Shows how much baggage traditional media carries from the past and how convoluted a news organization can get once you start adding sales, advertising, and other departments that can be avoided now with the proper strategy.
Marco Arment has a sizable niche following which provided an initial boost when The Magazine launched. His personal connections have allowed him to snag a handful of known names within that same niche circle.
But more importantly, I think there's a different level of burden on a niche, under-the-radar type publication like this as compared to much of traditional media. I don't think Marco has a research staff to vet every article, so it's possible that they have or will eventually publish false information thanks to a lack of due diligence. Will anyone care? I guess it depends what falsehood they publish.
What if the falsehood results in a libel claim? Now you're talking about significant legal involvement (and costs).
Or maybe they end up running a story that has been plagiarized. What happens then?
I think that what Marco has done with the Magazine has been great, but I often find that when you start dissecting "broken industries", you can start to see a method to the madness that led to the current state of affairs, and I question if big media is no different.
Simplified money transfers were (still are?) a booming concept when PayPal launched, providing a simple alternative to the major banking networks that were slow and full of red tape. But as time has gone by, most of these payment services have gotten equally complex (holds on money, automatic reversals, etc...) because they slowly discovered that there was a reason for all the red tape. I find myself wondering if The Magazine's business model will discover a similar situation.
I think it was a pretty brilliant idea to have a lot of the pieces be written by popular bloggers and people with lots of twitter followers. Then they organically advertise The Magazine "for free", right when it needs the biggest pop.
(And yes, they were mainly his friends, but I bet offering people a few grand for a longer blog post, cold, would work pretty well.)
That said, I can't really think of a plausible example of something The Magazine could hastily publish that could land them into legal trouble. I suppose a story full of falsehoods could tarnish its reputation, but I'm not sure it has a reputation to tarnish in the firs place.
Liability insurance (http://www.authorsguild.org/services/media-liability-insuran... for example) would help to mitigate this risk. I can't find premium cost info for a writer's policy, but our premiums for engineering general liability and E&O are a few thousand dollars. I don't imagine a writer's policy could be significantly more than that (our policies cover injury and death).
At the very least, any publications that follow in The Magazine's footsteps stand a far better chance of success than the current lot of broken-by-design Newsstand apps. Every time I see a magazine app whose thumbnail is the cover from their print edition which is too small to even read it's obvious they haven't thought much about what it means to make a publication for a smartphone. "Exporting to app" from InDesign just isn't going to cut it. Marco's app is among the first that seems to have actually taken design of a mobile publication seriously.
OTOH, this is basically the business model of most niche paper magazines. You essentially have one editor, a bunch of freelance writers given assignments, and then photos are either freelance or stock. I guess they also have an ad sales department, unless that it outsourced too. But shoe-string permanent staffs are very common.
Marco did something interesting: stick to one platform, play by Apple rules and see what you can build with that scheme. Id say that him being a developer was a huge advantage. Finding a developer for a small project these days is costly. But starting from zero he avoided the trap a lot of magazines fall into, like trying to create a enriched PDF that use the design guidelines we use on paper (multicolumn, etc..).
I read somewhere that his contributors get paid the standard going rate in most big magazines (Time, New Yorker,...) Not a lot of small magazines can say the same. The Magazine did not have ads, so he didn't need to manage/outsource that part of the business.
By no means is this the only way of doing things, of course, and it might not work for everybody but I found it inspiring. It was (is) a tight, lean and simple product.
That is primarily due to his large influential niche audience and friends in the tech media. Joe Schmoe could do the same thing, better, but without that free media exposure it would go nowhere, lost in the open sea that is the App Store.