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Gourmet: The Newest Zombie Media Brand

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Earlier this week there was a bit of hubub around Gourmet magazine, the beloved foodie bible tossed out with the fish guts last year by its cost-chopping publisher, Conde Nast, under the guidance of its knife-sharpener McKinsey. Yesterday morning, Ruth Reichl, the Gourmet editor at the time of its demise, used her Twitter account to turn the heat off any talk that Gourmet was coming back in print form.

“Thanks Tweeps,” she wrote, “you’ve really made my day, week, month with all your support. Re: Gourmet; they’re reviving the brand, not the magazine.Pity.”

Thanks Tweeps, you’ve really made my day, week, month with all your support. Re: Gourmet; they’re reviving the brand, not the magazine.Pity.less than a minute ago via TweetDeckruthreichl
ruthreichl

Distinguishing between channel of distribution and brand is nothing new, especially for print media companies as they try to reinvent their business models. For years, the purveyors of glossy magazines have thought of their titles as having intimate connections with carefully aggregated, loyal, engaged and, to advertisers, highly desirable audiences that will follow a Vogue or a Vanity Fair or a Wired anywhere they might go. Online, events, TV — wherever. It’s a rightly-placed belief that it’s the editorial voice and sensibility that matters, not whether that voice is being distributed on dead trees or in pixels.

As magazine-cum-brand success stories go, Gourmet would seem to have been a classic case study. That’s why so many very vocal readers mourned its end and it’s why Conde Nast feels comfortable with the reincarnation it’s now ordered up, which will come in the form of a free iPad app called Gourmet Live. There’s still brand equity and possibly revenue in them thar hills; how do we suck it dry?

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Is the FCC’s Consideration of Media Ownership Laws a Waste of Time?

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When I first started writing about media seven years ago, the biggest public-policy question was this: How many media outlets should one company be allowed to own in a given market? In those pre-Google IPO, pre-Facebook days, there was a very real concern that big, publicly-owned media companies, like Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. or Clear Channel with thousands of outlets were wielding too much influence over the minds of Americans. Hence, the then-Republican-led FCC’s attempts to relax rules governing media concentration was met with legal opposition persistent enough that it’s still raging today, even as the FCC once again considers those laws.

Today things on the media scene couldn’t be more different. We might still fear the craggy visage of Rupert Murdoch using his newspaper and TV empire to spread his conservative agenda, but there’s probably more reason to worry about the babyfaced Mark Zuckerberg and what he’ll do with your data. If past worries were founded on the idea that a town’s media could essentially be owned by one family, now it’s that all the information you share online will be used in some way you don’t want. For big, old media companies, the period of geography-based expansion — the snapping up of local newspapers and TV and radio stations — is over. Now it’s all about who owns what digital platform.

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  • 18 Jun 2010 at 6:02 PM

The Best Media Writing of the Week: Ebert, Cheezburger, Gillmor and More

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The amazing Robert Ebert details his Twitter addiction and lays down some smart rules for how to use the tool.

I vowed I would never become a Twit. Now I have Tweeted nearly 10,000 Tweets. I said Twitter represented the end of civilization. It now represents a part of the civilization I live in. I said it was impossible to think of great writing in terms of 140 characters. I have been humbled by a mother of three in New Delhi. I said I feared I would become addicted. I was correct.

The idea of the week goes to Dan Gillmor, who argued on Salon that if the U.S. government wants to save the news business then it should subsidize broadband access, not journalists:

If we’re going to spend taxpayers’ money in ways that could help journalism, let’s make that benefit a byproduct of something much more valuable. Let’s build out our data networks the right way, by installing fiber everywhere we can possibly put it. Then, let private and public enterprises light it up.
And at that point, we can step back and allow real competition to reign, not the phony facsimile that passes for broadband in American today, a broadband future that the carriers have loudly proclaimed their intention to control at every level. I’m not minimizing the difficulty of making this work; what I’m describing would come with many complications. But this is worth doing, because we simply can’t trust our future to the cable-phone duopoly or the relatively weak competition we’ve seen from wireless providers.

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  • 17 Jun 2010 at 3:46 PM
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McKinsey Gets Social. Maybe Now CEOs Will Start Listening

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I was initially unmoved by the news earlier this week that McKinsey is doing a joint venture with Nielsen leading the management consultancy to take over BuzzMetrics, one of the many firms out there that analyze what people are saying about companies online. There’s been so much acquisition action in that monitoring space over the years that it was hard to get excited.

But then this morning I read some late coverage of the announcement in the Financial Times that woke me up to the significance of the deal.

What the FT told me that I didn’t know is that NM Incite, as the new company will be called, is the first time McKinsey has attached its name to another company. “We have never done a joint venture of this magnitude before,” McKinsey’s Dan Singer told the FT. That detail got me thinking about how far the incredible popularity of social media has traveled upstream into corporations.

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Some Suggested Taglines for MySpace’s New Ad Campaign

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Tom Anderson MySpaceAd Age has the scoop that MySpace is poking — hahahaha- wrong network — around for an ad agency to do a branding blitz in support of it oh-so-hotly anticipated relaunch. The News Corp.-owned property has been getting pounded by Facebook, even with its big-time PR screw-ups. Global users, according to Ad Age, has dropped from 127 million to 111 million between April 2009 and April 2010. Facebook has about half a billion.

As a way to stop the bleeding, MySpace is getting its functionality changed out to become more friendly to content producers, musicians, gamers, advertisers… in other words, everyone because… the user experience is horrifying. With it, comes a brand overhaul. Write Rupal Parekh and Michael Learmonth, “Industry executives say the News Corp.-owned company recently put out a request for proposals to several creative shops, asking them to help MySpace get the word out about the relaunch, which will include new features to be introduced in stages starting this summer and a revamped site and logo in the fall.”

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  • 15 Jun 2010 at 4:27 PM

A Corporate Website That Doesn’t Suck, Courtesy of Crispin Porter and Bogusky

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I never thought I’d say this, but I just saw a corporate website from an ad holding company that doesn’t completely suck.

For the uninitiated, the lion’s share of the largest ad agencies are owned by a handful of publicly-traded conglomerates with names like Omnicom, Interpublic and WPP that function largely as financial institutions. They’re not typically given much credit by creative types — except when they’re handing over buckets of cash and stock in exchange for an agency. These companies generally play the role of beancounters and aren’t known for adding much to the creative process. And, as you’d expect, their websites are usually lifeless.

A notable exception is the new internet home of MDC Partners, owner of Crispin Porter & Bogusky, one of the more famous agencies in the land. The main attraction on the relaunched site, designed by Crispin, is a map that tracks the comings and goings of key executives. So with a bit of clicking and sliding you could see that Alex Bogusky, the creative legend who now works at he MDC level, is splitting this week between New York and his headquarters in Boulder, Co. You can also see his recent Tweets and a profile. And of course the site also does all the other stuff you’d expect a corporate site to do: investor information, mission statement, etc.

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  • 14 Jun 2010 at 12:47 PM

What the FTC Doesn’t Understand About Journalism

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The FTC probably isn’t going to save journalism, you won’t be shocked to hear.

The agency recently dropped a set of potential policy recommendations resulting from its yearlong investigation into the news business’ commercial woes. It’s a 47-page (with footnotes) round-up of the problems facing news organizations with some surface-level thinking on how to remedy them.

To anyone who’s been paying attention to the news business over the past several years, it’s a work of extreme intellectual myopia. To put it in sports terms (You’re welcome!), it’s a playbook that has only defensive schemes: government subsidies, contracting the scope of fair-use provisions of copyright law, taxes, legalized price-fixing and collusion, “hot news” protections. It’s entirely free of any solutions that foster innovation or entrepreneurialism. It is, to be completely clear, a complete mess.

Nevertheless, journalism does need to be reinvented. To help re-frame the issues, I’ve provided a few recommendations of my own.

1. Stop pretending that newspapers equal journalism.

Throughout the findings newspapers and journalism are used pretty much interchangeably. Newspapers, you would think from reading the report, are the be-all and end-all of newsgathering and their business model needs to be preserved at all costs. Online news sources, on the other hand, are dismissed thusly: “virtually no sites have yet found a sustainable business model that would allow them to survive without some form of funding from non-profit sources.” Um, I guess that’s true unless you think of companies like Gawker Media, Salon, Drudge, Huffington Post and so on. While none of these have models that you’d describe as unimpeachable and while they do, often quite pleasantly, trouble traditional definition of “journalism,” they can’t be ignored. Each has broken news — in some case’s news of the highest order — and thus participates in journalism.

2. Cool down about the “hot news” protections.

“Hot news” would essentially extend copyright protection to the reporting of facts for a certain time. It’s a nice idea that would seem to be completely unenforceable, if not a straight-up violation of the First Amendment. I can see the attraction to protecting meaningful news breaks. But let’s be really honest. A not-so-small portion of newsgathering, even at our most august institutions, is about negotiating a press release from a PR flack a few minutes before your competitor gets it. Is that behavior we really need to protect? And how does social media fit it into this? Will random Twitterers who retweet news breaks suddenly be the subject of litigation because they don’t comply with some “hot news” time frame?

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  • 11 Jun 2010 at 1:40 PM

The Best Media Writing of the Week: Libel, Newsweek, Remnick and Shirky

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Our weekly round-up of the strongest thinking and writing on the media business that you might not have seen.

Clay Shirky tells us to stop worrying and learn to love the fact that any moron can produce content.

The past was not as golden, nor is the present as tawdry, as the pessimists suggest, but the only thing really worth arguing about is the future. It is our misfortune, as a historical generation, to live through the largest expansion in expressive capability in human history, a misfortune because abundance breaks more things than scarcity. We are now witnessing the rapid stress of older institutions accompanied by the slow and fitful development of cultural alternatives. Just as required education was a response to print, using the Internet well will require new cultural institutions as well, not just new technologies.

Newsweek’s Tumblr gives Howard Kurtz some notes on his latest piece.

While journalists get into the business for various reasons — vicarious thrills, investigative zeal, outsize ego — ultimately they’re at the mercy of the marketplace.[ED-as opposed to who? Bricklayers? Florists? Bond traders? This lede is a pretty obvious cliché, Howard; pls rework] And that marketplace seems [‘Seems’ is pretty squishy. Has the marketplace sent a message or not?] to have sent a very discouraging message to Newsweek.

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GM’s ‘Chevy’ Screw-Up: A New Coke for the Twitter Age

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Don McClean speaks out on the Chevy-Chevrolet DebateFor years now and despite all its woes, General Motors has been one of the more aggressive adopters of social marketing tactics among the big old American corporations. It has a social media team that pushes its products and fields complaints, using platforms from Twitter and Facebook down to Gowalla. Social’s been a big at GM for a while, with departed vice chairman Bob Lutz’ Fastlane blog being among the first of such corporate sites to gain traction. But in the new, post-bankruptcy GM social’s going to be an even more important part how the automaker relates to its customers, if we’re to believe this quote from Scott Lawson, director of customer and relationship services:

“In the old GM, we said you need to call us or you need to write us a letter. That’s not treating them how they want to be treated. In the new GM, we’re going to be where our customers want us to be.”

Too bad that doesn’t extend to what customers want to call your most famous products.

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Finally, a Smart Alternative to the AP

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The maturation of the digital news business hasn’t been kind to the Associated Press. In addition to fighting a pointless battle with Google over the distribution of AP articles in its news channel and taking potshots at aggregators, the iconic news association has been dumped by CNN, as the network pushes its own newswire offering. On top of those strategic missteps it’s obvious the world has passed by a service that, not long ago, was indispensable to journalism.

In 2010, it’s pretty clear that the real associated press is comprised of thousands of strong credible voices breaking news and doing sharp analysis on any topic you can name — not a vast network of expensive reporters churning generic content and a revenue model based on overcharging for the privilege of distributing that content. Finally, there’s a service out there that recognizes that fact and is set to help get those voices more eyeballs, especially those eyeballs that are still glued to the proverbial fish wrapper, all while reducing costs for newspaper publisher.

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