I almost wrote a piece not too long ago about food magazines because I’d unsubscribed to Gourmet but then discovered that having access to millions of recipes online is really a pain in the ass and what you need is an editor and some beautiful photographs to get your mouth watering so I resubscribed. Too bad Si killed it off. I hope they bring it back someday.

via, Will Steacy Blog

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“The Economist has launched a single copy subscription service in the U.K. that allows readers to order just one copy of the magazine for home delivery the next day. Readers can place an order online or via text message for a copy of the latest issue of the weekly publication. The cost of the delivered magazine is the same as the newsstand price.”

via MediaPost.

Seriously, American magazines (Anne Moore!?), wake the-f up. If that’s not enough, subscribers can listen to the latest issue on their ipod (the Economist read out aloud word for word by four or five posh sounding British newscasters). What the hell? I just subscribed to a magazine and was told it would take 4 – 6 weeks for the first issue to arrive.

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…It used to be that on Monday mornings, the flower deliverymen would clog the elevators while they brought fresh bouquets for editors’ and publishers’ desks.

…“When a client wanted to go to get Japanese, you used to say, ‘Ooooh! We’ll go to Nobu!’ But it’s so outrageously expensive, now you have to think twice.”

…they would order takeout from Balthazar several times a week. Sandwiches, cheese plates, the works

…“I just found out today that we are on our last batch of Poland Spring,” said the source. “We won’t have any more after this. We have to start drinking tap water.”

via  The New York Observer.

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A group led by the private-equity firm InterMedia Partners and InterMedia’s luxury magazine publisher, Uptown Media, has reached an agreement to acquire Vibe and its Web site. The new owners say they plan to relaunch Vibe.com in the next few weeks.

They intend to bring out the print edition only at the end of the year and then publish it quarterly rather than monthly, possibly increasing the frequency after 2010.

via- WSJ.com.

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via, Mr. Magazine.

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In the digital age, with its overabundance of information, the modern newsweekly is in a particularly poignant position. Designed nearly a century ago to be all things to all people, it Chaplin-esquely tries to straddle thousands of rapidly fragmenting micro-niches, a mainframe in an iTouch world. The audience it was created to serve—middlebrow; curious, but not too curious; engaged, but only to a point—no longer exists. Newsweeklies were intended to be counterprogramming to newspapers, back when we were drowning in newsprint and needed a digest to redact that vast inflow of dead-tree objectivity. Now, in response to accelerating news cycles, the newspapers have effectively become newsweekly-style digests themselves, resorting to muddy “news analysis” now that the actual news has hit us on multiple platforms before we even open our front door in the morning.

Bottom line here is that advertising used to be sold on a “hits” basis, but now that hits are practically worthless (blame the ease at which juvenile humor, celebrities drinking starbucks and vitriol can produce millions of hits) it’s engagement and finding or slashing circulation down to an audience that is passionate about the product you produce. This also means they can start discarding all the junk they put in the magazines that caters to a more general interest crowd. Sounds good to me.

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You can read the fascinating “inside baseball” account of writing for the New Yorker (here). It was first published as a series of tweets over a week ago and seems to break some kind of code of silence that surrounds the publication. They don’t publish a masthead after all.

Even more interesting and certainly educational for photographers will be his list of successful story pitches (here). Photographers have great stories all the time but I’ve rarely seen a passable pitch from one, so most of the time if I really wanted to get something made I would write the pitch myself. As a side note it’s even worse when photographers take their excellent ideas and give it to a writer who’s not qualified to write for the publication.

Wired, another Condé magazine was written up Sunday in the NYTimes (here), because they have the dubious of being both award winning and advertising losing. I was pointed to this discussion over on Boing Boing Gadgets (here) by Scott Bauer where a former wired.com editor uses that story to take a few digs at the print magazine and then a whole bunch of writers chime in on the comments. EIC Chris Anderson even drops a couple comments one in particular where he attributes the problems between online and print at wired to Condé HQ decisions. More “inside baseball” but interesting nonetheless.

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You can see some of the photography nominees for the SPD awards on their grids blog and I think they will put a few more up next week so check back:

Service Feature, Story

Section, Series of Pages

Section, Single Page or Spread

Trade/Corporate

Educational/Institutional

Service Feature, Single or Spread

Photo-Illustration

Redesign

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This is what Esquire has to say about the shoot (from their site here):

Greg Williams recorded ten minutes of loosely scripted footage with Fox — getting out of bed, rolling around on a pool chair, inexplicably lighting a barbecue.

“It allowed her to act,” Williams says. “She could run scenes without being reminded by the sound of a shutter every four seconds that I was taking a picture. As in still photography, a lot of it is capturing unexpected moments. This takes that one step further.” He then went back and pulled out the best images, which you can see in Esquire’s June issue, on sale May 10. Plus, there’s a fantastic by-product: Even though we made the film to get the stills, we were left with ten bewitching minutes of footage of a beautiful woman. We edited it down to a mini movie, which will be available at esquire.com/megan on May 4.

I think it’s working. The covers are creating buzz and along the way they will inevitably stumble upon something innovative for magazine covers. The RedONE may be it but not because I think people want to watch a 10 min. video of someone posing for a cover. Something interesting will come out of this, maybe they can create cool animated cover badges from all the frames around the shot to spread around the web or maybe it just changes the way subjects and photographers work together for cover shoots. Regardless, I can’t wait to see what happens next. I’d rather see them try something and fail than endlessly plodding along with “57 fat burning secrets.”

Saw it on Gizmodo, forwarded to me by Peter.

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It used to be an open secret that one of the most profitable names in the television industry, HBO, went to great lengths to discover, develop and take chances on unknown talent. Many of their biggest hits came from unknown writers they took chances on (here) or discovered through one of their contests.

So, why don’t magazines do the same? Besides the obvious lack of vision at the top of most publication it’s likely because they don’t realize their future depends on finding talented people and attracting them to magazines over other mediums. The history of magazines is littered with ultra talented writers, photographers, designers and editors and somehow I think in the last 10 or more years many of these people may have gone into advertising instead and now with all the potential on the web who knows if they will find their way into the magazine industry.

I once worked at a magazine that built their reputation with a handful of extremely talented writers who all eventually moved on. I often wondered how they planned to find the next group of talented writers who would define the next phase of the magazine. Now that I think about it, talent scouting might have done the job. This Hearst Biennial seems like a good step in that direction for photography.

The winning photographers are:
Andy Freeberg
Louie Palu
Benedikt Partenheimer
Brad Carlile
Edith Maybin
Nicholas Prior
Mark Kessell

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The new Life.com just launched and it’s worth a visit to go peruse some great old photography. I think they’re planning on simply using it as a portal to sell Getty images, but it’s nice that they put a decent user interface on it and created edited material to check out.

This is from the press release:
“More than 7 million photos from the Life and Getty Images photo collections are now available to consumers in the largest online photography site. The curated site features both rarely seen and iconic photos from the 1850s through today. More than 3,000 new photos from Getty Images award-winning photographers will be added to the site daily.”

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When I saw these old Rolling Stone pages (here) I thought how exciting it must have felt to ship that issue to the printer; a cover with one coverline, pages with no text and a photographer in his prime.

UPDATE: I just heard from Elizabeth Avedon who was working for Richard at the time as the resident Designer, Art Director, Photo Editor and she designed that issue of Rolling Stone including the cover. She says, “It was designed in-house at Richard Avedon Studio, as was everything of Richard Avedon’s as he always retained control of what went out. ”

Magazine pages via, Things To Look At

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Back to the income statement. In May 08 here are the numbers:

The income:
$40,000 in advertising with online and print being nearly equal.
$19,000 in subscriptions
$50,000 in newsstand sales

The Expenses:
$23,000 paid in contributor fees ($100 a photo for the photographers)

$104,000 for paper and printing
$23,000 for subscription postage and newsstand shipping

$5,000 for website hosting

$10,000 in salaries for the circulation staff
$55,000 in salaries for the sales staff
$47,000 for the website staff
$58,000 for the magazine editorial staff
$18,000 for the marketing staff
$12,000 for marketing expense
$78,000 for executive salaries
$32,000 in general operating expenses
$17,000 for rent

For a grand total of -$375,000 in net income. Giant sucking hole.

You can obviously see why magazine making is a rich person’s game because $125,000 just to print and deliver the thing is a serious bill to pay every month.

Media Post is reporting that the magazine has been bought (here). I wonder if they can find any fat to trim. Apparently Mitch Fox is stepping down.

jpgmagnetincome – Get more Business Documents
Thanks, Joerg.

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From Karl Baden http://www.CoveringPhotography.com

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“Newsweek is about to begin a major change in its identity, with a new design, a much smaller and, it hopes, more affluent readership, and some shifts in content. The venerable newsweekly’s ingrained role of obligatory coverage of the week’s big events will be abandoned once and for all, executives say.”

“‘There’s a phrase in the culture, ‘we need to take note of,’ ‘we need to weigh in on,’ ‘ said Newsweek’s editor, Jon Meacham. ‘That’s going away. If we don’t have something original to say, we won’t. The drill of chasing the week’s news to add a couple of hard-fought new details is not sustainable.’”

*clap, clap, clap, clap* Brilliant move. Thanks, Ryan.

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Found it on the Creative Review blog.

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It’s somewhat ironic that a company with a stable of magazines that rely on dispensing the same advice year after year (how to get 6 pack abs!) would be the first to enter that information into a permanent database where anyone can look up content.

I’m not sure how the rights are going to be handled with this if at all. Publishers are already barred from selling the content to online databases (according to this) without renegotiation of the rights so I guess giving it away is the only way it can be done without paying extra. So, why is Rodale doing this? My only guess would be, to snag potential readers who might stumble on the content and discover they like it, but would rather have it delivered in the usual format.

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These things seem to be sprouting up everywhere lately:

The originals: zinio.com and issuu.com

Trying to become legit: mygazines.com

More: ceros.com, openzine.com

What I find truly annoying with someone like zinio is that they save the publisher money on printing, paper and postage but still try and charge the same as a printed magazine. I don’t like reading digital flipping magazines in the first place but will do it to save time, money and trees. I would probably subscribe to 40 of these if they were a dollar apiece but if it’s the same price as print I prefer paper. What I really want to do is browse all the magazines and pay to read the articles that interest me. That’s how it works on the newsstand, why don’t they realize that.

Thanks for the tip Stephen.

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It all comes down to a fairly common discussion at magazine story and photography meetings. Do we inspire our readers with content where they can say “I could do that” or do we give them aspirational content so they say “I wish I could do that.” A mix is probably closer to the truth but I’ve always been in the aspirational camp and that means running photography that not even my editor understands.

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We would like to publish your photo in Time Magazine in a year-end issue and also on Time.com. If you are the author of the photo and can give Time the rights to publish it, please send a high-resolution image to xxxxxxxx@timemagazine.com. While we can’t pay you for this use, we’ll give you an author’s photo credit with the published photo in the magazine and of course you retain the copyright.

Thank you for your participation.

Sincerely,

XXXXX

When I saw this I thought, how stupid it is to not to offer your space rate or at least a hundred bucks for the use and avoid getting people all riled up about it. But, on the other hand writers call people all the time and get them to contribute quotes for articles without any payment so how is this different? I can see a case where you’re sampling the opinions of Americans, using photography, where asking for free photos isn’t such a big deal. It really comes down to the end use, which isn’t indicated in the email.

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They revert back to an old nameplate from the middle of the last century and bring back a version of the “TOC on the cover,” something that’s very common with literary magazines.

“In a magazine of ideas, writers depend on words to build their arguments, but we didn’t want The Atlantic’s pages to look like homework,” says Bierut.

“Photography has an enhanced presence, and is more journalistic and real-life in execution. The use of photoillustration or montage has been reduced: illustrations are illustrations, and photos are photos.” (*translation: photoillustrations and montage’s are lame)

As always Pentagram does an amazing job with restrained design, powerful typography and grounded photography. A redesign is always an exciting time to work at a magazine as the budgets get loosened a bit and the mantra for photography becomes “new and big.” I hope it works out for them.

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Dr. Husni, J schooler and clearly a big champion of printed magazines argues that newsweeklies need to change their content to better become a bridge between what happened last week and what’s about to happen and how it will effect readers. John Friedman columnist at Market Watch dismisses printed magazines and the newsstand entirely claiming that the battle is on the web and the newsstand is dead.

Do you carve out your place on a shrinking newsstand to deliver something nobody else does or do you evolve your business model to chase news online? To do both well, will take a serious investment.

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This is from a story in the NY Times last weekend:

“Condé also consistently sells more ads than its competitors and at higher prices, though some of its magazines make little or no profit. Even so, spending money to make money, and focusing on premium products to attract readers and advertisers, has clearly worked for more than a decade, though its margins are thin compared with those of its competitors. Condé executives say it generates close to $5 billion in revenue, has operating margins of around 10 percent and profits of about half that. Analysts and bankers say that Advance as a whole, which carries no debt, is worth, conservatively, $15 billion.”

Read more (here).

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Until I get my hands on the first issue I’ve only got the website (here) to go off, but I really like what I see and of course the 80 page photo essay sounds epic. This jibes perfectly with the role I foresee for magazines in the future. Covering topics in depth and displaying them in ways the internet can never compete with. Long form journalism and BIG photo essays. I honestly don’t need to see another thumbnail photo in a magazine for the rest of my life. I’ve got my fill right here on the internets.

Funny how none of the big publishers are going to step up to the plate on something like this so leave it to a photographer who’s sick of covering a story for a month and getting 2 pictures published in a magazine that will end up in the garbage can by Wednesday to make the big move.

Mort explains it further in the editors letter:

“We conceived dispatches to fit somewhere between Gutenberg and Google, a lively source of fresh knowledge about a world changing at warp speed in a format for people who savor the heft of words and images on paper.”

“Too often, these days, we forget a simple truth: the Internet is a means of delivery, not a source.”

“Gary Knight and I, co–editors, are journalists who were frustrated at trying to seek “truth” on the fly.”

Also, be sure to check out World Press Photo’s overall winner, Tim Hetherington’s acceptance speech (here). Love the honesty.

Good luck Mort and Gary. I hope you find your audience.

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Is the high school newspaper cool in some schools? I had no idea.

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Readers can be bought with football phones but they can’t be forced to buy your magazine at the checkout… or can they. The newsstand is actually where the real nefarious stuff happens. That’s because newsstand is the only metric anyone has to judge a magazine’s popularity (advertising sales isn’t a good indicator because you have no idea how much they discount the ad and how many are house ads).

I was reading a post by Craig Stolz (Web 2.Oh…really)–recently in Time Magazine’s top 25 blogs (here)–about newspaper websites using SEO trickery (worthless links to common words) to make their stories rank higher on google at the cost of degrading the user experience (here). Reminds me of the similar magazine practice where the cover will have fake numbers (chosen for how they look on the cover) to trick people into thinking there’s 234 tips or 55 great trips inside and then big cover lines will sell you on stories that turn out to be 1/3 page or worse–a sentence within a story. And then there’s all those lifeless packages (conceived to give you a number on the cover or a coverline), topical yet vapid front of book pieces and shiny products with hollow write-ups, all served up at the cost of user experience in hopes of attracting more newsstand buyers.

Of course the worst example of this bait and switch technique is the cover image. A subject chosen for their ability to hit it big on the newsstand accompanied by a perfunctory story on the inside. This has nothing to do with your mission as a magazine.

That’s why I love Esquire for owning up to it on the cover this month with a picture of Jessica Simpson and the coverline “We shot this image to catch your eye so you will pick up this issue and immerse yourself in the most gripping story you will read this year.” Bravo.

(click to make big)

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I really like this quote from the Alex Pappademas story. Works for photographers too.

“Y’know, I grew up in a different generation. I grew up after World War II, and boys did different things in those days. You went camping. You went hunting. You boxed. And the image of a writer, to someone starting off in those days was not some schmuck who went to graduate school. It was Jack London, Nelson Algren, Ernest Hemingway. Especially coming from Chicago–a writer was a knock-around guy. Someone who got a job as a reporter or drove a cab. I think the reason there are a lot of novels about How Mean My Mother Was to Me and all that shit is because the writers may have learned something called ‘technique,’ but they’ve neglected to have a life. What the fuck are they gonna write about?”

–David Mamet

There’s also and excellent profile of Terry Richardson written by Andrew Corsello that furthers my theory of how a photographers DNA imprint in pictures cannot be replicated or taught. Calling it talent is not very accurate because it’s the sum of everything you know and have experienced and it leaves a mark on the photographs. I’ve always liked Terry’s work and I’m somewhat floored by the story of his hellish/crazy upbringing and how that fed his photographic style and subject selection. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to walk and inch in his shoes if that’s what it takes to become a much sought-after photographer with an original point of view.

(click to make big)

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