American Airlines universal app gets updated look, Passbook use for AAdvantage card

If you are a frequent traveler you are probably discovering just how useful the airline mobile apps are becoming. Today American Airlines updated its universal iOS app, unveiling a new look and logo, as well as some more features.

The American Airlines app already will let you book flights, monitor your stand-by status and set a reminder so you don't lose your car in the long term parking lot. Oh, it also let's you play Sudoku, though I've never really understood the attraction of that.

Now the app has added Passbook support for the AAdvantage card, and of course, unveiled that new logo (what do you think? I'm not so sure). It also fixed some bugs, says the app description.

I don't travel as much as I used to when I was publishing B2B magazines. But I have this app, as well as many of the other airline apps on my iPhone. You may not use them all the time, but I have a feeling they will come in handy now and then (those airport terminal maps, for instance).

Safeway updates its mobile apps for its grocery brands

It is not a big secret that newspapers have lost much of their advertising over the past decade or so. Observers point to the loss of classified business such as recruitment and auto advertising and one of the major factors total ad revenue has been falling in the industry.

But newspapers have been losing the advertising out of many of its most powerful categories for years now, beginning well before the Internet began to syphon off the business. Real estate brokers, for instance, began producing their own tabloid magazines for homebuyers in the nineties; auto traders and apartment rental publications appeared in gas stations, convenience and grocery stores long before the advent of Google and Craigslist. If there is one thing newspaper executives have proven adept at, it is ignoring threats from competitors.

(Disclosure: I worked in both sales and management in the classified advertising and national and retail food advertising departments at Hearst, Copley and other other newspaper chains.)

But that is not to lessen the impact of the Internet, and now mobile and tablet platforms. Marketers have been trying to reach customers directly for years by buying subscriber lists and building their own databases. To do this, without the help of media outlets, brands started building their own websites, their own email capabilities, their own in-store publications. That they would now turn to mobile apps is a natural.

Safeway, the second largest grocer in the U.S. behind Kroger, has had its own mobile apps since early last year. Its brands, such as Dominick's, Vons, Randalls, Pavilions, and Tom Thumb, also have mobile apps identical to the Safeway branded app.

Those mobile apps were updated today. The biggest new features users will notice is that the apps are now supporting the iPhone 5's larger display. But the apps also build on the apps's main purpose, which is to drive offers to customers, help them compile shopping lists, and make the grocery chains more in control of their customer relations.

Newspapers won't be the only publishers effected by the growth in mobile apps and the web. Direct and marriage mailers, too, are seeing their ad space decline and retailers take on more of the marketing burden themselves.

Morning Brief: The Sun uses free iPhone app in marketing effort; Newspaper Guild to open talks early with Philly newspaper owners; Apple works with Hearst Magazines on 'Read Them Here First' push inside the Newsstand

The U.K. tabloid, The Sun, owned by News International (Murdoch's UK division of News Corp.) has launched a new free iPhone app in support of a promotion effort. The app (U.S. App Store link) will be supporting the paper's promotion called "The Sun's Big Smile Giveaway." The promotion runs through March 31.

"Smile in the face of winter blues with The Sun's Big Smile Giveway," the promotion on The Sun's website reads.

Everything about the promotion seems to be tied to getting information from readers, front the sign-up form, to the new app that makes readers sign in using Facebook.

The free app features the day's funniest stories, according to the app description. The app is a good example of using mobile or tablet apps as marketing for a media company.

Here is the paper's video in support of the promotion, very cute.



The Newspaper Guild of Greater Philadelphia has agreed to conduct early talks with the owners of The Inquirer, the Philadelphia Daily News, and Philly.com in a move that even the Guild admitted was unusual.

The union's contract with Interstate General Media LLC, owners of the papers, runs out in October. The papers are looking once again to cut costs.

While it was an unusual, and I am sure difficult, decision for the Guild, it is really a very important step they are making by reopening the contract," Interstate General chief executive Robert J. Hall said in the Philly.com report.

Yesterday Apple began promoting the digital magazine titles of Hearst inside the Newsstand in a marketing effort under the banner "Read Them Here First."

"Subscribe to these Newsstand magazines and read them on your iPad before they appear in print or any other digital edition," reads the promotion.

The idea counters one argument against some digital magazines, that subscribers of print editions might receive their magazines earlier than digital readers.

The promotion will also help Hearst, which has received very low grades from readers inside the App Store for its pricing policy: Hearst charges all readers for its digital editions, even print subscribers.

Hearst apps also have suffered from bugs, as well. The most recent recent version of Cosmopolitan's tablet edition, for instance, is getting hammered for blank screens. The app was last updated in December.

One reason to charge all readers, of course, is to drive readers to digital, where production and distribution costs will be lower. The move, while making sense from a cost perspective, does leave out the question of paid advertising: can magazines maintain their rate bases through tablet editions without losing advertising from clients and agencies. Most publishers seem to believe they can, so long as audits reflect the total audience.

Adobe and Apple help promote Wenner Media's new tablet edition of Rolling Stone magazine

Not surprisingly, Adobe is promoting on its blog the release of the new tablet edition of Rolling Stone, as it was made using the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite. You can read the original post, and the accompanying video, here.

Adobe doesn't have a whole lot to say about the new app, but it does include a quote from Joseph Hutchinson, Rolling Stone Design Director: "We’re excited to give our readers a digital version of the magazine that is designed specifically for the iPad. Each page and photograph of the magazine is optimized to enhance readability and allow readers to easily navigate through the issue, along with the added feature of being able to listen to music samples."

Apple, too, is promoting the new app, featuring the app at the top of its carousel in both the Music and Newsstand categories inside iTunes.

With the recent redesign of the App Store, new apps no longer can be found simply by searching under the "All" area as it's been eliminated. In fact, as of today, other than the "New and Noteworthy" section, which does not actually feature new apps, the only other apps being feature are 13 apps under the banner Entertainment News. Because of this, many developers are complaining about both declining app sales and the barriers Apple seems to be putting up for small and independent developers.

Wenner Media is clearly not in this category and is, therefore, getting good treatment from Apple.

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As with many other big name magazine titles, Rolling Stone has launched its first interactive tablet edition strictly for Apple's iOS platform. Amazon continues to have a Kindle Edition, but readers generally have rated that poorly for its high price and replica edition design.

I found nothing in Google Play.

It seems likely that Wenner Media is staying away from doing much more than support the other platforms with replicas, at least for now.

From unlikely sources come compelling new tablet titles; The Long Haul Magazine, The Nimble Magazine, BackPocket Magazine, Blueprint Entrepreneur Magazine

Late this morning I responded to a tweet from Rafat Ali, the co-founder of Skift (and founder of paidContent), a new B2B travel website. Ali had tweeted "It is amazing, shocking, confounding yet delightful how slow the travel trades are." I basically said that he had no idea, it is worse than he thinks.

Nothing exemplifies this slowness of the trades than the repeated press release about the low number of new magazine launches seen in 2012. Just a superficial examination of the claim would have shown that it was simply not true. In fact, the pace of magazine launches – digital magazine launches, that is – is incredible.

One of those titles actually has been in the Newsstand for a while now. The Long Haul Magazine is on its third issue now and focuses on the issue of driver health and lifestyle, rather than just the business of long haul transportation.

Edited and published by Luisa Nims, the idea for launching a tablet magazine came from her husband who told her about a new digital publishing solution – Magcast. Until then Nims was contemplating a website only approach.

Nims doesn't come from the print magazine world, nor does she come from a trucking background, either.

"I've never driven a truck, I don't even like driving. If I could walk everywhere I would," Nims told me.

By being an early customer of the company Nims was able to launch her digital magazine with low start-up costs, less than $1,500 I was told. This will allow Nims to not only experiment with the platform, but not feel the pressure some publishers deal with in a new launch situation.

"It's also confidence issue, too: it's OK to mess up $1,500, it's not OK to mess up $15,000, or $20,000," Nims said. "When I've been talking to some mainstream magazine titles… you know they spent $60-70,000 just to get one of their titles into the digital space, which makes no sense at all."

Nims knows that eventually her revenue will come from advertising, but for now it is all about building up her readership, something she plans to do through new launches.

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The Nimble Magazine is a new tablet magazine from Benjamin Rabe, a freelance web-designer from Hamburg, Germany.

"It is an experiment, ma," Rabe writes whimsically in his new invention.

"I think that's the apt way to label something you have never done before. I always wanted to more illustrational work, and blogging for over three years on fingerpainted.it, a magazine seems like the logical step for me," Rabe writes.

"With The Nimble Mag I will try and embrace the three key elements in this new area of art: mobility, data-driven collaboration and sharing. The first three issues are free. After than I will see whether I am able to sustain it all and also switching to paid subscription."

Rabe does us all a favor by listing his tool right on the first page: The Baker Framework, animate, The Laker Compendium, Middleman, FontAwesome and Google Web Fonts. The result is, as Rabe describes it, "a tiny publication about mobile art and other stuff."

It is well worth checking out.

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BackPocket Magazine and Blueprint Entrepreneur Magazine
use two very different vendor solutions.

BackPocket is published by Alexander Chaney and is using Coverpage to produce its app. I have not played around with Coverpage, but the solution appears more powerful and feature laden than Magcast, which both The Long Haul Magazine and Blueprint Entrepreneur Magazine are using.

Jamie Cheng is publishing Blueprint Entrepreneur and is charging $10.99 for single issues, though a free trial of the new digital magazine is available within the app.

Rolling Stone gets an iPad edition, a hybrid edition that needs ad agencies to get on board the tablet bandwagon

You can be sure that media websites will want to rub it in a bit. Jann Wenner famously dismissed iPad publishing and as a result the Wenner Media titles have been slow to appear inside the Apple Newsstand. But today the first tablet edition for Rolling Stone has been released.

Rolling Stone Magazine, the app, is the second Wenner Media tablet edition to appear inside the Newsstand, US Weekly having been released in May of last year. Why the long delay? Did the company feel that releasing an iPad app for Rolling Stone would be a bit of an embarrassment? Who knows, and it really doesn't matter if you are a fan of the magazine, it is in the Newsstand now.

Print subscribers to Rolling Stone's print edition will not be pleased: everyone is being asked to pay to access the digital editions – $4.99 for individual issues, $1.99 per month or $19.99 per year to subscribe. The price, though, does represent a discount over print, so it is possible here that the publisher recognizes that driving readers to digital will payoff in the end – at least from the standpoint of production costs.

But Jann Wenner's point about digital, made to AdAge in May of last year, has some validity still today:

From the publisher's point of view I would think they're crazy to encourage it. They're going to get less money for it from advertisers. Right now it costs a fortune to convert your magazine, to program it, to get all the things you have to do on there. And they're not selling. You know, 5,000 copies there, 3,000 copies here, it's not worth it. You haven't put a dent in your R&D costs.

So I think that they're prematurely rushing and showing little confidence and faith in what they've really got, their real asset, which is the magazine itself, which is still a great commodity. It's a small additive; it's not the new business.

I don't think many publishers would argue about the idea that a tablet edition will end up getting less ad dollars than a print magazine. But then again, most publishers are not looking to separate their print editions from their digital editions, continuing to charge one price for everything, pumping up circulation through digital distribution, but still charging ad rates based on the print price model.

That is why it shouldn't be surprising that the new Rolling Stone tablet edition is a hybrid tablet app, with print ads reproduced as seen in print, and the editorial pages reformatted – we are seeing this more and more in magazines that are maintaining healthy ad page counts.

But I'm not sure the approach woks well here, at least not at the beginning of the book. The two-page spreads seen here are incomprehensible (see video walk-through below). With so much time between the US Weekly launch and the Rolling Stone launch it is disappointing to see that the ad team was not able (or given the opportunity) to go to agencies and swap out copy for more appropriate, more interactive ads. Who is at fault here: agencies or the publisher?

The first issue seen here, dated January 31 (that doesn't make much sense in a digital world either, does it?) weighs in at only 137 MB thanks to utilizing portrait only.

The other thing that keeps the file size down is that much of the links point to outside the app. But by taking the hybrid approach, the editors were able to add audio content that greatly improves the reading experience. Loyal readers, who go digital, will certainly think the digital edition offers great value and a good reading experience.

Also, as you will see in the video, those links to outside content also include links to iTunes where a reader can buy the music being featured. If there is a problem with the approach it is that it takes you completely outside the app and to return the reader must go back to the app itself. Surely Apple would want a more elegant way to link to its own store than this?

(I've deleted the paragraph that ended this post because it violated my own rule about commenting on the content of the magazines seen here, rather than just the app, its approach and its business model.)