The reporting around this iPad magazine subscription issue has been pure crap.

Building on my last post outlining what I think the dynamics surrounding the iPad magazine subscription issue are I give you the below – yet another sloppy piece of reporting, this time from arstechnica.com. I pulled three paragraphs from that post which I feel highlight the complete cluelessness with which many analysts have approached this [...]

The days of “Mad Men” are over; we are in the age of Math Men.

The recent shift in focus over at Conde Nast is one of those half brilliant half idiotic ideas that correctly recognizes a crisis and then fails miserably in how to go about addressing it. Lucky for them AdAge has their back. This post by Rajeev Goel does a great job of laying it out all [...]

Forget about the transition from print to digital – the real switch is from bound to unbound.

This post was originally going to be a lot longer. It was going to be a philosophical, abstract, quasi academic screed on the differences between bound and unbound media. I shit-canned that post. This post, the one you are now reading, is going to be short and sweet and to the point. If you publish [...]

Magazine publishers need to think less about form and more about flow

Ok, so Flyp is pretty… I guess. That is, it’s pretty in a digital edition, lets throw some bells, whistles and Flash at them kind of way. Still, if this is the future of magazine publishing the industry may be in some serious shit. If we can’t get beyond this destination mentality, this egocentric way [...]

It’s a free concert from now on: Woodstock as media allegory

At some point on Friday, August 15, 1969 it became overwhelmingly clear to the promoters of the Woodstock Arts and Music Festival that they were being overrun. The tide of enthusiasm, the groundswell, was growing out of control. It was an emergent, organic, spontaneous overflow of a social stream that had been brimming for quite [...]

Newspaperman and the Drunken Slumber

The bottom line in this whole mess is that the owners of most newspapers fell asleep. As the world continued to spin, life continued to evolve, and technology continued to advance, the hero of our story – Newspaperman – feel into a deep, ad revenue induced sleep. It was a pleasant dream filled drunken fairy tale of a slumber – the kind you never want to end.

An analogy involving food, news, and your mother

The more I thought on these questions the more the phrase “spoon-fed” stood out – it made me think of my one year old. And then I realized – that’s were we’ve been. In the twentieth century news and media model we were all infants, happily eating up whatever mamma (the press) fed to us. We didn’t care – we didn’t know any better. Strained peas was all we knew.

This band makes me want to write poetry again

I used to write poetry. I saw the world in metaphor. I spent late nights into early mornings pushing a pen fitfully along ruled lines. I filled corners of open time with random phrases. I turned smiles into ink. Somewhere along the way I lost that. Somewhere along the way life became economic. Somewhere along [...]

Xark!: The newspaper suicide pact

Multinational monster banks are dying – peer to peer micro lending and local currency exchange is growing. Centralized auto manufacturing is dying – a better place and useful mass transit is coming. Factory farms are creating viruses and nutritionally bankrupt foodstuffs – backyard victory gardens and local farmers markets are restoring health.

And, thankfully, Newspapers are dying – Newsgroups are forming.

A Model for the Magazine Industry

This new tack is going to require some rather intense restructuring as clients will now require more than just a sales contact. Account support will need to be enhanced, creative teams will need to be built, production and design will need to be re-imagined. This is not your father’s magazine workflow.