For Magazines, It’s About the Brand

I spent a couple days this week locked in a room with a bunch of top magazine editors, and the rest of those days mingling with other leaders in the magazine industry. New York-centric, but also a fair representation from around the country, especially Washington, with a smattering of Texas, California, Colorado, the midwest, etc. I was a little bit of what someone once called a polar bear to penguins -- I sometimes felt like a different species. They asked what I did, I told them digital media, and we’d of course get into a discussion about how they could improve their magazine Web sites, what they could do to better the content from the magazine online, what offshoots there should be and so on.

“Stop right there!” was more or less what I said, in polite ways. The challenge for so many of these folks, I thought, was in defining their brand strategically and then devising digital media to fulfill the missions of those brands. Think of those brands and how they convey and atmosphere, a realm, an audience, a mission -- anything from Foreign Policy to Teen Vogue, from Atlantic Monthly to Maxim, from GQ to Hello. If you’ve picked up an issue of any of these, you know what they are, what they stand for and maybe even who there audience is.

For magazine brands’ digital media, it’s not a question of:

• Whether the magazine or a larger organization that includes a magazine should have sway on the Web site. (Should the company or the individual magazine control the “.com.”)
• Whether the marketing or editorial department should oversee it all.
• Whether content from online should inform the magazine or vice-versa. It’s not an either-or, nor should the question be phrased that way.

The magazine is a different medium than the Web, which may again be many media. The metrics and operations and concept of the magazine should not be imposed on the Web or mobile WAP site, any more than a TV show borne of a magazine would be. You might, in conceiving aTV show, say “what do we have that can make this TV show more interesting, enhance it, be a cross-promotion.” But you would not -- unless you wanted to be really boring -- insist that the show hew to the structure, form and content of the mag. Nor would you insist on any straight-line connection in story selection, order of presentation or the like.

Likewise, for the Web, it should be first: What are we? What do we stand for? A policy magazine for retired Americans? The ultimate guide for the ski enthusiast? The magazine of luxury for those who can afford it? Discussions about life and society? Who is our community? What do they want/need? And so on. And with that in hand, conceive of Web content, structure, materials, staffing. Throw in business imperatives as well, if you need to. (What of these ideas and sections will attract revenue from ads or subscriptions or lead generation and such.) What blogs, social network, email and the like should we institute? How excited can and will our community be? What will keep it all flowing and bubbling and hopping and interacting? That will free the thinking to go much beyond a Web site, to anything from podcasts to Twitter, Pownce or myriad other applications to numerous tolist.
Rather than an anxiety-producing exercise -- which is how I interpret some of the furrowed brows I saw -- it should be a wonderfully creative exercise that takes initiative and figures out the digital presence that will work. Epicurious.com works, I think because those who’ve put it together have defined the brand as all things by for and about food for foodies. TVGuide.com has a community of avid TV fanatics, perfect for their brand and happy to yell at each other online and get text message news alerts about their favorite shows. I’m not sure how well Meredith’s Better.TV works, but it is a creative effort to translate the Merdith home and lifestyle magazine concept to a TV-style presentation without necessarily making it conform to any magazine.

Yes, the technology and technological choices are important -- as, in magazines, are the choices about typeface and ink and printing plants. But those choices should flow from the overarching concept, and be guided by the larger imperatives. The operational choices of course will always be a balance, but the first questions can and should be whether the defined goals and missions are being fulfilled. I say: first define the goal, then worry about the rest

Let a Thousands Cameras Bloom

Fox TV in Chicago emailed me (and a jillion others) today to say they're launching an experiment, to see what happens when you take live feeds from Fox cameras all over the U.S. and just slap them on a page. Upper right is a woman at a desk reading, and working on her computer, and talking to the camera a bit. On the page are myriad boxes from stations and cameras all over, dozens of cities and locales.

Later, I imagine, they'll add voting apps, maybe some social networking, perhaps even embedding. But for now, it's what they call a skunk works, and I see no harm in posting the link so they can get some feedback.

The Super Bowl Ads, Through Internet Eyes

I was very obsessive in going to the Web sites of the Super Bowl advertisers, and wrote about it here, for Jack Myers. My overall assessment: Some executed well, giving users an easy way to register, play, etc. But we've a way to come before there really is true integration.

Yahoo, Microsoft and Google

Ian Schafer has it about right: What Microsoft sees in Yahoo is the chance to increase its ad serving reach, cover more of the market, and improve not only reach and frequency but also the third all-important, beyond “GRP” component in today’s ad sphere: targeting. Both Microsoft and Yahoo have been in furious competition with Google and AOL (and each other) to build or buy ad platforms like Blue Lithium and aQuantive that have a variety of ad-serving, targeting and amalgamating solutions for a networked society.

One thing Schafer hopes for (and Henry Blodget calls for) doesn’t seem likely: that Microsoft will let the Yahoo brand live separately and distinctly. Not only does that not seem to be the Microsoft way, it also would make it hard to achieve some of those efficiencies Microsoft keeps talking about. Ask yourself, if Microsoft buys Yahoo:

• Will they subsume their Hotmail (integrated with Passport and .msn) into Yahoo’s mail? Or are they more likely to migrate Yahoo’s mail over to MSN?

• Are they likely to let Yahoo’s small business and Web hosting area live on its own, or try to migrate all that small- and medium-sized business over to Microsoft (encouraging it all the while to buy Microsoft Office products)?

• Will they let Yahoo’s social networking and blogging and tagging and bookmarking properties live separately, or try to integrate them into Microsoft’s properties, trying to get some long-missing traction for Microsoft’s initiatives?

Blodget talks a lot about the different cultures and the difficulties of integrating the two companies, how Microsoft is already battling on many fronts and is unlikely to be able to fight all these battles and make itself into a GE-like conglomerate. He also talks of Google’s play to help Yahoo stay out of Microsoft clutches and in his post and another alludes to Google’s “Ahabian” desire to sink Microsoft’s Office products with cloud computing Web software.

All that cultural stuff is big, and important, and he’s right that senior execs at Yahoo, and Microsoft’s Internet division, will be working scared for the foreseeable future. But, as said above, the real rubber and the real road here is advertising reach and targeting. That’s what has to work for this deal to be worth Microsoft’s while.

Breakfast With Roger: “Me, Mine, Us, Them”

For me, this is a first. Blogging an event at which I not only moderated, but in which my company, Teeming Media, partnered (with the irrepressible Bill Sobel of NY:MIEG). But enough about me, and Bill. Our guest, the speaker, was the equally irrepressible Roger Black, who has managed to not only design some of the preeminent magazines, newspapers and other media properties of the 20th century, but also bring his knowledge and expertise further into the digital realm and relaunch himself as an eminence in the 21st. He’s redone Bloomberg.com, the popular Houston Chronicle website, and a bunch of other properties.

This morning, he revealed another venture which will be a U.S. version of the popular Mexican digital magazine Indigo. There are prototypes here, though Roger says it’s not done, and it will be named something other than “Indigo” for its north of the border version. He talked a bit about why this is Flash, and not a digital magazine technology like NextBook or Zinio, and I'd boil it down to greater functionality for a wider audience than those proprietary and more closed systems.

In a wide ranging discussion with a wonderfully combative audience trying to take Roger (and me) to task for the idea that there even needs to be such a thing as a “magazine” on the Web (even though we didn't really say that) or anything approaching traditional literacy (even though I'm not sure we really said that), Roger talked of the editor Ramon Alberto Garza whom he quoted, when asked what should be the sections of a general interest newspaper or magazine site as answering: “Me, Mine, Us, Them.” And that, said Roger, is the pinnacle of what the Web is about -- concentric circles moving outward from the individual. That phrase in a way sums up the essense of Facebook, or MySpace, or DIGG, PageFlakes, or maybe even YouTube. And those sections are more appealing, as Roger pointed out, than the constructs we're used to in the more designed media such as U.S., World, Business, Technology, Health and so on.

Later, at the AlwaysOn conference, which I ran to after the Roger Black breakfast, Jeff Jarvis blogged about “lazy advertisers who don’t want to converse with us.” Conversation -- not content, according to Jeff -- is what the Web is about, about “connections and relationships” which would, if I think about it for a sec, be me and mine connecting with us, and then them. An my friend and mentor Ed Fields, a finance consultant and expert lecturer, pointed out another reason the Web works for him that's related: “When I read a newspaper I’m letting somebody I never met decide what’s important for me. That’s not true on the Internet.” He was adding to a comment by Fred Seibert, also at the breakfast, who pointed out that his daily front page didn’t rely on any one writer, or any universe created by a magazine editor or any other editor, for that matter. It was, rather, created by him, aggregating and hunting and assembling what he wanted to read from the sources he wanted, and, he said, was every bit as immersive for him as a glossy mag is for any fan of that genre.

Off the Media: Pay Your Sources

NPR’s On the Media in its show before the most recent episode brought up the issue of paying sources and brought back some poignant thoughts about whether and why sources should or shouldn’t be paid. Sure, there are all the usual arguments about polluting the system, encouraging untruths, and starting a slippery slope of checkbook journalism. But, “I've always just questioned that taboo on talking about money,” says guest Robert Boynton, an NYU journalism professor.

I’ve been asked more than once, “Why should I help you?” Some folks I’ve interviewed have even pointed out that I’m being paid to report, that the organization I’m working for (whether a newspaper or TV show) is money-making, even for profit, and so why should we reporters feel sanguine about asking or requiring that the grist for our work be provided for free? It’s a hard question to answer, when you can’t say “for publicity that will help your business,” or if someone isn’t buying the argument that getting the word out may help others in other situations or that simply getting it off their chest will be liberating.

In Japan, it’s common to pay sources, especially when they’re experts -- and, yes, they also get the advantage of publicity. There is, in giving over a token amount of cash, a display of gratitude, and acknowledgement that value has been given. I had one uncomfortable interview in Tokyo while working for Newsweek, when an expert in the construction and maintenance of the Bullet Train gave me some inside information about troubles the line had had in its earlier days. I wondered why he was telling me such info so frankly. At the end, he expected -- as he had come to expect from journalists -- a gratuity, and it was left to a Japanese co-worker to explain to him, with both in considerable discomfort, that American organizations didn’t do that. I was uncomfortable, too.

As OTM co-host Bob Garfield and guest Robert Boynton point out in the radio piece, even when no money is exchanged there is a currency of those who give their time and information in exchange for exposure, perhaps the chance to flog their point of view. Some journalists talk of disinterest in how money is made by the organization they work for, which I find a little odd. Is there another such for-profit industry, where the folks steeped in producing the product are willfully ignorant of how it's sold and makes money? There is certainly a coin of the realm, and one in which journalists spin and get spun, journalists and sources use each other in various ways. Boynton says it would be OK to pay, if it were disclosed that someone had done so. That would be an open and honest way of doing it. Let the consumer make his or her own decisions. And it would be more open than the hidden agendas the public sometimes can’t see.

The Power of Convenience

Bob Pittman to VideoNuze on how much ease of use matters:

"My experience from the Internet is that just one more click means a lot less response. You think, well it's just one more click. But for example, when I was at Time Warner, we had 2 options for ordering PPV - one to click a button and one to call an 800 number. The response rate for the former was three times the latter - that's the power of ease of use and convenience."