Week in Review

Short reads on a Saturday morning:

• Gannett's head of digital is leaving the media giant but has handed it a present, of sorts: a long memo on why the industry's fascination with paywalls is wrong-headed.

The Gannett Blog, an independent Blogspot site that keeps an eye on Gannett, reports that Chris Saridakis wrote a 1,700 word letter to employees expressing his views.

"I do not believe a paid content/pay wall strategy will work for newspaper companies. I think the industry is going about it all wrong," Saridakis writes. "If everyone decides to charge for content that a consumer will need to pay for based on usage, then every newspaper company will have learn how to market like a consumer packaged goods company overnight. They will have to build consumer experiences at the same level that Apple, Coca-Cola and Procter & Gamble do every day."

Saridakis is as big a believer in mobile as TNM: "(Mobile) is the next frontier, and is not that far off. In fact, having spent half my time in front of advertiser clients, the opportunity for mobile is in reach. We cannot afford to miss this one. Just like the computer, mobiles devices will get cheaper, faster, easier to use and the operating systems and applications will all become standardized. Advertisers are waiting to take advantage of this sector."

Saridakis is leaving Gannett to take a position as CEO of Global Marketing Services for GSI Commerce, a provider of e-commerce and interactive marketing services for brands and retailers. Prior to joining Gannett he headed PointRoll, a digital marketing services company that is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Gannett.

• The April 30th date came and past and with it the official closing of 19 of the 23 titles that Reed Business Information announced would be closed. Four titles that made up Supply Chain Group found a new home, as well as three titles that Jim Langhenry has managed (Control Engineering, Plant Engineering and Consulting-Specifying Engineer). The other titles had their websites shuttered yesterday.

As I wrote on Friday, the divestiture will be felt throughout the industry, and offshore, as well. Reed Data Services, housed on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts, is also being downsized as circulation and data services that once assisted RBI titles are being scaled back. Only services related to Reed Construction Data will remain.

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← It's one thing to conceive of an innovative new product, it's another to actually launch it.

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• The week ended with the launch of the 3G model of Apple's iPad, as well as the word that H-P would not be launching its Slate tablet as expected, and the Microsoft is not going to develop its much discussed Courier tablet.

For H-P, by acquiring Palm, they have also brought Palm's WebOS in-house. Rather than launching their Slate with Windows, which would have resulted in a slower, more bloated machine, they will now have the option to develop WebOS or go with Android.

For Microsoft, the Courier may have caught the imagination of some, but in the end it was all vaporware.

Photoblogging Friday - 17

Friday is here and with it another edition of Photoblogging Friday, TNM's way to end the week.  The week has certainly been interesting with more Apple-Adobe battles, the launch of the 3G version of the iPad, the announcement that both HP and Microsoft are delaying or killing their own tablet plans, and finally the inevitable end to the B2B publishing giant Cahners, destroyed by the media wizards at Reed.

Our contributor/editor Dean Brierly is on the road so before he left he sent along this week's contribution to PbF (my guess is he's off being depressed after his Red Wings lost last night to the Sharks). Take it away Dean:

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This week’s Photoblogging Friday is dedicated to the memory of Myron H. Davis, a former Life photographer who died tragically in a fire in his home in Hyde Park, Chicago, on April 17, 2010.

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Myron H. Davis, 1953, from the set of From Here to Eternity.  →

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Born on July 3, 1919, Davis was Life’s youngest staff photographer when he joined the magazine in 1941. Two years later he covered five amphibious invasions in the Southwest Pacific under the command of General Douglas MacArthur’s headquarters until being knocked out of action with a serious case of malaria.

Following the war, he freelanced for numerous magazines, and also covered the filming of From Here to Eternity for Columbia Pictures in 1953. That assignment resulted in his best-known photograph, depicting stars Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr in a torrid clinch on an Oahu beach. Davis also took the last photograph of actress Carole Lombard at a 1941 war bonds rally hours before her death in a plane crash.

Despite his accomplishments, Davis lapsed into undeserved obscurity in his later years until Chicago photographer/collector David R. Phillips helped organize Davis’ archives and facilitated several major articles on his work for Black & White magazine.

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You can read more interviews with photographers at Dean Brierly's website, Photographers Speak.

Reed divestiture hits offshore unit, as well; three additional magazines find new homes with former publisher

Today, being April 30, is D-Day for many of the publications that Reed Business Information announced would be closed. A trip to the Construction Equipment website now results in a bounce to a corporate page that summarizes the April 16 announcement.

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← All that's left of the once mighty RBI-US

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While it is possible that some of the magazines assets may still be sold, the ripple effects of the divestiture will continue throughout the industry.

One unit that is being effected is RBI's own Reed Data Services, housed on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts. Reed Data Services provides circulation, fulfillment, research, and other service for the RBI stateside titles and employed about 200 people. Now, according to a local report, only services tied to Reed Construction Data will remain.

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As I wrote a few days after the RBI announcement, the divestiture of the Reed titles could have presented an incredible opportunity to launch a new business. The B2B industry is horribly behind in both web and mobile media and the door is wide open to investment.

Unfortunately, the financial community is divided into two segments: the NY based PE firms that have just about had it with B2B, and the often West Coast firms that shy away from anything related to print and opportunities that not 100 percent technology related.

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The MMH website is still live, unlike other RBI titles, but continues to say that MMH is set to close today. →

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As a result, the only two asset purchases ahve so far been announced.

The first involved the Supply Chain Group made up of old Cahners legacy title Modern Materials Handling, as well as Logistics Management, Supply Chain Management Review and Material Handling Product News. The deal was financed by EH Publishing along with the former management team of the group. The new entity will be called Peerless Media.

Although the corporate website for EH Publishing is, well, nothing to write home about, the individual property sites, like that for Electronic House are well designed.

The second purchase was announced this afternoon as Jim Langhenry and Steven Rourke have formed a new company and picked up  Control Engineering, Consulting-Specifying Engineer and Plant Engineering from RBI. The new company will be called CFE Media. These are books that Langhenry has been directly involved in for a number of years. (Langhenry was publisher of Plant Engineering while I was publishing two magazines at Cahners, later Reed in the early nineties.)

Of the remaining magazines, the R&I/Chain Leader and construction group hold out great promise. While both RBI groups reside within crowded fields, neither industry is well served online -- and certainly not via mobile or tablet.  I suspect however, that additional management acquisitions will be announced for these groups, as well.

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I am not optimistic about these management buyouts. Unless these buyers are able to secure a nest egg worth of funds, the RBI titles will have to be run on a shoestring budget. Although the new companies being formed will not have the corporate overhead of a Reed, they will also not have the internal services either (though I recognize, having worked at major publishing firms, how the P&L's of publishing units can be overcharged by other internal units).

Nonetheless, I am sure that both new companies, and any others that arise from the ashes of RBI, will be run by motivated, experienced publishers.

Now the race will be on to see if the old brands, including the RBI titles, will be able to make the transition to new media products, or whether a new company, possibly without any interest in print at all, arises to take advantage of the wide open field.

Short takes on a Friday morning: Lala to shut down; Motorola waits for Droid results; iPad 3G launches today

Lala is about to shut down. The music streaming service has posted a notice on its home page informing users that the service will be shut down on May 31st and that it is no longer accepting new users.

Apple acquired Lala last year and speculation was that Apple wanted to bring in the engineers and concepts from Lala and incorporate them into iTunes. Lala scans the hard drives of users to create an online music library. This cloud would then stream a user's music to their devices.

Lala is being shut down just prior to the Worldwide Developer Conference Apple holds in June. Coincidence? WWDC is being held June 7-11 and it is expected Apple will officially unveil (as opposed to Gizmodo doing it for them) their new iPhone models.

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Motorola's earning report confirms that Apple is now the largest U.S. based mobile phone manufacturer. Motorola sold 8.5 million phones in the last quarter, versus 8.8 million iPhones.

Apple's status has far more to do with Motorola, however, than the popularity of the iPhone. Motorola sold 46.1 million Razrs four years ago when Motorola was a bigger player.

Motorola may be on a comeback, though, as it has jumped on the Android bandwagon with its Driod model, which the company is heavily promoting.

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Apple retail stores will be closed from 4:00 to 5:00 p.m. (local time) today as the stores prepare for the launch of the iPad 3G. The closing is pretty much a gimmick as the iPad 3G models really no different (other than the 3G capability, of course) than the WiFi-only models released on April 3. But Apple likes this kind of dramatics.

While the introduction of the iPhone 3G was the real catalyst for Apple's dramatic growth in cellphone sales, don't look for the same kind of sales jolt from this launch. Many iPad users are perfectly satisfied with the WiFi only models and will leave 3G connectivity to their smartphones.

The next really important iPad launch will occur next month when the tablet becomes available in Europe. Pre-orders will being on May 10th.

Sadly, it looks like we will continue to be talking about Apple a lot thanks to HP's and Microsoft's decisions to kill or delay the launch of their own tablets (though it is doubtful that Microsoft's Courier was ever a real product). In the meantime, Dell continues to release their own tablets. Dell's newest tablets, and their first attempts to compete with the iPad, will be Android-based and Engadget believes they will be seen this summer.

Ex-Buzzwire CEO Greg Osberg becomes new publisher in Philly; Newsweek, CNET & Kaplan part of resume

Buzzwire may not be a very strong player in the mobile space, but at least it was in the mobile space. Today Greg Osberg who was CEO of Buzzwire, and former head of CNET, was named publisher of the Daily News and Inquirer in Philadelphia, pending completion of the auction formalities.

Osberg, 52, who has root in Philadelphia where his mother still lives, will, it is thought, try and take the Philly papers into the mobile and tablet publishing age.

"I've spent 30 years in the traditional and digital news business, and I know that to be successful, it all starts with content and the relationships you have with your audiences," Osberg is quoted in the company's release announcing the hiring. "We want to build on our reputation for creating compelling journalism of the highest quality, creating an unparalleled resource for news and entertainment."

Osberg career includes eight years as VP/Ad Sales at U.S. News & World Report as well as another eight year tour at Newsweek in the early nineties. He left Newsweek to join CNET where he stayed two years before leaving for Kaplan Professional, then off to BrassRing.com, back to Newsweek where he served as President, then Buzzwire.

Things did not end well at Buzzwire as the start-up had funding problems at the end of its life. The company worked with carriers like Verizon and AT&T to stream news and video to cell phones via the rudimentary web browsers found on many low-end phones. The features offered by Buzzwire were already made outdated by the introduction of the iPhone and other smartphones that offered consumers full (almost) web browsing on their mobile devices, as well as the growth in mobile news applications, such as those found in the iTunes app store.

Buzzwire's website appears to the last updated back in March of last year.

Microsoft's Courier tablet turns out to be vapor ware; highly anticipated tablet never had a launch window

Gizmodo, the same folks that brought you the iPhone caper, has confirmed that Microsoft will not be producing their Courier tablet after all.

The Courier was a widely touted, never seen or officially talked about tablet to be produced by Microsoft. The tablet was demoed in animated videos on YouTube but never in the wild, leading some to question the very existence of the project.

As you can see in the video below, the vision for the Courier was very different from the iPad, which specializes in media and games. The Courier, instead, was more of a personal planner that depended on handwriting with a stylus instead of a virtual keyboard.

Yesterday, HP let it slip that it wasn't releasing its Slate anytime soon either. It's possible that HP has decided that if it were going to release a new tablet it might as well use the WebOS it now controls through its acquisition of Palm. But, of course, this kind of a radical course correction -- the Slate was supposed to use Windows -- would mean a significant delay in launching the Slate.