Posts
Short reads on a Saturday morning:
• Not much to report this week, other than a near complete meltdown of the financial system. Oh well. If you missed the excitement of Thursday's near collapse of the stock market you can get a feel for the drama with my afternoon post from that day.
• The Washington Post announced that they were putting Newsweek up for sale. You can see a video from "The Daily Show" of an interview with Jon Meacham to the right. (That's → way.)
I wrote several posts this week about the sale and my own experiences with the Washington Post Company, specifically its old PostNewsweek Tech Media division. I deleted them all because I think few people would have believed the crazy stories and would think I made them up. Let's just say that my experiences with the company were enough to make me think that a move to Washington DC would be a very bad idea. In 2006, the Post decided to sell off that division, and now Newsweek is on the blocks. Next should be the Post itself. But I'll leave that subject for another day.
• TNM posted an interview with new Sporting News publisher Jeff Price and his plans for his publication. Price is the former head of digital for Sports Illustrated and now gets a chance to guide the fate of one of the nation's oldest publications.
One of the first changes Price implemented was converting his web-only Sporting News Today daily news product from a free service to a paid subscription. He also brought in digital magazine company Zinio to manage the web product, as well as using Zinio to distribute the product for the iPad (seen here at right).
Some time this summer they will launch a separate dedicated, co-branded app that will be able to take advantage of another of Price's moves -- partnering with CineSport, a syndicated sports video company to bring highlights and team specific multimedia to the Sporting News' electronic media products.
• The week ended with no word from RBI about the fate of the remaining closed B2B magazine -- specifically the remaining construction titles. The thought is that they will also go to the former management teams in an attempt to keep them out of the hands of other, more well funded competitors.
• Speaking of B2Bs: Canon Communications bought a blog. Pharmalot, and more specifically, its owner Ed Silverman, will be joining the trade magazine publisher. Silverman will continue to manage the blog, but will now contribute to the company's other properties as Editor-at-Large, and will be "helping spearhead further development of Canon’s digital assets, including webcasts and podcasts." A good move by Canon Communications parent Apprise Media.
Saturday, May 8, 2010
Week in Review
Friday, May 7, 2010
Photoblogging Friday - 18
It's Friday and I'm certainly glad to see it end. The Dow ended the day only down 140 points, and everybody seems to think that is good news.
But Friday also means another edition of Photoblogging Friday. Our contributor, Dean Brierly, sent this entry to TNM early this week -- a tribute to the British writer Alan Sillitoe:
← Portrait of writer Alan Sillitoe
by Monire Childs
Last week Photoblogging Friday noted the April 17 passing of Life photographer Myron Davis. Not to establish a morbid trend here, but I thought it fitting to pay tribute this week to the British writer Alan Sillitoe, who died April 25 aged 82.
Sillitoe arrived on the literary scene with the landmark novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
, which presented a bracingly unsentimental view of British working-class life. His follow-up collection of short stories, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner
, validated the brilliance of his first novel and placed him solidly in the ranks of the era’s “angry young men” literary movement. (Both books were made into critically and commercially acclaimed films.) Yet Sillitoe always resisted facile labels, and his subsequent output varied widely in tone and content. He was a staunch atheist and critic of political and societal complacency, and remained true to his convictions and his highly personal muse until the end of his life. Monire Childs’ portrait of Sillitoe is full of evocative detail—the book-lined den, the ever-present pipe, the ink pen with which he wrote his first drafts in longhand. The image is direct, telling and unpretentious, just like its subject. You can find a full obituary of Alan Sillitoe at The Guardian.
You can read more interviews with photographers at Dean Brierly's website, Photographers Speak.
New Sporting News publisher, Jeff Price, partners with Zinio on paid daily iPad and web-based news products
It hasn't taken the new President and Publisher of Sporting News long to make a big impact on the venerable brand: developing partnerships, transforming free products to paid, launching apps. For Jeff Price, the former head of digital for Sports Illustrated, it is all about building the brand and extending the reach of the publication.
Price comes to the 124-year-old Sporting News with a marketing and sports background and sees his role more as brand champion than publisher. But for a publication that was last the dominate when John McGraw still managed the Giants (OK, slight exaggeration) the challenges of transforming the title into a major player in both electronic and print media will be great.
With the help of one of his new media partners, Zinio, I talked to Price about his New Media plans and the ground already covered since the announcement of his appointment in February by the owner of the Sporting News, American City Business Journal, a unit of Advance Publications Inc.
Price moved immediately to make some hard decisions at Sporting News. These included ending the title's fantasy games operation, the source of some of the title's best web traffic. "The fantasy industry is changing, and we feel it's best to devote our resources to providing the best fantasy content and advice on the Internet, and beyond," Price wrote in a letter to customers.
Price had made the same move at Sports Illustrated, where he was head of digital, said before relaunching the service. Price said he will be doing the same thing at Sporting News, launching a new fantasy games service in time for football season, this time with an unannounced, major new media partner.
Creating partnerships is part of Price's M.O., as this was part of the job description for Price at previous stops at Millsport, Trakus, MasterCard and USA Sports.
← SN's first iPad presence through Zinio is for its daily news product, Sporting News Today.
One of the most important new partnerships Price established was with Zinio, the San Francisco headquartered digital magazine and book company. One of Price's first decisions was to work with his new partner on Sporting News Today, the publication's daily web-based newspaper, rather than the main biweekly Sporting News magazine.
"Part of the struggle that's going on right now in the industry is trying to force fit what your current business model is into this new platform," Price told TNM. "If we were taking that approach we would have started with Sporting News magazine and said 'OK, we're going to put all our energy behind Sporting News magazine and we're going to translate that over to the iPad.'"
So rather than have Zinio port over their bi-weekly magazine, Price would have his new partner bring the previously free Sporting News Today daily to the iPad, as well as other mobile formats through Zinio's digital newsstand. Now, a reader can subscribe to the daily product and read their news on their iPad, or on the web, and just pay once -- currently 99 cents an issue, or $2.99 a month.
So, for now, readers of Sporting News, the magazine, will have to wait for an iPad solution. "We've honestly put that on the shelf for now and we'll come back to that and find a way to make sure that its available for those folks who'd want to engage with the magazine from a digital content perspective."
One advantage of starting with the daily product was that it was already a digital-only product. The other reason was that Price saw that the product filled an important need for consumers. Sporting News Today "was providing packaged content on a daily basis, 365 days a year, really giving a comprehensive review of what happened yesterday in sports and being ready for consumers and business travelers at 6 am in the morning --- we really looked at the opportunity that we had was to fill a void that folks in the newspaper sector are certainly trying to do."
Working with Zinio provided Sporting News the opportunity to have first mover advantage. Price had seen that, on the iPhone and Android, app developers had leaped into the field -- apps like Sportacular and SportsTap were "thinking like start-ups" by providing readers the sports information they wanted on their mobile devices -- they took advantage of the opening created when publishers failed to step up and rethink their products.
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Why one plus one plus one doesn't equal three when talking about media fragmentation
Some of my publisher friends have begun to wonder why advertising remains so weak, while at the same time some publications appear to be recovering with gusto. The inevitable question is always "when will the recovery hit us, too?"
Leaving aside the issue of economic recovery (since one look at the events of yesterday regarding stocks, Greece or the UK might make you wonder if a recovery is on the horizon), the chances that advertising will rebound across the board is very small. Each downturn in the economy leads to reductions in advertising, of course. But it also leads to advertisers attempting to find new ways to market outside the world of B2B and consumer magazines, newspapers, etc.
Combined with the increasing fragmentation of media, this is leading to many media properties being edged out of budgets permanently. Further, those properties that are getting new schedules are finding that they have to offer more and more options themselves, or else have a piece of their schedule reallocated.
Take a simple marketing tool like e-mail and e-mail newsletters. Any small advertiser that finds their budget cut can very affordably begin their own e-mail marketing campaigns through widely available companies that have sprung up over the last decade. A return to healthier budgets simply won't stop this approach, though often publishers can win back some of the business by promising to take on those responsibilities themselves as a added-value item on the schedule.
Additionally, the growth in alternative forms of media -- now mobile, then Internet -- means that adding a new form of marketing to the budget doesn't necessarily mean a growth in actual dollars spent, or the addition of a new media outlet. In other words, one plus one equals two -- but adding another one simply might mean one of the old media outlets will be left behind.
Thursday, May 6, 2010
Don't look now but something just laid an egg
2:45 PM: Tell me that this is just a typo: Dow down 413 point.
My day has not been the very good, I hope you are doing better. For the second time in as many weeks I've had to throw away hours worth of work after I discovered that the company I was profiling was failing to deliver a workable product. It happens, I suppose. But it is doubly frustrating when you know that a lot of publishers are depending on these third party developers to help them out in their mobile media projects and are instead not getting very good results.
Last week one of these companies responded to a story I wrote and wanted to set the record straight. I responded that I would happy to talk to them, but alas they never called. No wonder, their apps are just plain bad. Users write one star reviews of the apps, but the company continues to spit them out week after week.
2:50 PM: a few minutes later and the Dow is down 789 points. Make it stop.
2:52 PM: Headline on New York Times website: Dow Plummets 900 Points on Concerns Over Greece but their ticker says down 580, it can't keep up. Click through to story and headline reads down 700. Refresh and it says down 500.
I promise to keep refreshing until it says Dow closes mixed.
The market, of course, was in free fall over concerns that the debt crisis in Greece would spill over into the rest of Europe, particularly in Spain, Portugal and Britain. This would have the same sort of domino effect that occurred when the Austrian bank Credit Anstalt went bankrupt after failing to secure loans to the government of Austria that would have propped it up. The loans were not made due to the internal politics of countries like France. Today, there are those in Europe opposing a bailout for Greece, using the same arguments.
3:05 PM: down only 324 points. Those that jumped off the ledge are starting to have regrets.
3:20 PM: I've gone back into this story to correct some of the typos that were caused by frantic typing.
4:00 PM: The markets are closed and the final body count is in -- down 347.80. The Times has their story up and quotes Peter Cardillo of Avalon Partners as saying "“what really happened here, gold was going through the roof and the euro went down to 1.25. There was a lot of panic selling that came in and the market fell apart.”
Jake Dollarhide, chief executive of Longbow Asset Management, said it best, though: “This is a terrible, terrible day.” No kidding.
4:40 PM: The Guardian is reporting that it "looks like the panic may have been triggered by one or more rogue trades." I've not heard that elsewhere yet, but Britain is very jittery right now as the country went to the polls today and there are fears of a hung parliament (the Tories are expected by many to win tonight).
Synapse Multimedia enters the mobile app business for local broadcasters; iPad applications on the horizon
The application development field is getting more crowded as third party developers begin to add iPhone and iPad application development to the list of services they offer. One such company that has started uploading iPhone apps to iTunes for their customers is Shreveport, Louisiana based Synapse Multimedia.
The company, started by Randall and Audrey Ache, works with a variety of customers ranging from Zocolo Neighborhood Eatery, a local Shreveport restaurant, to Arizona broadcaster KVOA. Recently, they started supporting their customers by creating iPhone apps, their first one appearing in December for LEX18, a Central Kentucky NBC affiliate.
As of today, Synapse has five iPhone apps in iTunes, the last four appearing within the past two weeks.
The latest app is for KSBY, the Santa Barbara NBC affiliate. Each app is identical in that it contains the same navigation: Home, Video, News, Weather, and More (which allows for some customization of content). The video is handled directly, that is, not through a service like YouTube.
The next step for Synapse appears to be iPad development. Randall Ache, writing on his company blog, appears to be a fan: "Finally we are starting to see mobile devices that can really change the way users interact with content. The iPhone is a great device, the best for its size but it did not give me the feeling I was interacting with a true digital interactive magazine or website with my hands and the iPad does this well. Over the next couple months I am really looking forward to the new iPad applications that will be coming out."
Ache goes on to say that Synapse has started developing for an app for the iPad that will be able to take advantage of the video content from their CMS.
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