Magazines

The next CEO is a big roll of the dice, as the gaming table shrinks. There’s little room for error. Pick the right new leader and the Times has improved its chances for survival; pick wrong and these key years of 2012-2014, as news crosses over into a mainly digital business, will be cited in the obit. AP faces a similar tension as it seeks a successor for long-time CEO Tom Curley. Dow Jones, cushioned by parent News Corp.’s better-lined pockets, too, is finalizing its CEO search. Put them together, and it’s a signal moment for American news media, as three top positions open themselves up to possibility, and imagination, simultaneously.

Forget “content wants to be free.” Now content wants a fee. And everyone from Time Inc to The New York Times to the Memphis Commercial Appeal to Hulu’s co-owners (Fox, Disney, and Comcast) see gold. They see another digital revenue stream, in addition to advertising or to cable subscription fees. Yet they are increasingly believing they’ve got to up the ante (and Hulu is raising new funds to buy original programming) to compete and to win those consumer dollars. News companies — at least one in ten U.S. daily newspapers and many consumer magazines — are rapidly embracing digital circulation revenue and All-Access. Yet results have been quite uneven. That makes sense: Consumers will pay for digital news, feature, and entertainment content, but they don’t want to overpay, and they’ll increasingly be forced to make choices. Buy this; let that go.

Getting All-Access right — pricing, real tablet- and smartphone-appropriate apps, customer ease, giving subscribers cross-title benefits — is one of the biggest tasks for news and magazine publishers this year.

We can point to three major phenomena that profoundly changed the news landscape this year. Each offers up its own half-formed metrics for that magic formula in process, and each has dramatically changed the possibilities of news, each largely positive:

1) The transcendant transformative age of the tablet
2) The dawn of digital circulation
3) Social curation joins editorial curation:

Now let’s turn the news and magazine industry, and ask a few questions:

–What’s the difference between a shipping fee and a subscription?
–What’s the difference between a buyer and a reader?
–What’s the difference between a newspaper subscription and a membership that gets you “free” media?

With the launch of Livestand, we see the beginning of Aggregator Wars 2.0, to be fought on a tablet near you.

Livestand pushes the question: How are we going to receive news and features via the tablet, through individual apps (paid or free) or through an aggregator? And how are publishers going to monetize their content and audiences, as those audiences move dramatically from newspaper, magazine and broadcast to the tablet? A Pew data point: “A majority, say the tablet takes the place of what they used to get from a print newspaper or magazine (59 percent) or as a substitute for television news (57 percent).” (See “The Newsonomics of the Missing Link,”) So let’s look at the Newsonomics of Livestand.

Far more important for Apple to maintain the iPad as the best, most complete way to do our digital reading. Readers don’t care about the tiffs between Apple and publishers; we all just want everything in one orderly place (nothing hursts like an incomplete Newsstand). Yes, Apple will go some potential revenue, by giving up the attempt to choke off 30% of publisher sub revenue ’til the end of time. Its gains, though, may be impressive.

Inevitably, many consumers will buy subscriptions through Apple. That’s a good thing – and a lead list for newspaper companies. Let Apple sign up new subscribers, happily providing the 30% commission. Even if the publisher doesn’t get much customer data (about 50% are withholding it, given the Apple-offered opportunity to opt out), the publisher retains an enviable relationship to that reader. It’s called the daily product. Each day, readers get the news products, and they can receive “all-access” offers. To Rob Grimshaw’s point, these offers don’t need to be seen as anti-Apple offers. They simply offer readers more choice, and who could argue with that?

Treat News ADD: In a world of plenty, really infinities of news, opinion and information, it’s not how much content you can push to the market, it’s how much reader attention you can earn and depend on. In describing Domino, Godin says, “The only asset we care about is attention.” You’ve got to ask, he says, “What are you doing with the attention you have.” That’s a highly relevant question. In print, news publishers used to engage lots of reader attention, gaining four hours or more per month of attention (reading time) of 40%-plus of the households in their markets. Online, most news sites have gotten 10-15 minutes per month of reader engagement, reader attention. The tablet, and e-readers, offer new opportunities in treating this attention deficit disorder, with the early signs showing more attention spent. Innovative approaches to publishing — what you offer, how you offer, how you package, how you engage readers — can be the best medicine. “It’s a huge opportunity for journalists. They can be the concierge of attention,” he says, as editors pointing to best, most useful content, their own or others.

Digital circulation money, though it may the highest profile part of this story, isn’t the most curious issue involved here. There are at least three big issues for media companies — and you can put Netflix, Hulu and Rhapsody in the mix here — surfacing here:

Selling a customer across all media types, including print, with the new all-access media consumer promise — a cornerstone of many next-generation business models.
Unifying the customer experience as we digidextrous readers (and listeners and watchers) move from desktop to smartphone to tablet and back and forth over the course of our days.
Sophisticated ad targeting. Yes, new digital circulation money — has it finally arrived? — seems like a godsend, but it’s a small godsend compared to the amount of digital advertising spending to be available to media over the next five years.