Category Archives: Magazines

Conde Nast brings make Gourmet magazine – as an app

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There was much clamour last year when Conde Nast announced the closure of specialist food title Gourmet. Now the magazine has been resurrected as an app and new website, Gourmet Live. Both will make use of Gourmet’s archive of material, but the app, which will be launched towards the end of the year, will feature new, bespoke content for iPad and tablet readers, the video below suggests:

“Because Condé Nast already has one strong-selling food magazine, Bon Appetit, it can afford to experiment with the Gourmet brand a little. What Conde Nast may discover is a new model for delivering the premium content of its magazines,” reports Mashable.

The free-to-download app will prompt users to pay for additional services and content and is promising a rewards system for readers. But as Lloyd Shepherd suggests is this a “gaming” element or ‘iFeudalism’?

Gourmet Live is hiding some content from most users (so isn’t this a kind of paywall I can’t see?). And if I do things in a certain Gourmet-approved kind of way, I get to see that content.

This is wrong for two reasons. One, it hides content away, so all the paywall arguments apply here, but doubly so, because at least there’s a simple way to unlock paywalled content – by paying. Here, I have to jump through some hoops.

And there’s the second problem. It changes the relationship between publisher and reader. It makes the reader a kind of supplicant, willing to perform tasks to get treats. And, frankly, it’s just a magazine, you know? Who can be bothered?

GQ takes home two Maggies including Overall Winner

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Men’s fashion magazine GQ was recognised twice in this year’s Maggie Awards, which celebrate the magazine industry’s best covers.

GQ won the top prize of Overall Winner, and the magazine’s September 2009 issue cover, which featured Sienna Miller, claimed them victory in the Fashion category.

Judging panel chairman Jim Bilton said the winning cover, which fronted one of the magazine’s most successful issues of the year, was “a textbook example of great cover design”.

“So good, it looks completely effortless, but a great deal of skill has gone into the execution of a cover which combines beautiful photography and strong coverlines,” he said.

Other winners included Metal Hammer in the Entertainment category and Beano in the Youth category.

Over 40,000 votes were cast to decide the winners.

See the winning covers here….

Brand Republic: Shortlist revenues give hope to free magazine market

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Shortlist Media, publisher of the free, weekly magazines Shortlist and Stylist, has reported an 81 per cent year-on-year growth in revenues, from £3.1 million to £5.6 million in the year to 31 August 2009.

The group significantly reduced its operating losses and said Stylist, which launched in October 2009 with a start-up cost of £181,000, is expected to be profitable in its third year.

Full story at this link…

Wired gets ‘wired’ with Adobe for iPad edition

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The US edition of Wired magazine has launched its iPad app in characteristic fashion with its June edition, priced at $4.99. Writes editor-in-chief Chris Anderson:

The irony that Wired, a magazine founded to chronicle the digital revolution, has traditionally come to you each month on the smooshed atoms of dead trees is not lost on us. Let’s just say the medium is not always the message.

Except that now it is. I’m delighted to announce that Wired’s first digital edition is now available for the iPad and soon for nearly all other tablets. We have always made our stories accessible online at Wired.com, but as successful as the site is, it is not a magazine.

The tablet is our opportunity to make the Wired we always dreamed of. It has all the visual impact of paper, enhanced by interactive elements like video and animated infographics.

Most interestingly, the magazine’s iPad edition has been in development for a year and will use new publishing technology from Adobe which will allow the title to create both the print magazine and its digital edition using the same system.

There is no finish line. Wired Magazine will be digital from now on, designed from the start as a compelling interactive experience, in parallel with our print edition. Wired is finally, well, wired.

Wired Magazine’s iPad Edition Goes Live | Magazine.

Newsweek experiments with Twitter profile of Michele Bachmann

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When Newsweek reporter Andrew Romano was dispatched by the magazine to profile ultraconservative Republican congresswoman Michele Bachmann it was not, as he would have liked, with a pen, paper and pretend fedora. Instead they suggested he do it live on Twitter as he followed her around. She doesn’t seem to have taken to the idea. Romano’s article about the experience makes for a good read.

I hadn’t spent enough time with her to decide if she was unserious, or crazy, or whatever. Instead, I was simply doing what Twitter demanded: being pithy and provocative. Straightforward narration would go unnoticed. Quotes from Bachmann’s old friends would seem un-newsy. Nuance would cost too many characters. So I became a color commentator, casting off the reporter’s traditional cloak of detachment and publicly weighing in on the proceedings at regular intervals. And because observation and publication were now compressed into a single act, I spent a lot of time thinking about how to phrase my tweets that I otherwise would’ve spent absorbing a scene or speaking to locals. I don’t remember much about the crowd in Monticello, the businessmen in Blaine, or Bachmann’s larger themes. I do remember what I wound up tweeting, and that’s about it.

Full story at this link…

MinOnline: GQ sells just 365 copies of iPad edition

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The Conde Nast title, one of the first to appear on the iPad, sold 365 copies of its December ‘Men of the Year’ issue. Priced at $2.99 per download, which is $2 less than the print edition’s price, this totals $1,091.35. Not the salvation the newspaper and magazine publishing industries might have hoped for, but publisher Pete Hunsinger is happy with the result, reports MinOnline:

This costs us nothing extra: no printing or postage (…) Everything is profit, and I look forward to the time when iPad issue sales become a major component to our circulation.

Full story at this link…

(via Mashable)

Advertising Age: Magazines to sell subscriptions in Facebook news feed

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Synapse, a division of Time Inc. that sells subscriptions to many publishers’ titles, is working with Alvenda, an ecommerce applications company, “to introduce a system letting Facebook users buy print magazine subscriptions without leaving the site or even the Facebook news feed”, reports Advertising Age.

There’s also plans for articles via Facebook:

If you share a magazine article link with your Facebook friends, for example, their news feeds will allow them to expand the item into a full article with ads and an option to subscribe.

Full story at this link…

#ppa: Follow the PPA’s annual magazine conference

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Today sees the PPA’s annual conference – a chance to hear the business and consumer magazine industry discuss social media, iPhones and iPads, digital revenues and more. Speakers include: David Rowan, editor of WIRED; Christian Hernandez, head of international business development, Facebook; and the CEOs of IPC Media, Future Publishing and Reed Business Information. There’s a full agenda to download here.

Follow live Twitter updates from delegates in the liveblog below:

Paywalled Rolling Stone brings readers closer to music

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Rolling Stone magazine set its relaunched website live on Monday introducing new subscription packages to its ‘Rolling Stone All Access’ section, greater access to the magazine’s archives and new navigation.

The changes to the site are explained in a post on the website, but one feature worth highlighting is the ability to listen to any piece of music that a visitor reads about on the site. Coupled with the option to buy albums reviewed by the mag, this is the kind of one-stop offering that could increase stickiness – the amount of time a reader spends on the site – for the new-look site.


FOLIO: RBI to close 23 magazines in US

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Reed Business Information is to close 23 B2B magazine titles in the US. FOLIO reports:

About nine months after putting the brands published under the U.S. arm of Reed Business Information on the block again, Reed Elsevier announced today that it is closing down the magazines it has not been able to sell or does not intend to keep. In total, the number of magazines to be closed down is 23.

According to FOLIO, parent company Reed Elsevier declined to comment on the number of job losses as a result.

Full post at this link…