Our post Hemmings to Digital Readers: Hurry Up and Wait drew a range of comments including offensive remarks from Hemmings staffer Richard Lentinello. The comment in question did not address the nature of the post and instead aimed to discredit myself and Mobilia Magazine, a publication I ran for eight years.

Lentinello referred to Mobilia as a “useless magazine” that “failed miserably.” Only in subsequent comments did another Hemmings staffer attempt to respond to the post’s stated subject of Hemmings digital strategy. So now we have two stories.

Hemmings disrespectful attack is a slap in the face to all entrepreneurs, fledgling publishers in particular. A number of publishing professionals have reached out basically saying “WTF” is this guy all about?

One way to answer that question is to address the matter of myself and Mobilia head on and, in so doing, attempt to educate Mr. Lentinello that his cloistered world is not the real world.

So for those interested in what it takes to develop a magazine and a market from the ground up are invited to read on.

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Just in from an anonymous source…

I think C&D and R&T magazines have lost their direction.  R&T has at least embraced the internet with their scans of the road tests, but both magazines test the same cars at the same time.  Winding Road was lost on me, though it may have been the future, it wasn’t successful…at least in my mind.  David E. gave it his best until they canned him.   As for C&D, they went for a short time with a new graphic look that was TERRIBLE.  It took them a couple of months to figure that out, but still the layout is absolutely a mess.   R&T on the other hand does look fresh, but I think they are getting too “cutesy” on the writing style.  Also, none of the magazines will pan a car (remember Aspen and Volare as Motor Trend’s Car(s) of the Year…….what a payoff….and I know the story behind it) as they only rank them among their peers.  I understand this….but I’d like someone to step up to the bar on a pig and say it is a pig….not put lipstick on it.

CPI highlighted a number of challenges facing the Fab Four (above plus Automobile) in a blog post April 2008, and here we are in 2012 with their continuing eroding reader and advertising bases.  What print-based editorial content could these mass market automotive titles possibly offer that might be sufficiently compelling to sustain a volume publishing model almost totally dependent on ad dollars? Five-buck subscription offers and costly photo shoots ain’t the path to break even let alone profitability. Yes, each title has a Web 1.5 site, but does it cater to a fan base more interested in watching than buying?

Apple’s iPad app came with a flurry last year, causing publishers to cede to its every policy in the belief this new digital star ship would somehow increase their magazines relevance and audience. See Apple’s Unfriendly Magazine App from CPI Feburary 2011.

That was then, this is now, and it’s only gotten worse. With a bit of historical perspective, the following also describes an app meltdown that took place at Technology Review presented by its editor-in-chief and publisher Jason Pontin.

By the time Apple released the iPad in April of 2010, just four months after Steve Jobs first announced his “magical and revolutionary” new machines in San Francisco, traditional publishers had been overtaken by a collective delusion. They believed that mobile computers with large, colorful screens, such as the iPad, iPhone, and similar devices using Google’s Android software, would allow them to unwind their unhappy histories with the Internet.

For publishers whose businesses evolved during the long day of print newspapers and magazines, the expansion of the Internet was tremendously disorienting. The Internet taught readers they might read stories whenever they liked without charge, and it offered companies more efficient ways to advertise. Both parties spent less.Tablets and smart phones seemed to promise a return to simpler days. Digital replicas of print newspapers and magazines (which could be read inside Web browsers or proprietary software like Adobe PDF readers) had never been popular with readers; but publishers reasoned that replicas were unpleasant to read on desktop computers and laptops.

The forms of tablets and smart phones were a little like a magazine or newspaper. Couldn’t publishers delight readers by delivering something similar to existing digital replicas, suitably enhanced with interactive features, which would run in applications on tablets and smart phones? They argued that the new digital replicas would be better because applications run “natively” on the operating system of mobile devices, such as Apple’s iOS, and can therefore have the functions of true software. (By contrast, a website is merely a series of HTML pages and scripts of computer code that run inside a browser, itself the real application. The Web’s architects had meant sites to be more limited than apps.)

For traditional publishers, the scheme was alluring. They lost their heads. One symptom of the industry’s euphoria was a brief-lived literary genre, the announcement of the iPad edition. A touching example of the form is this 2010 letter by the editors of the New Yorker, published by Condé Nast, dashed off in a style that was uncharacteristically breathless: “This latest technology … provides the most material at the most advanced stage of digital speed and capacity. It has everything that is in the print edition and more: extra cartoons, extra photographs, videos, audio of writers and poets reading their work. This week’s inaugural tablet issue features an animated version of David Hockney’s cover, which he drew on an iPad.”

Publishers believed that because they were once again delivering a unique, discrete product, analogous to a newspaper or magazine, they could charge readers for single-copy sales and even subscriptions, reëducating audiences that publications were goods for which they must pay. They allowed themselves to be convinced that producing editorial content for the apps and developing the apps themselves would be simple. Software vendors like Adobe promised that publishers could easily transfer editorial created on print copy management systems like Adobe InDesign and InCopy directly to the apps. As for software development … well, how hard was that? Most publishers had Web development departments: let the nerds build the apps.

Publishers hoped that the old print advertising economy could be revived. The Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC), the industry organization that audits circulation and audience information for magazines and newspapers around the world, promised it would consider the replicas inside apps in calculating “rate base,” the measure of publications’ total circulation, including subscription and newsstand sales. Rate base had been the metric for setting advertising rates in publishing before the emergence of keyword and banner advertising, which measures click-throughs and ad impressions. Advertising is the real business of media, but traditional publishers couldn’t compete with Google and new-media companies for selling digital ads. Apps would interrupt that decline, returning media to its proper, historical structure: publishers could sell digital versions of the same ads that appeared in their print publications (perhaps with a markup if they had interactive elements), valued with the old measurement of rate base.

Expressed like this, the delusion is clear enough, but I succumbed myself—at least a little. I never believed that apps would unwind my industry’s disruption; but I felt some readers would want a beautifully designed digital replica of Technology Review on their mobile devices, and I bet that our developers could create a better mobile experience within applications. So we created iOS and Android apps that were free for use; anyone could read our daily news and watch our videos, and people could pay to see digital replicas of the magazine. We launched the platforms in January of 2011. Complimenting myself on my conservative accounting, I budgeted less than $125,000 in revenue in the first year. That meant fewer than 5,000 subscriptions and a handful of single-issue sales. Easy, I thought.

Like almost all publishers, I was badly disappointed. What went wrong? Everything.

Apple demanded a 30 percent vigorish on all single-copy sales through its iTunes store. Profit margins in single-copy sales are thinner than 30 percent; publishers were thus paying Apple to move issues. Many responded by not selling single copies of their magazines. Then, for a year after the launch of the iPad, Apple could not figure out how to sell subscriptions through iTunes in a way that satisfied ABC, which requires publishers to record “fulfillment” information about subscribers. When Apple finally solved the problem of iPad subscriptions in iTunes, it again claimed its 30 percent share. From June of last year, Apple did permit publishers to fulfill subscriptions through their own Web pages (a handful of publishers, including Technology Review, enjoyed the privilege earlier); but the mechanism couldn’t match iTunes for ease of use, and most readers couldn’t be bothered to understand it. And while Google was more reasonable in its terms, Android never emerged as an alternative to the iPad: today, most tablet computers are Apple machines.

There were other difficulties. It wasn’t simple, it turned out, to adapt print publications to apps. A large part of the problem was the ratio of the tablets: they possessed both a “portrait” (vertical) and “landscape” (horizontal) view, depending on how the user held the device. Then, too, the screens of smart phones were much smaller than those of tablets. Absurdly, many publishers ended up producing six different versions of their editorial product: a print publication, a conventional digital replica for Web browsers and proprietary software, a digital replica for landscape viewing on tablets, something that was not quite a digital replica for portrait viewing on tablets, a kind of hack for smart phones, and ordinary HTML pages for their websites. Software development of apps was much harder than publishers had anticipated, because they had hired Web developers who knew technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Publishers were astonished to learn that iPad apps were real, if small, applications, mostly written in a language called Objective C, which no one in their WebDev departments knew. Publishers reacted by outsourcing app development, which was expensive, time-consuming, and unbudgeted.

But the real problem with apps was more profound. When people read news and features on electronic media, they expect stories to possess the linky-ness of the Web, but stories in apps didn’t really link. The apps were, in the jargon of information technology, “walled gardens,” and although sometimes beautiful, they were small, stifling gardens. For readers, none of that beauty overcame the weirdness and frustration of reading digital media closed off from other digital media.

Without subscribers or many single-copy buyers, and with no audiences to sell to advertisers, there were no revenues to offset the incremental costs of app development. With a couple of exceptions, publishers therefore soured on apps. The most commonly cited exception is Condé Nast, which saw its digital sales increase by 268 percent last year after Apple introduced an iPad app called Newsstand that promoted the New York publisher’s iPad editions. Still, even 268 percent growth may not be saying much in total numbers. Digital is a small business for Condé Nast. For instance, Wired, the most digital of Condé Nast’s titles, has 33,237 digital replica subscriptions, representing just 4.1 percent of total circulation, and 7,004 digital single-copy sales, which is 0.8 percent of paid circulation, according to ABC.

Today, most owners of mobile devices read news and features on publishers’ websites, which have often been coded to detect and adapt themselves to smaller screens; or, if they do use apps, the apps are glorified RSS readers such as Amazon Kindle, Google Reader, Flipboard, and the apps of newspapers like the Guardian, which grab editorial from the publishers’ sites. A recent Nielsen study reported that while 33 percent of tablet and smart-phone users had downloaded news apps in the previous 30 days, just 19 percent of users had paid for any of them. The paid, expensively developed publishers’ app, with its extravagantly produced digital replica, is dead.

Here, the recent history of the Financial Times is instructive. Last June, the company pulled its iPad and iPhone app from iTunes and launched a new version of its website written in HTML5, which can optimize the site for the device a reader is using and provide many features and functions that are app like. For a few months, the FT continued to support the app, but on May 1 the paper chose to kill it altogether.

And Technology Review? We sold 353 subscriptions through the iPad. We never discovered how to avoid the necessity of designing both landscape and portrait versions of the magazine for the app. We wasted $124,000 on outsourced software development. We fought amongst ourselves, and people left the company. There was untold expense of spirit. I hated every moment of our experiment with apps, because it tried to impose something closed, old, and print like on something open, new, and digital.

Last fall, we moved all the editorial in our apps, including the magazine, into a simple RSS feed in a river of news. We dumped the digital replica. Now we’re redesigning Technologyreview.com, which we made entirely free for use, and we’ll follow the Financial Times in using HTML5, so that a reader will see Web pages optimized for any device, whether a desktop or laptop computer, a tablet, or a smart phone. Then we’ll kill our apps, too.

A new take on the future of e-book publishing at Ideo.com.

The following from Ben Elowitz as reported today at All Things D.

Ben’s remarks are a timely and persuasive arguing the high ground of audience development. I’ve long championed that content is becoming the shorter leg of the stool in favor of amassing targeted groups and empowering them to generate their own content. Pinterest anyone?

Stay tuned for my upcoming post Content is So Valuable It’s Free. 

“Content is king” has been a long-lived mantra of media. And in the 1990s and early 2000s, it was true.

But over the last several years, the Internet has up-heaved the aphorism.

It used to be that media was linear. And in that world, content and distribution were married. The HBO channel had HBO content. A New York Times subscription bought you New York Times content. And Vogue and Cosmopolitan each month delivered exclusive and proprietary content from … Vogue and Cosmopolitan.

Until the Internet came along. In every single one of the varied businesses the Internet has touched — from commerce to media to communications to payments — there has been one common impact: disaggregation.

Content and distribution have parted

In the case of the hundreds-of-years-old media business, the Internet has fundamentally separated content from distribution. Today I can watch hundreds of South Park and Jon Stewart clips, all without a cable box — on my Apple TV, my Android phone, or YouTube on my desktop. But wait, South Park and Jon Stewart? Content is king, you say. It’s now even more free to reign, unfettered by distribution channels! No; because content is no longer enough. Content has always been a means to an end. And the end has always been audience.

Content isn’t the goal. Audience is.

When it comes to the business of media, there’s no question: advertisers don’t pay to reach content. They pay to reach an audience. What’s the first item in every brief from every advertiser? It’s not Target Content, it’s Target Audience.

Media has been slow to adjust to this new dynamic. Companies have sunk billions into content management systems — using CMS as the cornerstone of their modernization — under the impression that they traffic in content.

But they don’t. They traffic in audience. And how much have they spent on audience development systems? Not much, if any at all.

Now that distribution of content to audience is no longer linear, distribution decisions are suddenly more complicated. And, at the same time, they are immensely more important — and more dynamic — to create the impact media companies are looking for: drawing an audience! Social distribution can outperform search, if you use it wisely. Day-parting your postings can boost post performance by 100 percent or more. Packaging can triple the effectiveness of content in reaching an audience.

And yet, few in media have even begun to optimize these decisions.

Who’s your Chief Audience Officer?

Distribution decisions are just as important as content decisions in building and serving an audience, and yet they are being largely ignored. Everyone has an Editor-In-Chief or a Chief Creative Officer. But how many have a Distributor-In-Chief? Or a Chief Audience Officer? A Head of Digital Programming?

The myopic focus on content over distribution is widespread, and it’s a bad business decision. It ignores a critical access of leverage, and one of competitive advantage.

The smartest media companies will do three things to take control of their digital opportunity:

• Put someone in charge of audience development.
  Give them latitude to think about the interplay between distribution and content, so that they can marry the two. Like a head of programming for a cable network, they should be tasked to realize the full potential of your digital channels. They should support the delivery of your content, and they should also provide back pressure to your content creators. Don’t merge it into your editorial jobs — that’s too precarious. Make it its own discipline.
• Adopt an audience development strategy.
  There are three basic components you have to master: insights (know your audience segments, and what each one will like); channel selection (identify the highest value distribution outlets for your brand, whether it’s search, social, YouTube, Hulu, or your own channels); and optimization (use data to create a feedback loop and tune your content, packaging, and timing to what works for your audience).
• Systematize it.
  You have sunk millions into content management systems. But how much have you spent on your most monetizable asset, your audience? You should be as systematic in audience development as you are in content creation, if not more so. Whether it’s with established processes or dedicated algorithms, make audience development a competitive advantage. Get so good at it that you truly know how to maximize every piece of content you create — and multiply your ROI. Use technology for what it does best: Systematize your advantages over your competitors.

With the rise of new distribution platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Hulu, there’s no question that the next generation of digital media is as much about distribution as it is about content. Media companies that orient their organizations to prize audience development above all (with distribution as a key component) will catch the upside of these tectonic shifts. And they will be the ones that survive and thrive in the digital age. After all, audience is the ruler of media companies’ fortunes.

This article by Ben Elowitz (@elowitz) is an exclusive selection from his Media Success newsletter for digital media leaders. Elowitz is the co-founder and CEO of next-generation media company Wetpaint and the author of the Digital Quarters blog about the future of digital media. Prior to Wetpaint, Elowitz co-founded Blue Nile (NILE).

I don’t endorse products on CPI, but after personally meeting author Michael Cannell at a New York City book club ditty last month, I’m gonna recommend his outstanding read on the early sixties F1 scene where only one in three drivers lived past race day. The Limit is a sobering account of man’s interior demons and his quest for speed. Available at Amazon.

Is print media dead?

Not according to farm wife “Emily” and her hubby’s cascading inventory of farm magazines. Emily’s condensed blog comments below weave a tale of everyday life on the farm accompanied by seed catalogs and tractor mags…

On my third trip to the washing machine today, I knocked over Joe’s stack of agriculture publications.  Nearly a quarter of my kitchen floor was riddled with pictures of cattle, folks in seed corn caps, and the Stockman’s Supply. The sad thing is, there were multiple copies of each, and the counter on which I ran into is only about two feet long by six inches wide.

So, not only did it cause the crazy anal-retentive person in me to pile all the periodicals into dated, post-it noted, can-we-please-throw-these-away-so-I-can-get-to-the-laundry-room-unscathed piles, it caused me, the blogger, the cyber-writer, the UNPAID, to beg the question of the minute:

“Isn’t print media supposed to be dead?”

My sweet friend Holly is screaming, “NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!” as are all the other paid, printed and proper ag-journalists, and while I sit here, lowly and just a mere blogger, I have the power of the pen, just hypothetically. While I have nothing but self-imposed deadlines and personal expectations to work off of, I get excited when I am actually in print…even if it’s just a hometown newspaper or one of the above mentioned publications, written by someone about me writing (seems redundant, don’t you think?). Print media in agriculture is alive, and evidently thriving, based on not only the pile in my kitchen, but the daily arrivals in my mailbox.

How often does my lovely, well-spoken, well-read husband get a minute to sit down and read aforementioned periodicals. Not since July of 2011, as evidenced today in the carnage in my kitchen.

However, in the age of blogs and cyber-digests, iPad apps and Facebook, why are there so many different ag publications? My short answer is that many farmers need something to read in line at the grain elevator during the hauling months of the winter.

My long answer is that agriculture, although seemingly similar in its outcome, is like anything: it’s multifaceted. Joe’s periodicals seem to center around cattle, corn, and equipment. However, my dad’s are a little different, and some times a swap will occur, a magazine marketplace, if you will. And, I know it’s a shock, but while I get smarty about all the crazy titles of magazines my husband gets, I too can pore over magazines when give the opportunity, reading such favorites as Runner’s World, Real Simple, and Better Homes and Gardens from cover to cover and back again.

The difference is, I throw them away when I’m finished.

Anyway, newspapers may be going broke and simultaneously going digital, but I will tell you, the agriculture print business is alive and kicking.

Spoken from the heartland. Maybe there’s hope in them there fields after all!

Check out Emily’s blog here.