Posts tagged ‘iPad’

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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Publishers, Follow The New Yorker on iPad Pricing. Please.

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I currently pay $2.99 a month for access to the The New Yorker on my Kindle. It’s actually a great way to read the magazine’s almost entirely text-driven content. And it’s probably an improvement on print when you consider how hard copies of the New Yorker tend to pile up. With the Kindle subscription, you always have a bunch of them with you and the content tends to stay fresh over time. All said, the Kindle version is handy and priced correctly.

But recently I’d been wondering whether I’d be willing to pay a separate fee when I buy an iPad later this year. Happily, that’s not a decision I’ll have to make.

David Remnick New YorkerYou wouldn’t expect the The New Yorker, whose move to the web been a bit like one of its articles — long, slow, with plenty of twists and turns — to be a trailblazer on anything digital. Yet Editor David Remnick’s announcement this week that it’s offering one pricing option across all platforms except print is a welcome bit of news.

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Beyond the iPad: Get Ready for the Internet of Things

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Earlier this year, at the Abu Dhabi Media Summit, I was struck by a remark that I thought I heard from Ericsson CEO Hans Vestberg. “By 2020,” he said, “50 billion devices will be wirelessly connected to the internet.”

GlowCaps Remind People to Take Their PillsI was going to tweet his statement from @breakingmedia but hesitated because I thought I must have misheard. After all, that’d be more than 10 times the current number of mobile phones in the world—an already incredible 4 and a half billion—and about four web-connected devices for every person on the planet. While those of us who live in the narcissistic media navel of New York are often tempted to imagine that everyone totes an iPhone, iPad and laptop—as well as whatever desktop is getting dusty in their study at home—it seemed a stretch to imagine the average resident of, say, India or China using four or more devices. I concluded that either I wasn’t paying proper attention or Vestberg was indulging in a little bit of corporate boosterism—Ericsson is in the business of enabling mobile connections, so 50 billion of them would be good business for the Swedish equipment manufacturer.

Then, at about the time the iPad was released, I had the chance to talk with David Haight, AT&T’s VP of Business Development, Emerging Devices Organization. Ten minutes of conversation with Haight is enough to change your vision of the future from one where everyone is carrying a wireless internet device like a mobile phone, to one where that device in your hand connects you with an internet of things all around you. Everywhere.

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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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