Passion for Storytelling

We didn’t build the Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves.

Steve Jobs’s Best Quotes - Digits - WSJ (via juliewestfall)

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Steve Jobs’s Best Quotes - Digits - WSJ / via @jenvalentino (via amzam)

The Wall Street Journal

Magazines Flex Their Apps - But Will They Make Any Money From Them?

Beach-goers this summer may have noticed that their favorite magazines — from Time to Vanity Fair to Esquire — have shiny new tablet editions.

Magazine publishers are betting heavily on the tablet platform, aggressively enticing new customers and existing subscribers to embrace their digital versions.

Hearst and Conde Nast both struck deals with Apple in May, permitting consumers to subscribe through the iTunes Store — deals that closely followed redesigned apps from the likes of GQ and Vanity Fair.

Two months later, Time made its biggest tablet-related news to date, announcing it would release tablet editions for the remaining 17 of its 21 titles. Time had already released editions for its four most popular titles, Sports Illustrated, Time, Fortune and People.

“Conde Nast and the others are looking at the tablet market as the promised land that will deliver them from the plight that they are going through in print and online,” said Roger Entner, founder of Recon Analytics, a research and consulting firm.

But the revenue for iPad apps has yet to materialize. Neither Conde Nast, nor Time nor Hearst has provided figures for what they’re making off their iPad apps.

Innovation in turbulent times

News organizations have an innovation problem. Especially print media. As they gingerly wade into digital, their ability to foster innovation becomes more critical than ever. In today’s fast-changing landscape, they should view innovation as their main weapon against direct competitors and emerging players such as tech startups,.

Unfortunately, print media appears ill-equipped to innovate. The reasons are many.

– The weight of the past. Looking back ten years, making changes to a newspaper or magazine used to be a lengthy and complicated process, with technical, industrial as well as political implications. On the internet, by contrast, major changes are a only few lines of code away. Modern CMS (Content management systems) are designed to allow and sometimes encourage modifications and adaptation to rapidly changing needs. As for applications, a minuscule team needs only a couple of months to engineer an impactful product.

– The takeover of the bean-counters. In the newspaper industry, years of revenue depletion have shifted tremendous power to the financial guys. They performed as requested by shareholders (especially because journalist-bred managers lost their credibility).They cut, downsized, optimized. Not exactly the best petri dish for creativity.

– A risk averse culture. This is mostly a consequence of the previous point. Cost-centered management, added to gloomy business conditions, won’t foster initiative and risk-taking. The result is you will not see a group of journalists putting their job in play in order to launch a new product they believe in.

– No management reform. Each time I look at a newspaper’s org chart, I’m struck by the complexity of the management structure, by the level of red tape still remaining. Curiously enough, very little has been done about it. (In most cases, it has to do with a spreadsheet-driven management unwilling to fight organizational conservatism).

As a result, very few news organizations prepared themselves to switch to a genuine competitive innovation model, more comparable to the one used by technology companies. Having said that, questions arise: How to create an environment that will stimulate new ideas; how to restore a risk-taking culture; should innovation be mostly internalized or outsourced; how to select the best decision-making processes for the new digital-driven world?

The newsonomics of what to read next

We’d all like to know what comes next. That can be a spiritual quest, a political one, or in the case of news publishers, one that would help them know what it is readers who land on their site would like to read next.

A new batch of news-oriented tech companies are hitting the marketplace, claiming to better understand — and help news publishers act on — what readers are more likely to read next. Know that, and publishers can better satisfy those readers, getting them to click on more pages, providing more ad-targetable data, and growing their businesses on the relative cheap.

It’s another riff on publishers’ renewed concentration on core readers, satisfying them more deeply and getting them to spend more time on site and maybe even pay for a digital subscription. It’s another way of saying we need more revenue per customer (The newsonomics of ARPU). New customers aren’t being minted overnight (most news sites’ unique visitor growth has stalled), so it’s time to improve the experience of current customers.

In macro terms, if the U.S. newspaper industry could use these newer technologies to improve revenue by 10 percent, that would be worth about $300 million a year, collectively. That’s a big number in the new no- to low-growth era we’re in.

Three companies — YieldBot, Jumptime, and Outbrain — are among those who offer news and media companies differing approaches to better reader engagement. Each has its own story to tell, and each is emblematic of a wider trend in the industry: mastering how the digital business is oh-so-different than print.

Cosmo Launches iPad-Only Magazine for Men

Cosmopolitan, long the resident authority on heterosexual dating and mating for teenage and adult women alike, has launched its first magazine for men, CFG: Cosmo for Guys.

Men won’t find this guide to women by women on newsstands, however. Instead, CFG is launching solely on the iPad, available via the App Store [iTunes link] for $1.99 per issue, $3.99 per month or $19.99 per year.

Cosmo Editor-in-Chief Kate White believes there is a demand for the product. Approximately 7.4% of Cosmo‘s readership is male, according to data from MRI. And more than one-third of visitors to cosmo.com every month are men, White says.

Since White arrived at the magazine in 1998, she says she has received hundreds of letters and emails from men who confessed that they were stealing their girlfriends’ or their wives’ copies when they weren’t around.

Why media companies should be braver with apps

Just a few short months ago the arrival of the iPad was being hailed as the saviour of the newspaper and magazine business. After the initial enthusiasm the realisation that apps are not a simple quick fix for the media industries malaise has led to a rapid growth in cynicism and caution. It reminds of the early response of the magazine industry to the emergence of the web: “It’s interesting but there is no money in it – so we will wait and see.”

It is estimated that some 48 million iPads could be sold this year, but other tablets on Google Google
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts a… Read more
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companies google ’s open source Android platform will outsell the apple Loading… companies apple-daily solution within two years (our report on mobile publishing has much, much more on this).

Meanwhile we have already reached the point where one per cent of the world’s web traffic is driven by iPads. That is a staggering rate of growth.

Vogue Casts 1,000 ‘Influencers’ for Network

It’s not enough that a brand like Vogue can sway people to buy certain products by virtue of its clout. Brands today want to use the magazine’s readers to spread the word about their products.

To that end, the Condé Nast fashion bible has launched the Influencer Network, a platform for advertisers that want to get on the social media bandwagon. The Influencer Network is a panel of some 1,000 women deemed to have sway over other women, based on how active they are on social networks like Facebook and Polyvore, a fashion site where people create collages of outfits and share them with other members.

“There are a lot of people who are self-appointed experts,” says Susan Plagemann, vp, publisher of Vogue. “The biggest difference is, we’re developing a program of ambassadors who spread the word digitally across a very big network about the access that’s been given because of Vogue.”

Panel members, who aren’t compensated, are asked to provide feedback for clients on anything from new products, upcoming fashion collections, and ad creative. They’re encouraged to talk about the products on their social networks, raising awareness of the products and Vogue itself. Plagemann says more than eight marketers have used the network since it launched early this year, noting that “word of mouth has become one of the biggest influencers, along with advertising, in terms of driving purchase.” She adds that Vogue’s marketing team devised the criteria to identify individuals who are “the highest caliber of people in this sphere of influence.”

Publisher Brings Digital Shopping to Its Magazines

The photos and quizzes in Hearst’s online magazines are about to get a digital upgrade.

On Monday, Hearst Magazines Digital Media will announce two new features for its online publications that will make it easier for readers to buy the products they see on the page. Kristine Welker, chief revenue officer for Hearst Digital, said the publication wants its magazines to be a “shoppable experience” for users.

One partnership with Pixazza, a Mountain View, Calif., company that makes images interactive, will allow readers to click on photos and get more information about the products featured in the image. The first brand to use the technology will be Glidden Paint, an Akzo Nobel Paints brand.

Users who visit the Web site for House Beautiful will be able to scroll over the images in photo galleries on the site and see a selection of paint colors similar to the ones in the photo, the name of the paint color they saw in the photo and the paint’s price. From there, users will be able to go the brand’s Web site and, perhaps, make a purchase.

Is Print Dead? No, Just Moving Online

New data from eMarketer shows just how quickly the print industry is losing its audience. In 2010, people spent 9% less time reading newspapers and magazines as compared to 2009, while in 2009 they already spent 12% less than in 2008. Assuming that not everyone is taking speed reading classes, newspapers seem to be losing both readers and readers’ patience.

According to eMarketer, the average American spends only thirty minutes reading newspapers and twenty minutes reading magazines per day. It’s significantly less compared to more than four hours of TV and video consumption and more than two and a half hours that people spend online.

The only two mediums that are taking more of people’s time are Mobile and Internet. In 2010, time spent on Mobile increased by 28.2% and is now 50 minutes on average per day, while time spent online grew by 6.2% to 2:35 hours. TV viewing has remained stable. It seems that Mobile and Internet are crowding out the print industry.

But wait, the decline of print does not mean that the news industry is dying. According to a Pew research published in September, more Americans are getting their news online. The study shows that, 34% of users responded that they got their news the day before from online sources, while only 31% reported receiving their news from a daily newspaper.

Therefore, it is not the newspaper industry that is dying, but rather the printing presses that are becoming silent. In addition, print is becoming more and more obsolete, as people turn to new tablets and online newspapers. There are two main reasons for this. First, print newspapers literally deliver yesterday’s news. Second, the entire printing and distribution operation is expensive and cumbersome, considering that readers can just as easily download the same content in seconds online.