A great critique. Catch his earlier takedown, on “the actual process of procuring issues of a magazine,” too.
Roger Black on web advertising:
What we have now is the ugliest advertising in the history of the media. I used to say that web sites looked like the walls of a third-world futbol stadium, but that was unfair to the stadiums. Most content sites look so bad they actually repel readers rather than attract them.
Some half-cooked thoughts, not yet popped:
Issues make little sense online. Obviously, they’re necessary for print, but web readers — especially of a less news-driven publication — don’t think that way.
Some content is inexorably tied to a certain date. News and blog posts, in particular. (There’s context again.) But so much is timeless. Why force that content into an artificial issue framework on the web? The web is alive, constantly growing and changing. Does a web reader really care when, say, a great recipe was published?
Don’t think of the website as a repository for magazine stories and the stuff you had to cut from print. And certainly don’t think of the website as a “brand extension” and marketing tool to sell subscriptions. Your site is its own, complementary product. And, yes, you can make money online.
Consider a digital-first approach. Never stop producing stories for the web, and instead pull (and rework for print) the very best for a monthly magazine. Then add to the mag some new, context-appropriate content and you’ve got the kind of durable, evergreen product that magazine people love to hoard. Encourage your magazine readers to visit your website for more great stories, all month long. Macworld is a great example of this model.
Next up on the reading list. Based on the sample chapter, Kissane’s thinking seems to jive with my own. Should be a great read.
Contents is a new magazine at the intersection of content strategy, online publishing, and new-school editorial work.
Context is king.
That holds true everywhere we publish, analog or digital. Anyone can sling content — and on the web, everyone will — but an article out of context is no more useful than a printed book chock full of typed-out URLs, which would be screwy, intrusive, frustrating and a distraction from the reading I’d want to do. Context can elevate content, but the wrong frame can tear it down just as easily.
But what does context mean on the web? There’s no single answer, and that’s the very crux of the internet: The web is whatever we need it to be, just as water changes shape when poured into a new glass. The web is more than a medium for publishing or communications or commerce — it’s a customer service medium, and websites and services sprout to fill every possible need.
I’m going to limit the scope here to magazines, simply because, well, that and the web are what I know.
Let’s consider a printed magazine, maybe a small regional publication about a certain lifestyle, history and culture. You know the type, I’m sure.
Then flip to a section like, say, travel reviews, punchy little things with an overview and maybe a recommendation. Is a reader of this section looking for a new place to visit? Quite possibly. Sure, many folks read travel stories like fiction, as a way to mentally get away. But a lot of people clip out the intriguing destinations or save whole magazines for future reference. It’s a casual, mostly passive act: That sounds interesting, I’ll have to try it sometime.
So now this magazine’s next issue is going to press, and the web editors have a whole book full of stories to parcel out on the website. (This works in reverse, too, in a digital-first workflow, where the print editors must put web content onto a different platform with a different context.) The simple solution — and, sadly, the one I see way too often — is the cut-and-paste: InCopy to CMS to website to social media. Repeat. But what about context?
Let’s consider the travel section again, this time on the magazine’s website.
Don’t call me a reader or user, no, here I’m a hunter of information. I’m planning a trip and I’ve come to your website to do it. I know what I want: Someplace family-friendly, and outdoors, in a three-state radius; it’s only a long-weekend trip, plus the kids’ll kill each other if they’re in the car together for too long. Alright, I’ll click on the travel section and see what matches… What? A long list of travel-related magazine stories?
A magazine reader is not the same as a web user; it’s a casual vs. mission-driven act. On the web, I want those travel reviews sliced and diced, sorted and tagged; I want the facts; I want the metadata. And, without the space restrictions of print, why limit the review to a few paragraphs, a link and a photo? Tell me a story about the experience, relate to people, and encourage your community of readers to do the same. That’s how you build a useful web resource — and best serve your customers.
But enough about travel sections. What do you do with a feature? The default response these days — especially in magazines’ tablet editions — is, “Add multimedia!” And I’m not fundamentally opposed; why shouldn’t we take advantage of all the different ways to tell a story on the web? But it has to make sense. A video produced just to have a video doesn’t serve anybody. Multimedia have to add a new dimension to the storytelling.
I love the work of Jonathan Harris. In other hands, his latest project, Balloons of Bhutan, could have been a drab, text- and statistics-heavy story of a tiny nation. But by giving faces and voices to the men and women of Bhutan, he’s created something powerfully human, something printed words can never match. And that’s the best way to use multimedia on the web.
How about the feature itself? Often, the text of a good magazine story transcends the medium. You can (and should) add links, restore photos cut for space, spin off sidebars into full-bodied articles of their own, or even embed a YouTube video instead of describing it, but a compelling story — the core of the article — is no less compelling whether in print or on the web.
What’s so often left behind, though, is the design of the feature. Print designers don’t lay out stories just for fun. Great editorial design is as much a part of the story as the text: It sets the mood, elevates the drama, and inserts critical elements like photographs precisely when and where they’re needed. In short, the design adds context. When you funnel a story through a CMS into the same template as a 200-word blog post, you’ve lost all of that.
At the Chronicle, I’ve tried to champion, and web-ify, that ethos. In print magazines, I love the full-bleed photos, the careful typography, the feeling you get when you open up a gorgeous spread.
Why can’t I feel that way when I read a web feature, too?
Long live context. Long live the king.
New Kindle Singles-like publishing house, launching with an investigative piece by Jon Krakauer. Looks great.
Now more than a bookmarklet:
Here’s how it works: every time you use Readability on a particular article, a portion of your subscription fees go right to the content creators. You get a fantastic reading experience. Publishers and writers get compensated for the content you enjoy. Everyone reads happily ever after.
I spend a good amount of time each day in front of my laptop, reading. For news and blog posts, the computer’s great, but for long reads it’s a terrible pain. Poor design and backlit screens wear on the eyes, and distractions abound. The result: I’d send many stories to Instapaper, but read few of them. In the evenings I’d reach for the book beside my bed, not my laptop.
Until the Kindle.
A recent birthday gift, the Kindle finally gives me the means to read the web’s bounty of long-form journalism, which I love so dearly, without wanting to gouge out my eyes afterwards. I can sit in bed with this tiny thing and have access to anything I want to read—be it books or Instapaper’ed articles—on a screen that looks awfully similar to a printed page. At last I can read whatever, whenever and wherever I want. That still seems like sorcery to me.
In the last few months, I’ve read more great stories than over any other span I can remember. And with so many Kindles, iOS devices and other reading machines now in the hands of consumers, I know I’m not alone. That bodes well for journalism and publishing, and a more promising future for both I can’t imagine.
Craig Mod:
Bibliotype is a (very) simple HTML, CSS and JS based library for rapid prototyping long-form typography and reading on tablets.
Launched in conjunction with his thoughtful A List Apart article.
Paul Ford:
I sometimes chat with people in the book- and magazine-publishing industries. They complain to me about the web. They worry about what is being lost. […]
The web, they are a little proud to admit, confuses them. They say: “We gave away all those short stories on our website but it sold no books.” Or: “We built a promo site for our famous author who does the crime novels and it was just a total boondoggle with no traffic.” Or: “The magazine can’t get enough pageviews, even after we hired the famous blogger. Now management wants to make people pay for access.”
“Look,” I say, “maybe you’re doing it wrong.”
“But,” they say, “we tweet.”
That’s when I tell them about the fundamental question of the web.
Today, Amazon is announcing that it will launch “Kindle Singles”—Kindle books that are twice the length of a New Yorker feature or as much as a few chapters of a typical book.
Love it. Great opportunities here, especially for long-form journalism. With digital text, there’s no need to shoehorn stories into legacy categories. That’s no excuse to eschew editing—a tighter story is always a better one, in ink or pixels—but it does allow for richer pieces: what would have been a stretched-thin book condenses into a powerful long read; a magazine narrative, begging for twice the words, develops fully.
I haven’t read The Accidental Billionaires, but Orson Scott Card did:
Mezrich faced a nearly insurmountable difficulty in writing the story of the founding of Facebook. After all his research, he had about fifty pages worth of story, and that’s not long enough for a book.
But it is long enough for a Single.
Tim Carmody:
A futurist (in Marinetti’s original sense) wants to burn down libraries. A bookfuturist wants to put video games in them.
Craig Mod:
The story begins on March 29, 2010, 10:18pm JST, when a woman sitting in her Brooklyn apartment pushed the first domino. Her $65 pledge kicked off a monthlong fundraising effort that would culminate in a room full of hardcover books, a publishing think tank and the means to begin experimenting with books on the iPad. Oh, and this essay.
In short, he loves it, even post-iPad.
With the new models priced so aggressively, I’ll probably pick one up myself.
Craig Mod’s follow-up to his excellent iPad essay.
Joe Clark, writing for A List Apart:
People are finally noticing what was staring them in the face all along—HTML is great for expressing words. The web is mostly about expressing words, and HTML works well for it. The same holds true for electronic books.
Lovely essay by Craig Mod:
This is a conversation for books-makers, web-heads, content-creators, authors and designers. For people who love beautifully made things. And for the storytellers who are willing to take risks and want to consider the most appropriate shape and media for their yarns.
The New York Times:
Called San Francisco Panorama, the editors say it is, in large part, homage to an institution that they feel, contrary to conventional wisdom, still has a lot of life in it. […]
As the name suggests, the focus will be local—the lead story is an investigative piece about the cost overruns on the reconstruction and retrofitting of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge—but correspondents are weighing in from as far away as Afghanistan and on cultural scenes as un-local as Nascar.
And McSweeney’s is using Spot.us to raise funds for the Bay Bridge story.
Neat idea:
On July 16th, 2009, I began serializing my novel FORECAST (read a blurb; watch a promo) semiweekly (Mondays and Thursdays) across 42 web journals and blogs.
He recently found a publisher, too.
McSweeney’s made an iPhone app:
It’s true. We hereby announce the debut of the Small Chair, a weekly sampler from all branches of the McSweeney’s family. One week you might receive a story from the upcoming Quarterly, the next week an interview from the Believer, the next a short film from a future Wholphin. Occasionally, it might be a song, an art portfolio, who knows. Early contributors will include Spike Jonze, Wells Tower, Chris Ware, and Jonathan Ames. This material will not be available online and is pretty sure to be good stuff.
The app will also deliver the daily humor from our Internet Tendency, specially formatted for the iPhone, along with news, updates, and announcements.
Sounds great, and makes wonderful use of in-app purchasing. Publishers, take note.
I don’t think they know it, but Scott Simpson and Jason Kottke are reviving a practice made famous more than 80 years ago by Emanuel Haldeman-Julius.
From The Believer, September 2008:
Stodgy-sounding socialist treatises were repackaged as self-help titles; books with vague-sounding subject matter were renamed with provocative teasers like “The Truth About…” or “A Little Secret That…” When Schopenhauer’s Art of Controversy was advertised as How to Argue Logically, sales jumped from a few thousand to thirty thousand per year; when Whistler’s Ten O’Clock was renamed What Art Should Mean to You, sales quadrupled. Haldeman-Julius had learned this technique from his days as a newspaper headline writer, and he made no apologies about his retitling strategy. “An important secret of successful titling is to be imperative,” he wrote, “to insist in the very name of the book that the reader have it. Now Life Among the Ants was much improved in its distribution by extending it thus: Facts You Should Know About Ant Life…. The public today wants facts and it likes being told that it is getting facts.”
As Haldeman-Julius readily found out, the public also liked titillation. Guy de Maupassant’s The Tallow Ball sold three times better when entitled A French Prostitute’s Sacrifice, and sales of Gautier’s Fleece of Gold jumped from six thousand to fifty thousand when it was retitled The Quest for a Blonde Mistress. “What could Fleece of Gold mean to anyone who had never heard of Gautier or his story before?” Haldeman-Julius wrote. “Little, if anything…. The Quest for a Blonde Mistress [is] exactly the sort of story it is.” In this way, a book about Abelard and Heloise was sold as The Love Affair of a Priest and a Nun.
Haldeman-Julius published the Little Blue Books, as chronicled wonderfully in the aforelinked Believer article.
For anyone in or around the industry, it’s been the unavoidable question of the last few years: How can we save newspapers?
It hasn’t always been put in those exact terms, of course. Just two years ago I was taught that newspapers simply needed to reduce expectations and realize that high margins were no longer possible. The monopoly was gone, but the fundamentals, as it were, remained strong.
We now know that they are not. Journalistically, perhaps, the fundamentals are unchanged—though even that is a debatable statement. But the business model on which that journalism depends could not be weaker.
And so, as papers fold and quarterly reports grow grim, print media tread on uncertain ground. And the question is: What’s to be done to save them? But it’s a misleading question, one that assumes newspapers in their current form should be saved.
Much has already been written on the subject, with the short-sighted looking for increasingly unrealistic ways to preserve newspapers. And there’s the problem, as the forward-thinking have realized: Newspapers don’t need saving—it’s journalism that does.
Journalism itself is independent of any medium. It exists as ink on a page, pixels on a screen, sound in the air—but it is not really any of those things. New means of communicating will develop, and journalism will follow. Saving newspapers for the sake of journalism couldn’t make less sense. Claiming that newspapers need preserving assumes that, through new technology, journalism can’t be made better.
What then of the news organizations behind the newspapers? Perhaps, one might say, they’re worth saving.
Again, that’s a bit disingenuous. Is it even possible to save those news organizations as they are? To date, that’s been nearly impossible. Revenue from the print side has withered, and news organizations, bloated and overreaching, have been unable to support themselves with meager Web revenues.
Newspapers as they are cannot survive on the Web. They’re too large, too unfocused, too general. Look at the successful, independent web publications of the day, and you’ll find they are everything newspapers are not: small, hyper-focused and reader-driven. More importantly, though, there is no pay wall, which many newspaper publishers see, however wrongheadedly, as the answer to their woes.
So here’s where we are: Newspapers—the physical products—have little hope of surviving as they are. The same holds for the news organizations that publish them. They just aren’t viable in an age when the day’s news can be had instantly, for free, from any number of Web publications. Magazine publishers, living in their world of niches, have long known that general-interest news is incredibly hard to monetize—you don’t see many newsweeklies today for a reason.1
But it’s a lesson that newspapers are only now learning. What, then, is the future of printed news?
Print as a medium need not die, and I certainly hope it doesn’t. Printed products do many things far better than their digital equivalents. But to survive, print does need to reinvent itself.
Before long, all content will be digitized and available for download cheaply, if not for free. And why shouldn’t it? Digital content is cheaper to distribute, infinitely reproducible, instantly available, searchable—the list of advantages grows long, and will only grow longer as devices and experiences improve. But there will always be something missing, I think, when you’re not holding in your hands a physical, purchased good, and that difference, that experience, is to be exploited. Bits on a hard drive or pixels on a screen—they’re fleeting, gone with the press of a button. A beautiful print product resists that pull.
Vendela Vida, author and co-editor of The Believer, spoke in 2007 with Jesse Thorn on The Sound of Young America about the magazine:
Jesse Thorn: One time your husband [Dave Eggers] came to one of my college classes, and somebody asked him, “I want to start a magazine. What should I do?” And his two pieces of advice were, (1) don’t start a magazine, it’s not worth it, and the (2) was make sure that you can pay for the magazine with the price of the magazine rather than having to rely on advertisers. […]
It seems to me as though one of the elements of this plan is to create something that has more of a lasting value. A lot of periodicals are designed to be very much of the moment, and it seems like you designed it to be of the opposite.
Vendela Vida: My favorite thing that someone said to me once about The Believer was that it was the hardest magazine for him to recycle. And I like that, because we do try to make it more like a literary journal that you want to keep on your shelves and not something that comes in the mail and you throw out the next week. And part of that longevity does stem from the fact that because we’re not timely or relevant or anything like that you don’t need to throw it out when the week comes to an end. It’s not going to tell you what to do on Saturday night or what book came out this week, and so there is something that has more of a lasting appeal, to me at least, about it.
That, I think, is the future of print in a digital world. It won’t work for every publication or every type of content, but that’s OK—it doesn’t have to, not with the Web and e-readers available as publishing platforms.
Print media can’t compete with the Web as a means of publishing simple information and news, nor should it be so. To be successful, print products—newspapers, magazines, books and anything in between—must make use of the medium and offer something that can’t be duplicated online or on an eight-inch screen: something beautifully made, worth keeping (as much for the content as the design) and thus worth paying for. Offer anything else and you’re competing against a platform that trumps you, or soon will, in almost every way. But make something awesome, and people will pay for it.
For traditionally printed publications, this new model means radical changes. No more dumping content verbatim from one medium to another, or relying on one to subsidize the other. Daily newspapers will disappear: the news of the day moves exclusively to the newspaper website2, while a lavish print product is published once a week or twice a month, perhaps, filled with content much like that soon to appear in the McSweeney’s newspaper prototype:
Issue 33 of McSweeney’s Quarterly will be a one-time-only, Sunday-edition sized newspaper—the San Francisco Panorama. It’ll have news (actual news, tied to the day it comes out) and sports and arts coverage, and comics (sixteen pages of glorious, full-color comics, from Chris Ware and Dan Clowes and Art Spiegelman and many others besides) and a magazine and a weekend guide, and will basically be an attempt to demonstrate all the great things print journalism can (still) do, with as much first-rate writing and reportage and design (and posters and games and on-location Antarctic travelogues) as we can get in there. Expect journalism from Andrew Sean Greer, fiction from George Saunders and Roddy Doyle, dispatches from Afghanistan, and much, much more.
For print, it’s a reduced role, to be sure, but the Web cannot be stopped in its reinvention of journalism. As soon as publishers realize that fact—and start taking advantage of it—we’ll see productions on each side that are greatly improved and better suited to their mediums and the media landscape today.
Nicholson Baker doesn’t much like the Kindle:
Amazon, with its listmania lists and its sometimes inspired recommendations and its innumerable fascinating reviews, is very good at selling things. It isn’t so good, to date anyway, at making things.
Instead, he prefers an iPhone or iPod Touch for his e-book reading.
I’ve never used a Kindle, but I have read a book on an iPod Touch. I found the reading experience good but not great, and the small pages forced more page turning than I’d have liked. I’d wait until I had something larger, like Apple’s rumored tablet, before again reading in e-book form anything longer than a short story or novella.
The Wall Street Journal:
At first, Mr. Finney worried about dropping the glass and metal device as he read. But eventually, the sophomore came to like the Reader. Its keyword search function, he says, was “easier than flipping through the pages of a regular book.” Dozens of other participants, however, dropped out of the program, complaining that the e-texts were awkward and inconvenient.
I think the problem, though, has more to do with the devices and pricing available today than with the concept itself. Wait a few years for the technology to improve and prices on content and devices to drop, and I doubt many students will complain.
Michael Josefowicz:
So readers will willingly buy words delivered in different forms, but it depends on a combination of price, convenience and timing. Sometimes they borrow books from the library. Sometimes they buy books. Sometimes they will even pay for access to words on the Internet — but more often than not, they balk at paying for words on the web. […]
“Read for free, pay for print or stuff,” on the other hand, is a model that can, and does, deliver revenue.