The end of Whole Living magazine at MSLO does not have to mean... well, the end of Whole Living magazine

I love writing headlines that I, as a publisher, would reject in a heartbeat. But when there is no one around to prevent you from making a mistake, well, just go with it.

Right now a lot of staffers at the Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia (MSLO) property are grieving the news late yesterday that the company has been unable to find a buyer for the title. According to a WSJ report, the title got an offer from a team backed by the PE firm OpenGate Capital, a rather low $2.5 million offer, but the deal fell through.

My guess is that the offer seemed low to MSLO based on what the new owners would get as part of the deal. At issue, generally, is future booked ads, future receipts, past liabilities, and the like. There are a lot of details that need to be worked out to close a deal and sometimes it just doesn't happen.

But Whole Living staffers need to keep their chins up, many titles miraculously find new owners shortly after the doors close. The reason is simple enough, what is sold after a title is closed is usually the branding rights, circulation lists and the things other than hard assets, past booked revenue and liabilities.

You can almost hear that MSLO's chief executive Lisa Gersh is keeping the door open in the quote she gave the WSJ: "Whole Living is a terrific brand in a high-interest category," Gersh said. "Our valuable content will be leveraged across our media platforms and we will continue to look for strategic opportunities to further capitalize on it."

Whole Living has not turned out to be a good acquisition for MSLO. After acquiring the title for $6 million in 2005, the title has turned out to be bleeding red ink. One would think that the product would perform best in an environment like MSLO where there are like titles. But sometimes the opposite occurs, the title gets little bits of the ad schedules acquired by the other titles in the publisher's portfolio, often the title can not attract advertisers that want that particular title by itself.

If a new buyer can deal with a couple years of losses, and if those losses can be lessen through decreased G&A expenses, then maybe it will be a good fit for a new owner. With the last issue scheduled to be the January/February issue, we should find out if, like many of the Reed titles shut down at the end of '09, if a new owners steps up in the new year.

The web world enters the second stage of grief

The Kübler-Ross model states that there are five stages to grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. After denying that mobile and tablets (but especially tablets) were to be important digital mediums, the web-only promoters have entered the second stage.

"See, we told you so, tablet publishing has no future." Or so the webbies* are proclaiming, though not necessarily in those exact words.

The problem with the theory is that most of the web-only crowd continue to fail to find many good examples of old media companies succeeding online, at least in comparison to the Internet pure plays that have arisen since the beginning of the Internet boom. The promoters of the web often say that paywalls are the answer, yet few of the media companies that have built paywalls are recording revenue growth due to those paywalls, instead substituting small, incremental gains in paid digital subscription for dramatic declines in ad dollars – both in print and digital.

We'll soon see the web-only crowd enter the third phase of grief soon. There are simply too many companies committed to mobile and tablets to see the platforms abandoned.

One of those companies, Joe Zeff Design, released an impressive new tablet app which TNM looked at this morning. They also posted their own defense of tablet publishing yesterday on their company blog:

We remain convinced that digital publishing through apps will continue to thrive. As more people consume content on iPads and iPhones, there is increasing value in delivering content that is best-suited to those devices. It's all about strategies, and how innovation can help those strategies succeed.

As for The Daily, I doubt that many of those writing about its demise ever had to create a P&L. If they had they would have realized that its demise has nothing to do with digital media, tablets, the web, multiplatform publishing, or even the content and quality of the journalism of the Murdoch press product. It everything to do with math – the numbers were never going to add up.

No start-up can throw $30 million at an advertising dependent media product where $30 million in ad dollars are not available. Today I could launch a B2B print magazine for the construction industry, be backed with $30 million, and tell you where I'll stand at the end of the year – down at least $25 million. If I launched a tablet magazine I might be lucky to only be down $29 million (and if the product were web-only it might be even worse).

That is the world of tablet publishing The Daily was launched into, one where there were too few iPads in circulation in the U.S. (remember that only half of all Apple sales have been in the U.S.) and where very few ad agencies were directing ad dollars towards tablets. The situation is only slightly better today than it was when The Daily was launched.

Soon we'll see webbies begin to hedge their bets, that will lead to depression. Eventually we'll see a few of the web-only crowd come over to our side, the rest will be like those print guys who could not make the move to digital. In fact, I see very little difference between those who dismissed the Internet in the late nineties and those dismissing digital platforms other than the web today – each is so damn sure that there is room for only one successful digital medium.

It is fairly ironic, then, that Felix Salmon of Reuters wrote "When the iPad was first announced, there were lots of dreams about what it could achieve, and how rich its content could be. But in hindsight, it’s notable how many of the dreamers came from the world of print." In updates to his post one can see that he is already beginning to reevaluate his position.

In the end, it is the person who thinks the web will be the one and only successful digital medium that is in denial and is the most like print executives, not those publishing to tablets. On the contrary, the most interesting new tablet publications are coming from those not involved in print at all, but those who see the tablet (and mobile) platform as the place to express themselves.

It is rare for the advocates of one medium to embrace another. David Sarnoff may be one of the few who understood that promoting television, despite having invested heavily in radio, would make RCA millions. But even he attempted to kill off FM. But I think it wasn't philosophy that led him to try and stop FM – it was simple economics, and ruthless capitalism. In the end, Sarnoff wanted to control it all. And there, in the end, is the real lesson to be learned. One can be in denial, one can be angry, but one can't control it all.

* The term "webbies" is not meant to be derogatory, though it may come off sounding that way.

Media app updates: the Sun-Times updates its line of tablet apps; Netflix continues improvement of iOS app

The Sun-Times got to crow a bit as its rival, the Tribune announced that it would once again begin using the firm Journatic, despite having to suspend using the firm just five months ago for plagiarism.

The Chicago area daily newspaper also got around to updating its line of tablet editions: its main news tablet edition, Bears Extra, Bulls Extra and Splash.

The update fixes bugs and allows for faster rendering on the original iPad.

Netflix updated its universal app to improve performance and fix bugs. Of course, sometimes it is hard to see the improvements to an app once it has been around for awhile. But it important to point out that the Netflix app's reliability is becoming pretty much taken for granted at this point.

Marco Arment has updated his original app, Instapaper. Now priced at $3.99, the new update fixes bugs, some of which are listed in the app description – though only the techies would understand what Arment is talking about.

KIDS DISCOVER: another fantastic new iPad app from the studios of Joe Zeff Design

As I have written before, a new application from the studios of Joe Zeff Design is always a cause for celebration. Yesterday I discovered, thanks to a blog post on the company's website, that a new iPad app, KIDS DISCOVER, has been released into the Apple App Store, and it does not disappoint.

Joe Zeff Design is the studio some of the best apps available: Above & Beyond: George Steinmetz and more recently BAMM.tv. To learn more about this creative firm I recommend the interview with Joe Zeff conducted by Pedro Monteiro which appeared on this site back in May of last year.

The new app is designed for kidsdiscover.com, a publishing firm with the mission "to expose kids to all the wonders in the world—science, space, nature, history and culture—in one easy-to-understand, beautiful publication." Now they have an interesting new app for the iPad.

The free app's business models is simple: download the app and gain access to one of the "issues" contained within the app free of charge. The free issue is Galaxies and needs to be downloaded once the app is installed. It weighs in at 392 MB due to its interactivity and animation.

Then, assuming you are happy with what you see – and most will be, that's for sure – then two other "issues" are available now for downloading at $2.99 a piece: Antarctica and Washington D.C.

The user can also choose to buy a monthly subscription at $1.99, this will gain you access to the other issues, as well as those coming soon: Cells, Weather, Oceans, Ancient China, Lewis & Clark, and Simple Machines.

The video below ends with the credits found in the new app, but the Joe Zeff Design blog provides a little more information:

Christopher Holewski was the project lead at Joe Zeff Design, collaborating with Ed Gabel, who created many of the computer-generated animations. Kids Discover involved its top people: Publisher Judith Princz, Director of Digital Development Ted Levine and Editor Jennifer Dixon.

The result is a wonderful app that should educate and entertain at the same time. It is safe to say that the apps developed by Joe Zeff Design are among the few applications that have a permanent place on my own iPad (though I must admit that means burning up quite a bit of storage space).

I guess the only other detail to mention is that the app was created using the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite.

Here is a little circular walk-through the app, from Index to some of the sections and back again:

Glossi promises embedded magazines for all, but what it can deliver is completely dependent on the 'publisher'

How does the cliché go? Oh yeah: if it were easy, everybody would do it. But creating a great looking magazine is hard, that is why we have art directors. But that is not stopping vendors from offering do-it-yourself publishing solutions. From OnSwipe to now Glossi, there is a never ending supply of DIY solutions for would-be publishers. Take it from me, it's not that easy.

Glossi, which received a nice write-up from the NYT on Tuesday is the latest company to promise both professional and amateur publishers that ability to create great looking magazines. Unlike OnSwipe, that wants you to create HTML5 websites using their system, Glossi is sort of a DYI flipbook solution. The publisher creates a "Glossi" then can embed that digital product on the owner's website, just as one would a YouTube video.

I like the idea, a lot. But don't expect it to be easy to actually create a great looking digital magazine because it helps if you already a producing a great looking print magazine, or a digital one using another process.

I played around with Glossi this morning and immediately found that it did not work with Safari – I continually received a warning that said I had cookies turned off, I didn't. So I switched over to Chrome and started in on my first "Glossi".

The process is simple enough, though limiting. I created a new page using their page templates and immediately discovered that the text would not flow from text box to text, as it would in Word, or in InDesign or Quark. That was strange since that would be a natural way a template would normally work.

But overcoming this was easy enough and getting a fairly attractive page was not impossible.

Then came creating the cover. Yikes. Using their system allows you to create a cover, but would you actually want to publish it? Well, that is the problem, isn't it? If you create your cover using InDesign, like a pro would, you'd get a great cover (assuming you are talented). But using their DIY solution creates something that looks, well, like it was built using a DIY system.

The "Glossis" that are featured on the website pretty much tell the story: you can tell which ones come from professional sources and which ones come from would-be publishers. And once you click inside these "Glossis" it gets worse.

But that doesn't mean that I don't see a use for the Glossi system. On the contrary, I bet a number of TNM readers would be able to play around with the system and create a perfectly good digital magazine. But can the average Joe produce a good looking product?

I've looked at a fair number of tablet editions released into the Apple Newsstand recently and see that there is a huge desire on the part of would-be publishers to create their own magazines. Using systems such as that offered by MagCast or other vendors, it is fairly easy to publisher something. But let's face it, many of these new magazines are like Etch A Sketch drawings next to a Rembrandt.

It's simply not that easy, even if everyone can do it.

The Washington Post updates its 'Politics' iPad app as it seeks to make app relevant to users after the election

One thing newspapers have never had to deal with in print is the issue of shelf-life. Print newspapers are not meant to have long shelf lives, in fact, the whole business model is built on this concept: you get today's paper, but you'll want tomorrow's paper, too.

Apps obviously don't work that way. A newspaper isn't going to launch a new app every day, it wants its users to open that app regularly, every day, if possible. For news apps, this is no problem, but for the special section or special interest app, this presents a challenge. What to do with those apps that aggregated the election news coverage of the papers?

Both The Washington Post and The New York Times launched apps that aggregated its election news coverage, but the WaPo is in the best position to update its app and make it relevant in the post-election environment.

WP Politics is an iPad app that has been updated numerous times since its launch. With the Presidential election cycle so long, there is no such thing as releasing an app like this too early.

The app team has done an excellent job of releasing timely updates for this app – I'm written about updates to WP Politics at least three times because I thought the updates worth talking about.

Yesterday the newspaper issued yet another update, bring WP Politics up to version 1.5. Now the election content moves from a focus on polls and electoral college projections to historical information. And, what has to be a bitter blow, any reference to Mitt Romney's issue stances have been wiped from the app.
Of course, a newspaper located in Washington DC is in a good position to continue to drive readers to an tablet app on politics. The New York Times, though, will have to move on and launch a new app.

The NYT app that iPhone owners gravitated to was NYT Election 2012. This app saw its last update shortly before election day and will either need to simply go away or have a complete overhaul to remain useful for readers.

It's fate is further complicated by the fact that access to its full content is tied to the digital subscription options offered by the paper. For me, who has a digital subscription, I found it somewhat useful. But the reviews in the App Store are pretty negative because of this tie-in.

The other problem with election apps is that editors are loath to make the content seen in the app exclusive to the app. Anything seen in the app is probably to be found online. It's taken editors a long time to become web-first advocates, to make sure that any content seen in print is also online - now we see that the same principal is effecting apps, as well.

As a result of this, apps such as NYTimes Election 2012 don't bring much new to the table. Their main benefits are that they gather up all the content of one subject into one area, and that they can archive important content for easy searching, as well.