, getting into the restaurant businesses for anyone is, well, risky businesses. Planet Hollywood, for instance, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection a number of times.  

The Rolling Stone brand, though, seems like a strong enough platform from which to launch a restaurant/bar project. It’s recognized across ages, gender and music preference. And, besides, Rolling Stone isn’t the only print magazine business that’s rolling the dice on branded venues.  

Maybe I’ll check out the new restaurant some night, but only if Wenner’s working the bar.

Big Pubs Looking for Strength in Numbers

Where smaller publishers—from b-to-b to consumer enthusiast—form consortiums to attain economies of scale for materials and production services like printing, paper buying and distribution, the mass consumer publishers are setting aside their historically fierce competitiveness to tackle mass problems.  

Across-the-board ad page and revenue drops, online-sourced subscriptions, pay wall models, and digital content formats and distribution are some of the latest battles that big consumer publishers think can be won through solidarity.

It's an interesting concept that can be traced back to then Hachette CEO Jack Kliger's outspoken calls for pre-recession unity to revolutionize rate base—magazines needed to stop competing with each other, come together as a platform and compete with TV, the Internet and radio. "Circulation-based metrics are irrelevant to proving advertising effectiveness," he told an AMC audience in 2005.

Now, sick of feeling the sting from getting spanked by "aggregators," "plagiarists," and "content kleptomaniacs," as Ruport Murdoch put it at a recent event in Beijing where he and the AP's CEO Tom Curley continued their rant against Google et al, big publishers are joining together to ostensibly regain—or actually gain—control of how their content and advertising models are consumed.

How crazy would it have sounded if, before the recession hit, Time Inc., Conde Nast, Hearst and Meredith all joined together to create a digital distribution platform to develop a proprietary content format and service eReaders?

How about creating an ad network? Up to now, publishers were leveraging and/or creating their own vertical networks. Martha Stewart Living, Meredith and Forbes were all creating them. Now, there's some background chatter about the formation of a multi-publisher ad network. AdAge reported on it, and PaidContent threw a wet blanket on the concept.

And then there's Time Inc.'s year-old Maghound, which offers custom subscription packages to a variety of publications from different publishers. 413,000 issues have been shipped so far, and Maghound's president Dave Ventresca told attendees at MPA's Innovation Summit this month that as the service moves out of its proof of concept stage, it will begin a more robust marketing campaign for all participating publisher titles, not just the Time Inc. ones.

Most recently, 15 British publishers formed a venture to promote their thinking person's magazines that apparently get lost in the crush of titles dealing with less weighty topics.

On a smaller publisher scale, but by no means tiny, Mother Jones is leading the formation of a journalistic co-op to tackle, in an investigative format, climate change—several magazines are sharing reporting resources. AdAge's Simon Dumenco spoke with MoJo co-editor Clara Jeffery about the project and her comments about the partnership can be applied to any area of the publishing business.

"We have complementary audiences, but even the biggest players seem to think they can benefit from having their work introduced to the core audiences of the other partners," she told Dumenco.

And, above all, it's the quickly-changing media world that's driving publishers to seek out ideas and and potential partners:  "Secondly, everybody is really eager to use this as a way to test-drive collaborations, which everybody sees as a vital part of the emerging media landscape. On that front, we'll likely learn as much from what doesn't work as what does."

Does Anyone Play Newsstand Shuffle Anymore?

The games we play change over time. I wonder if my favorite magazine game has gone the way of stickball and “kick the can.”

When I worked at Ziff-Davis in the 1980’s I was fortunate enough to be placed in a “loop course” type of specialized circulation class taught by the VP of Circulation and one of the industry’s most outrageous old school characters, Larry Sporn. Larry taught us a simple little game called “newsstand shuffle.” Basically, all you had to do was go to a newsstand, browse the magazines, and accidentally place your companies’ titles on top of your competitors’ magazines. The trick was to make sure you didn’t get caught by the newsstand manager but this wasn’t very difficult. It was a cheap thrill.

Where the game really got going, though, was the classic Mother of All Newsstands, that being the one at the edge of Grand Central Station, in the PanAm building (now MetLife). Here was a newsstand in the hub of The Great Commute—108,000 people were estimated to be streaming through the building each day, according to an article in the NY Times on June 18, 1984. At that point in time, the newsstand stocked more than 2,000 titles and sold 10,000 copies of magazines per week.

But volume was just half the story. This newsstand was smack in the middle of the magazine publishing AND ad agency capital of the world. Beyond just selling copies, it was critical that the hundreds of media buyers streaming by each day saw your title prominently displayed.

Since so many magazine professionals walked through the station daily, Newsstand Shuffle became a very lively game. If you stood and watched closely you could see people picking up an issue (or four), casually glance over their shoulder at the counter and then quickly shuffle the magazines to their favor. Sometimes competitors would be in the PanAm at the same time seeing who was willing to take a later train and get the last laugh.

Of course the next day, someone else had either fixed the stack or buried your magazine under Civil War News or something. So to win we had to compete almost every day.

Is anyone still playing?


Photo credit: Martin Green

Believe It or Not, Fewer Magazines Folding in 2009

Once again, the number of magazine closings has outpaced the number of titles being launched, according to the latest report from U.S. and Canadian online magazine database MediaFinder.com. But when comparing the number of titles (383) folded through the third quarter of 2009 to the same time period in 2008 and 2007, the pace is significantly less.

According to MediaFinder's most up-to-date numbers, 643 magazines ceased publication in 2007, and a total of 613 magazines closed in 2008. Right now, that means we’re 230 titles off from last year’s total. So unless there’s a dramatic push in closings through the fourth quarter, it looks like the industry may be looking at fewer magazine closings from the past two years (we can only hope!). 

Of the 259 titles to launch so far in 2009, the report showed that publishers have pulled the plug on 104 more magazines since the first half this year, when 279 folded publications were counted. During the third quarter, 72 titles launched while 104 magazines closed, including the high-profile closings of publishing giant Condé Nast's four titles—Gourmet, Cookie, Modern Bride and Elegant Bride. Other titles to vanish in ’09 included Meredith’s Country Home, Hallmark, American Express Publishing’s Travel & Leisure Golf, Time Inc.’s Southern Accents and Rodale’s Best Life.



Of the launches in 2009, the regional category topped the list with 15, but also experienced the most folded titles (31), including Tampa Bay Living. Both business and lifestyle categories also declined, folding 14 and 13 titles each, respectively.

The food (14), health & fitness (13), and home (13) categories proved to be popular for launches this year.

B-to-b publications accounted for 75 of the new title launches, 130 of the shuttered magazines, and 24 of the magazines that ceased print editions over the past nine months, the report said.