Posts
Short reads for a Saturday morning:
• This week was all about newspaper firms reporting Q1 earnings, and the spin that usually accompanies the results. The New York Times Company, McClatchy, Media General, Gannett, Lee Enterprises and Journal Communications all reported similar earnings: net income up thanks to cost cutting, print revenue continued to decline, but at a slower pace than last year.
Publications like B2B Editor & Publisher took the spin and ran with it, demonstrating once again why many trade publications have lost credibility.
• I didn't review the Time Magazine app when it first came out mainly because it is wasn't exactly revolutionary. But three weeks after the launch of the iPad, and the iPad app store, it is obvious that Time's strategy of releasing a new app every week is paying dividends: the app is consistently in the Top 20 of paid news apps (even though each week's app is tracked individually). Despite the uproar over charging $4.99 for the app (that is, giving no discount off the cover price for the tablet version), the app is doing very well and proving to be a very smart marketing move.
• Two posts revolved around Amazon and the Kindle
• Four of RBI's 23 closed magazines got new life when Brian Ceraolo formed a new company, Peerless Media, to take back the Supply Chain Group. The new company will now take over the titles Logistics Management, Modern Materials Handling, Supply Chain Management Review and Material Handling Product News.
So much for the idea that Reed didn't want to sell the titles, huh?
• Blue Toad released a load of iPad apps for Modern Luxury this week -- eight on Thursday and another on Friday (they were actually released to Apple earlier, of course, but this is why they made their appearance in the iTunes store). The apps are simple flip books, without additional new content added to the issues (like audio and video, for instance), but they are easy to use and so far appear not to be as "buggy" as apps released by some other digital publishing vendors.
We still await the first awe-inspiring iPad magazine app, however.
• Flyp did not make into the tablet era, apparently. Flyp Media announced that due to a lack of funding, and unable to survive off of its advertising base, it is shuttering its flip book, web-only magazine.
The news brought back memories of Balthaser Studios, and their pioneering first web site. The Shockwave animated website premiered in 1999. This being the age of dial-up, Balthaser's animated site would take forever to load, then would explode on the screen, shocking the uninitiated, and proudly proclaiming that this was the future of the Internet. It wasn't. And Macromedia was acquired by Adobe and the rest is history, as they say. The web may be filled with Flash videos and animations, but by-and-large, the web is not the kind of place envisioned by Balthaser back in '99. But for a rush of nostalgia, go visit the original Balthaser Studios website.
Saturday, April 24, 2010
Week in Review
Friday, April 23, 2010
Photoblogging Friday - 16
An ugly week of earning reports from newspaper companies has ended and the only lesson to be learned is that which could have been learned from Trading Places: invest in pork bellies and frozen concentrated orange juice.
Yesterday I stumbled upon the American Memory site that houses photographs from the Chicago History Museum. The Photographs from the Chicago Daily News 1902-1933 is what got be thinking that it would be nice to include a photograph here for our traditional Photoblogging Friday feature.
Chicago Daily News negatives collection,
Chicago History Museum. →
The Chicago Daily News was an afternoon paper that published for a bit over 100 years and closed about two years before I finished getting my J degree -- essentially ending any chance I had of getting a good job at a daily newspaper in the Midwest (so off to LA for me).
The two photographs I've selected are of favorite subjects of mine: Clarence Darrow, seen during the original trial-of-the-century, the Leopold and Loeb case, and Ty Cobb, baseball's greatest hit-for-average star. Growing up in Detroit, Cobb was as a local hero -- until I learned his story and discovered the man was from Georgia and a true SOB.
← Ty Cobb, SDN-051967,
Chicago Daily News negatives collection,
Chicago History Museum.
But one thing you could say about Cobb was that he knew what to do with his money. Cobb started investing in Coca-Cola way back in 1907, the exact same year this photography of him was taken, eventually securing 20,000 shares and a couple of bottling operations. There is no record of Cobb investing in a newspaper company.
Barnes & Noble updates NOOK OS; adds web browser, Read in Store streaming, and two Android games
Barnes & Noble released a significant update to its Nook reader OS, 1.3, adding a few features, and promising to release an app for the iPad in order to keep up with Kindle.
The NOOK
The new NOOK UI includes additions to the five icons displayed along the bottom, adding Games, WiFi, Audio, and the browser.
The most significant addition is the WiFi-only web browser which is based on the Android web kit, bringing NOOK users an experience more in-line with some smartphones -- unlike the text based Kindle web browser.
The 1.3 update gives owners two Android based games, Chess and Sudoku, which gives you a bit of an idea of the kinds of games that will work best on the Nook. To exploit the update Barnes & Noble has produced a television ad, something of a departure for a company which has not been an aggressive marketer in the past.
Time Magazine: the weekly release of iPad apps exploits the marketing potential of Apple's iTunes store
April 3 was launch day for the iPad, a day where around 300,000 or so customers received their tablets via UPS, unboxed them and immediately began downloading apps. Time Magazine was one of the handful of publishers that was ready to go from Day One.
Time took advantage of the opportunity by putting Steve Jobs on the cover -- a not so subtle move on the publisher's part, but one that certainly got the attention of iPad owners. The reviews for iPads owners was mixed -- nice app, but $4.99? -- but iPad owners were hungry to test out their new tablets and Time was there to take advantage.
For many iPad owners, the idea that a publisher would price their app at print levels stings a little. But Time, like the WSJ decided not to discount their first tablet product. The WSJ, though, decided to create a free app, but then charge a bundle for a subscription. The result is that the app has been a popular download, as well as a generally panned app. Of 590 reviews in iTunes, 62 percent of reviewers have give the WSJ app a one-star rating -- the lowest possible.
In the end, though, one has to admit that Time's strategy of launching a new app every single week is marketing genius. The biggest issue facing app developers who create iPhone and iPad apps is that it is easy to get lost in the iTunes app store. Unless you have created an app that can generate instant buzz and have your app listed in the top seller's list, an app can quickly get lost among the thousands upon thousands of other apps available.
Upon release, a new app will appear on the first page of its category, but after a few days will drop off that first page and most likely into obscurity. But the Time app, because a new one is released every week, always is visible, always listed on the first page.
In addition, because Apple counts individual app sales, not the cumulative sales of all of Time's app sales, it is clear that the weekly release strategy is working. No single issue of Time leads news app sales, but the publisher has all four of its apps listed in the Top 20 of paid news apps. Further proof that the strategy is working is that the April 12 issue, the one all those early adapters downloaded, is not their best seller to date -- that goes to last week's issue, April 26.
The newest issue, May 3, is already listed as the 13th highest paid news app. The Time strategy seems to be working. And judging by the reviews, users are already used to Time charging $4.99 an issue.
Ultimately, Time will have more competition in the iTunes app store. But Time's first mover strategy has been a success. The app itself will need to continue to evolve as iPad users are generally disappointed in the efforts of newspaper and magazine publishers so far. The lack of interactivity and creativity in design has only reinforced the notion that publishers are too conservative in their approach to tablet publishing. But Time's decision to launch early and often has been a great marketing move.
Update: Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times has his own review of Alan Brinkley's new biography of Henry R. Luce, the founder of Time Magazine, entitled The Publisher
.On Tuesday of this week, I wrote a piece that was ostensibly about Amazon's Kindle store and how it might actually be helped by Apple's iPad. But the genesis of that post was the first review of Brinkley's biography of Luce, published the previous day in the NYT and written by Janet Maslin. I am currently reading The Publisher
on my iPad and will report back on the experience. I think, though, that Maslin's and Keller's reviews will more than suffice.
ABC Interactive promotes third party mobile platform; Verve Wireless gets nod from auditer
In one of the strangest press releases I've read in a while, the Audit Bureau of Circulation's interactive unit announced that "it is teaming with Verve Wireless to audit newspapers’ mobile content delivered via the Verve publishing platform". Times must be tough at the ABC for them to so openly support one mobile vendor.
I assume that the ABC will treat newspapers served by other mobile publishing platforms fairly, so maybe this is the first in a long line of "ABC partners with so-and-so" press releases. In any case, Verve Wireless's PR team should be congratulated for the marketing coup.
The bottom line, of course, is that newspapers are blowing it with mobile the same way they blew it on the web. The growth of RSS readers for mobile devices is evidence enough that mobile phone and tablet users want newspaper content. There is already money being made in mobile news, its just not going into the pockets of media companies.
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Amazon blows out its numbers; Kindle Store now has more than 500,000 books; no word on Kindle reader sales
Just yesterday morning I wrote a post where I said that Amazon should thank Apple for saving Kindle. I was referring to the Kindle Store and their new app, not the actual Kindle
Well, today Amazon posted their Q1 earnings and it was a blow out. Sales were up 46 percent to $7.13 billion. Net operating income rose 62 percent to $394 million. All-in-all, a fantastic earnings report.
← The Kindle app on the iPad
Amazon continues to not report its actual Kindle e-reader sales, though the company was more than happy to brag about the growth of the Kindle Store itself. Amazon now has over 500,000 books available in Kindle editions. The company has also introduced a self-service vehicle so that publishers around the world can upload and make available their books in Spanish, Portuguese and Italian to customers worldwide in the Kindle Store. The Kindle Digital Text Platform previously was worked for English, French and German.
Apple's iPad was introduced on April 3, so any iPad effect will not be learned and reported on until July. But since Amazon does not report Kindle reader sales, the next report will not have to compare Kindle sales to iPad sales. It will be interesting to learn, though, if the iPad has led to an increase in Kindle Store sales of books and periodicals.
