Media Companies

The Best Recent Writing (and Ranting) About the Media Business

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The media business, you may have heard somewhere, is in upheaval. Anyone with a stake in the production of content needs smart dissection of business models, careful parsing of data and, of course, pointed investigations that cut through the hype that always accompanies technological change. Too bad strong acts of journalism are few and far between, with most media writers chasing their own tails.

There have, however, been a few standout pieces of reportage and analysis of late, a few of which we’ve assembled below for your convenience.
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Magazine Apps for iPads Need Work. Here Are Five Ways They Can Improve

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I’ve spent a bit of time recently with the iPad, looking at some apps that were developed for magazine brands. It’s an experiment I assumed would be like of the those YouTube videos in which a cat, against all rules of nature, takes to nurturing a bunny or a baby squirrel: cute, compelling and somewhat dread-inducing, because you know this moment of cross-species nurturing won’t last forever.

My conclusion, after looking at 10 or so apps, is that the iPad teat won’t yield much for troubled magazine publishers if they don’t sort out some big problems with both content and commercialization.  You can already find more than a few examples of print titles trying force into the iPad content and design conventions that were honed over print’s long history. That is not a good thing, considered in the light of most print mag’s past attempts to go digital. The development of your average consumer magazine website, with its unpredictable content mix and garish, often Flash-heavy design, makes for a generally clunky experience.

On one hand, the missteps are are acceptable—it is early days after all. On the other, it’s scary, especially if you care about how these businesses will succeed in the future. The good news, of course, is that it’s far from too late to fix what’s wrong. Here are five ways to do it.

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Was Gawker’s Decision to Identify the ‘Racist’ Harvard Emailer Unethical? We Say Yes.

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The notion of online privacy may be nothing more than a “fallacy,” as one New York judge recently opined, but anyone concerned with both the free-flow of information and with being fair to the subjects of news coverage will confront this question:  Do bloggers and journalists have a responsibility to protect the identities of the subjects? We know that sources enjoy all manner of ethical protection, but what of the people we write about, many of whom who are public figures only in the broadest definition of the term?

This issue hit home just last week when a Harvard law student became famous on the web. Or infamous, rather.  After a conversation with a few friends last November about affirmative action, she raised the possibility that race may be a genetic determinant for intelligence. Unwisely, she made this suggestion via email.

Crimson DNAWhen she had a falling out with one of those friends, that friend-turned-enemy disseminated her old email, including her name, campus group affiliations and the fact that she would be starting a federal clerkship in the fall. It quickly went viral, spreading through the Harvard Law community and among Black Law Student Associations at several top law schools, many of whose members sent it along to us at Above the Law. (Fuller back story on this here.)

If nothing else, it was certainly a lesson in being careful about what you say in emails.

What was of interest to us when we broke the story was the reaction on Harvard’s campus, the propriety of disseminating a private email, and the response from recipients of the email — some of whom suggested that her clerkship be taken from her. Engaged by those issues, we chose not to include the student’s name and instead called her by a pseudonym — “Crimson DNA.” Her identity did not seem integral to the story, and our policy, as we’ve stated before, is to maintain the anonymity of law students. We only name names if (a) the name is already mentioned in a public record (like a police report), OR (b) the name is already mentioned in a mainstream media outlet.

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A Fashion Magazine That’s Taking Digital Seriously. Seriously.

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I’m a fashion person. So I don’t read Glamour Magazine for style inspiration. For that, I read Paris Vogue and Purple and V. But you know what? None of that matters, because a significant number of smart, capable women do read Glamour. And they’ve made it the most popular–and arguably the most influential–women’s magazine in the US. A big part of that influence stems from the fact that, unlike a lot of style books, Glamour has adapted with the times. Rather than sit back and let their lunch get eaten by smart blogs like ours, Glamour is taking the web seriously.

No doubt some industry insiders were shocked when the 71-year-old publication won Magazine of the Year at last week’s National Magazine Awards.  The magazine was the only glossy nominated for the new award, which according to the American Society of Magazine Editors website “honors publications that successfully use both print and digital media in fulfilling the editorial mission.” And it represented a victory for hair removal and sundresses over the far weightier issues covered in the likes of  The Atlantic, Fast Company, Men’s Health and New York. (Well, maybe count Men’s Health out of the weighty class.)

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To Truncate or Not to Truncate: An RSS Experiment

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Yesterday we made a decision to truncate the RSS feeds on AboveTheLaw for the next thirty days. RSS subscribers will get a headline and first paragraph, but will have to click to the site to get full stories.

AboveTheLaw.com's shortened RSS feedWe’re far from the first to do it. In fact just recently Gawker joined many more mainstream publishers like the WSJ and FT in truncating its feeds, much to the chagrin of Felix Salmon, who has written extensively on the topic. In our case, the move was prompted as much by my annoyance at the growing group of content thieves scraping our content via RSS (I dealt with two yesterday), as it was by a desire to get some commercial benefit from those readers. We’re a small company with limited resources, and I got fed up wasting valuable time trying to track down these parasites who aren’t only benefiting from our editors’ hard graft but also potentially messing with our search engine results by creating duplicates of our content on other sites.

I say “we” made the decision, but it was hardly unanimous. In fact, our executive editor here, Matt Creamer, bets it won’t work. Here’s an excerpt of an email he sent me on the topic:

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  • 26 Apr 2010 at 7:43 PM

Media Companies Need to Kick Their Ad Dependency

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I recently spoke at the annual conference of the Canadian Media Directors Council in Toronto. It was a good event as these things go, with an impressive speaker lineup (Bill Buxton, Microsoft’s principal researcher, was particularly fascinating), and the only reason I squeaked onto the agenda was that when they asked me if I’d do it, I was the editor of Ad Age – a job I left at the end of 2009 to come here to Breaking Media – and had just written a column on the future of media companies that someone at the CMDC found interesting.

As it turned out, the audience of 700 senior media agency and media owner executives had to listen to the manager of a small, startup digital media company that is still taking its first few tottering steps, telling them how they should prepare their considerably larger businesses for the future. I guess I’m lucky that they were Canadians – too polite to tell the presumptuous little British bloke to pipe down.

The main point I tried to get across (and I think it sort of worked), is that advertising-dependent media companies need to think of themselves as being in the business of providing marketing solutions. Don’t get me wrong. We here at Breaking Media love ads. They help pay our bills and we believe we deliver  an effective suite of advertising services to a growing set of clients who love our highly-engaged, loyal and affluent audience. But a problem arises when the end-all and be-all of a company’s revenue stream is ad sales.

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