My master plan for revolutionizing the future of publishing
marco.org
marco.org
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.
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...
Depends on what you're reading. If you read e.g. Clay Shirky et al.'s "Post Industrial Journalism" report [1], which is close to the consensus view among people talking about the future of journalism, you'll find that it aligns pretty well with what you outline in your comment.
It's different when you talk to the owners and managers of newspapers and magazines because it's their job to make sure the ship doesn't sink, not follow the disruption to its logical conclusion as fast as possible but to delay it as long as they can so you can avoid social and financial drama. Yes, they're grasping at straws ("Let's license Marco's iPad app and everything will be better. Or let's put up a paywall."), but they're in a very unenviable position and I don't know what I'd do if I were in their shoes.
[1] http://towcenter.org/research/post-industrial-journalism/
Worthless? Distribution is about more than just shuffling bits from point A to point B. For one, it requires an building an audience.
Building an audience is now handled by search engines and somewhat by marketing services... marketing services operate on a flat rate, not taking royalties let alone the 90%+ cut publishers want, and the sheer scale and reach of the Internet makes building an audience not terribly difficult. In addition, a MUCH smaller audience is necessary to support a single journalist than to support a large inefficient corporate publisher. Whereas you needed millions of readers to stay afloat, now far fewer are necessary and niche markets are entirely exploitable by individuals.
A lot of your insights make a tremendous amount of sense from the writer's/journalist's perspective, as in, 'what can I get out of my publisher, since I can distribute my content so easily... only their marketing team is valuable to me now, and they're not tremendously good at their jobs anyway.'
I think a good objection to raise to that way of looking at the situation is that we should really be considering the value of publishers from the consumer's perspective.
'The future of publishing' discussions are driven not only by some weird desire for the status quo (which can be found in any industry) but, in my experience, also by the huge fear that we will be living in a world in which there are no gatekeepers. The stodgy traditional industry chugs on because it serves as a quality stamp. I don't mean to just cite anecdotal experience but it's pretty clear to me that the majority of self-published 'journalism' is simply not up to the level of say, The Economist, and I know that the Amazon self-published scene is full of both unreadable, horribly formatted, typo-heavy books and straight up nutjobs, which doesn't happen too often in the big six. Another way of saying this, if I haven't gotten the point across, is that publishers DO find journalists and manage logistics for journalists. They also give them a soapbox that has a big stamp on it that reads, 'trust us, she's a great writer. All this stuff is true.' So yes, I do fear a world in which anyone can become a 'journalist.'
I'd have to disagree with that. While I definitely think aggregation is a valuable service, it has never been able to hold a candle to distribution. Without distribution, a work could only be sold or acquired in extreme geographic proximity to where it was created. Distributing it far and wide is what creates the entire market, and makes it possible for publishers to exist. Once anyone at all is able to distribute things far and wide, however, that's no longer valuable and the publisher will hopefully simply go away. As for aggregation, there are 2 issues I see with seeing this as very valuable - first, publishers are terrible at it. See the book "A Drunkard's Walk" for some statistics on the matter, but the bottom line is that no one in publishing is capable of telling the difference between what will be a success or a failure. 9 publishers passed on the Harry Potter series before one 'took a chance' on it. It's not really their 'fault' exactly, it's just that the public responds to entertainent products randomly and anyone who claims to have noticed a pattern in the noise is a (usually self-deluded) charlatan. So, from that aspect, publishers cannot offer anything superior to what anyone else can offer. Secondly, machine-learning-based recommendation systems such as Amazon, Netflix, etc have completely automate the aggregation process and reduce the value of aggregation nearly as much as the Internet has reduced the value of distribution.
>They also give them a soapbox that has a big stamp on it that reads, 'trust us, she's a great writer. All this stuff is true.'
If there were evidence that publishers had an accuracy rate greater than random chance at this (there isn't), this would certainly be something they could profit from.
From what I can see of Gawker business people CAN make good money by hiring journalists, it's just that the skill that will get you rich is the ability to spot talent as opposed to traditional business skills. Also of course those that build armies of digital ink stained techno slaves may become wealthy as well.
* You have to pay for the content (The Magazine). * You have to buy an expensive Apple product to access it.
http://www.mobilechameleon.com/toolkits-to-develop-magazine-...
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.
"Eat your own dogfood" and "scratch your own itch" have always been good mottos... but they're not the secret sauce to success.
This is also what an enumerable number of failed founders think as well. Shipping is the important portion of your quote - not the deprecating position about one's relative importance to an industry/cause.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.