Lou's Commentary

Digital Magazine Editions for Mobile Devices…Waste of Time

Tuesday, April 28th, 2009

Advertising Age ran an article today (4/28) titled, “Publishers Seize on iPhone as Great White Digital Hope for Print”

Despite the mention of a couple of information apps, 90% of the article is about print pubs trying to be relevant (and profitable) by re-purposing their content as mobile editions and subscriptions or as stripped-out articles with attendant images and ads, delivered to current mobile devices. The information apps can and will work (I use some on my Blackberry now), but the attempts at digital magazine editions for mobile devices is a waste of time. Similarly, there are more than enough mobile aggregators out there already (Google News’ mobile format, etc.) to make it tough to make money breaking your own stories out for mobile with display ads.

But the bigger flaw with the story is that it is talking about current hardware (iPhone, Blackberry, Kindle, etc.). None of that hardware (including the current iPhone or the little new one due out this summer or Palm’s neat little Pre) is suited for digital/mobile magazine or newspaper distribution or re-marketing.

No mobile device out there at the moment (or announced yet) matters to print content producers. That includes Kindle and Sony’s eBook reader, both doomed by technology choices, proprietary formats and pricing.

The battle will be fought on the NEXT generation of mobile devices, the first of which is slated to appear before very long.

Bob Atkinson

Technology Lead, Sabatier Consulting LLC

Should We All Just Go Home?

Monday, April 6th, 2009

The B-to-B magazine sector has just gone through a terrible quarter, following a terrible year.  It was just announced that there is no buyer for Cygnus, a large multi-title trade magazine publisher, echoing the news from last year that there had been no buyer for Reed Business Information after it sat on the market for months.  Print advertising is way down, continuing its long, familiar decline.  Even online advertising is down.  The implication is that the industry is dead.  What should we do?  Should we all just go home?

The first big magazine transaction I worked on was for McGraw-Hill back in the mid-1980’s.  We simultaneously sold American Machinest and 33 Metal Producing to Penton and Engineering & Mining Journal and Coal Age to Maclean Hunter.  Coal Age was spun out of E&MJ in 1909.  E&MJ got started in 1866, ten years before Sitting Bull won the battle of Little Bighorn and Custer made his last stand.  The irony of this is that we were dumping those “smokestack” titles to increase our focus on faster growing computer titles like Byte, each issue of which was a doorstop.  Now, Byte is gone, while AM, 33MP (now Metal Producing and Processing), E&MJ and CA are all still publishing.  I don’t put any great significance in that; publications have life cycles, some longer than others.

Perhaps what is significant is that we have had bad quarters before.  We have had disruptive technologies affect our industry before.  What we do, though, in the B-to-B business is timeless.  The publisher of AM, Dick Larsen, said to me on his way out the door on 6th Avenue for the last time, “No matter how many computers you have at the front end of a metal fabricating process, you still need someone down on the shop floor who knows what metal will cut another metal and how to make things work where the cutting takes place.”  In B-to-B we know how to help people who work “where the cutting takes place” in any industry do their jobs better.  That won’t change, and that’s where the future of the industry lies.  And yes, doing that well is what creates value for publications and the companies that own them.  Back to work.

Ed Fitzelle

Senior Consultant, Sabatier Consulting LLC