Sporting News to shutter its print publication, will rely on website and mobile apps to reach current print readers

The publisher of Sporting News, Jeff Price, today announced that after 126 years the title would be shuttering its print publication on January 1. To reach its current readers the sports publication will rely on its mobile and tablet applications, as well as the sportingnews.com website.

"Having spoken with many of our longtime subscribers, we recognize this is not a popular decision among our most loyal fans," wrote Jeff Price and Garry D. Howard on the Sporting News website this morning. "Unfortunately, neither our subscriber base nor the current advertising market for print would allow us to operate a profitable print business going forward."

The move is a logical one as the sports news publication has become tied to AOL since last year. The once weekly publications went to bi-weekly in 2008.

In early 2010 Jeff Price came over from Sports Illustrated where he was head of digital. In an interview with TNM in May Price talked through the paper's options concerning publishing on the iPad>

"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 said in 2010. "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.'"

Sporting News at the time was publishing a daily digital flipbook on its website called Sporting News Today. Then in September of 2010 Zinio released a branded iPad app for the daily publication. Eventually a tablet edition reached the Apple Newsstand, where Sporting News still resides.

Existing print subscribers can contact the publisher to get a refund of their balance, or they can apply their paid subscription to the cost of the yearbooks the publication says they will continue to produce in print, at least for now. "In the event we cease publication of the yearbook previews, any balance left on your account will be refunded," Sporting News said.

Angry Birds celebrates third birthday, reminding us that app development is still in its adolescent stage

It may seem strange that TNM would write about Angry Birds, one of the most popular, widely-known apps for mobile devices. But this is the third birthday of the app, so its update today is a great reminder that no matter how far it appears we have come regarding the mobile and tablet platforms, we are still in the early days of this business.

Most media observers point to the introduction of the original iPhone as the day the mobile (and later tablet) platform was born. But that isn't precisely true. Yes, Steve Jobs did introduce a revolutionary new cell phone. And yes, his boast that Apple was reinventing the phone was, for the most part, accurate.

But the original iPhone was expensive, slow, and most importantly, devoid of third party apps. Whatever Apple gave you when you bought your original iPhone you were stuck with until Apple decided to give you something more. Those maps were not a Google app, but an Apple app using Google data.

All during the summer and early fall of 2007 the hacker community got hard at work to jailbreak the iPhone and build its own app world. Finally Apple announced that fall that third party apps would be coming, and the iPhone SDK was officially released on March 6, 2008. For developers, that was the beginning of the real revolution.

That is also why, when you count back three years, you discover that Angry Birds didn't arrive until much later than you might remember – it seems like it has been around forever.

Of course, this fact won't stop some tech writers from proclaiming that media apps are horrible, or have no value. OK, let them, but let's stop calling these guys journalists and start calling them "analysts" – we all know how accurate that crowd is – not only will that annoy these writers but it will reveal to everyone that they are just guessing.

If you wouldn't come to final conclusions about your three year old kid, it is probably a good idea to not come to final conclusions about a new platform either. Those of us who are advocates for the new digital media platforms see the potential in them, but should not be naive enough to come to too many conclusions just yet. We are in the early days, and that means we are lucky to be witnessing something very interesting and potentially wonderful.

Team behind the iPad magazine TRVL gets things ready to roll out PRSS, its own tablet publishing platform

The travel iPad magazine, TRVL, launched originally in September of 2010, has seen a number of updates lately – the reason is that the publishing team behind the app recently moved the digital magazine off the Woodwing/Adobe platform onto a platform it has developed itself.

The transition is not an easy one: TRVL is a unique app where a subscription to the magazine means access to over 80 editions (and counting). A subscription is not so much a way to access monthly magazines as it is a way to access the TRVL ecosystem.

TRVL

Launched by Dutch co-founders Jochem Wijnands, a documentary photographer, and Michel Elings, who was responsible for the design and technical portions of the digital magazine, TRVL has become instantly popular inside the Appp App Store, and later the Newsstand, and has come to symbolize for many the potential of the tablet platform.

TRVL emphasizes the photographer, not necessarily the travel writer, leaving the photography to speak for itself.

"We try to make the content feel really personal," Michel Elings told Susan Currie Sivek of MediaShift this summer. "We don't crop photos, and we don't put text on photos. We respect the photographer and writer. We want to give people the feeling that a writer and photographer went to Amsterdam, and this is what they've seen."

"What is motivating us is the fact that these are historic times, and we can make a difference," Jochem Wijnands told me recently.

For the TRVL team, the launch of the iPad in 2010 opened up some unique opportunities.

"Our first emotion was 'wow, we can start our own magazine' – which used to be so difficult, and now it's easy," Wijnands said. "It was still quite a lot of money involved, but nothing compared to what you would normally need, and you could reach a readership all over the world."

Jochem Wijnands

TRVL's approach has been different from the start. Rather than creating a magazine based on print, where the design owes its inspiration from print travel magazines such as National Geographic or a Condé Nast title, and where each issue tries to give readers a broad range of topics, each weekly issue of TRVL concentrates on one destination, as seen through the eyes of the photographers whose work is featured in the issue.

"It's new magazines like ours that show that it is going to be a new game," Wijnands said of TRVL.

Publishing weekly also has tremendous advantages based on the way Apple's App Store works. "I don't think a monthly magazine works because you never use the algorithms of the App Store. When you publish new content, the App Store ranks you higher the next day, so when you publish, you are in a good position for the weekend. When you only do this once a month, you never use your advantage," Elings told MediaShift.

Creating the first iPad magazine app with Woodwing must have seemed like a natural choice – Woodwing is based in Zaandam, just outside Amsterdam.

But since TRVL first launched, Woodwing has changed its mission, now becoming a reseller of the Adobe platform and concentrating on enterprise solutions. The platform probably was never a good fit, in any case. "We are really into less is more," Elings said this summer. "I turned off 90 percent of what you can do with WoodWing because I don't think it helps the user."

So after almost two years of publishing, and over 700,000 app downloads, TRVL's co-founders felt they needed something else.

"So then we starting developing our own software out of frustration with what was available," Wijnands told me. "If there was an acceptable software around about a year ago we would have seriously considered it."

PRSS

One month ago the publishers of TRVL let out word that they would be entering the digital publishing platform business themselves, offering its own publishing solution. Things are proceeding slowly, mainly because the TRVL team is still working out the kinks on their own iPad magazine app.

Changing platforms for tablet magazines is not necessarily an easy thing to do – especially if you want to continue to offer the past issues to your loyal readers. Some major publishers have resorted to launching separate apps for their archives when moving over to a new system. Hearst, for instance, has launched a stand-along app to house the Esquire digital magazines for its tablet editions launched from October 2010 to October 2012. Meanwhile, its updated Newsstand will house the new issues.

For TRVL, though, where all the issues are housed in one app and are part of the basic design of the app, it was necessary to redo all the issues using the new platform (at the time 80 issues).

So an update was posted on November 1 using the publisher's own platform.

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Citizen publishers are not saying "No' to the tablet platform just because some tech writers are skeptical

It sometime seems like many in our industry live in a parallel universe where down is up and where people actually care what tech writers have to say about digital media. That is not where I live.

Two news items that came from the industry seemed to merge into one story for me today. The first involved the Why Magazine Apps Suck post written by M.G. Siegler. A lot of people actually took the post seriously. I did, too, until I realized that if Fonzi jumped the shark for ratings, why shouldn't Siegler jump the shark for clicks?

But that didn't stop Joe Zeff Design from responding on their company blog. Hey, two or three years ago I might have listened to what Siegler might have to say on tablets and the potential of tablet publisher, but today Joe Zeff's opinion is 100 times more authoritative, in my opinion.

Another company, to remain nameless, also sent me a press release that tackled the topic. They, too, were not happy but their press release was 99 percent self-promotion. The company, though, is a good example of why tablet publishing is succeeding for many, even if it is not working out so well for others.

Then I received an industry newsletter from one of our trade publishers, telling me that magazine launches were down this year – only 227 magazines were launched in 2012 their source says. Really? Oh yeah, digital probably doesn't count, right?

Well, who cares if they think digital doesn't count, both digital publishers and the readers who download their mobile and tablet apps sure do. So I can say, without too much fear of contradiction, that 2012 will probably end up being the biggest year for magazine launches ever, ever.

The credit for those magazine launches goes to three players: Apple; the vendors helping make it happen; and, of course, the publishers.

One of those new launches hit the Apple Newsstand today, Coffee Lovers Mag, another of those citizen publisher products that is using the MagCast platform to produce an app.

This magazine immediately caught my attention because I used to publish a coffee industry magazine – yes, I know, I've published just about every kind of magazine, haven't it? The coffee book was fun because I am a big coffee drinker and so attending coffee trade shows was not at all painful – I especially liked bringing home the freebies from the vendors.

This book is not a B2B digital magazine, though. It wants to reach consumers and will need to in order to get back its costs. The MagCast platform costs a bit under $500 a month, though they have been discounting it lately. Nonetheless, anyone hoping to launch a digital magazine and continue to publish will need to see subscriptions or sell advertising.

Coffee Lovers Mag, therefore, is charging $5.99 an issue, with monthly subscriptions at $3.99. So Joseph Robertson, who launched the app, and who attended Reed College, will need to hit triple digits in sales each month to make a go of it.

He is not alone, a lot of people are jumping in, too. Way more than what that monitoring service is recording, that's for sure.
Left: the store page; Middle: simple layouts, in portrait, are the rule; Right: the app has trouble detecting if the reader has an Internet connection.

Australian police in Mildura call the new Apple maps app 'a potentially life threatening issue'

One wondered when someone would say it out loud: Apple's new maps are dangerous. In fact, police in Muldura, Australia are the new maps "a potentially life threatening issue."

My own tests with the new Apple maps have shown that the data inside the apps are totally unacceptable – why Apple didn't see that is anyone's guess. But now more real world testing by iPhone owners is showing just how bad the maps really are.

Mildura, a city in Australia with a population of 30,000, has been forced to issue a statement warning motorists not to rely on the new Apple maps when trying to find their city.

"Mildura Police are urging motorists to be careful when relying on the mapping system on the Apple i-phones operating on the iOS 6 system after a number of motorists were directed off the beaten track in recent weeks," the statement warned.

"Tests on the mapping system by police confirm the mapping systems lists Mildura in the middle of the Murray Sunset National Park, approximately 70km away from the actual location of Mildura."

Police warn that the park has no water supply and can be extremely warm, up to 114 degrees farenheit.

"Some of the motorists located by police have been stranded for up to 24 hours," the police statement said, "without food or water and have walked long distances through dangerous terrain to get phone reception."

Mildura police have contacted Apple concerning the problem, but advised travelers to the area that they "should rely on other forms of mapping until this matter is rectified."

Morning Brief: Emmis updates its city/regional magazine apps; British Airways redesigns mobile app; Fairfax updates tablet editions for its Australian newspapers

The city/regional magazine publisher Emmis Communications updated its tablet editions over the weekend. These apps for such titles as Texas Monthly and Los Angeles Magazine and remain, for the most part, simply replica editions.

The Emmis regional print magazines are well designed, this helps a bit when they are translated to digital, especially when the reader has a newer iPad with a retina display, but otherwise the reader is forced to use pinch-to-zoom to read much of the content.

But there may be some hope on the horizon: the Texas Monthly app contains a single article issue that the reader can download for free. This "Single" is reformatted for the iPad, its fonts appearing to be huge when compared to the standard replica editions inside the app.

The "Single" serves two purposes, it allows the magazine to promote an article in hopes of luring new digital subscribers, and it could, it used this way, allow the editors to play around with the tablet platform a bit – though it doesn't look to be utilized in this way at this time.

Emmis is finding that, like Hearst, its readers are not exactly happy with its digital subscription policies as these apps require all readers to buy a subscription, even if the reader is already a print subscriber.

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British Airways has redesigned its mobile iOS app, adding new features and changed many of its functions to make managing flight information easier and more intuitive.

There is a new "Manage my flight" section allowing users to check arrival departure times, choose seats, access upgrade offers – and the airline promises to do more with this new section in the future.

The app is now optimized for both iOS 6 and the new iPhone 5, and one assumes it is using Passbook now, though it doesn't mention it directly. But the app description does say that the company has "also made it easier to access alternative boarding pass options if a mobile boarding pass is not available."

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Quite a number of media companies updated their apps this weekend including The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Independent, Le Soir, BBC News and The Canberra Times for iPad.

Most of the app updates are simple bug fixes or updates to add iPhone 5 support. Others add new features like pinch-to-zoom to the crosswords like the Canberra Times app.

That app, from Fairfax, is just one of the company's apps updated this weekend. The others are for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.