Magazine Publishing | [in plain sight]

[in plain sight] | a collection of digital artifacts from the life of Michael Turro

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Finally something for you magazine people out there to think about.

Monday, May 5th, 2008

While I hate to sound like chicken little - and though the print is dead meme is way overplayed - I had to post this quote from Steve Frye. In a sidebar in the current issue of Publishing Executive titled The State of the Printing Industry Frye drops this bomb:

I think we need to change our philosophy of what a magazine is. We are no longer a cheap means of dispensing information, and that’s what we were until the Internet came along. Now we are an inefficient and expensive means of distributing information. … We need to reinvent ourselves as a luxury item that people want and are willing to pay for. And until we change our own image of who we are, we’re going to find out that our vendors are gong to change it for us. Because, right now, postage is a premium. Paper is a premium. Soon printing will be a premium. How long can we buy at a premium and sell at a discount? We can’t.

Damn straight. I’ve been singing this song for a while now and it’s refreshing to finally see these kinds of blunt words in the pages of an old school cheerleader like Publishing Executive (I couldn’t find them on the PubExec site that’s why there is no link for the quote - had to transcribe it myself).

Hopefully this marks a turning point in the direction of not only Publishing Executive’s reporting, but in the reporting of all the media that cover the magazine and printing industry. Hopefully they’ll awaken from the coma that has produced little more than a sleepy rhetoric of change management and stir the pot a bit. They need to give publishers a sense of urgency. They need to stop rewriting and regurgitating vendor press releases and start doing some hard, studied thinking.

Ultimately - when you get right down to it - the road ahead is uncharted and there isn’t a vendor alive today that has anything close to a solution for the kinds of questions we face. To answer those questions we need journalists, not marketing contacts.

Tags: journalism, magazine publishing, printing

Posted in notes |

[Out of Sight] - A Linkblog

The Religion of Bringing Social to Software
Marc Canter with hits some sweet notes in this rather meaty post on the ever evolving landscape of social data sharing. I especially like the way he distinguishes between "our" open and "their" open.

Selling the Digital Edition
Marcus Grimm of Nxtbook calls me out on my pessimism with regard to the usefulness of the digital magazine. While he's bullish on the format (he has to be - it is his job after all) I still find it a bit awkward.

Hillary Clinton Doesn't Listen to Economists
Robert Reich has an excellent post about how HRC is playing the same kind of sickening political shell game that voters claim to be so tired of. It's patronizing bullshit and a sure signal that she is just there to be there.

Wish I’d seen this
Adam Greenfileld's astute observations of a Web 2.0 Expo panel that he didn't attend. Makes me wish I saw it as well - and that I was sitting next to Greenfield.

Can't Cross A Virtual Wall
Designer Hanyoung Lee has this very interesting take on what the future of traffic signals can hold. It's worth a click through for the mock-up pictures. Just another example of how good design works - improve the function AND the style.

Rejoice Ever More
Wine blogger Tom Wark has a thoughtful post up about the nature of wine reviews and, well, life. His inspiration for the post is the final episode of HBO's John Adams and I find that his sentiment could be well applied to all manner of review, not just w

Twitter Can Be Dangerous
Friend and co-worker daveB has taken the prize for first semi-serious twitter related injury - at least that I'm aware of. I would imagine stories like this are quite common - there should be a group, no? This just goes to show you, attention has value.

Newspapers Confront The Enemy Within
Looks like the traditional firewall between advertising and editorial is slowly coming down. This is an ethical sticking point with a lot of editorial types, but it might just be necessary if traditional media outlets want to stay competitive in the new

The Google economy
Jeff Jarvis does a pretty good job at making sense of the recent misread of Google quarterly earnings by economic pundits. As with most things these days (and especially media) the old tools just don't work anymore.

Web Design of the Times
Khoi Vinh puts his finger on exactly what's going on in the print/web design world. Couldn't have said it better myself: "it's absolutely imperative that a shift in thinking occurs" - "In my opinion, a designer has to learn how to write HTML and CSS"