Category Archives: Magazines

FT: Washington Post to sell Newsweek to Sidney Harman

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The Washington Post has agreed to sell Newsweek to businessman Sidney Harman, the founder of one of the world’s largest audio equipment companies, reports the FT.

Harman said he is interested in “the publication’s mission” and was not investing in Newsweek to make a profit – just as well, given recent declines in the title’s ad pages and reported $30-million losses last year.

Full story on FT.com at this link…

According to the Guardian, Harman bought the title for a nominal amount “reported to be just a single dollar”.

Hack vs. Flack: Journalist reports back after week on the other side

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The relationship between journalist and PR officer is one of the most valuable – but often one of the most difficult – to foster and maintain in the media world. But there are often valuable lessons to be learnt from understanding the tensions on both sides.

PRWeek decided to let its deputy features editor Kate Magee find out what these could be, by setting up a job swap with Bite Communications‘ account executive Mat Gazeley. They would spend a week in each others shoes, documenting their experiences and hopefully learn a trick or two for dealing with the “other side” in the future.

Speaking to Journalism.co.uk after the swap, PRWeek’s Kate – now safely back in the world of journalism – said life on “the dark side” was not such a far cry from the newsroom as people may think.

There were actually more similarities than I had expected. Throwing around ideas in a brainstorming session was my favourite part of the job. I found it similar to my role as a journalist; working out what is interesting about a topic and translating this into something that will engage an audience. The work was also a far more collaborative process than journalism, with team members reporting back on which calls they’d made and even what was said. In my role, I am quite independent, coming up with ideas and being able to run with them myself. As a journalist there is also a far greater individual pressure to hit deadlines. The blank print page or online space is waiting, and you have to fill it. As a PR, it felt like more of a group effort.

But for journalist Kate, the pride of a byline still draws her back to the day-job.

I won’t change my approach dramatically, but I will have greater empathy for a PR trying to find out whether a story will be used or not. But certainly for now, I still want my own name, not my client’s name, at the top of an article.

Watch an interview with Kate and Mat below, courtesy of PRWeek’s video podcast produced by markettiers4dc.


Read the final PR Week feature here…

Controversy over Time Magazine cover showing mutilated Afghan woman

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The Atlantic Wire site has published a series of different points of view about this week’s Time Magazine cover, which shows a harrowing image of an 18-year-old Afghan woman who has had her nose and ears cut off by the Taliban.

Under the headline “What Happens if We Leave Afghanistan”, the magazine’s picture caption reports that the woman was attacked for having tried to flee from “abusive in-laws”.

The Wire asks if Time Magazine is right to publish the cover, with answers first quoted from managing editor Richard Stengel discussing the reasons for their decision.

I thought long and hard about whether to put this image on the cover of Time (…) But bad things do happen to people, and it is part of our job to confront and explain them. In the end, I felt that the image is a window into the reality of what is happening — and what can happen — in a war that affects and involves all of us. I would rather confront readers with the Taliban’s treatment of women than ignore it. I would rather people know that reality as they make up their minds about what the U.S. and its allies should do in Afghanistan.

The article then moves to comments from a range of other publications, some who say the cover is “good journalism” while others feel it “oversimplifies war”.

See the full post here…

What makes you an arts journalist? The Stage on a changing profession

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Mark Shenton shares his thoughts on the world of arts journalism over on the Stage’s blog today, putting a spotlight on a profession being transformed by amateur critics online and an industry yet to fully accept the opinions of an unpaid commentator.

Of course, no special qualifications are required to be a theatre critic: just the fact that someone employs you to do so makes you one. But in the new online environment, no such appointments are necessary anymore; you can start a blog and call yourself one in the click of a mouse. It’s an increasing challenge amongst theatrical PRs to work out who they should extend the courtesy of free theatre tickets to.

The problem, according to Shenton, is that there are still organisations who put up barriers to those not yet being paid for their work.

The Edinburgh Fringe’s press office runs a media accreditation process to validate the numerous people claiming to be critics, so that there’s at least some kind of filter; but they’ve caused a little bit of a stir this year by denying accreditation to one particular website, The Public Reviews, which as its name suggests, uses members of the public to review shows as opposed to professionals. And being paid for your writing isn’t, of course, a pre-requisite either anymore to call yourself a critic. One of the best reviewing sites out there is theartsdesk.com, set up by a team of established print journalists, and it isn’t paying its contributors at the moment yet, either. (Neither does one of the biggest and most influential news and opinion sites in the US, The Huffington Post). But they’ve all noticed that the market is changing, and are taking a proactive step to be out there with a well-produced site that may, in turn, start making money in due course.

See his full post here…

Cooliris brings Wikipedia to the iPad with new magazine-style layout

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Wikipedia will soon be available on the iPad with the launch of new app, ‘Discover’, according to a report by cnet.com.

Discover is the first app from software company Cooliris, which already produces an iPhone app that enables its users to turn photo collections into “interactive 3D wall” art.

The new app uses content from Wikipedia and organises the data into sections which can be browsed in a magazine format instead of having to scroll down a long browser window.

The end result is a Wikipedia with larger text that can be read like an e-book and photos that can be thumbed through and scaled up to the iPad’s full resolution. The app also takes advantage of orientation to reposition, expand or consolidate the data it’s showing. Along the way, Cooliris serves up advertisements, which is where it can make some of its money given the app’s free price tag.

Discover has been submitted to the App Store and users are invited to sign up here to be notified of its availability.

World’s first social magazine launches on iPad

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Flipboard, the world’s first personalised social magazine, has been launched on the iPad, offering its users a magazine packaged collection of the news, features, videos and images circulating within their social networks.

The app was masterminded by Mike McCue, former CEO of Tellme and Evan Doll, former senior iPhone engineer at Apple and is getting its first public demonstration later today.

Because Flipboard renders links and images right in the magazine, readers no longer have to scan long lists of posts and click on link after link – instead they instantly see all the stories, comments and images, making it faster and more entertaining to discover, view and share social content.

Flipboard also lets readers easily create sections around topics or people they care about. Choose from Flipboardʼs suggested sections on topics such as sports, news, tech and style, with content hand-curated from popular and interesting Twitter feeds. Or, create an entirely new section by searching by topic, person or Twitter list to make Flipboard even more personal.

See a demonstration video below, courtesy of Inside Flipboard:

See the site at this link…

MediaMemo: Time Inc. on paywall plans and print/iPad-only content

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As reported by Nieman Journalism Lab, Reuters blogger Felix Salmon noticed late last month that a Time Magazine story he had followed a link to online wasn’t there, instead there was this message:

To read TIME Magazine in its entirety, subscribe or download the issue on the iPad.

The next morning the story reappeared in its entirety.

Yesterday reporters at Nieman noticed that “nearly every major article” on Time Magazine’s website was no longer available in full:

Check out the current issue of Time Magazine at Time.com. Click around. Notice anything? On almost every story that comes from the magazine, there’s this phrase: “The following is an abridged version of an article that appears in the July 12, 2010 print and iPad editions of TIME.”

This afternoon MediaMemo has confirmation from parent company Time Inc. that there are title-by-title paywall plans and content across its publications will increasingly be print and iPad only. Spokesman Dawn Bridges outlines the publisher’s policy:

We’ve said for awhile that increasingly we’ll move content from the print (and now iPad) versions of our titles off of the web. With People, we haven’t had hardly any content [SIC] from the magazine on the web for a long time. Our strategy is to use the web for breaking news and ‘commodity’ type of news; (news events of any type, stock prices, sports scores) and keep (most of) the features and longer analysis for the print publication and iPad versions.

Full story at this link…

‘The state of the journalistic art’: In defence of Rolling Stone’s Gen. McChrystal reporter

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The furore following Rolling Stone’s General McChrystal feature doesn’t look like calming down any time soon.

Eric Alterman, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress has put together a great post calling into question some of the criticisms of RS reporter Michael Hastings.

Reporter after reporter has complained that by accurately reporting what McChyrstal and his aides said in explicitly on-the-record conversations to a reporter with a tape recorder and/or notepad in his hand, Hastings has violated the tenets of professional journalism.

One comment he refers to was from David Brooks, opinion columnist for the New York Times, who called Hastings a product of the “culture of exposure”:

But McChrystal, like everyone else, kvetched. And having apparently missed the last 50 years of cultural history, he did so on the record, in front of a reporter. And this reporter, being a product of the culture of exposure, made the kvetching the center of his magazine profile.

By putting the kvetching in the magazine, the reporter essentially took run-of-the-mill complaining and turned it into a direct challenge to presidential authority. He took a successful general and made it impossible for President Obama to retain him.

But in Alterman’s view, the feature was the epitome of quality journalism.

(…) an almost picture-perfect example of skillful interviewing, smooth narrative writing, extremely exhaustive research, and finally (and perhaps rarest) thoughtful contextualizing of extremely complicated material. I recommend it to all journalism professors as an example of the state of the journalistic art.

Read the full post here…

‘The imperatives of the news cycle’: A licence to steal?

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Last week we highlighted some of the criticism being directed at Rolling Stone magazine for its decision to hold off publishing the now notorious General McChrystal article online.

The magazine’s hold-for-the-newsstand tactic led Time.com and Politico to make full PDF copies of the printed article available through their websites – copies which were not provided directly by Rolling Stone, as was first thought, but by third parties.

In the wake of Rolling Stone’s much-derided decision, New York Times’ Media Equation blogger David Carr turns his attention to the behaviour of Time.com and Politico, which later linked back to Rolling Stone’s website when the magazine finally published online.

Publishing a PDF of somebody else’s work is the exact opposite of fair use: these sites engaged in a replication of a static electronic document with no links to the publication that took the risk, commissioned the work and came up with a story that tilted the national conversation. The technical, legal term for what they did is, um, stealing.

Jim VandeHei, executive editor and a founder of Politico, defended the site’s move by claiming that “the imperatives of the news cycle superseded questions of custody”.

Full story at this link…

Rolling Stone under fire for mishandling of General McChrystal scoop

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Rolling Stone has come in for a fair amount of flak from media commentators for the way it handled its General McChrystal scoop. It’s a very big scoop, the fallout from the story has seen McChrystal, who was US and NATO Commander in Afghanistan, sacked by President Obama. And yet the magazine decided to hold back the story for its print edition, aiming instead to generate buzz online and direct the money to the newsstands.

Buzz successfully generated (as Roy Greenslade reports, the New York Times has led with the story since it broke, as have many other outlets), readers who logged onto the Rolling Stone site couldn’t access the article. In fact, the story was nowhere to be seen.”It is one of the best pieces of reportage I’ve ever read. In these digital days, how could Rolling Stone ever imagine it could keep such an agenda-setting story to print alone?” writes Greenslade.

The story is still not available in print, it hits the newsstands tomorrow. “Clearly, competitors can’t wait until Friday to pick up a copy, especially when McChrystal has already been summoned to the White House,” wrote former Politico staffer Michael Calderone on his Yahoo! blog that day. They didn’t need to wait though. Rolling Stone had provided advance copies to Associated Press and others as part of its buzz-generating exercise, and in an unauthorised move Politico made the full text available for download from their site hours before Rolling Stone conceded and published it online.

The story eventually went up on the Rolling Stone website at around 11:00am ET, the following (Tuesday) morning.

If you are a news outlet looking to break a big story in a similar way, Megan Carpentier’s TPM Livewire article includes a step-by-step guide. Some of the key points:

  • Fail to publish even excerpts of the story on your own website, figuring that your promotion of the story will cause people to go out and buy the magazine.
  • Go to bed and sleep like a baby after the story hits.
  • Wake up to find out that Politico has published a reprint of the story you gave them, since you weren’t smart enough to put the story on your own site and despite the intellectual property violation.