Media firm musical chairs: Primedia sold to TPG Capital

For the private equity business it never ends: buy properties, sell properties, cash in some profits, dump some losses. For the folks at Primedia they know the routine all too well.

Today Primedia's President and CEO Charles Stubbs made the latest sales announcement: the company has been sold to TPG Capital for $7.10 per share, or about $525 million.

“I am pleased to announce this agreement as it delivers significant value to our shareholders," Stubbs said in the company's announcement. "In addition, it is a clear endorsement of PRIMEDIA and of the hard work and commitment of each and every one of our employees. TPG is a premier private investment firm and has a strong understanding and appreciation for our marketplace, our business model, our business strategies and the potential opportunities that lie ahead. We are very excited about this transaction.”

For Primedia, experience with the media banking business is just the norm. The company has been publicly traded for years, but its controlling stake has been owned by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, which help found the company back in 1989. Founded as K-III, it soon was renamed Intertec Publishing and quickly began rolling up media properties – Macmillan, Funk & Wagnalls, nine magazines from News Corp., 14 properties from Cahners, etc. etc. Eventually it started selling off many of the properties it owned, such as the B2B titles it had acquired that are now part of the Penton Media group – itself owned by a PE firm.

Moving Media+ launches new version of its Mag+ Review iPad app; digital publishing system spun out by Bonnier

The digital publishing system Mag+, recently spun out of the Swedish media firm Bonnier into its own company, Moving Media+ AB, has released a new version of its Mag+ app for the iPad.

The new app, Mag+ Review, is a free download in the App Store, and is meant to replace the previous version which users installed themselves.

If you have been playing around with the new digital publishing system then you will want to update this app, asap. If you are unfamiliar with the Mag+ system then here is a brief description:

The Mag+ system centers around a plug-in for InDesign that allows you to build digital publications for the iPad. The plug-in based system works with the Mag+ Reviewer app by exporting the InDesign work to the app for displaying on your iPad.

Unlike the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite which costs a fortune to get started, the Mag+ system is free at the start. The user downloads the required software and gets started. But the costs get heavy on the backend: $2500 for a branded app, good for only five months, followed by a $500 per issue charge, or $500 per month for unlimited publishing.

If you were publishing multiple magazines or books each month using the system the cost could be spread enough to make it very reasonable. But for the individual title or unfunded start-up the costs could be tough to swallow. The advantage of the system, obviously, is that it is InDesign based, making it easy for many art directors to begin producing tablet editions.

Morning Brief: Two lessons from Google's Blogger outage; new hard drive from Seagate targeted at iPad owners

The two day Google debacle is most assuredly not the talk of the town. Unless you were effected directly, you really probably didn't really mind that half the blogs around the world were down – they are just blogs, after all ;) But I can think of at least two important lessons that can be learned from the outage – if you didn't know them already.

First, cloud storage is not about storage. With both Amazon and Google recently launching cloud music services, and with Apple rumored to be about to launch their own, the issue of a cloud service's reliability comes to the forefront. For any cloud service, an outage of service creates a giant warning sign about that company's performance track record. If you are relying on a company of actual storage, even a once in a blue moon outage is cause for worry.

That is why cloud music services are not about storage, they are about convenience. If a service is designed to actually store all that data, then eventually it will fail – an outage is pretty much inevitable. But if the service is about convenience, and customers use the service strictly for streaming, keeping the vast majority of their data on their own hardware, then the service has some value.

One rumor out there involves Apple not requiring users to upload their entire catalog of music in order to use the service. That is, say you are uploading two songs – something by Lady Gaga, and something by Miriodor (a band out of Montréal) – the service would recognize that there are already copies of the first song and the service would not upload the song, simply recording that you are entitled to a stream of it, the second song would have to be uploaded. The idea here would be that Apple wouldn't have to store ten million copies of the same data, but could instead use their storage space to created redundant storage so that an outage would be next to impossible.

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One reason Google's outage didn't seem to be really big news is that America's media, especially its B2B media, is gun shy when it comes to reporting on bad news concerning major companies – that is, US companies.

It is a phenomenon all too familiar to B2B publishers: a company has problems with a product and editors, afraid of upsetting their publishers or the company themselves, either downplays the news or doesn't cover it at all. It is a big reason why America's trade magazine industry has imploded: most B2B magazines are simply not worth reading. (A common phrase heard from prospective readers is always "there is nothing inside that I don't already know.")

With Google, the problem is that the company touches so many areas now: search, advertising, apps.

Yet Google's own response to it's outage should have raised a firestorm: a post on its own online blog once a day simply isn't adequate. But if I were an executive at Google I would have noticed that the PR damage done to the company was negligible, thanks to the media.

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Speaking of storage: there are a number of product reviews online this morning for Seagate's new portable hard drive, the GoFlex Satellite. The best one can be found on ZDNet here.

Read More >

СТРАТЕГИИ: Ukrainian business magazine, Strategy, releases iPad app that uses simple, native tablet layouts

As many web readers know, Google has had a monumental meltdown of its Blogger system. Many stories that were posted on Wednesday and Thursday of this week have apparently been lost. I have tried to retrieve some of them thanks to TNM's iPhone app (lots of copy and paste), but some will just have to stay lost, I guess. I thought this one interesting enough to repost at the top of the website.

One advantage to looking at foreign media applications is that one is not distracted by the actual content, I suppose. In the case of this magazine app, СТРАТЕГИИ на IPAD (Strategy for iPad), the lesson here is how deep the new tablet platform has reached in such a short time.

Who knows how many people own iPads in the Ukraine, there is no official Apple dealer in the country according to one source I read. But now the country has at least one iPad magazine app!

The free app also gives you free access to the one issue found inside the library. Weighing in at only 18 MB, the download was very quick, but the app surprisingly does give you both portrait and landscape orientations. And while the app does contain some multimedia content, it is really a very simply assembled app – and yet I bet Ukrainian readers will appreciate the end product.

Strategy – I won't continue to use the Cyrillic in case your browser can't handle it – is a Russian language business monthly magazine. Its website translates very easily using Google's Chrome browser.

(I use Chrome a lot since I often find myself on foreign language websites. Otherwise, it is Safari.)

The tablet version uses the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite and was developed by Adobe's partner in Russia, Terem Media, which has three other tablet apps in the App Store at this time. The app is being sold under the Terem Media name, though the support page does take you to the Strategy website where there is a nice support page, complete with a "User's Manual".
I noticed one very, very minor programming error, but otherwise the app was very easy to navigate, despite the language barrier. It goes to show you that app navigation is becoming fairly standard.

Of course, I know of a few developers who might consider this tablet edition a bit boring, programming-wise. I understand that and certainly sympathize with that point-of-view. But then again most print magazines are pretty predictable, as well, aren't they?

Quite a number of publishers, or would-be publishers have complained to me about the enormous costs associated with using the Adobe tools. In Eastern Europe, at least, there is a digital publishing partner that can help. But for those of us here in the US seeking affordable, easy to use tablet publishing production tools remains a top priority.

'Houston, we have a problem!'

Google has really blown it big time. As you can see below, all the posts created Thursday have disappeared from site. As you may have heard, Google's Blogger platform sprung a leak, or in as they say in the tech community, has been "upgraded" – another way of saying "crashed".

I don't know if the posts will reappear or not, but interestingly, they can still be found on TBM's iPhone app. (If you haven't downloaded the mobile app you can do so here.

As I write this I see that I'm getting an error message from Twitter: "Twitter is over capacity."

Gotta love New Media, huh?

Well, until I can bde assured Blogger won't delete anymore posts, and until I can get those old posts back on the site, I see no reason to add any additional material into the system. So, let's just pretend that today is a holiday and head on out to Wrigley to catch the Giants while they are in town, OK?

See you next week.

Salt Lake City becomes one of the few cities where both of its rival daily newspapers now have tablet editions

On April 18 I wrote a piece about RSS driven newspaper apps looking at several new tablet editions including the newly launched tablet edition of the Deseret News. One month later, its arch rival, and also distribution partner, The Salt Lake Tribune has released its own first tablet edition. This makes Salt Lake City one of the few cities in America where competing newspapers each have their own iPad editions (New York being obviously another).

The two daily newspapers in Salt Lake City are very different from each other: the Salt Lake Tribune is the larger paper, with a daily circulation of 113,032 based on the latest ABC report, while the Deseret News has a daily circ of 73,075. The Trib is owned by MediaNews Group, the group formerly run by Dean Singleton (he is still “executive chairman of the board"), while the News is owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Both papers, however, are published under a joint operating agreement (JOA) by the Newspaper Agency Corporation.

Both newspaper apps are fairly similar looking, as you can see above. But the Deseret News app is a universal app, hiding its mobile origins fairly well on the iPad. The SL Tribune app, however, is solely for the iPad. In fact, in its own post about the app, the paper uses the word "native" to describe the app (as opposed to "replica").

"This is part of a continuing effort to deliver Utah’s most complete news report in whatever format readers want," Salt Lake Tribune Deputy Editor Tim Fitzpatrick is quoted in the Tribune story introducing the app. "This is our first step into tablets, and there will be many more."

Both apps are free to download and both apps offer their readers free access to the content. Since the Deseret News app was the first to appear in the App Store, and it was completely free, I wonder if the SL Tribune felt it had to go free, as well, or whether this is the kind of decision forced upon the newspapers by their JOA.

Both apps treat stories pretty much the same, allowing font size adjustments, though the SL Tribune app allows for the changing of the font from Arial to Georgia. The SL Tribune app also utilizes push notifications, while its rival's app does not.

For readers in Utah, however, the two papers probably provide enough differentiation that their apps don't need to be that different. The Deseret News, for instance, in its story today about presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, a Mormon, calls the candidate "Mitt" in its headline (which I found to be extremely creepy). Meanwhile, the SL Tribune app description brags that its app contains the political cartoons of Pat Bagley, who was quoted in a story that former President Bush "radicalized me ... I used to be kind of a moderate Republican. I've been pushed to the left."

Whether one app is better than the other I'll leave to you. But one thing for sure, the SL Tribune app is a vast improvement on the replica apps released by other MediaNews Group properties such as those of the Los Angeles Newspaper Group.