Category: Blog News

Across the 190 magazines tracked by the survey, the total print audience declined by 1.7 percent in the past six months versus the prior six-month period. At the same time, digital readership (which could be digital-only or in combination with print readership) had increased by 24 percent on the same basis. However, digital-only reading added 1 percent to overall magazine readership. These digital readership figures include magazines’ digital reproductions and apps but not magazine websites.

via Adweek.

…in less than 10 seconds he was miraculously able to make a 180-degree turn and decided she was right. In what the previous day he thought was the best one-day shoot of his career, had now turned into a dismal failure without one good picture

Read more on Rodney Smith’s The End Starts Here.

Frankly, it’s hard to see war photography these days as anything but a moral compromise across the board.

For example, how is the embedding program anything else but a moral compromise? How are those emotional bonds, and the natural empathy that develops between soldiers and photojournalists anything but a moral compromise? How is photo story after photo story of medevac missions — dramatic and heroic reportage facilitated in lieu of imagery that delineates an actual war front or the battle on the ground — something else beyond moral compromise?

Read more at: BagNews.

At the heart of the Internet business is one of the great business fallacies of our time: that the Web, with all its targeting abilities, can be a more efficient, and hence more profitable, advertising medium than traditional media. Facebook, with its 900 million users, valuation of around $100 billion, and the bulk of its business in traditional display advertising, is now at the heart of the heart of the fallacy.

via The Facebook Fallacy – Technology Review.

What you need to decide, is if you really want to be a commercial photographer, or if you just like taking pictures. These are two very different things entirely and it’s hard for many people to separate these two things.

via Steve Giralt | So you are interested in Becoming a photographer.

I blew it. I was lost. I don’t know anymore today what the right answer is. In retrospect the problems are the same today as they were then and I am not sure I have learned anything. The light I use is revealing and penetrating. It may be, but it also may not be flattering. My instinct is to get close, when maybe it would be best to stay far away. I am not thinking of pleasing the subject, I am thinking of finding a way into the person I am photographing.

via The End Starts Here — Rodney Smith.

everyone said print was dead and I would have to publish online. I don’t think print is dead at all, but it never hurts to listen. So, we decided to publish monthly online first, for economics as well as discovery. The print edition was still on the drawing board as to frequency, content, etc. After the first issue my blatantly honest focus group all said, “This is gorgeous, but when’s the print edition coming out?” So, in December, we began producing print, a composite of images from our first quarter. Our print editions are currently produced on demand by HP MagCloud.

Read more on: La Lettre de la Photographie.

Just about every institution has changed in the new Conversational Age, including media. What really hasn’t adapted is advertising. Extremely few interactive ads have ever been served up and those that have seem less than remarkable.

via Facebook is a Media Company — And So Are You – Forbes.

“I do feel these are extraordinary times. I do feel that we in a sense are at the beginnings of a renaissance with regards to journalism,” he said. “I know that’s hard for many people to hear given the pain of the disruption to the traditional sources.”

via Google’s Richard Gingras » Nieman Journalism Lab.

Now it is almost impossible for me to shoot a photo where someone is NOT taking a picture or posing for one. So I am under the impression that no-one is really paying attention to the splendours and beauties of the site, as the urge to photograph is so overwhelming. The photographic record of the visit has almost destroyed the very notion of actually looking.

Martin Parr.

I’m a fan, personally, of art that sucks at marketing itself, that doesn’t have a cute backstory or a built-in ‘platform,’ that is not cuddly or ‘adorkable’ and doesn’t immediately lend itself to a hierarchy of ‘rewards’ for ‘backers,’ that is antisocial and prickly and deeply strange.

via photographsonthebrain.com.

journalism is not being disrupted by better journalism but by things that are hardly recognizable as journalism at all. Stepping up your game is always a good idea, but it won’t save you.

via stdout.be | Fungible.

We never discovered how to avoid the necessity of designing both landscape and portrait versions of the magazine for the app. We wasted $124,000 on outsourced software development. We fought amongst ourselves, and people left the company. There was untold expense of spirit. I hated every moment of our experiment with apps, because it tried to impose something closed, old, and printlike on something open, new, and digital.

via Why Publishers Don’t Like Apps – Technology Review.

“Truth be told—I like seeing photographs that I don’t like. It makes me question why I don’t like them, which in turn makes me question why I like the pictures I do like!

Comment by Simon Robinson on The Online Photographer.

There is a universal truth about creatives: At some point in his or her career, he or she will have an ego that far outweighs the depth of their experience and the quality of their work. It may last for decades or it could shrink the minute that person walks out of art school.

via CLREPS.

I would put the value back on to certain creative. It’s not about money, but it is about value. You can have it good, fast or cheap, but you can only have two. And people are leaving ‘good’ out of it and want it fast and cheap. I would like everyone to slow it down just a little bit to bring back the quality a bit. To have the appreciation for things that are of quality. Just want job done well and with passion. Nothing is free, the fact that seems to be lost lately.

–Cindy Hicks of The Martin Agency

Read more: Heather Elder Represents Blog.

What is the key to producing constant, memorable work over a number of years?

A healthy fear of failure. You’ve got to get behind the mule every morning and plow.

via – Grids – SPD.ORG.

The publishing world has been continuously startled by the announcements of Amazon’s new print publishing imprints, and this has been going on for a good year.  It’s quite funny that Amazon was able to sneak up on everyone, since this has been part of a chain of events dating back to at least 2005 and probably earlier than that.

via Startup Grind.