No B.S. : Publishing And The Continuance of Digital Ubiquity

Posted on February 18, 2012 by

[Knowledge can be communicated, but wisdom cannot. A man can find it, he can live it, he can be filled and sustained by it, but he cannot utter or teach it. -Hermann Hesse (1877 - 1962)]

BoSacks: No B.S. : The Continuance of Computer Ubiquity and Publishing

As smartphones, cloud computing and other technologies form a global network among consumers, what is the impact on publishers?

By Robert M. Sacks

Publishing Executive Magazine

http://www.pubexec.com/article/bosacks-the-continuance-computer-ubiquity/1

I attended the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January to see what electronic implications would further affect our ever-changing industry. What I discovered is not so much a new technology, but the start of a thought process in what I consider the inevitable next digital chapter. As you might guess, CES is filled with electronic gadgets from the smallest imaginable to the largest possible with today’s advanced manufacturing techniques.

The pervading idea/concept was displayed everywhere, but not precisely articulated by anyone. What I saw was the overwhelming need for humans to communicate. We have been at it since cave paintings and the ability to grunt words as ideas and then put ideas into action. We have been at it since smoke signals, tom-toms, papyrus and, of course, our pal Gutenberg. We humans are who we are because we needed to communicate, teach and share knowledge.

Publishing boiled down to its lowest common dominator is the instrument of this human requirement.

CES has taken the information-distribution concept to the next logical mechanical conclusion. Hans Vestberg, CEO of global telecommunications equipment and services provider Ericsson Corp., said in his keynote that 50 billion connected devices will exist by 2020. He added that there will be 6 billion mobile subscriptions and, by
2015, 5 billion smartphone broadband-connected people around the world.

This creates a new communications dynamic and a yet-to-be-understood networked global society. What will be the impact on us, as publishers, and to our society, when all our gadgets can not only “talk” to us, but also talk to each other, and without our intervention?

I saw at CES the continuance of computer ubiquity in the age of mass-information distribution. This is a time when very smart computers will be embedded into everything we buy and own. They are already in our toys, stoves, refrigerators, phones, cars, eyeglasses, medicine, TVs, internal implants, e-paper, and soon-to-be-full-color, reflective reading substrates.

Let’s also add the rapidly developing stages of cloud computing to this line of logic, where all data will be stored on huge server farms in isolated areas around the globe. This obvious next step will bring the power of unlimited computation to everyone and all our electronic things.

Imagine the vast power of the IBM Watson computer at everyone’s beck and call 24/7. This universal, super-cloud-based, data-driven community powered by Watson-like machines will be connected to the 50 billion gadgets and computers we will have in unimagined and intricate ways-the power to think, reason and answer almost any question in less than a nanosecond by anyone and everything. Yes, it also does sound a bit like the world that the “Terminator” movies portrayed. The “Terminator” Skynet scenario is nothing more or less than a cloud-computing infrastructure with a very bad attitude.

But put aside the dark side of what might happen and think about the positive effects this might have on society. What I am describing is just the beginning of the next wave of ubiquitous computerized power to the masses.

To us in the publishing/media world, the possibilities are awesome and endless. We could and should be at the center of the digitized reading experience.

I believe all this informational power will lead to an energized and profitable age for all of us in the information-distribution business. PE

Bob Sacks (aka BoSacks) is a publishing industry consultant and president of The Precision Media Group (BoSacks.com). He also is co-founder of research company mediaIDEAS (MediaIdeas.net), and publisher and editor of a daily, international e-newsletter, Heard on the Web.

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iPad App Subscriptions Grown Through Bundling / Tablets Help Publishers

Posted on February 17, 2012 by

["The great thing in the world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving." -Oliver Wendell Holmes (American Physician, Poet, Writer, Humorist and Professor at Harvard, 1809-1894)]

iPad App Subscriptions Grown Through Bundling

http://www.mediabiznet.com.au/news/home.do?newsId=5510

Today’s iPad magazine enthusiast is someone who buys a magazine app twice a month, purchases an average of three apps per transaction and spends more than $10 per purchase. He or she buys magazine apps in the same transaction as sports apps, games, and apps related to other enthusiast interests.

A dataset provided exclusively to eMedia Vitals by eDataSource provides a unique look at the purchasing habits of anonymous individual consumers from Aug. 12 to Oct. 31. The data shows profiles of three types of users that consumer marketers and audience development professionals should be developing specific strategies for:

* New Users: someone recently purchased an iPad and is loading up on apps to see what they like

* Magazine Enthusiasts: someone who buys a magazine app at least twice a month

* iPad Zealots: someone who has two transactions a month of $20 or more

While nearly one-third of all iTunes transactions involving a magazine app were less than $5, over 48 per cent of transactions were for more than $10 and consisted of more than 3 apps. The price per app in transactions of $10 or more jumps considerably, demonstrating less price resistance than the casual buyer.

Bundle related magazines apps into a single offer

According to the data, the more apps purchased, the more paid per app. Users who buy multiple apps at one time are less price-sensitive than the one-off casual buyer. This suggests that publishers should consider bundling multi-brand subscription offers to iPad users or cross promoting quickly after a single app purchase. This can be accomplished in one of several ways:

* Using the app’s push notifications to suggest a purchase

* House ads cross promoting other brands with a link directly to the brand in the app store

* Using an existing circulation and fulfillment service to create a multi-brand iPad subscription offer (which could also offer print)

Reach out to related non-magazine app providers for bundles

Remember the old Sports Illustrated TV commercials? You get a one-year subscription to Sports Illustrated, the Swimsuit Issue, a calendar of your favorite team, and the football phone! One of the key characteristics of the Zealots category is that they buy expensive apps like NHL GameCenter at the same time that they buy GQ.

Use this same strategy to test bundles of your brand with other non-magazine apps. Use Google Ad Planner or Quantcast to find sites and users interests of your audience. You can see on GQ’s Google Ad Planner profile that their readers 15x more interested in Deadspin than an average Website. So, partnering with top-selling sports apps on some bundled offers might reap rewards.

Targeting new iPad users can increase app sales

The data also suggests targeting new iPad users, as they make large purchases right away. While we have not been able to identify a telemarketing or email list of new iPad users, we have seen some successful strategies that can be employed here.

The New York Post’s iPad marketing is one to use as a model. They intercept any iPad browser attempting to access nypost.com, and they redirect them to an iPad offer. Initially, it was an interstitial, but today you have to subscribe via their app in order to access their content on your iPad. This tactic can be modified easily, and it can at least target iPad users who are new to your site.

1. Develop three offers: a single brand offer, a multi-title bundled offer, and a choice between a bundled offer or a single brand

2. Test the single title subscription offer and the choice offer to returning iPad visitors

3. Test the multi-title bundled offer and the choice offer to new iPad visitors

Targeting new iPad users, enthusiasts and zealots with customized offers ensures your brand won’t be so reliant on Apple’s Newsstand for app discovery and increases your yield per transaction.

Source: emediavitals

Tablets Attract Magazine Readers

http://www.mediabiznet.com.au/news/home.do?newsId=5513

New research composed exclusively of Tablet and eReader owners, reveals that male Tablet owners are particularly interested in reading digital magazines and that Tablets are generating readership of back issues of publications.

According to the GfK MRI iPanel, almost three-quarters (71 per cent) of Tablet owners say they are interested in reading magazines on their device. Men, in particular, are open to digital magazine reading: 77 per cent of male Tablet owners expressed interest in reading magazines on their device versus 68 per cent of female owners. Among younger male Tablet owners, ages 18 to 34, 85 per cent expressed interest in reading magazines on their device.

Digital magazines seem to be sparking new reading behaviour among consumers, says the report. 19 per cent of Tablet owners who read a magazine on their device in the last 30 days also took the opportunity to read back issues of a title during their reading session, with little difference between genders, as 20 per cent of males having read back issues compared to 19 per cent of females.

Risa Becker, SVP Research at GfK MRI, says “The fact that younger men who own Tablets are interested in reading digital magazines bodes well for digital magazine advertisers, since this demographic has been historically hard to reach.”

The most popular way in which Tablet owners read a magazine or magazine-related content is with an App, according to the GfK MRI iPanel:

* 65 per cent of Tablet owners who read a magazine on their device in the last 30 days did so via an App

* 47 per cent of Tablet owners accessed magazine content on their device by visiting a magazine’s website

* 37 per cent read a digital reproduction of a magazine, which includes both print content and advertisements.

Tablets Helping Publishers Sell Back Issues

http://www.mediabiznet.com.au/news/home.do?newsId=5508

Good news for publishers when Apple launched the tablet, single copies were the only way most magazines were available. Because single issues usually were priced the same as the print edition, readers balked at having to pay almost as much for a single digital issue as a year’s print subscription.

Now digital subscription options are available to consumers, and single issues have turned out to be a good way of selling back copies of magazines, which has been cumbersome to do in print.

At U.S. based publisher Hearst Magazines, 30 per cent of its single copies sold on tablets are back issues, according to president David Carey. Hearst sells digital editions of lots of its brands including Cosmopolitan, Esquire and Popular Mechanics on the iPad, and with single issues representing 10 per cent to 15 per cent of its digital editions volume, back issues make up some 4 per cent of the total.

Carey calls back issues the “long tail” of digital editions. “Like book publishers, we’re making our ‘back list’ more easily accessed by readers,” he emailed. “Much of the content is truly timeless.”

Enthusiast publisher Bonnier has had a similar experience. At its Popular Science, which has been on the iPad since its launch, back issues have accounted for 40 percent of its single digital copies sold this year, said Gregg Hano, Popular Science’s publisher. At sibling title Popular Photography, the figure is 41 percent.

It’s hard to see news-driven magazines selling a lot of back issues, but for those with evergreen content, back issue sales have the potential to be big business. Martha Stewart Living and Everyday Food report that one-fourth of their digital single copies sold on the iPad are back issues. “Our readers have always told us they archive every issue of our magazines and regularly refer back to them, and they’re archiving issues digitally now as well,” a Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia rep said.

Similarly, people also are drawn to back issues like Popular Science’s Best of What’s New that have a long shelf life, Hano said. Even with Bonnier’s back issues being priced lower than current editions ($2.99 versus $4.99), he said, “We have found this to be really good for our business.”

Pleased by the appeal of back issue sales, publishers are now mulling how to make the most of them by getting them in front of readers in tablets’ app stores. They may have to wait, though. At least for now, the sale of multiple back issues is limited to the iPad; sources said only one back issue per title is available on Barnes & Noble’s Nook and the Kindle Fire.

Source: Adweek

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WSJ. and T Magazine : The Rivalry Is On

Posted on February 17, 2012 by

["The ability to learn faster than your competitors may be only sustainable competitive advantage." - Arie de Geus]

WSJ. and T: The Rivalry Is On

By JOHN KOBLIN

http://www.wwd.com/media-news/media-features/wsj-and-t-the-rivaly-is-on-5688981/print-preview/

Sally Singer

Photo By Steve Eichner

Lana Del Rey on the cover of T.

Photo By Courtesy Photo

NEW YORK – Five years ago, The New York Times had a real business on its hands when it badly needed one. T: The New York Times Style Magazine had become a powerhouse. It had just over 1,600 ad pages, and brought in more than $45 million in revenue. It was frequently mentioned by chief executive officer Janet Robinson in quarterly earnings calls and at media summits as being a standout business for The New York Times Co. Meanwhile, across town, Rupert Murdoch, fresh off closing on the sale of The Wall Street Journal, was assembling his own luxury magazine, WSJ. When the magazine came out in September 2008, it came off as a poor imitation of T, and a transparent attempt by Murdoch to elbow his way even further into the Times’ turf. The verdict came in early: It was T’s town and there was no competition. Not so fast. In the year of crazy catch-ups, with the Giants surging to a Super Bowl championship and Linsanity and Rick Santorum roaring up to Mitt Romney, WSJ. editor Deborah
Needleman has driven the Journal’s magazine into sudden contention with T editor Sally Singer’s domineering but also flat-lining title. In 2011, WSJ. had a double-digit increase in ad pages and this year will get another frequency bump to 10 issues, the third time that’s happened in three years. As for T, from going to a star of the Times Co., it has now become something of a source of frustration for the ad sales team and the paper’s executive editor, Jill Abramson. The gap between the two glossies remains significant – T, which published 15 times last year, finished 2011 with 1,087 ad pages, according to Media Industry Newsletter, and WSJ., which published nine times, had just 383, according to stats provided by the Journal. But Murdoch’s team is beginning to feel some momentum and sensing an opportunity. “If there are 1,000 pages out there that T has, I want a good portion of them,” said WSJ. publisher Anthony Cenname. When Singer came to T, succeeding Stefano Tonchi, she
wanted to create a more readable magazine, something that a reader of A1 news wouldn’t find to be such an exotic little creature that looked entirely out of place in the paper. “I want to make sure that the reader who reads the front page [of the Times] doesn’t think of T as this strange dispatch from ‘Project Style’ that they can toss away with everything else,” Singer told WWD last year. She went to work retooling it. Her magazine is grungy, cool and downtown. Her women’s fashion issue has Lana Del Rey on the cover, shot by Terry Richardson. It does not bear much resemblance to the explicitly commercial enterprise that Tonchi’s T was. Early on, it seemed like a bit of a risk to muck with the T format since it had been a success at its only real mission: to be a cash cow. The paper’s former executive editor, Bill Keller, once said that T was created to “generate the revenues that help subsidize the stuff that drew most of us into the business.” These days, its results have
been mixed. In 2011, T had an ad page bump of 0.7 percent, according to data from Media Industry Newsletter. T’s upcoming fashion issue had an 8 percent decline, according to MIN. It was a noticeable drop for the magazine considering nearly every major fashion title had strong results in the second biggest month of the year for fashion titles (Vogue, InStyle, Elle, Marie Claire, Glamour, W and Harper’s Bazaar all had ad page gains ranging from 2 to 31 percent in their March issues). The paper’s new executive editor has taken notice. According to several Times insiders, Abramson gave Singer a dressing down late last year after hearing complaints from the ad sales staff. They were having a tough time selling her magazine. The ad sales team was not a big fan of the magazine’s visuals. It was time to go ahead and make a slightly more marketable title. And perhaps those black-and-white covers – five of Singer’s first 17 issues have had them – could go. Any hiccups at T are particu
larly felt considering that the Sunday Magazine – itself under a new editor, Hugo Lindgren – has dropped 28 percent in ad pages from the beginning of the year to mid-February, according to MIN. “Jill’s position is that T largely exists for one reason and one reason alone: To make money,” said a Times source. “It should not be something, like our coverage of the White House or how we handle anonymous sourcing on sensitive A1 articles, that should be occupying a lot of her management time.” Singer declined to comment for this story and Abramson was traveling, but said in a statement: “Sally is a brilliant editor who has done a terrific job with T to the great benefit of our readers. The upcoming spring fashion issue is absolutely gorgeous and full of interesting and enterprising pieces. It is one of her finest issues to date.” Indeed, sources said Abramson and her boss, Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, both believe Singer is a talent, but they have real concerns about her bud
get. And the objections with the visuals in Singer’s magazine are not limited to her ad sales department. Just ask her predecessor, who has long to be known as a quasi-publisher in his own right. “It’s different from my vision,” current W editor in chief Tonchi told WWD last June. “I had a very specific vision, I suppose. I like large images, I like white space, I like a certain kind of elegance in the design and the images and I thought that was the way to make a difference from the rest of the paper, from [the Styles section]. Now, it’s all a little bit like soup. You don’t know exactly if you’re in T, in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, the style pages or the paper. “I think I brought in a lot of great images,” he continued. “I don’t see them anymore, photography particularly.” (Tonchi’s W is starting to pick up: After a single-digit ad page bump in 2011, the magazine has a 17 percent gain in the first quarter of 2012, tied for the biggest quarterly increase in the maga
zine’s history. Its April issue is up more than 30 percent, said a spokeswoman for the magazine).

Deborah Needleman

Photo By Steve Eichner

Like Tonchi’s W, Needleman’s WSJ is bringing in good returns. Since she took over in 2010, the Little Engine That Could of the Journal newsroom has had frequency increases from six to nine to 10 issues. In the six issues that overlapped between 2010 and 2011, it saw 30 percent ad page gains, according to the Journal’s internal stats, which a spokeswoman said are tallied in accordance with how the Publishers Information Bureau would add it up. In 2010, WSJ. finished with 217 ad pages and last year had 383. Its March issue is up 27 percent year-over-year and its publisher said that the April issue will be up more than 50 percent. The magazine, which once had no place in the world of fashion media, is quietly beginning to circulate more and more. Needleman created a cult magazine in Domino, but it wasn’t a commercial success – it closed four years after it started, one of six Condé Nast titles that shuttered in 2009. Now, it appears that Needleman that could be turning into a b
it of a business success. “It’s nice that it’s fat with ads and they’re good-looking ads,” said Needleman. “But from my perspective I’m still doing the same thing, which is trying to make the best magazine I can make. But it’s definitely nicer be at a growing magazine.” When she took over WSJ., she said it was a “respectable luxury platform” but that “it didn’t have a whole lot of personality.” She said she had to set out figuring out a way to connect a lot of different interests for her luxury title – fashion, luxury, philanthropy, art, food, business, design and technology. “The filter – that’s how these disparate subjects get held together in one magazine,” she said. “I had this at Domino. All the stories have to meet certain criteria. It’s like influence, and creativity and innovation and power or a sense of independence. Every person, idea or story is in some way kicking off one of those boxes and that’s how it keeps it coherent. Lots of magazines create coherence by doi
ng all one thing – it’s like Dwell, it’s all one look or something! But the other way, in my mind, is to have a kind of filter that everything goes through. You basically create a world, a little hermetic world. “I felt like at Domino we were feeding decorating crack to 30-year-old girls,” she continued. “The audience was made for what we were serving them. It surprises me and this is something that pleases me much more than any of the ad things.” And what of her rival, Singer? When Needleman and Singer were both appointed to their jobs, it looked like it could be the most intriguing of the several wars between the Journal and the Times. After all, both were extremely well-respected and burnished their reputations at 4 Times Square – not the newspaper world. Is T Magazine her rival? “I was giving this talk to the ad people yesterday or two days ago, and I think it’s really something that’s true for the advertisers,” she said. “To them, they are our direct competitors. The ad
dollars are finite and if they go here, they’re not going somewhere else. But making a magazine is not quite like that. I truly don’t ever think about other magazines when I’m making this magazine. I feel like it’s a natural comparison for other people to make but it doesn’t feel real to me at all.” But to her bosses? And to Singer’s? It’s starting to feel very real.

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Apple CEO Cook Tells Why Tablets Will Take Over

Posted on February 17, 2012 by

["That is the road we all have to take - over the Bridge of Sighs into eternity." - Soren Kierkegaard (Danish Philosopher and Theologian, generally recognized as the first existentialist philosopher. 1813-1855)]

Apple CEO Cook Tells Why Tablets Will Take Over

By Tiernan Ray

http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2012/02/14/aapl-cook-tells-goldman-reasons-tablets-will-take-over/

Apple’s CEO Tim Cook took the podium at the Goldman Sachs Technology Conference this afternoon to talk with hardware analyst Bill Shope.

Cook remarked that Apple’s revenue from greater Asia, India, Africa and other emerging market territories had expanded from $1.4 billion to $22 billion.

Shope asked Cook what prompted explosive growth in the iPad.

“This 55-million is something no one would have guessed,” said Cook, referring to the total shipment volume to date in just under two years.

It took 22 years to sell 55 million Macs, it took us three years to sell that many iPhones. The product is absolutely incredible, and the pace of innovation on the product has been incredible. And the ecosystem. There are 170,000 apps optimized for iPad. But the reason that it’s so large in my view is that the iPad has stood on the shoulders of everything that came before it. The App Store was already in play. People were trained on the iPhone, so they were already familiar with multi-touch. It’s amazing how the product has captured so many people … You’re using one! My mother is using one. I go to the gym and my trainer is using one. It’s the fastest adoption across a wide range that I’ve ever seen before. It quickly became 80% to
90% of my work was done on the iPad. Many of us thought at Apple that the tablet market would become larger than the PC market, and it was just a matter of time before that occurred. I see the incredible rate and pace of innovation among developers. If you invited everyone today to come to this room to discuss the coolest PC apps today, you might not have anyone in the meeting! This is where the innovation is. I love the Mac, and the Mac can still grow, but I strongly believe that the tablet market will surpass the unit sales of the PC market, and it’s just a matter of the rate and speed with which that happens. It’s too much of a change for it not to.

Asked about pricing as a factor, Cook responded that tablets might sell units on price, but that the experience upon taking the product home would be despair. You feel good taking your wallet out to pay for it. But when you get it home and you use it, you don’t remember, Oh! I got a good deal! Because you hate it.

Amazon.com (AMZN), said Cook, is a “different kind of competitor.”

I think they’ll sell a lot of units. I think they have and they will, but I think the customers we’re designing for are not going to be satisfied with a limited-function product. I think the catalyst in the tablet market will be innovation, and going to the next frontier. As long as people invent their own stuff, I love competition.

Cook said iPad has cannibalized some Mac sales. “I don’t predict the demise of the PC industry. I don’t subscribe to that. I do believe it’s cannibalizing more Windows PCs, there’s many more of them to cannibalize. I think tablets in general will cannibalize PCs.”

“Maybe, i think politicians do this, it forces you to sharpen your message and say who you are. It will be good for the PC market because it will force them to innovate. Out of that I think there will be a strong PC industry. I just think in units the tablet market will be larger than the PC market.

Shope asked Cook why the company is using its cash “sparingly.”

Cook took exception to that phrasing.

We’ve spent billions on acquisitions, including the acquisition of IP. We’ve spent billions on retail. We’ve spent billions on infrastructure for the App Store and such. But, yes, we still have a lot. I guess I would say we’ve been judicious. We spend money like it’s our last penny. I think shareholders want us to do that. I don’t think they want us to act like our rich. And we’ve never felt that way.

“I’m not religious about holding it. We’re in very active discussions at the board level about what to do. We’re not going to go have a toga party and do something outlandish. People don’t have to worry it’s going to burn a hole in our pocket.”

When shop asked Cook if the cash balance was “inefficient,” he conceded Apple has more cash than needed to run the business. “I only ask for a little patience.”

Shope asked about the AppleTV product and what Cook’s intentions are for the product and the market, and why it is still a “hobby.”

We don’t want to send a message to you and our other shareholders that we think it is as big as our other markets. We don’t want to send a signal we think the leg of that stool is of equal length as the other [product categories at Apple.]

Although Apple has sold 3 million units of the product, and Cook notes satisfaction is “off the charts,” he said the company has thought it would need something “more main market” to have the product be at a larger volume.

When Shope asked Cook about iCloud and Siri, Cook said iCloud followed the “media hub” idea of the last decade for the Mac, but “iCloud turns that on its head.”

You and I live off of multiple devices. It’s no longer a great customer experience to have to sync your iPad to your Mac, and then sync to your iPhone, and then resync your iPad because there’s something you forgot. All of a sudden your life has gotten so much easier. We now have 100 million users of iCloud. There’s obviously more we can do with it. For years, you used a physical keyboard and you used a mouse for input. You did that for a long, long time. There wasn’t a great deal of revolution. All of a sudden Apple comes out with multi-touch on the Mac Pros. Then extended that in phones and tablets. Well, Siri is another profound change in input. It’s something we’ve always dreamed of. It’s sort of like having a video call with FaceTime. Ah ha! It can work. These are not things where we run separate P&Ls because we don’t believe in that. We’ve always run just one P&L and don’t worry about it. We just want people to have a great experience. But I think these are things you
will look back on and talk with your grandkids about that are profound.

When Shope asked Cook what his role as CEO is about, Cook reflected on Apple’s culture, which he said he did not want to change,

Steve drilled in all of us over many years that the company should revolve around great products. We should stay extremely focused on a few things rather than that we do so many that we don’t do them well. And we should only go into markets where we can do good for society, not just sell a lot of products. These are the things that I focus on. We’re always focused on the future. We don’t sit and think about how great things were yesterday. Those are the things I’m holding onto. It’s a privilege to be a part of it.

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BoSacks Readers Speak Out: The Advantages of Being a Print Dinosaur

Posted on February 14, 2012 by

["It takes in reality only one to make a quarrel. It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favour of vegetarianism while the wolf remains of a different opinion." - William Ralph Inge (1860 - 1954), Outspoken Essays (1919)]

BoSacks Readers Speak Out: The Advantages of Being a Print Dinosaur

Re: BoSacks Spoke Out: The Advantages of Being a Print Dinosaur

Oh I don’t know. Prescient, yes. That’s one thing you always seem to be. But are people still fighting the future that’s walked up and smacked us on the forehead with a two by four? No, I don’t think so. The problem is no can really see where the future is going anymore. There are dozens of potential paths for us tp travel and unfortunately many of them are dark and not very promising. And, unfortunately, those seem to be precisely the ones that our vaunted industry leaders seem to want to go down. Perhaps that’s why so many publishers are still reluctant to go.

(Submitted by an Industry Consultant)

Re: BoSacks Spoke Out: The Advantages of Being a Print Dinosaur

This is a good one, Bo!

Nice to see you remembering how gravure (the forgotten print process that doesn’t have to worry about trapping, fountain solutions, ghosting, etc.) was digital far ahead of offset.

Here at Hearst we abandoned edit proofs quite a while back and we no longer require ad proofs either…..it states that on our websites and Ad Portals. It has made things infinitely better, and has (finally) put the onus of responsibility back on the agency where it always belonged…….has put the kabosh on many ad complaints, also.

Thanks for keeping us in perspective.

(Submitted by a senior Director of Manufacturing)

Re: BoSacks Spoke Out: The Advantages of Being a Print Dinosaur

What always amazes me is there is so much focus on proofing and so little on press calibrations, ink density on the sheet, ink formulations and paper variance. I feel most proofs are a good representation of the file provided the proofing device is calibrated with regular maintenance following the manufacturer’s specification. Be the proof a sprayed on inkjet that are mostly the norm these days and have gotten quite good even if they don’t represent the lay down of a screen or layered Kodak Approval that with Kodak’s recent financial trouble and the all around slowness in making those proofs, I think most are moving away from even though in my comparisons to printed results it is superior proof. Maybe not a cromalin of with actual tints of PMS laminated into the proof (one of the only proofs to ever accurately predict what a PMS would look like on press without having an actual ink drawdown in hand) or a matchprint that were good proofs though costly and often too much proof
for a job.

I digress though. The press calibrations- tension settings, running speed, oven temps and myriad of nuances a good pressman adjusts can deliver a superior result and seeing a good press crew at work to get the press humming and delivering its best product possible is really something to behold. To get to that superior result, proper ink density must be observed and quality inks should be used. Some questions have surfaced with increasing petro costs if the inks have been getting less adequate…no solid evidence though have heard talk.

Keep up the good work Bob

(Submitted by a publisher production professional)

Re: BoSacks Spoke Out: The Advantages of Being a Print Dinosaur

Well done.

I started in printing with the Hughes Printing Company in ’89. By ’90 it was acquired by the Mack family.

In a few short years I remember Cahners informing Mack that they would no longer supply proofs and that we would “run to the numbers”. Not so easy on presses from the Carter Administration that were maintained only when they broke down (which is technically a ‘repair”, not ‘maintenance’) and boasted 30% dot gain across the board.

Ah, memories.

(Submitted by a senior print sales professional)

Re: BoSacks Spoke Out: The Advantages of Being a Print Dinosaur

Bo, you have been ahead of the curve since we first crossed paths in 1979. This was a great trip down production memory lane. This reminds me of the stupid fights about CTP or film. Which was the better process? DUH. You were fighting the right fight then and now. Let me add that your talk at PRIMEX was terrific. Best of the show by far.

(Submitted by a senior publishing director)

RE: The Three “Real” Reasons for Single Copy Sales Decline…

One of my clients just sent me the e-blast they send out when a new issue goes on sale. Right there, in all it’s glory (along with a notable lack of sponsorship) was the line, “Want to save money? Stop wasting time and trouble finding “X” on the newsstand and subscribe and save 80%”.

Ouch.

To Samir’s list we could also add: distribution centers that are too far from the retailers to allow for appropriate re-stocking of sell outs. Untrained merchandisers. Obsolescent distribution systems that were not really designed for the super sized distributions they now manage.

Distribution managers and category managers that are too far removed from the product they are supposed to be managing. An obsolete industry pricing system that makes it impossible for several links in the chain to be adequately compensated for their sales efforts (and not just the wholesalers – it’s getting harder for publishers to make money on the newsstand, and even the ND’s are getting stretched). Either we’re doing a lousy job explaining our business to the retailers, or the retailers just won’t listen. Plan on Gramed mainlines. Plan O Gramed mainlines that aren’t followed. The incessant desire of some retailers to jack up publishers and shake them down for retail promotion dollars…..

Too many choices? I’d have to disagree with Samir on that one. If we properly maintained our racks and product mix, it wouldn’t be an issue. For years wholesalers have cried foul, all this product was dumped on them. Nonsense. Most of them can either withhold, which they do anyway, or sit their ND’s down for regularly scheduled and properly enforced allotment reviews. We used to do that with Chas. Levy four times a year. It worked pretty well and I always wondered why other wholesalers, especially the larger ones didn’t follow their lead.

(Submitted by an industry Consultant)

RE: The Three “Real” Reasons for Single Copy Sales Decline…

Covering the subject of subs. Just in today’s mail from Time Inc/ They are calling it a “Senior Citizen savings Offer” 57 issues of Time + 6 additional months(as a bonus) price $20.00 Cover price is listed as $259.03.

Oh forgot they are also offering a “Ultronic Weather Station Clock. Howsaabout that(As Mel Allen used to say)

(Submitted by an industry Consultant)

RE: The Three “Real” Reasons for Single Copy Sales Decline…

In my humble opinion it really all boils down to the word “original distribution”. The so called make a like really does not cut it.I can remember in many agencies years back where the dist clerk was the poorest paid person in the agency.

One other item which you covered; new titles: if it were not for them the business would have died 40 years ago. We do not have to sit here and name all of the supposed “big ones” that have been buried for a longtime now. Because of the w/s being stretched out the help they have the services many racks leave a lot to be desired. Many premature returns are because the minimum wage part time person is just to lazy to put up the new merchandise received on the day(s) they work.

(Submitted by an industry Consultant)

Re the unpaid intern at Hearst: My first job in publishing was on part-works in London in the mid-1970s, before Mrs Thatcher and when inflation was raging and everybody was living on overdrafts. Most of the staff on the magazines were wonderful young women, all with college degrees, and all happy to be working in publishing for peanuts while the company made money hand over fist. Is the worm turning? Maybe magazines will disappear for the same reason big bands disappeared after WWII: it was uneconomic to keep them on the road.
(Submitted by a Retired writer)

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Behind magazines’ newsstand woes

Posted on February 14, 2012 by

["Look now how mortals are blaming the gods, for they say that evils come from us, but in fact they themselves have woes beyond their share because of their own follies." - Homer (800 BC - 700 BC), The Odyssey]

Behind magazines’ newsstand woes

You can blame the economy for the tumble in single-copy sales

By Diego Vasquez

The big question for the magazine industry is whether the recent decline in single-copy sales can be halted. The answer is yes, but it’s going to take a huge effort on behalf of publishers and retailers to turn it around, according to analysts. The publishing industry needs to remind the public of reasons why to buy the magazines, from the lush visuals that are less striking on digital screens to the simple pleasure of flipping through a well-conceived book. Retailers, meanwhile, must make better decisions about how they display magazines. And the entire industry could really benefit from a stronger economy, which has certainly hurt sales over more recent years. During the most recent six-month reporting period, newsstand sales were off nearly 10 percent. John Harrington, partner at Harrington Associates, which also runs the web site, talks to Media Life about how the industry can turn its circ woes around, what’s really behind the sliding numbers, and how much digital publishing is hurting print.

Why have newsstand sales been on such a steady decline for so many years?
The sales slump began in 2008 at the beginning of the so-called Great Recession. Although the economy has picked up, retailers, particularly supermarket operators, report customers have changed shopping habits, sticking to their lists. That hurts impulse sales, which is bad for magazines.

Publisher digital initiatives and aggressive subscription marketing have hurt as well.

A financially distressed wholesaler level also hurts because it emphasizes cost cutting.

Retailers have also made some bad decisions about magazine display placements. And that is measureable.

Does this say more about the magazine industry or the economy? Why? It’s both.
Publishers’ very public stressing of their digital products confuses retail management and the public as well.

Don’t people tell you they do more and more of their reading on the internet, or on their phones, or their tablets? But the economy is still a major factor. Do you foresee any end to the newsstand sales dip anytime in the next few years? Why or why not?
I really think it can regain some of its losses, but everyone–publishers through wholesalers–will need to embark on a major marketing and promotion program to remind consumers of the excitement and value of magazines, especially at retail. Which categories are seeing the biggest newsstand circ dips and why? Obviously celebrity is taking a hit.

There are so many sources of that type of information, social media particularly. Yet some of them had big numbers, particularly on the royal wedding and the Osama Bin Laden assassination.

The history of newsstand sales is that one or two categories drive the business, both in up periods and downturns. Celebrity books are the main group driving them down right now. Of course, not many are doing all that well. But the big new category may be just around the corner. I’m always an optimist.

Are there any categories that are holding up fairly well? Why?
The Food Network Magazine is still growing, and fast. It may bring other food books. A number of specials, book-a-zines, have done well. Some may develop into regular frequency titles and continue to prosper.

Will the increasing adoption of tablets, and the availability of magazines in electronic form, begin to impact newsstand and/or subscription sales?
I don’t think digital publishing has found its place yet, or its format. It is hard to tell if it will be the new form of publishing or become a truly new media format. My feeling is that they will depress print subscriptions more than newsstand in the long run. The newsstand is still where new magazines are introduced and where consumers can shop for them. Nobody really browses a digital newsstand.

Again, I’m an optimist. Are electronic subscriptions being included in ABC numbers?
Yes, in some cases, but I can’t tell which ones definitively. I think you’d have to check with ABC. What’s the most important thing that media buyers and planners can take away from the most recent set of ABC numbers? Not to jump to conclusions. There are so many factors impacting the newsstand, as well as the whole publishing business, that it would be unwise to make major changes in your media plans.

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Hearst to Link Digital Editions With Amazon

Posted on February 14, 2012 by

["Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?

Steve Jobs, The line he used to lure John Sculley as Apple's CEO" - US computer engineer & industrialist (1955 - 2011)]

Hearst to Link Digital Editions With Amazon

As publisher tightens pact with the e-tailer, the trick will be to maintain its editorial independence

By Lucia Moses

Is it a magazine-or catalogue?

Magazines have been increasingly blurring the line between editorial and commerce, lending their names to products and shopping sites. Now, computer tablets and e-readers are making it more tempting to bridge that gap.

So far, efforts have largely been one-offs, with a few magazines like People and Wired letting readers tap on their digital editions to buy certain products through iTunes and Amazon. Now, Hearst Magazines is going all out, with plans in the coming weeks to start making many of its Kindle Fire editions shoppable by linking products to Amazon. Hearst will get a cut of the sales, which it wouldn’t disclose.

Hearst has been actively trying to wring more money out of its magazines, and in that vein, plans to commit a low seven-figure investment to e-commerce for 2012. The shopping links in its Kindle editions will echo what the company’s already been doing on some of its websites. On Goodhousekeeping.com [1], for example, beneath reviews of editorial products are photos of identical or similar products that are available at Amazon. Click-through rates on these sites have been impressively high, said John Loughlin, general manager of Hearst Magazines.

“Amazon is a unique opportunity because they have gazillions of SKUs,” Loughlin said. “When we feature a product, generally, it is available.”

Magazines whose editorial coverage and advertisers overlap have always endured a pay-for-play perception. As publishers tighten their relationship with retailers and make money directly from the sale of products they review, they can run the risk of appearing beholden to them or the stores that sell them.

“You have the church and state issues,” said Ken Doctor, a media analyst at Outsell. “Then there’s the question of how likely are people to click through from an article to buying something. Is that the mode they’re in when they see a mention of a product?”

These days, publishers have to compete with burgeoning sites that blend shopping with content, and they badly need the revenue as growth of print ad dollars softens. “We have a new set of competitors in Net-A-Porter and Gilt [Groupe], and we want to make sure our business models are as nimble as possible,” Hearst Magazines president David Carey said. (One of those efforts, Clad, a partnership between Hearst’s Esquire and JCPenney, has already been scrapped, though.)

The consumer demand certainly seems to be there. Forrester Research found 60 percent of tablet owners have used them to shop, while 70 percent of tablet owners would like to be able to buy items by clicking on the ads in a digital magazine, according to a survey by GfK MRI.

Loughlin said the product suggestions are added after editors make their recommendation, so there’s no interference with the editorial process. “We’re not saying to the editor, ‘You should be reviewing pots and pans,’” he said. “We’re taking their editorial perspective and applying it to what we feature.”
_________

Is It Already ‘The End’ for E-Book Readers?

By Rick Aristotle Munarriz, The Motley Fool

It may be time to turn the page on the e-book reader.

Pacific Crest analyst Chad Bartley is slashing his forecast on the Kindle. He now sees Amazon.com selling just 24 million units of the Kindle family of non-tablet e-readers in 2012. His earlier target was calling for 28.6 million to be sold.

It’s important to note that the figure doesn’t include the $199 Kindle Fire. Bartley actually raised his target — from 12.7 million to 14.9 million — on the number of entry-level Amazon tablets that the leading online retailer will sell this year.

However, it’s easy to believe that the success of Amazon’s tablet is coming at the expense of its market-leading e-book reader.

Gray Areas in Color

Amazon has certainly been aggressive enough in pricing its Kindle e-readers for mainstream appeal. The Kindle hit the market at $399 five years ago; these days, you can pick one up for as little as $79.

The problem is that the $199 Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble’s (BKS) $249 Nook Tablet can do everything that each company’s cheaper dedicated e-readers can do — plus a lot more as Android-fueled tablets.

Purists will cringe. It took them some time to adjust to the idea of replacing leafy books with e-readers, and now the market wants them to trade the comfort of E Ink for glaring tablet screens?

But they — and the tech industry — may not have much of a choice. Apple (AAPL) is making a huge push to get into the classroom through the digital textbook initiative it announced last month. Richly detailed colorful textbooks spring to life with interactive features on the iPad. Traditional e-readers outside of Barnes & Noble’s Nook Color just don’t have the palette to pull that off.

Don’t Bury the E-Reader Just Yet

There’s still time. Even Bartley sees Amazon selling 9 million more Kindles than Kindle Fires this year. Traditional books continue to be published in black and white, and that’s just fine for Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Sony e-Ink gadgets that are easy on the eyes.

The trend is still working against dedicated e-readers. As more classrooms begin embracing digital textbooks on tablets, that will be the platform that young people associate with digital book consumption. The fact that they can also use tablets to play games, check the weather, and stream videos will make them the new Swiss Army knives of students.

If you recently bought a new Kindle or Nook, don’t panic. They’re now cheap enough where you can make it worth your initial investment after just a handful of books. However, don’t be surprised when bibliophiles who originally lamented the gradual demise of the crisp paperback and now fear that their e-readers will be obsolete begin firing up their tablets.

It’s the new way.

Longtime Motley Fool contributor Rick Munarriz does not own shares in any of the stocks in this article. The Motley Fool owns shares of Amazon.com and Apple. Motley Fool newsletter services have recommended buying shares of Apple and Amazon.com. Motley Fool newsletter services have recommended creating a bull call spread position in Apple.

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Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? The New Revenue Revolution

Posted on February 13, 2012 by

["If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading." - Lao Tzu (Chinese taoist Philosopher, founder of Taoism, wrote "Tao Te Ching" (also "The Book of the Way"). 600 BC-531 BC)]

Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? The New Ad Revolution

Location-based technology will redefine behavioral targeting, maybe sooner than you think

By Tim Peterson

That future in which a bus-shelter ad equipped with geofencing technology scans your smartphone as you stroll by-inviting you to, say, a free latte or a cut-rate back rub-may not be so far off after all.

“2012 is going to be a huge year in terms of innovation-not just with respect to being able to leverage location to contextualize the types of advertising and offers that a consumer receives, but also then to turn the corner on that and turn it into actual commerce in the physical world,” said Walt Doyle, CEO of the location-based service Where. Last spring, eBay bought Where to facilitate its mobile transactions. It will figure heavily in the forthcoming mobile-commerce initiative of eBay’s electronic payment service PayPal, which has already been tested with Best Buy and Home Depot.

And geotargeting doesn’t stop with the widely cited example of a free cup of Starbucks. While often accused of not living up to its promise, we likely will see the day, and soon, when location-based technology redefines behavioral targeting as we know it, when a consumer packaged-goods company recognizes that a shopper is in the cereal aisle and sends a Wheaties coupon to her phone. What’s more, in the not-so-distant future, a marketer could use technology like that of Where to track a person’s daily routine so precisely that it knows when she’s on her way to the office, the gym or home for the evening.

To be sure, the future of location-based marketing is about more than just check-ins.

While Foursquare, the most famous LBS, certainly opened our eyes to the potential of marketing via GPS-enabled devices and made check-ins part of the language, the category is much bigger than one company. In fact, in its current life stage, location-based advertising is far more likely to involve a brand testing mobile banners that factor in a user’s location than any single location-centric social network or app.

Foursquare may have given way to countless marketing campaigns, but it’s a mistake for marketers to equate location-based mobile marketing with a mere check-in campaign, said Forrester Research analyst Melissa Parrish-especially considering that, despite its high profile, Foursquare is not all that big.

According to a Forrester report last December, only 6 percent of U.S. adults online have used an app like Foursquare or the now-defunct Gowalla (which Facebook acquired in December), representing just 2 percent growth year on year. Compare those stats to a 2011 Pew Research Center Internet and American Life Project survey which found that 55 percent of smartphone owners had used their devices for location-based information such as restaurant recommendations or driving directions.

The biggest obstacle to a check-in campaign may be the check-in itself. Plenty of brands display signage in retail locations to remind shoppers to check in, but consumers can easily ignore the call to action.

For some brands, location-based marketing remains a work in progress.

Take JetBlue Airways. Members of JetBlue’s TrueBlue loyalty program can link their accounts to an app on the company’s Facebook page. Then, by checking in at various JetBlue terminals, they automatically received TrueBlue points or special offers.

To encourage customers to participate, the airline’s agency Mullen executed a campaign in which travellers automatically received text messages when they entered an airport, reminding them to check in-a tactic known as geofencing. But as the airline shifted focus to updating its digital platforms (JetBlue unveiled redesigned mobile and desktop sites as well as an iPhone app last week), the check-in campaign went dormant.

Jonathan Stephen, head of mobile at JetBlue, says it’s not dead, however. “We started to focus on our digital refresh program where we introduced some newer technologies such as push notifications in our iPhone application,” he said. “We felt that with the tremendous number of iPhone users that we have, we wanted to leverage the push notification service to send them, perhaps, location-based messages. It’s something that we’re looking into at this point. It’s sort of a crawl, walk, run approach.”

JetBlue doesn’t run location-based mobile ads, says Stephen. One brand that does is The Weather Channel. Its mobile app, which specializes in local weather information, helps brands target users based on their location. Westin Hotels and Resorts teamed with TWC on its “Wipe Away Your Weather” campaign last fall. “It knew where the user was and then allowed them to wipe away from the screen elements of their local weather,” said Pat McCormack, TWC’s vp of mobile sales and strategy. “So if it was [snowing] in Vermont, you wipe away the snow and reveal resort destinations in warm weather climates.”

Delivering an ad based on whether it’s snowing in Vermont is one thing-delivering an ad based on whether it’s snowing on a given city block is another. McCormack says that this year, TWC will roll out a new location-based function enabling advertisers to target a consumer below the ZIP code, potentially factoring in a person’s behavior or intent.

The Weather Channel isn’t the only company experimenting with location-informed ad content. Forrester’s Parrish points to Victoria’s Secret. A user clicking on one of the retailer’s rich-media display ads expands to reveal the message: “The closest Victoria’s Secret to get this set of pajamas is 0.4 miles away. Click here for directions.”

But location-targeted mobile display ads face a familiar obstacle: consumer action, or the lack thereof.

Generally, consumers don’t have to check in to a location to receive an LBS ad, but they do have to open an app to see one. Geofencing sidesteps that. After the consumer completes an initial opt-in-usually through a third party operating the geofence for a brand-all that’s required to participate is for his phone to be turned on in order for a marketer to target him with a local ad.

“If geofencing allows [consumers] to not have to download an app to check in, the barrier to entry is lower,” says Parrish.

The problem, Parrish says, is that most marketers perceive geofencing as lacking scale. “Somebody’s going to have to lead the market,” she said. “It’s either going to be the marketers offering real value or the consumers being willing to try to see what will happen. I feel like it’s in marketers’ best interest to go ahead and try to set the stage.”

Another major concern: privacy. Congress grilled reps from Apple and Google last spring following reports that the companies were logging the location history of devices running their respective mobile operating systems. The issue was reignited in November after the mobile software company Carrier IQ was discovered to be storing data such as device-location history. That led Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) last month to introduce the Mobile Device Privacy Act, requiring companies to get a consumer’s consent before collecting location information.

When it comes to privacy, location-targeted mobile ads sound fewer alarms since they run in apps that already require consumer consent-Westin’s ads via The Weather Channel’s app, for example. But messages via geofencing technology are where things can get really creepy, which is why companies like location-based marketing firm Placecast require consumers to opt in.

Privacy concerns could actually facilitate the entry of highly regulated verticals that are generally hesitant about testing newer technologies but that are persuaded by the adoption of safeguards to address privacy concerns. Pharmaceutical and healthcare companies are among the most legally constrained when it comes to consumer privacy, but Carat svp and head of mobile practice Jason Newport hopes to see those industries expand their use of location-based mobile campaigns this year.

“You can imagine geofencing campaigns around pharmacies for vaccination reminders or something like that,” he said.

Likewise, JetBlue used Placecast’s ShopAlerts program to geofence airports.

Placecast CEO Alistair Goodman says more than 6 million consumers to date have opted in to receive ShopAlerts, while more than 130 brands used the company’s platform last year. North Face uses Placecast to geofence ski resorts and deliver snow reports to skiers on their way to the slopes. “It creates ways for the brand to interact with those consumers in meaningful ways tied to location,” Goodman said. “It doesn’t just have to be deals.”

Not that deals don’t work. Among purchases based on a ShopAlert message, 19 percent are the result of a reminder while 49 percent weren’t planned at all, according to Goodman.

More than 90 percent of ShopAlert messages are opened within three minutes of being delivered, Goodman points out. That is all well and good as long as a consumer enrolled in the program only receives five offers a week. But as the number of brands that set up geofences swells, consumer adoption could actually shrink because of the very real possibility of geofence overload.

As location-based marketing has become more commonplace, consumers have come to expect that marketers will use the latest technology to track them down wherever they are, whatever they are doing, to offer them that coffee or back rub.

“From a consumer perspective, location is just something that’s expected,” Where CEO Doyle said. “It’s become almost like a dial tone where you expect [a mobile service] to contextualize to where you are.”

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BoSacks Spoke Out: The Advantages of Being a Print Dinosaur

Posted on February 13, 2012 by

["BoSacks Speaks Out: I was rummaging through some old emails and I found the following BoSacks Speaks Out from September, 9th, 2005. I would love some feed back here on this topic and this particular vent. It seems to me much of this dialog is still in play 7 years later. Amazing when you think about it.

I believe that what I wrote in 2005 is still right on the mark, and very much worth the re-read. And, of course, I have perhaps 5,000 new readers since then, so it is not a reread for some but rather a look at this futurist's prescient consistency."]

“Heard on the Web” Media Intelligence:

America’s Oldest e-newsletter est.1993

Courtesy of BoSacks and The Precision Media Group

Web

Contact – Robert M. Sacks

By far the best proof is experience.

Sir Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626)

………….From the General Publication News Files……………

The Advantages of Being a Dinosaur, or ‘I saw the comet the last time and now I know what to look for.

By BOB SACKS

FOLIO: (From FOLIO Magazine 2005)

Editor’s Note: In the June issue of Folio: we published a report on soft proofing that suggested the technology-while promising-is in its current form highly buggy. Tech and workflow issues have yet to be resolved. And the investment on the part of printers to install monitors on their press lines is very large. And then there are advertisers: They need to submit files in the right formats and ultimately, be happy with the quality of pages approved through soft proofing. In this column, production expert and newsletter editor Bob Sacks makes the case for why soft-proofing is not just the future, but the very near future

I was at a technology roundtable in New York City last month. There were perhaps 25 publishers in the room, with an odd assortment of skill sets, experiences and attitudes. I always like to go to meetings like this because, after thirty-five years in the business, I find that I am still continually learning. In fact, I learn at least one thing from every encounter. In August, one of the things I walked away fully understanding was the amazing advantages of being a dinosaur. Now perhaps that takes a little bit of explanation.

Having been raised as a young production pup on color keys and-God forbid, who can afford them?-press proofs, the whole digital-proofing dialogue nowadays seems to me to be fraught with too many personalities and clearly a lack of understanding of the concept of technological progress. There are too many old sayings that would fit here, but let’s try this one:

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

George Bernard Shaw

I’m no doubt a cranky dinosaur and perhaps an unreasonable man. My feelings are that, if I could peer through the four layers of thick acetate of a color key 25 years ago to do remarkably fine and detailed reproductions for some of the most demanding editorial and art professionals of our age, then all else is just a matter of mental adjustment and having reasonably reliable expectations. In the past, I personally used color keys to determine the inherent value of color separations on the works of several major artists and many major national advertising campaigns. Not to mention what seems like a couple a billion national magazines.

Then there was the not-to-be-forgotten world of discovery I went through at McCall’s participating in forcing an unwilling industry to go to heretical halftone (CPT) gravure. Did you know that gravure was making digital plates (cylinders) ten years before offset? There were of course as many naysayers at that time as there are now. There are always a few who resist inevitable change. It ended up a piece of cake and a congenial walk through the techno-park.

Today’s dialogue is just another version of seeing the difference between the forest and the trees. Printers and production personnel often misunderstand or forget what we actually do. We are not in the replication business. We do not, and cannot, reproduce art. What we can do is try our hardest to get a reasonable facsimile and on most occasions, a really great one. That would be a really great, reasonable facsimile. Sometimes I feel a little like Archimedes-give me a thousand colors and I will move the art world.

Bah Humbug! We’ve only got four colors and with that we do some damn great work. Indeed, work to be proud of at 2,000 feet a minute, and each revolution of the cylinder creating a similar masterpiece. Well almost! People always forget that four-color printing is really a magician’s trick, all done with optical illusions and a couple of mirrors. The real truth is, what we print is not what you see. What you see is a blurred approximation of the original art. What we print are tiny little dots that were never in the original.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Arthur C. Clarke

I sometimes wonder how we do the voodoo that we do at all. And we do voodoo so well.

Competent and professionally created hard proofs are basically all the same to me. First thing to always remember is that they are not proofs at all. They prove nothing. What they do is give you a reasonable guide to printing an excellent facsimile. Learn the inherent flaws and predictable curves of the process, any process, and it’s not a problem. You almost always know what you are going to get, or at least you should.

So okay, where am I going with all this? The bottom line here is that soft proofing is the future. No ifs, ands, or buts about it.Any other current technology that takes the backward step to render a hard proof from an original pixel is unnecessarily expensive, redundant and, by and large, amazingly self-indulgent.

Will it take time for monitors to be calibrated so that they can be reliable replacement “proofing facsimiles?” Yes, I suppose it will. So what? I want to know how many color keys were calibrated as well as today’s monitors are. How many matchprints are currently viewed under a 5,000K viewing station in the prepress arena and then corrected at a production manager’s desk on the third floor of a florescent/incandescent cell?

Look, I don’t want to scare you or overstep my literary license here, but soft proofing is just a step on the way to the eventual reality of no proofing at all. Yes, that is what I said, no proofing whatsoever. None at all. Perhaps you didn’t know that Time Inc. has not used an editorial proof for over fifteen years. Nope, no proofs at all for a magazine that is printing the same magazine at ten different plants.

Think you are professional enough to tell them apart? I doubt that I am. What Time Inc. does is called running to the numbers. That really means that each printing plant commits to a standard ink density for each color laid down. The process is that simple and that brilliant. Universal quality control reduced to a set of numbers. Running to the numbers takes all the old suggestive and arbitrary problems of quality control out of the printing process. If you run to the correct ink density you print it correctly.

So now you know why any proof is really just a crutch and an unacceptable delay for an analog system that is competing with an ever-present digital world.

No Makegoods for Internet Ads

Here is my last question to any reluctant soft-proofing production professional. The advertising world is currently going crazy in the online world. That would mean that there are millions and millions of uncalibrated monitors projecting millions of dollars worth of advertising revenue. How many makegoods do you think there are for Internet advertising fidelity? I will answer that for you: None.

Soft proofing is the next step in the future of your industry. Learn it and learn it now. If your printer has it, go and watch it work. If your printer doesn’t have it, call a friend who does. If you can’t, then perhaps you are a dinosaur. The soon-to-be extinct kind.

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From Bloomberg, a New Luxury Magazine / Australia’s Top-Selling Magazines

Posted on February 13, 2012 by

["Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons." - Woody Allen (1935 - )

"Rich or poor, it is good to have money"

as told to Bosacks by his mother at an early age

From Bloomberg, a New Luxury Magazine

By AMY CHOZICK

A Wall Street executive posing in front of a garage full of red Ferraris isn’t the populist choice for a magazine cover given the current economic climate.

But Bloomberg L.P. isn’t aiming for the 99 percent with its new luxury magazine, Bloomberg Pursuits, which will be distributed twice a year beginning this week to customers who subscribe to the company’s financial data terminals and receive the related Bloomberg Markets magazine.

The magazine, sent to an audience with an average annual household income of more than $450,000, represents a tiny pocket of the print publishing world that is thriving, even as its mass-market counterparts face a slump in newsstand sales.

“In luxury, paper is still king,” said Samir Husni, a journalism professor at the University of Mississippi who tracks new magazines.

Chanel, Cartier and Porsche have all bought ads in the first issue of Bloomberg Pursuits; 29 of the magazine’s 72 pages are ads. “These advertisers view digital editions as a very disposable thing. You wave your hand and it’s gone,” Professor Husni said.

In the quarter that ended Dec. 31, advertising pages at many consumer magazines, especially celebrity publications and women’s magazines, fell, according to the Association of Magazine Media. Us Weekly’s ad pages fell 32.6 percent, People was down 10.1 percent and Glamour had a 19 percent drop from the same period a year earlier, the report said.

Meanwhile, publications like Departures, a lifestyle magazine published by American Express and sent to platinum and centurion cardholders, the Financial Times’ monthly luxury magazine How to Spend It and WSJ., the glossy magazine enclosed in The Wall Street Journal’s weekend issue, have grown.

In the quarter that ended Dec. 31, advertising revenue for Departures has increased by 46.2 percent and its pages have jumped by 39.4 percent from the same period a year ago, according to the Association of Magazine Media. Begun in 2008 as a quarterly publication, WSJ. will publish 10 issues this year.

Pursuits (which has the same name as a short-lived Wall Street Journal weekend leisure section) will be sent to 375,000 readers, with 60 percent of those living outside the United States, the company said. That demographic influenced features in the first issue, like one about wealthy Chinese buying vineyards in the Bordeaux region of France.

“Our readers spend a lot of time in the electronic world, but when it comes to lifestyle, it’s wonderful to sit back and read stories in a way only magazines can convey,” said Michael Dukmejian, publisher of Bloomberg Markets and Bloomberg Pursuits.

Bloomberg Markets and Pursuits have their own staff but will share resources with the wider company. (It’s separate from Businessweek, Bloomberg’s weekly magazine sold on newsstands and through traditional subscriptions.)

Mr. Dukmejian said that Pursuits had its readers in mind and that he wasn’t worried that the conspicuous consumption celebrated in the magazine might seem tone-deaf. Added a company spokesman, Drew Kerr: “It’s a very closed audience. Pursuits is poly-bagged with Bloomberg Markets so it’s not like we’re flaunting Ferraris on newsstands.”

Australia’s Top-Selling Magazines Eyed for Sale

CVC Considers Sale of Magazines Business

By Gillian Tan and Cynthia Koons

CVC Capital Partners-owned Nine Entertainment Co. is considering selling its magazines business, ACP Magazines, to pay down debt, according to a person familiar with the situation.

CVC is considering various refinancing strategies but recently denied a meeting request from senior debtholders Oaktree Capital Management and Apollo Global Management. Hedge funds have bought up at least half of the of the group’s 2.7 billion Australian dollars (US$2.88 billion) in senior debt which matures in February 2013 and some are agitating for a “loan-to-own” situation, which would give them equity stakes in the business.

Nine also has A$975 million in mezzanine debt, a portion of which is held by Goldman Sachs.

According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC), the Australian magazine industry generated 923 million Australian dollars (US$985 million), a 3.8% decline in consumer spending from 2010. Consumers have grown more cautious in Australia and have cut back on discretionary spending over the past year due to rising household bills.

In an ABC audit on magazine sales for the six months to December 2011, ACP commanded a 50.7% market share and maintained leadership in categories including major monthlies, major weeklies, women’s lifestyle, fashion and homemaking.

In a statement Friday, ACP Magazines chief executive Matthew Stanton said ACP was progressively offering new ways for readers to engage with its mastheads, with 36 digital editions already on offer. Last November, ACP sold its Asian magazines to Singapore Press Holdings for 58 million Singapore dollars (US$46 million).

Nine’s other assets include free-to-air broadcaster Nine Network Australia, an interest in the Australian News Channel (Sky News), ticketing company Ticketek, the Allphones Arena and a 50% venture in online company ninemsn.

CVC’s Australian team has shrunk of late, with investment director Jonathon Pearce leaving to join Quadrant Private Equity in January and investment director Gareth Woodbridge leaving this month to join Archer Capital.

Its only remaining Australian investment apart from Nine is a stake in ASX-listed Jetset Travelworld.

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