

My master plan for revolutionizing the future of publishing - olivercameron
http://www.marco.org/2012/12/12/the-magazine-future-of-publishing

======
JohnsonB
Well, if there would be enough general interest in "The Magazine"'s format,
such that a service Marco sold would cause a flood of app-store clones, then
whether Marco sells one or not, such a clone _will_ inevitably be created and
allow the flood of those clones. That would simply be a realization of basic
market forces and not something Marco can control.

However, the bigger issue is that Marco thinks that the editorial _format_ is
(one of) the key distinguishers between publications:

>>A publication’s app should be designed and built with purpose and
consideration. The Magazine works because I based decisions not on what
everyone else was doing, but on what would be best for this magazine. Every
publication has its own unique needs, audience, economics, and style, so their
apps should reflect that.

I don't think this is significant. The value of a publication is its _content_
, primarily, and the creation and selection thereof. Yes, I do think that a
general app store creation service should exist for publications, or even
several. Should every publication be burdened with re-inventing the wheel for
basic webb/app infrastructure? Looking at the web front-end of The Magazine, I
see a basic hierarchy of Issue > Article List > Article Preview, which may not
be perfect for _every_ publication, but perhaps close enough? Presumably, the
app functionality is also close enough to what a large number of publications
would need in terms of UX. Wordpress isn't the perfectly ideal format either
for every website with articles but the millions of installations out there
still saves the industry a significant amount of time and money.

------
otakucode
How much of the 'future of publishing' discussions do you think are driven
purely by ardent desire not to lose the status quo? I mean, it seems to me
that looking at it objectively, the future is very self-evident. What product
did publishers provide? Among other things, their business model was
completely built upon distribution being a valuable service and the entire
industry being impossible without it. This made them rich. Now, distribution
is a worthless service. In fact, the way in which they provided distribution
for so many years, they are actually actively destroying value by having to
adhere to all of the arcane, unnecessary geographic limitations that made
distribution possible a decade or so ago.

Now, they will either morph and stop even charging for distribution (since any
12 year old with an Internet connection could beat their ass at the task) and
radically shink their business (from billions to thousands) as they have lost
their golden goose, or they close their doors. They can still make money
providing a few services like aggregation (when distribution is essentially
free, aggregation becomes a valuable service... not as valuable as
distribution used to be, but not worthless either). They can provide
promotional services to their writers (who are now the bosses, while the
publishers are starving service providers) and things like that too.

If they're really smart, they will realize that the future is consumers
getting their journalism from, gasp, journalists directly since distribution
is now basically free. How can they profit from that? Well, finding
journalists, managing logistics for journalists, etc could be valuable
services. There is no question, they have to face the fact that there will no
longer be The Fifth Estate and they will no longer be international power
brokers, they won't even be reasonably wealthy businessmen. They're going to
be working from home and shuffling bits unless they're willing to get on a
plane and go where the danger is and become a journalist themselves. I
understand from their perspective this is a scary prospect, the same for
anyone who feels that the status quo gives them safety and predictability. And
I can't help but think that a lot of these talks are based on that fear...

~~~
pdog
_> Now, distribution is a worthless service._

Worthless? Distribution is about more than just shuffling bits from point A to
point B. For one, it requires an building an audience.

~~~
jcurbo
I think a better way of saying it is that distribution is a commodity. It is
easy and painless to distribute newspaper-style information these days
compared to 100 years ago. Not to say there aren't ways to make money - look
at Newsstand for example.

~~~
mjn
The distribution market is very unevenly commodified. Hence, Apple is able to
take a 30% cut of _The Magazine_ 's gross, in return for distributing it.

------
Magenta
Master plan for REVOLUTION: make an application that is double-paywalled.

* You have to pay for the content (The Magazine). * You have to buy an expensive Apple product to access it.

------
troymc
There already _are_ things that aim to be "the WordPress of Newsstand"; see:

<http://theperiodical.co/>

[http://www.mobilechameleon.com/toolkits-to-develop-
magazine-...](http://www.mobilechameleon.com/toolkits-to-develop-magazine-
apps-and-book-apps.html)

------
grinich
_"There’s no master plan. I wanted Instapaper to exist, so I made it. Five
years later, I wanted The Magazine to exist, so I made that._

 _I don’t know how to save journalism, but I’m also not qualified to. I’m not
a journalist and I don’t know much about that industry."_

This is essentially what every successful founder thinks before they end up
starting a billion dollar company...

I'm not saying that Marco is going to flip this industry, but his general
attitude is consistent with people like Zuck or Drew Houston.

~~~
cjensen
I think Macro is making a huge error in deciding not to license out the
Magazine code to others. He has shown the way, and I'd like to see him lead
forward.

If he licensed it to a smart political editor of the Obviously Correct
persuasion who would commission stories for me to read, I'd subscribe.

He's right that a gazillion clones is a Bad Thing. He should instead license
it to serious editors only, and have a family of The Magazines each with a
different focus. In order to enforce quality, he should only provide annual
licenses to a few serious editors at a time, and then discontinue them if he
feels the customers are getting a bad deal. He should start small: one
magazine at first, then add on fast as he can while maintaining quality.

In other words, the path to Quality for this type of thing is for him to
retain control (and a bit of profit) rather than his current path of
unintentionally encouraging others to clone his app badly.

~~~
woah
What he seems to be saying is that it's all in the editorial decisions he's
made, and the quality of writing and other content in "The Magazine". If this
is really the case, he should totally license out the code, or release it open
source. He's saying that what differentiates "The Magazine" is not the app,
but the publication. If this is the case, then there is no problem with
letting other people use his platform to do what they will.

------
johnrgrace
The problem with digital magazine apps is they are pushing an analog business
model into a connected world.

Publishing! = Magazines. What is publishing? It used to be we print with a
period of Y on paper type X, be that daily newsprint (newspapers), monthly
super calendered paper (magazines), every few years on acid free paper
(hardcover), and weekly super calendered Kraft paper (comics).

With digital the lines between the different publishing families are simply
erased. Content can be put out at any point in time, and on any format.
Further, complete works don’t have to be published all, serialized content is
back after having been almost dead for decades.

What publishing needs is a business model that helps them sell content of all
sorts of length that comes out at all sorts of time. Magazines have always
been content buckets, where the taste and choices of the editor in chief and
the publications self determined constraints determined if you wanted to buy
that bucket.

The magazine in the connected world is going to have the problem of most
topics they pick to have someone write about will be outdone by many other
places on the net and available for free. Take a blog like footnoted.com,
they’re doing deep dive financial journalism better than the Wall Street
journal.

The future of "The Magazine" is BoingBoing.net, they deliver a bucket of
curate content filtered through the tastes and choice of their editors. They
make income off ads, referral links, and sponsored posts for $5k a pop.

------
programminggeek
I think people looking at the Newsstand or apps for publishing are missing the
point. It's not about formats or delivery mechanism. It's more of a
fundamental business problem.

I knew magazine apps were doomed when there was talk about how beautiful the
ads would be in them. How they could faithfully reproduce the fantastic
advertising in the print editions of the magazines.

Media was able to charge both a subscription fee to the consumer and an
advertising fee because they had high barriers to entry and a captive
audience. People fundamentally don't want ads in their media, but media
companies have made so much money for so long charging on both ends that they
forgot why they were able to do so - there was a high barrier to entry.

Now that technology has made the barriers to publishing $1,000 or less, there
is a shift in business model. Either the media should be free and ad
supported, or paid with no ads. There just isn't the same market for something
that does both anymore. Their answer thus far seems to have been "just add
more ads" or "put up a paywall in front of the ad-laden content".

Also, with fewer barriers to entry, there will be fewer big content companies,
and a lot of smaller ones. The economics don't make sense yet for a big media
company that is Newsstand only yet, but there will probably be a lot of
smaller, scrappier publishers like The Magazine that pop up.

Again, it's not about The Magazine having some formula right, or its
publishing platform being so amazing. It's that the business model and
economics of publishing have changed and The Magazine is a lot closer to that
reality than traditional publishing companies. One could make the same
argument about Redbox and Netflix compared to Blockbuster and Hollywood Video.

~~~
wallflower
> I think people looking at the Newsstand or apps for publishing are missing
> the point. It's not about formats or delivery mechanism. It's more of a
> fundamental business problem.

If you have never read it, I highly recommend Clay Shirky's classic essay:
"Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable". It may make you think more about
the economics of publishing and forced change.

"It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry,
because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty,
complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has
stopped being a problem...

The old difficulties and costs of printing forced everyone doing it into a
similar set of organizational models; it was this similarity that made us
regard Daily Racing Form and L’Osservatore Romano as being in the same
business. That the relationship between advertisers, publishers, and
journalists has been ratified by a century of cultural practice doesn’t make
it any less accidental..."

[http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-
thinking...](http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-
unthinkable/)

~~~
sdoering
Well the barriers of entry in respect to publishing my be lower today. But in
terms of generating interesting content, they may be as high as ever.

For example, it just costs a ton of money to have really good people in every
part of the world - not only to get the "news" or the pictures, but to
reflect, to comment, to understand the relevant, cultural contexts - and to be
able to communicate this in terms of intended target audience.

This form of journalism (as one example of publishing) is expensive. It was
financed by the ads and subscriptions in times of printing on dead wood. And
modern publishers try more and more, to outsource this to news-agencies - but
with this outsourcing, everybody got the same dry content.

This is less and less working in print-journalism and it is even less working
in digital-publishing.

If twitter - or some regional blog is better in explaining the happenings in,
let's say: Egypt, why should I pay my local paper to deliver crap for the
dustbin?

And then, it happens more and more, that (at least here in Germany), that the
local content is getting worse. So their core-business, reporting and giving
context on local things, is done in a bad way.

I am not willing to pay for a product, that treats its customers like crap.

The problem is, that the people (journalists) inside these organisations feel
entitled to something, because a, it was done that way all the time, they can
remember b, they are protected by the constitution and they really feel, they
are doing a job, that is essential in keeping democracy alive (what the imho
are really not doing anymore)

So as these people are really quite resilient to change (and to changing their
ways), they cannot see the road ahead, they are blinded by their own
worldview.

So probably, they have to go down - and I'm not sad to see them go. But I
really fear what comes with these gone. Yes there will be some form of (good)
journalism to emerge - but the time in between might be quite "interesting",
as political players may feel like doing what they want, with the
(pseudo-)watchdogs gone.

------
barkingcat
I really like these unique ways of approaching media / content. I just
downloaded the trial of the Magazine and will try it out!

------
hymloth
Imagine a platform for curating or writing your own intelligent magazine that
edits itself autonomously to match the interests of every individual user. Now
imagine a publishing network that users social filtering to identify the best
articles and publications. Add adaptive web design never achieved before and
you get NOOWIT.com (coming soon to change online publishing history).

------
yycom
Step 1: make site readable on android

------
barkingcat
Does anyone know if the Magazine has become profitable yet?

