Harper's Publisher Rejects $50K in Union Pledges

Jeff Bercovici - Mixed Media - Forbes: "Tens of thousands of dollars in pledges raised by the staff of Harper’s magazine won’t save any jobs — or benefit the magazine in any way. That’s because publisher John 'Rick' MacArthur has informed the magazine’s newly-formed union, which organized the pledge drive, that he will not accept the funds.... "

Magazine Publishers Anxiously Seeking iPad Subscription Deals from Apple

AppleInsider: "As the iPad-only newspaper The Daily is expected to launch with a new subscription service in the near future, major magazine publishers are still looking to reach a deal for recurring application subscriptions on the iPad. ... "

NewsBeast! - The Newsweek/Daily Beast Partnership

This should be interesting. NYTimes.com: "After a brief and interrupted dalliance, Newsweek, the 77-year-old magazine, and The Daily Beast, Ms. Brown’s two-year-old Web site, have decided to put their cultural differences aside and join forces. Ms. Brown confirmed the deal in a column posted Thursday night in which she said the agreement was finalized with a coffee mug toast Tuesday evening. 'As for me, I shall now be in the editor-in-chief’s chair at both The Daily Beast and Newsweek,' she wrote."

News Corp.'s Murdoch Predicts Ad Changes for Digital Newspapers

Bloomberg: "'Digital news will look like cable channels with affiliated revenue,' [James, not Rupert] Murdoch said at a media conference in Monaco today. Titles will compete for ad revenue across this market and media buyers will 'make a big commitment' to purchase advertising, rather than making bookings for just a month at a time, he said. News Corp.’s U.K. titles the Times and Sunday Times erected paywalls in July, which reduced the number of readers and advertisers on the sites. Murdoch this month said these newspapers have more than 105,000 paying online customers, and today characterized paying readers as 'more engaged.' ..."

Amazon Gives Magazine Publishers Larger Kindle Revenue Share

PCWorld: "Amazon.com will give magazine and newspaper publishers selling through the Kindle Store up to 70 percent of the retail price of their products, after delivery costs, it said on Monday. The terms will become available on Dec. 1, and will be offered to new and existing suppliers, according to Amazon. Publishers will get their share of the revenue after Amazon deducts delivery costs. These apply if the content is delivered via what Amazon calls a paid distribution method, such as its own Whispernet 3G mobile wireless service. That service costs US$0.15 per megabyte, so the data cost of a newspaper that delivers 9.0MB per month is $1.35. If the publication retails for $9.99 per month, the publisher would earn $6.05 for each subscription, according to an Amazon FAQ."

Adobe Will Create Tools For All Conde Nast Digital Mags

paidContent: "Conde Nast will formally rely on Adobe tools when it comes to crafting its digital magazine replicas, after dividing duties between the software company and its in-house team at Conde Nast Digital. The decision, announced by Bob Sauerberg, Conde Nast’s president, comes on the heels of five new app releases. Although there is 'ongoing R&D,' the change marks the completion its initial wave of experiments with mobile apps. It also comes as Conde Nast has been making some changes following two high-profile hires on its technology and marketing sides."

Conde Nast Study Concludes iPad Is Not A Mobile Device (At Least Not Now)

paidContent: "There have been over 3.8 million downloads of Conde Nast apps on the iPad and iPhone since the publisher began rolling them out. Over the past few months, Conde Nast has been surveying readers of its GQ, Vanity Fair, Wired and Glamour apps and has found that these users are generally not the early-adopters or Apple fanboys the publisher expected. ..."

Magazine Association Revises Name to Match Digital Age

NYTimes.com: "The Magazine Publishers of America is being renamed MPA — the Association of Magazine Media (dash and all). The dispatching of “publishers” from the name is meant to signal how readers can engage with magazines beyond the printed page through nontraditional means like Web sites, mobile devices, tablets, events, social media, books, retail presences and even branded merchandise."

The New Yorker Launches iPad Edition Using Adobe Tools

Adobe Digital Publishing: "The New Yorker, the iconic magazine title from publisher Conde Nast, today released an app for the iPad using the Digital Magazine Solution from Adobe. Available on the Apple App Store, The New Yorker tablet edition preserves the look-and-feel of the print publication, and adds interactive audio, video and slideshows to supplement the magazine’s signature mix of reporting and commentary. Adobe collaborated with The New Yorker to launch the iPad edition, in part because the publication’s design challenges represented a different end of the magazine publishing spectrum. ..."

The Sad Economics of an iPad Magazine

Gizmodo:

When you turn the latest Sports Illustrated iPad issue to the portrait position, like a book, nothing happens. Just an error message. That's because Sports Illustrated is too poor to offer it in anything but the landscape format.

The issue, says Time's Josh Quittner, who's been guest editing the iPad edition of SI, is that offering an alternative view taxes already overburdened designers. It's 33 percent more work. And they can't hire more designers. They want to! "Well, if we were able to build a real business, with subscriptions that offered our iPad versions to readers at a reasonable price, that would be a no brainer. But we can't yet..." Emphasis mine: SI needs subscriptions to be a viable business as an app, is what Quittner's saying.

Subscriptions the single largest pain point for publishers dealing with Apple, who've otherwise come running to splash themselves on the iPad, one desperate belly flop for print salvation. The sticking points have been many. Apple doesn't want to hand out valuable subscriber info willy nilly; publishers don't want to give a third of subscription revenue to Apple in perpetuity, as current App Store guidelines would dictate. So there've been no subscriptions. Until now, maybe. ...

Tablets: Media Outlets Ponder Options as Free Web Editions Compete with Paid Subscriptions

My hunch is that the publishers of The Economist know whereof they speak:

... The [iPad] contains a web browser as well as an app store, bringing together the world of paid content and the open web, where print content tends to be free. It is as though a news-stand carried two versions of every magazine—one costly, the other inferior but free. Media firms that were already coming to believe that the web is a mediocre advertising platform have drawn a stark conclusion: they should pull back from the free web.

Time magazine has begun to hold back some stories from its website, on the ground that it is now providing a decent digital alternative. Time Inc is moving towards all-access pricing, in which content is available on all platforms to people who pay for it. This is in line with the “TV Everywhere” plan developed by Jeff Bewkes, Time Warner’s chief executive. Others are likely to follow. James Moroney, publisher of the Dallas Morning News, says the release of a paid iPad application later this year is likely to coincide with the erection of a paywall on the Dallas.com website. It is illogical to charge for one but not the other, he says.

Yet obstacles lie in the path of media firms that want to move in this direction. The first is that many print publications do not have enough information about their customers to enable them to sell across platforms. Ken Doctor, a media analyst at Outsell, points out that American newspapers tend to sort their readers by address rather than by name. The second obstacle is Apple. The firm has made it difficult to sell subscriptions on the iPad, and is reluctant to disclose much data on buyers. This is a particular problem for magazine firms, which use customer data to push other products and to sell advertising. ...

Print Magazine Readership Off Sharply Among Increasingly-Digital Affluent

Advertising Age - MediaWorks:

BATAVIA, Ohio (AdAge.com) -- Magazine readership among the affluent plunged 16% in the past year as the group spent 12% more time using the internet and sharply stepped up purchases of e-readers and tablet computers, according to the annual Ipsos Mendelsohn Affluent Survey. ...

Magazine readership has slipped modestly in some prior years of the annual survey, which this year garnered more than 13,800 responses, but this is the first double-digit decline, said Ipsos Mendelsohn President Bob Shullman.

Mr. Shullman said the year-over-year shift represents something he's seen daily on his commute into Manhattan over the past year: the widespread disappearance of magazines and print material in favor of e-readers and other mobile devices.

"I was talking to the guy who runs the newsstand at my rail station," Mr. Shullman said, "and he said, 'Bob, I'm basically doing half what I was a year ago.'" Mr. Shullman said he believes much of the shift also comes from traditional media stepping up efforts to drive people to their websites. ...

"The consumer is getting more and more comfortable with the alternative platforms," he said, adding that he believes affluents are simply getting their content in a different format, not doing away with it.

The Magazine Publishers of America agrees. "It has become increasingly recognized that traditional ways of audience measurement are not capturing the total magazine readership footprint," the group said in an e-mail statement. "Affluents are among the early adopters of new technologies, and thus it's more likely that they would be first in migrating some of their magazine readership to various new digital platforms."

The Ipsos survey was completed in June, only two months after the launch of Apple's iPad, but it already shows nearly a million of the nation's more than 44 million affluent heads of household owned tablet computers and another 2 million owned e-readers. ...

Joe Wikert: iPad Magazines, Thumbs Down

iPadHound Blog: "After much disappointment with Amazon, and their inability to offer a comprehensive magazine portfolio on the Kindle, I had high hopes for the iPad. And while the iPad is still fairly new, the magazine experience up to now has been pretty disappointing. Like so many others I tried the first issue of Wired in their iPad app and I haven't been back. (I have a print subscription, btw.) I've also tried Zinio and subscribed to PC Magazine in it. Nothing remarkable. ... "

To Launch: NOMAD EDITIONS - A Magazine for Mobile

NYTimes.com: "A small group of former magazine journalists and editors, including a former president of Newsweek, plan to publish a weekly digital magazine this fall, seeking to create content specifically for mobile technology. The magazine, called Nomad Editions and created by a New York start-up of the same name, will feature the work of freelance journalists with expertise in a specific area, like surfing or movies. Every Friday, starting in October, subscribers will receive through a mobile application what amounts to a mini-magazine, focused on their area of interest. Each edition is expected to each take 20 to 30 minutes to read."