BoSacks Speaks Out

Find Your Place in the Great Search Society

2010-01-04T15:03:00.000-08:00

BoSacks - The Profit Prophet

The sea change in how we seek information presents challenges and opportunities for publishers

By Robert M. Sacks

Over the past 15 years or so, I have become a genius. I know that sounds brash, but the thing is, so have you. In fact, everyone's a genius these days. It is no longer important to just know facts; it is more important to be able to find facts. That is a definite sea change for society and especially for the information distribution business formally known  as publishing.

With the push of just a few keys on any computer, you can find out anything you need to know on any subject at any time. The next generation is already comfortable with this new reality, having grown up in the "great search society." They have the ability to settle arguments, finish projects, or complete any task or chore with an efficiency and speed unheard of a few years ago. You want to build a jumbo 747 airliner in your spare time in your backyard? There's an app for that.

Unfortunately, this concept of "instant information" is growing faster than any business, including publishing, can adapt. And if you can't adapt to it, how can you monetize it?

If you think about it, magazines, especially niche magazines, were the focused apps of yesteryear. They were the  system-specific resources for information on subjects that were near and dear to you. For me it was, and still is, the how-to titles—Popular Science, Popular Mechanics and PC Magazine, to name a few. I still enjoy perusing these titles for the thrill of focused, personal information discovery.

While the natures of the editor and writer remain the same, the key for them to remain functionally lucrative today will rely upon their ability to join the still evolving "great search society" infrastructure.

It will be important to isolate and monetize the various components of the "great search society." In which part of this process do we (publishers) belong, and which part, if any, are we willing to allow someone else to monetize?

What we do now is different and much more complex than ever before. Our core may be the same, but the ways in which we perform our magic have been completely  altered forever.

If you've been in the publishing business for any length of time, you remember the old adage, "It's Christmas in July," which meant that in July you already were working on the Christmas issue. But today, of what use is information that is several months old? Unless it is fiction, the older the information, the less value it has, especially to the "great search society" of today and tomorrow. We need to turn our old and successful apps (niche magazines) into modern products for the current technologic age in which we live.

Today's consumer wants to find what he wants, when he wants it. For old-style publishers, this is a new concept, but for the adventurous publishing entrepreneur, it has unlimited possibilities. There will be a number of ways to monetize this desire for instant, informational gratification—the public has already been programmed to pay for access to desired entertainment and informational services. All the publisher needs to do is provide unique and worthwhile content, any way and anywhere the reader wants it. That should be both your mission and your mantra.

Bob Sacks (aka BoSacks) is a printing/publishing industry consultant and president of The Precision Media Group (BoSacks.com). He also is the co-founder of the research company mediaIDEAS (MediaIdeas.net), and publisher and editor of a daily, international e-newsletter, Heard on the Web. Sacks has held posts as director of manufacturing and distribution, senior sales manager (paper), chief of operations, pressman, circulator, and every other job this industry has to offer.

The Profit Prophet : The Organized Chaos Theory

2009-10-07T11:31:00.000-07:00

Publishing’s systems are under tremendous stress, but we have been given a brief period of time to adjust to the new media order.
By Robert M. Sacks

A few weeks ago, I was reminded of Bob Garfield's 5-year-old book, "The Chaos Scenario," in which he explained that various converging forces will doom mass media and mass marketing. Garfield argued that the style of old media will continue to be under stress and that this stress will change what we, as producers and users, have grown accustomed to expect from our media.

Garfield once said, "It would mean radical changes in the economy, the culture and the society itself. And they wouldn't be easy to swallow. And, by the way, it's happening right now. We are heading, all of us, into a historically turbulent moment in the history of media, with the very real risk of disruption on a mass scale."

Upon a review of his statement five years later, I think Garfield was correct. Applying his theory directly to our own print publishing industry, I think it is time to consider that what we are still confronted with is, at best, organized chaos. I say "organized" because we have been greatly privileged to have a period of adjustment between what was and what will be. We are still able, in many cases, to make a very nice profit from our old media tools as we seek a sensible path to use the new tools and methods that are now available to us. As fast as the new media order is changing our universe, we haven't been totally vaporized, but rather greatly scorched. It seems that we have been permitted a short period of time to make adjustments to our business plans toward a new era of publishing sensibility and sustainability.

So, contrary to what many believe, we are not yet in complete chaos, even though our systems are, indeed, under tremendous stress to survive in this still-evolving convergence of technology and society in addition to what is now a stressed global economy.
What we are all going to need in this new environment is a superior business plan and some luck. Like any successful publishing platform in the past, we still need to be in the right place with the right product and recognize the market conditions as they constantly change. It has always been my personal mantra that change is unavoidable and should not only be welcomed, but must be continually used to your advantage.

How is this chaotic period different from other historic periods? It is what I call the disruptive factor. In the past, when new technologies were invented, entrepreneurs could devise a system to sell that new technology at a profit with the reasonable expectations of both a return on investment and some assurance that the technology would not rapidly or radically change. This is no longer true. Ever-morphing technology increasingly enables fine targeting and interaction between marketer and consumer, while our old-style measurement and deployment standards are primitive almost to the point of ridiculousness.

Did you know that just three years ago the average Internet user spent little to no time with social media? In a recent report, Internet users were found to be spending approximately 16 percent of their time online with social media. Do you think that this social-information phenomenon will go away or continue to morph into some greater form of a socialized, community-information distribution system? The growth and power of this kind of World Wide Web social word of mouth cannot be underestimated. It is, in fact, beyond our understanding. It is a new form of niche. And niche is the publishing world's bread and butter. It doesn't matter what your successful title is; you can survive in the world of chaos with niche.

Now that there are alternatives to our magazines, we need to attempt to own the printed and the electronic population of our individual nichedoms. As I see it, this is not far from what our goals have always been—bringing stability to apparent chaos by owning our sector outright in each and every form available.

What's the Formula for Our Future Business Plans?

2009-08-04T03:30:00.000-07:00

BoSacks - The Profit Prophet : What's the Formula for Our Future Business Plans?
A hint: The printed magazine replicated digitally is not the answer.
By Robert M. Sacks
http://www.pubexec.com/

I get the very strong impression that we are on the cusp of the next phase of information distribution. Kindle sales are booming, and there is competition aplenty for the black-and-white Amazon e-reader. Several new machines that cost at least $50 less than the Kindle now are on the market, with more seemingly on the way each week. In cooperation with Google, Sony is making available 500,000 free e-books for e-readers. It is important to note that Kindle sales figures are believed to have grown faster than iPod sales in the same time frame. That is very impressive. Most book publishers are adjusting and adapting to this new platform in one way or another at a rapid pace.

But where do magazines stand in this race for a digital foothold? The most obvious fact we all can agree upon is that magazines are not books. And while book publishers can get away with offering an exact digital replication of their text-only products, can and should magazines do the same and expect success?

I am a voracious digital user, reading multiple newspapers every day and dozens of magazines every week in digital format. But let me be clear: I'm not talking about going to a Web site and reading the news. I'm talking about reading, scanning and thumbing through entire issues of said publications in a paginated format.

Let me ask you this: What's the point of owning a sports car and never putting your pedal to the metal? What's the point of owning the best stereo system money can buy and not turning up the volume? Likewise, what's the point of having a digital magazine that doesn't exploit the full digital nature of the product?

Should the digital version be exactly the same as the printed version? The answer should be a resounding "no"! The editorial surely shouldn't be the same. Why set ridiculous restrictions on an amazing, new publishing product? There are terrific opportunities in the downloaded versions of magazines that ink on paper just can't match, and it shouldn't.

We absolutely need accountability and creditability when detailing circulation figures, but we also must not hamper the new digital magazine business with arcane restrictions based on ancient printing technologies and abacus accounting methods. We must move forward, not back, if we are to survive as publishers in the growing digital information age.
The bottom line is that the ads and the edit do not need to be and, in fact, shouldn't be exactly the same in both mediums.

They should be more enriched and focused in the digital version and have as much creative involvement and special interest as the technology allows. A static informational/branding ad should run in the print issue, while a dynamically charged ad appears in the digital issue. Static, informational editorial belongs in the printed version, while hyperlinked, graphically active, fully charged edit belongs in the digital issue. Those are the choices.

Does the advertising and edit have to be exactly the same in the digital version as in the printed version to be fully credited on an ABC or BPA statement? Of course not. It's time we as an industry start a constructive dialog. What is a successful and satisfactory formula for our future businesses?

Bob Sacks (aka BoSacks) is a printing/publishing industry consultant and president of The Precision Media Group (BoSacks.com). He also is the co-founder of the research company mediaIDEAS (MediaIdeas.net), and publisher and editor of a daily international e-newsletter, Heard on the Web. Sacks has held posts as director of manufacturing and distribution, senior sales manager (paper), chief of operations, pressman, circulator, and almost every other job this industry has to offer.

BoSacks Speaks Out: On why Twitter is important to Publishers and their employees

2009-03-17T04:32:00.000-07:00

BoSacks Speaks Out: Well, What can I say? I have been posting since 2007 that publishers and publishing employees had better get familiar with social networking and specifically Twitter.

My Friend Steve Smith clearly agrees with me by his report..

Did you know that Business Week editors have over 40 Twitter accounts that they use for reporting. So do many other newspapers, magazines and journalists across the country.

Publishers as diverse as Playboy and Christianity Today have editors posting and experimenting with this unusual communications tool.

Is it the be all and end all? No, of course not. It is just yet another platform in the ever-changing universe of Information Distribution, formally known as publishing.

If you aren't there yet you better get there soon. It just might come up on your next job interview.

Listening, not imitation, may be the sincerest form of flattery.
Dr. Joyce Brothers (1928 - )

Steve Smith's Eye on Digital Media: Listening To Twitter
Posted By Steve Smith
http://www.minonline.com/topstory.htm
It's 12:11 p.m. and Martha Stewart is at lunch with Ludacris. It's 10:31 p.m. and In Style staffers are watching "Jack and Sharon Osbourne walking in" to an American Idol "Top 13" party in L.A. It's 7:30 p.m. and BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE editor-in-chief John Byrne mentions that he began his career as a rock critic at a college newspaper. This comes after Byrne's asking readers what intro music to use for his next podcast.

Then, it's 3:10 p.m. and Scientific American seems to be responding to a reader query and states (in a way only SciAm can) that "consensus view is that spontaneous mutations of natural pathogens is far more dangerous/likely than terrorist- building smallpox."

Huh? We can't say you will understand all of the chatter on Twitter, but you and your magazine brand had better get there pronto. At MINONLINE's own Twitter page (TWITTER.COM/MINONLINE) we are constructing a makeshift directory of magazine brands and their main Twitter feeds. Visit it yourself to see which of your competitors is already using the micro-blogging service, or tell us about your brand's feed.

So far, we are following nearly 100 of you and getting a fair look at how magazines generally are using this phenom of 2008. Twitter has been exploding in recent months and it is downright fashionable in media circles to broadcast these little 140-character missives to "followers" who subscribe to the feed. Magazine online managers have been setting up official, branded feeds in recent months, and we will be aggregating that list at our own Twitter home for our readers to peruse.

Everyone is in test mode when it comes to broadcasting media messages and/or interacting with readers. Many magazine Twitter sites merely repurpose their RSS (really simple syndication) feeds and treat this as another content distribution platform. BW Online's John Byrne, who uses the platform much more broadly with his 10,700 followers, says that Twitter "is showing up as one of the top referring domains...user response has been overwhelmingly good." His editors now have over 40 accounts they use for reporting. BWO recently put a Twitter feed on its site to invite readers to suggest how President Obama could craft an economic stimulus package.

Redbook editor-in-chief Stacy Morrison says her Twitter feed will point followers to new stories, but it is the chatter over Redbook's annual Americans' Hottest Husbands feature that blew the doors off. "Finalists' wives from around the country are tweeting to drum up support for their guys," she says. "We expect a big increase in the number of votes this year thanks to this additional platform."

You can attract a massive following quickly in this viral atmosphere. Women's Wear Daily editors have been tweeting about celebrity sightings at fashion fetes, and in just three weeks the feed has attracted 69,000 followers.

While posting new content links back to a publisher's main site is a standard, albeit unimaginative, use of the tool, the best feeds that we have seen respect the conversational and even trivial roots of the platform to craft a new kind of reader/publisher relationship.

Playboy's feed will punctuate the links to the latest cyber-Playmate pics with complaints about Twitter's and a roundup of what his Twitter followers snack on. Christianity Today editors post: Editorial page meeting Thurs. p.m. What should we opine about in the May issue? And an editor at defunct yoga magazine Ascent twittered (above) until the bitter end: counting down: 4 days till the final issue goes to the printer.

Doubters once bashed the micro-blogging fad (and who knows? It may still be one) as self-absorbed techies posting the detritus of their bored lives to one another.

This it is. But when you weave into that everyday ephemera real conversation and actual content, then the trivial becomes the essential. It is in the little personal observations and meaningless asides that Twitter feeds achieve an intimacy that is unique and quite different from a blog post or e-mail missive. When handled well, these feeds move between the personal and promotional, the outward facing content that builds a brand and the inner, human workings that make the content.

It is still unclear to any of us how once-imperious media brands go about building the kind of personal connection and community readers now crave. Whether Twitter itself is the answer seems unlikely. But interacting with it sure seems to be raising some good and necessary questions about who media are and how they relate to audiences.

The new min Twitter (TWITTER.COM/MINONLINE) feed will be used not only for reporting and content posting, but we will also aggregate the many other magazine brands in our following section. Come here to see what brands are using the platform or to add your own.

Steve Smith (POPEYESMITH@COMCAST.NET) is digital media editor for min/min's b2b/MINONLINE.COM. He posts regularly on The Minsider blog and directs the min Webinars. Smith also co-chairs the annual min Day Summit and as ceo of Roving Eyeball Inc., consults for a number of publishers in the digital space.

BoSacks Speaks Out: A Time for Reflection and Hope

2008-12-19T18:46:00.000-08:00

BoSacks Speaks Out: A Time for Reflection and Hope

As 2008 draws to a close and, to most publishers, the world's future seems somewhat dark or at the very least uncertain, we are all looking for shafts of hope and light in the current financial storm. That hope and that brightness are still here if we look in the right places. I actually think there is room for more optimism then may at first seem apparent to many other prognosticators.

Our industry may be a bit battered, but it is not defeated. It cannot be vanquished, because the distribution of information is the cornerstone of a free and democratic society. Writers will write and publishers will distribute that writing to a willing public. Our future is just as vibrant as it always was and I expect, as necessary changes occur, it will manifest itself in positive ways we can't yet imagine.

So, as we drift into 2009, it is a perfect and natural time for us to take a moment or two for reflection and review and for a reassessment. It is a perfect time for evaluating the current and future possibilities of our professional and our personal lives.

I first suggest that we look back with pride on what we and our fellow publishers have accomplished in the past before we look forward into an unknown future. We as a group and as a business are indispensable. As information providers we are the glue that holds society together. We provide the mortar known as knowledge and we make it available to all.

Technology has given us expanded markets of information distribution unheard of a decade ago. Though the outreach and growth is exponential, our profits haven't been able to keep up with the new technologies. We clearly need new business models. Fear not, we will invent them.

There are currently four billion mobile phone users and around one billion personal computer users around the world. That means that there are at least four billion potential readers for publishers to learn how to tap into and profit from. This technologic growth and apparently inexhaustible need to read is proof of our value and of our continued existence. The publishing nation has grown and will continue to grow, but most likely in directions that are unexpected. Our former sphere of influence is changing, and our business models must grow with the times and the ages before us. We will go through a complex series of transformations before we are who we are going to become - new age information distributors. This is not a might be, but rather a will be state of affairs.

I feel it very safe to say that as we go into the 6th year of on-going war, with continued industry-wide lay-offs still on the rise, and the general uncertainties of an industry and a country in transition, we have all had a moderate amount of reassessment forced upon. It is probable that many of us are challenging our own personal paths and calculations of who we are, where we are going and when we will get there. Let me suggest that I believe our industry can and will not only survive but thrive and prosper as never before.

A look at history proves that wars come and then they go; that economic down turns have happened before and will happen again. They appear when least expected and retreat with the same regularity. We know that the winter is cold only to be followed by the joy and beauty of a warm summer's day. But the most enduring cycle throughout history is the love of family and friends.

I send warm greetings to all with a big hug and the hope that you are surrounded by the love of your family and friends.

I found the following message from Fra Giovanni almost 12 years ago. It was first sent from one friend to another in 1513 A.D. It has become part of my traditional year-end expression of hope and reflection. In it I find a certain central peace and great depth. Every time I read it, I come away with a little more understanding.

Like the author, I hope that your paths are clear of shadows and that you have the time and sensibilities to take a few moments to really stop and look around you. Most of us work too hard and forget the reasons for our energetic professional pursuits. I learned years ago that I was "working to live, not living to work". I think sometimes we have a habit of forgetting that. Work is a means to keep a safe roof over our heads, food on the table, and to help facilitate the comfort and joy of our family and friends.

In the end, the truth is it is our ability to love and share that love that has any real or long-lasting meaning.

I SALUTE YOU!
There is nothing I can give you which you have not;
but there is much that, while I cannot give, you can take.

No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in it today.
Take Heaven.

No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this present instant.
Take Peace.

The gloom of the world is but a shadow; behind it, yet within our reach, is joy.
Take Joy.

And so, at this holiday time, I greet you, with the prayer that for you, now and forever,
the day breaks and the shadows flee away.

-FRA GIOVANNI

BoSacks Speaks Out: Twitter has made Dell $1 million in revenue

2008-12-17T05:55:00.001-08:00

BoSacks Speaks Out: Twitter has made Dell $1 million in revenue

The following two articles are about Twitter. I have been experimenting with Twitter for a few weeks now and I am here to tell you that Twitter is a piece of our media future.

I can't tell you the what or the how of it quite yet, but I can firmly suggest it is part of a newly developing communications platform. Dell Computers claims to have made at least a million dollars using twitter. Imagine that? How much have you made off of Twitter? Communications and creativity is a very powerful mechanism as Dell has creatively just proven.

The only suggestion I am making to you is to look at it, so when your boss, or your boss's boss starts asking questions, you understand what the heck he is talking about.

For what it is worth you can find me in Twitter at: http://twitter.com/BoSacks

What Keeps Twitter Chirping Along

By David Miller

http://www.internetnews.com/webcontent/print.php/3790161

It's practically impossible to find a story that doesn't darkly point out that the microblogging service Twitter has no revenue model, yet despite that concern, all the complaints about unreliable service, the rants about the exceptionally high noise-to-signal ratio, the outright attacks that accuse the company of "top-to-bottom incompetence," Twitter keeps on tweeting and seems likely to continue doing so into the foreseeable future.

The question in Twitter's case is whether that's likely to happen due to a buyout, another round of funding or its owners finally finding a way to monetize a service, like it said it would do, that an increasing numbers of users (including InternetNews.com) are finding useful for more than just posting 140 character tweets (short blurbs) about what they happen to be doing at any given moment.

"We're using Twitter to get info out to the public and the media," said Claire Sale, an interactive media specialist with the Red Cross. "Twitter offers a single stream of information, and it's been most successful in disaster response, like the recent wildfires in California.

"I think people like to follow breaking news on Twitter because it's so instantaneous," Sale added. "And it's self-correcting. You might check a blog or an RSS feed once a day, but people tend to follow Twitter constantly." The Red Cross has 3,000+ "followers," people who have signed on to view their tweets.

Less altruistically, some businesses have discovered that Twitter is an effective way of communicating with consumers. Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) says Twitter has produced $1 million in revenue over the past year and a half through sale alerts. People who sign up to follow Dell on Twitter receive messages when discounted products are available the company's Home Outlet Store. They can click over to purchase the product or forward the information to others.

Dell started experimenting with Twitter in March of 2007 after the South by Southwest conference, an annual tech/music festival in Austin, Texas. Conference attendees could keep tabs on each other via a stream of Twitter messages on 60-inch plasma screens set up in the conference hallways. There are now 65 Twitter groups on Dell.com, with 2,475 followers for the Dell Home Outlet Store.

"A million dollars isn't a lot of money, but it shows that people want to sign up for feeds," says Bob Pearson, head of communities and conversation for Dell. Pearson is a big fan of Twhirl, a free desktop client for that lets users manage feeds from Twitter and other popular microblogging sites (laconi.ca, Friendfeed and seismic).

"It's a good quick way to see what's going on in the world," Pearson said about Twhirl.

Good for customer service

Discount airline Jet Blue also uses Twitter to offer real-time discounts, sometimes even offering tickets or adding flights when large numbers of people are Twittering sadly about the lack of transport options to a conference or festival. JetBlue also monitors Twitter for comments about the company, responding quickly to compliments and complaints, and following its customers.

"Asking when Twitter will end is like saying, 'When will the cell phone fad end'?" said David Spark, founder of Spark Media Solutions, a storytelling production company. "The value of cell phones can't end, it only can be replaced by something that provides the same value and more. Once we have a capability, we never want it taken away from us."

Spark, who recently documented "16 Great Twitter Moments," believes that all companies should be listening to what's happening on Twitter, blogs and elsewhere on the Internet, noting that "it's truly the cheapest and most accurate market research you can possibly have.'"

Tech evangelist and well-known blogger Robert Scoble suggests that Twitter can make money by offering a premium service.

"If they turned out a lot of cool features, I would pay," said Scoble. "Direct messaging where I could forward and sort messages, real e-mail messaging features, stuff like that. Or put pictures on my tweets, like FriendFeed has pictures and videos. It would have to be part of a suite of other features, like the 'pro version' of Twitter. I would pay for that."

He added that Twitter could turn to advertising as a revenue model, perhaps inserting ads between messages like Meebo does, but he thinks it's possible people might complain and also wonders if the advertising could be targeted enough to appeal to marketers.

Describing Twitter as the love child of IM and chat and blogging, Scoble said the big attraction for him is the interactivity.

'When I post a comment on my blog, it's usually 20 or 30 minutes before I get a comment. With Twitter, I get feedback in seconds," said Scoble. "And it's a worldwide community. You can talk to camera guy at the White House, a supply chain manager in China, a reporter in India. People find that fascinating and useful."

Of course not everyone is a fan. Google "I Hate Twitter" and you'll see plenty of gripes, mostly about the banality of tweets and peoples' increasing belief that everyone in the world is their very own '50s sitcom mother, endlessly fascinated by every single one of their thoughts and actions.

"I find Twitter incredibly annoying, both as a user and bystander," said Trisha Creekmore, interactive executive producer for Discovery.com. ''There's nothing more annoying than trying to enjoy an event with a bunch of Twitter geeks and having to stop every five seconds for them to tweet into their mobile device. If you're at an event, BE at the event. Or leave."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Twitter has made Dell $1 million in revenue

BY MG Siegler

http://venturebeat.com/2008/12/15/twitter-has-made-dell-1-million-in-revenue/

Everyone loves talking about Twitter's business model - because there isn't one yet, and they'll keep talking about it until there is one. But it's becoming more clear that while a business model is of course important, Twitter is perhaps the perfect example of a company that can afford to take its time in finding the one that is perfect for it. That's because other businesses are building so much on top of the micro-messaging service and using it for their own services. If worst came to worst, and Twitter had to sell, there would probably be a bidding war of a magnitude that would make it seem like this country wasn't in the midst of a recession.

InternetNews has a good rundown of the Twitter/business phenomenon. Buried in it is this gem:

If Twitter has made Dell $1 million in revenue, imagine how much it's making for all of the companies it helps promote. While a million dollars may not be much to a company like Dell, for some smaller companies that are also using Twitter as a sales/promotional tool, it is no doubt invaluable.

Twitter is expected to lay out its plan for how to monetize the service in 2009. It may involve creating premium, corporate accounts, which seems like a good idea given the numbers Dell is stating. But while everyone is busy getting in a tizzy over its business model, Twitter continues to gain popularity, including the all-important mainstream variety.

One way or another, Twitter will be fine - even if that still doesn't make sense to some people.

You can find me on Twitter here along with fellow VentureBeat writers Eric Eldon, Dean Takahashi, Anthony Ha, Chris Morrison and Dan Kaplan. Oh, and we have a VentureBeat account (for our posts) as well.

[via Fred Wilson, who is a Twitter investor]

BoSacks Speaks Out: It's a Digital World Now

2008-12-03T19:26:00.000-08:00

BoSacks Speaks Out: It's a Digital World Now
http://www.writersdigest.com/article/its-a-digital-world-now/
by Bob Sacks
Insiders Bob Sacks and Samir Husni square off in the magazine industry's hottest debate: Will print magazines survive-or even thrive-in the next century? Here's what Bob Sacks had to say.

Intro: Bob Sacks, better known as "BoSacks," is a 38-year veteran of the publishing industry whose e-newsletter, "Heard on the Web: Media Intelligence," reaches nearly 12,000 readers daily. Samir Husni, nicknamed "Mr. Magazine," holds a doctorate in journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia and is the author of Launch Your Own Magazine: A Guide for Succeeding in Today's Marketplace. Sacks and Husni have lengthy publishing résumés. Both run private consulting firms primarily focused on magazines and media. Both are well-respected experts in the publishing world. And both have strong opinions on where the magazine industry is headed.

We asked BoSacks and Mr. Magazine to share their views and let you be the judge. Here are BoSacks thoughts on the future of magazines. . Click here (or the link at the end of the article) for Mr. Magazine's take.

A basic modern assumption is that things will be as they are, only more so-that is, that we'll still have the same needs, wants and desires as our forefathers, but we'll continually satisfy those needs faster and more efficiently.

Writer and publisher alert: The speed and efficiency of the future is here right now, and it's accelerating at an unprecedented and perhaps even uncomfortable rate. Because we're actually in it, sometimes we don't realize how far we've progressed into the future. But it's possible to recognize that change when we reflect on the past and look into our tedious recent and former methodologies.

Even if you went as far back as Johann Gutenberg, you couldn't find a more interesting and complex period in our industry than right now. Gutenberg created movable type and an industry was born-the rapid distribution of information as never before achieved, nor dreamed possible.

At the time, the growth of the printing press and the distribution of information were irresistible forces whose only combatants were ignorance and, to us, extremely limited technology. Of course, that limitation is only apparent with tremendous hindsight. The technology of those days was no less amazing than our reaching out to the stars or the World Wide Web. Remember, it took a single scribe more than a year to hand-copy a single book. And there were no "pre-flighting" and "spell checking" to make sure he got it right. But Gutenberg could turn out hundreds of books in a week, each one identical to the next. So, it's not hard to envision the exponential growth of ... well, everything. You no longer needed old wise men to learn from. You didn't even need to be an apprentice. You could learn anything and everything from a book. What Gutenberg actually achieved was the democratization of knowledge. Does that concept sound familiar?

From the time of Gutenberg 600 years ago, we've seen little change in our expertise except the speed with which we produce words, type them and print them on paper. But now the future portends to possibly eliminate the need for paper, and thus doom the otherwise noble process (and lucrative business model) of putting ink on paper. Is that important? Where does the importance really lie-in the creation of thoughts and words or the substrate on which they rest and are read?

In discussing the future of reading and publishing, electronic publishing is an unavoidable topic. I prefer to call the process Electronically Coordinated Information Distribution, or El-CID. It's clear that publishers must now consider themselves information distributors and be independent of a reliance on any single platform or substrate.

The reading of a book is the distribution of stored information, passed from one person to another. Could it be a book printed on dead trees? Yes. Could it be the same book delivered in electronic format? Yes. The point is that all the world's information is now available for immediate distribution in any format the reader requires.

Bernard Baruch once said, "A speculator is a man who observes the future and acts before it occurs." This seems like prudent advice for today's writers and publishers to ponder as we proceed into the future of publishing in the 21st century.

From a 20th-century perspective, one of the most wonderful things about magazines and books, apart from their content, is their amazing and convenient portability. You can read them anywhere, at any time, without a plug or an Internet connection. Simply put, magazines and books are easy to get and easy to read. With ink printed on paper you're usually provided with a crisp, high-contrast, highly reflective substrate. And because it reflects light evenly in all directions, you can read it at almost any angle. Not bad for 600-year-old technology.

On the other hand, a computer-be it a laptop or a desktop-is not so uncomplicated, not kind on the eyes and not nearly as convenient. But it can store as much information as the Library of Alexandria and can instantly summon text or images from deep within its memory or from the Web.

There's a new product called e-paper that combines the best of the new and the old media through the use of thin, lightweight and flexible displays that simulate traditional paper while providing the immediacy and versatility of a computer screen. A company called E Ink has already commercialized a large-scale version of its electronic paper technology for use in products such as the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader, and as screens in PDAs, cell phones and pagers.

These displays perform just as paper does and can be read under the same light conditions as paper. There's no backlight to e-paper like a traditional computer screen-it works on reflective light. You can read e-paper wherever you can read traditional paper, and it's serving as the substrate for electronic books, magazines and newspapers, the content of which can be stored, updated and changed wirelessly. The power requirements are meager, because the voltage only needs to be applied once to change an image. So, in the example of an electronic book or magazine, power would be needed only when downloading new text onto the plastic pages. Thereafter, the text could be carried around and read anywhere without using a power source until you change to the next page.

Many researchers and corporations are in hot pursuit of this new vision of El-CID, and they've already produced and sold millions of products. As this technology matures, the results of their efforts could conceivably and permanently change the face of publishing and reading.

Information distribution (formally known as publishing) is no longer just about the paper, and it's not about your computer browser, either. It's about getting all the information anywhere, anytime, on any substrate and any platform. Are we headed toward a totally paperless society? No, not quite yet and perhaps not completely in our lifetimes, but that doesn't mean we can rest on our laurels. It's a digital world now, and the digits aren't going to go away.

There is a revolution brewing and the change is us. The speed and accuracy of information distribution increases every day and we like that. The portability, costs and flexibility of the electronics improve everyday. What we want and what we will have is an easy-to-read, flexible device that that can go anywhere, be read anywhere, and have all the bells and whistles of a computer-driven web-connected cozy book or magazine. You want comfort and style. You shall have it. You want the joy of a cozy plush reading experience. You shall have it. You want to tap on that unknown word and pull up the dictionary, you shall have it. You want to check the author's references or see pictures of the settings in the book you are reading. You shall have it.

There is nothing wrong with paper, but there will come a time in the very near future when we will wonder what all the fuss was about.

BoSacks Speaks Out: The Mumbai Attack and Social Media

2008-12-01T17:22:00.000-08:00

BoSacks Speaks Out: The Mumbai Attack and Social Media
This article isn't so much about magazines as it is about modern journalism or a new form of modern journalism. It is a segment of the way that we will communicate. Twittering is just like text messaging except that instead of a one-to-one communication stream, you can be communicating to two or three or to 15,000 people at the same time. All the 15,000 have to do is ask to "follow" your twittered postings. I follow several twitting people and several twitters follow my postings.

Twitter is a very strange communication tool. If you have not used it yet, I suggest you give it a try, just so you understand the feel and flavor of it. Reporters all over the world are using it. Kids use it. Businessmen use it. And last but not least, some of my favorite entrepreneurs use it.

I agree with the author of this article that there is the potential for good and evil with its usage.

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it. George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

Mumbai attack coverage demonstrates (good and bad) maturation point of social media
Posted by Jennifer Leggio
http://blogs.zdnet.com/feeds/?p=339&page=2

The devastation in Mumbai has been top-of-mind and top-of-the-news over the last few days - with good reason. It's also been the hottest trending topic on Twitter and covered widely as the latest disaster to be live broadcasted via tweet.

Sadly, the people writing about how cool it is that people are live tweeting the events in Mumbai are missing a huge point. What's happening now - and what is happening in Mumbai - is bigger than all of us. It's bigger than communicating via Twitter. It's bigger than just reading blogs. This is where social media grows up.

Social media is providing the ability to report and take in unfiltered news in a more direct way than ever before possible and we're doing it on a mass scale. It's no longer just a toy for early adopters and Internet nerds; it's taking its place as an influencer far beyond technology. There is, however, a downside: there's very little way to know what is true and what is rumor. As fellow ZDNet-er Michael Krigsman said to me the night, "we're trading off potential accuracy for immediacy."

He's right. On one hand, social media shows the wisdom of crowds while at the same time demonstrates the reactionary failures of the crowd.

One example: Do a Twitter Search for the hashtag #mumbai and you'll find thousands of tweets from folks near the site of the tragedy as well as folks in other countries who are offering support. People are sharing locations where blood is needed, police activity that they are witnessing, and the health status of their family and friends. This is good, minus one little point in there - the police activity. These updates have begotten seemingly urgent warnings from users reporting that the government of India is asking people to stop reporting on police movement (that includes Twitter users, bloggers and television stations) due to the fear of the terrorists using the tools to glean information. Those not tweeting for the omission of police details are calling it a hoax.

Is it so far-fetched to believe that terrorists could be tracking Twitter or social media sites as part of their overall intelligence efforts? The U.S. Army doesn't seem to think so. Last month it was broadly covered that the U.S. Army issued a report in which it claimed Twitter could be used as a terrorist tool. Many mocked this concept but I believe that mockery shows a bit of ignorance as to how any site or online communications tool could be effectively leveraged for evil - as demonstrated by cyber warfare. And look at how many articles and business decisions have stemmed from a 140-character thought over the last two years. It's not so shocking that this technology can be used for evil as well as good.

My point isn't to determine whether or not terrorists can use social media to get a leg up on their attacks. My point is that we have individuals running amok with information and we have no way of knowing if what is reported via user-generated social media is true. And in situations like the response to the Mumbai attacks, this presents bona fide danger. Remember the "roving gang" rumors that spread and created panic after Hurricane Katrina? This chaos was aided during a time when electronic communications were down. If social media had been as prevalent as it is now, it might've been worse.

Some cynics might say, "Jen, we've had this issue with mainstream news media for years. Yellow journalism?" To me, social media presents greater risks, as every single person with Internet access now has the power to report. And with such surges of information our filters for discerning truth from sensationalism are cluttered.
,
Beyond sensationalism, social media can be wrongfully leveraged as a fear tactic or a platform for hidden agendas. With most social networks there are no immediate content controls. An example of this is the Wikipedia page covering the Mumbai attacks. Impressive that the page was created so quickly, but it demonstrates the lack of controls I mentioned a minute ago. For a short time on Wednesday night, this is the only information that appeared on the page:

As social media grows to take on the issues of the world beyond the bubble of Silicon Valley, we early adopters need to consider how to balance the flood of information. This goes back to the age-old argument of the ethics of journalists vs. bloggers and their ethics, but it now extends to every person. We need to take what's happening during the Mumbai tragedy and create an example of what to do and what not to do. While some controls are needed, one of the biggest benefits of social media is its transparency and freestyle communication, so is it even possible to control it at this point? Perhaps the train has left the station. Social media is complementing traditional media, and while this is new and exciting now, it's going to boom in the next few years. As the communications increase so will the risks of fallacies. We owe it to ourselves to find the balance between excess communication and truth.
Thanks to Krigsman for the Wikipedia screen shot - and for lighting a fire under me to write this in the first place.

BoSacks Speaks Out: On the "Incredibly Fragile" Newsstand

2008-10-07T18:29:00.000-07:00

BoSacks Speaks Out: In the following article John Loughlin, executive vp, general manager, Hearst Magazines says: 'If the current trends continue, magazines could be facing a time when instead of 1,000 titles, 200 or fewer are on display in stores."

Well, everybody who reads my newsletter knows that I think in the near future the predominant way that people will read will be digitally. But that doesn't mean the end of print. No, not for a long time to come. I think perhaps Mr. Loughlin has forgotten what it is like to be a scrappy entrepreneur. The future will be filled with printed titles, but it won't be the same market that he is used to. Nor will the business models be the same. There will, by necessity, be short run, specialized and, most likely, expensive magazines. But they will be there. It is/will be cheaper to reach the world digitally, but printed products still have life and the entrepreneurs to help maintain their existence.

I have several friends who own magazine printing companies. Recently in conversation with one of them I was asked if I thought his children would be able to continue successfully in the magazine business. Yes, I replied. An efficiently run printing facility will be a good business, with shorter run titles and plenty of make-readies to profit by.

Entrepreneurs and their small enterprises are responsible for almost all the economic growth in the United States.
Ronald Reagan (1911 - 2004)

AMC Notebook: Hearst's Loughlin Calls the
Newsstand "Incredibly Fragile"

And so the conference kicked off, with presenters cataloguing the industry's worries that seemed even more dire than in recent years.
-By Lucia Moses
http://www.mediaweek.com/mw/content_display/news/magazines-newspapers/e3i418b037a2c9b1c0fc5b4000104df2be7
.

The American Magazine Conference taking place in San Francisco started its first full day Oct. 6 on an auspicious note, as attendees arose to find the stock market-and their portfolios' value--had plummeted another several hundred points that morning, compounding last week's tumultuous losses.

And so the conference kicked off, with presenters cataloguing the industry's worries that seemed even more dire than in recent years.

With the market crisis' anticipated impact on ad budgets, magazines will find it hard to offset further postal and paper costs coming next year.

At retail, the newsstand situation is uncertain, with stores cutting checkout and mainline display space for magazines and wholesalers, themselves in financial peril, pulling copies out of the system to cut costs.

And the Magazine Publishers of America is concerned that a revenue-hungry Congress will seek to wring more money out of businesses by removing tax deductions on advertising and reversing a cap on postal price increases in the year ahead. A clampdown on over-the-counter drug advertising also remains a worry.

Turnout at the annual conference, which has been following a long-term trend of declining attendance, was down 10 percent this year to 440, which was interpreted as a sign that with the state of the industry, many publishing executives felt they could do more good by skipping the confab and focusing on their businesses.

"It's a slugfest out there," acknowledged Ed Kelly, president and CEO, American Express Publishing Corp., speaking on a panel about future models for magazine companies. Later, Kelly told Mediaweek that he expected company revenue to finish down 4 percent in '08, the first such decline in several years.

The outlook also is dire at retail, where, John Loughlin, executive vp, general manager, Hearst Magazines, said that if the current trends continue, magazines could be facing a time when instead of 1,000 titles, 200 or fewer are on display in stores, depriving the industry of critical promotional opportunities. The situation, he said, speaking on a panel, "is unfortunately incredibly fragile."

Loughlin called on publishers to take a page from the consumer packaged goods industry and make use of coupons and in-store promotions to boost single-copy sales. He also urged the industry to adopt scan-based trading, which proponents say will reduce inefficiencies by eliminating double-counting of magazines and cut waste.

With questions swirling around print advertising's outlook, publishers are increasingly accepting that their future growth will come from non-print sources of revenue.

Kelly of AmEx said that the company is looking to develop more events and affinity clubs as it seeks to drive non-magazine revenue to 50 percent of the company, from 45 percent today.

Andy Sareyan, executive vp, Meredith Corp., said that 25 percent of his company's $1.3 billion in revenue in 2007 came from non-magazine sources like direct marketing and broadband TV, but that he'd like that figure to reach at least 50 percent over the next few years. "The only opportunity for us is to develop our brands across platforms," he said.

BoSacks Speaks Out: How to Benchmark the Top Magazine Printers

2008-09-29T20:26:00.000-07:00

BoSacks Speaks Out: How to Benchmark the Top Magazine Printers
I was rummaging in the basement of my computer today, and stumbled upon an article that I wrote several years ago for PrintMedia Magazine now called Publishing Executive. I just finished re-reading it and liked enough to send out to you tonight. There is no need to change a single word of it, and I agree with it completely several years later. What do you think?

So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.
Peter Drucker (1909 - 2005)

New Benchmark for the Top Magazine Printers
By BoSacks
http://www.printmediamag.com/doc/284014119175820.bsp

In the January/February issue of PrintMedia, there was an article listing the "Top 25 Magazine Printers." The criterion for determining who was at the top of the list was revenue. That is all fine and good, but what if the criteria we looked at was something else?

How about a common, secret concept that we all have and hold? Common, yet something that nobody really talks about. This thought process is as of yet an unregistered and untested new kind of industry criteria or benchmark. But, if we could identify it, I wonder who would be at the top? Using this benchmark, dollars do not count.

So what is this secret criterion we all keep buried? Our "favorite" printer. Not the one that makes the most money, but a real favorite. All industry people have a printer they love. And I'll bet the reasons for that love are very different.

What Woos You?

What makes a printer your favorite printer? Is it the print quality? The people in the customer service department? Or is it the ease and method of doing business with them? You know what I mean-do they run the shop like the Marines, with everything done exactly by the book, or more like the TV cartoon "South Park," where it's a little loosey-goosey, and you never know quite what to expect on a regular basis?

Perhaps it's the terrific contract you signed, or the amazing boondoggles you get to go on? Could it be the expensive lunches? (Does anyone have time for that anymore?) And how about the printer's sales force? Could the sales team be the reason that your favorite printer is your favorite printer? The coffee they serve in the customer lounge? And, for that matter, what about the customer lounges? I have been in cinder block bunkers buried in the earth and in plush, multi-roomed, leather-upholstered suites. Does that make the printer your favorite?

I will tell you why my favorite printer is my favorite. Management! Yep, that is right. I seek a printer with enthusiastic and extremely attentive management. I love great management. Most plants have good management. Some have very good management. And every now and then there is a plant with terrific management.

The sad thing is terrific management is a highly movable target. For whatever reason, as times change, so does management. And as that happens, so does my favorite printing plant.

5 Criteria for Great Management

What is it that I look for in great management?

1) I expect great management to be totally involved and understand the process, not from an ivory tower, but from the perspective of the pressroom floor.

2) I expect a commitment and readiness for ongoing reinvestment in the information-distribution process, sometimes referred to as printing and publishing.

3) I expect a dedication and willingness to change thoughts, processes and, with that, a headset for rapid deployment of the same.

4) I expect great management to have the proper respect and support of their customer service representatives (CSRs). A great CSR team with proper management support is like manna from Heaven. Conversely, poor management support of the CSR process is like dealing with the devil. Both the good and the bad come directly from management and management style.

5) The last is an intangible. The closest I can get to describe this "thing" would be chemistry. There is, at times, a unique and wonderful chemistry between the publisher's representatives and the printer's personnel. I attribute this chemical reaction to management. If all the players are positioned properly, then all it takes to ignite it is the catalyst of great management. It is an exhilarating experience when that happens.

So, with all that said, do you have a favorite printer? How do you feel about your printer's management? If you could, would you like to replace it? And while we are on the subject, how do you feel about your publication's management team? If you could, would you replace it as well?

It is also an interesting exercise to look up and down your internal business food chain, and see which parts of the process you would like to replace or outsource, if you could.

Hold that thought and ask yourself: Are the other departments in your company thinking the same thing about you and your department? If they could outsource you, would they want to? In these times that is worth pondering.

BoSacks Speaks Out: On E-Ink, Esquire and Mankind.

2008-09-23T11:12:00.000-07:00

BoSacks Speaks Out: On E-Ink, Esquire and Mankind.
I am sitting here with my copy of the October issue of Esquire with the now famous e-ink cover. I thought I would take a moment to reflect on what it is and what it isn't.

So what is it? It is a flashing billboard on the cover of a magazine. It flashes the message "The 21st century begins now." It's somewhat glitzy and underutilizes the real possibilities and significance of e-paper. But it is important to note that it is real e-paper, and it has gone completely through the magazine manufacturing cycle of being printed upon, manhandled, bound, stacked on skids and shipped across the county. That alone is worth several kudos to those who know and understand the manufacturing and distribution process.

I would also like to point out that I went to four large newsstand/bookstores in Manhattan and all were sold out. Kudos again to the PR and press for the coverage of this unique publishing event.

My real disappointment is the exploitation of the product itself. I'm sure there is enough memory on whatever chip is in there to have displayed some actual text in a more creative and expressive way as to why the 21st century begins now, but it doesn't. It only uses large headline type to broadcast and blink its message. E-ink is capable of more, much more. And just to confuse the issue further there is a plastic layer over the e-ink that deadens the contrast of the product. The plastic is there is give the illusion that the e-paper is in four color. It is not. The four color is printed on the plastic overlay. That was an unnecessary "fake out". Why tout the greatness of e-paper and then diminish the final reading results of the product itself? Is it a demonstration of design over function?

I am a patient man and delighted to see this technology finally come into the public's peripheral vision. This is the first time that e-ink is on/in a magazine and as such it is the beginning of something very important for readers and publishers alike. With the success of the Kindle, the Irex Iliad, the Sony e-reader and other new e-reading products soon to be released, it is one small step for e-ink and a giant leap for reading mankind.

It behooves every man to remember that the work of the critic is of altogether secondary importance, and that in the end, progress is accomplished by the man who does things.
Theodore Roosevelt (1858 - 1919)

------------------------------

The Future of Electronic Paper - a Flawed Vision?
http://www.ianhoar.com/2008/09/20/the-future-of-electronic-paper-a-flawed-vision/
Posted by Ian Hoar

Electronic paper, and e-book Readers are all based on a pretty cool technology that is truly something you have to see to believe. E Ink is the brand name manufactured by E Ink Corporation and it really does look like paper. The first time you see it you realize that it has a completely different feel to it than your standard LCD display. You can check out an E Ink display at the Sony store or anywhere that sells E Ink based readers.

Lately E Ink has been getting a lot of press. Earlier this month Esquire showed off the worlds first ever E Ink magazine cover. This brought visions of the science fiction film Minority Report to many people and an environmental disaster in the making for others. There are also many e-readers being released with iRex to introduce a 10.2-inch E Ink reader next week. Although I love the technology, I think the current vision of E Ink by the press and blog sphere is somewhat flawed.

Every where I read about E Ink I hear things like "Will this replace paper" and "This will allow for a more print / newspaper friendly layout". These are all flawed concepts to me. It reminds me of other great technological advances like "Will the TV replace radio" or "Will the Internet replace TV". Yes some of these technologies merged and can be used over the Internet, but no technology replaced the other. We still listen to the radio, whether it is satalite radio in our car, FM, or streaming radio, and we all certainly still watch television. We also use the web in the way it was envisioned also.

The grid
My art teacher would shoot me for saying this as she felt that the failure to adhere to a print like grid was a major failing of the web. I on the other hand believe it is a major advancement, I really hope that we don't resort back to old fashioned print style layouts. This was done on paper because there was a finite amount of space and paper costs money so you have to use it all up. Writing content to fit little boxes isn't fun. Anyone who has had to create print style web layouts knows this, it usually doesn't work. The wonderful thing about a digital display is that you have a liquid medium and unlimited paper. The text can be as long as you want and flow around images and boxes according to font size or display type. With CSS you even have the power to display the content in different formats, independent from the layout. This allows web designers to support many different platforms, and make sites usable for the visually impaired.

If e-readers do take off, and I think they will, I really hope that print changes to be more like the web, and not the other way around, it's a far more flexable approch. It's also only a matter of time before touch sensitive E Ink displays will be the norm, why lock it down to old fashioned design principals. Will I even have to click/touch my way to page 5 to continue the story? Maybe we can even add E Mess to the reader itself so that when you hold your reader for a long time your fingers become all soiled just like with a real newspaper.

A land fill nightmare, why?
While everyone was praising Esquire for bringing magazines into the 21st century did anyone stop to think of the environmental implications? This is a little more serious than my first grip; why do we have this disposable attitude towards everything? Here we have this fantastic reusable technology, but we want to turn it into a throw away medium? Don't we have enough garbage clogging the landfills already. I know we can recycle newspapers, but I'm not so sure about E Ink, and recycling costs a lot of money. Why bother when we can just re-use the technology. Once everyone has an e-reader they can just wirelessly download their favourite newspaper.

If papers had to stay old fashioned with their multi-columned mess, companies could even deliver content in multiple formats. Lets hope that every time we read a newpaper or magazine in the future we are not dropping batteries by the boatload into our garbage cans as we step off the subway for work. It should be about reusability, not a throw away technology.

Cost
The cost is the last major hurdle. Right now really popular readers cost anywhere from 300 to 1000 dollars. This is just too much for the average Joe. The new 10.2 inch iRex reader to be released next week clocks in at $850 for the high end model with Wi-fi, Bluetooth and 3G. Couple that with the fact that a lot of people don't even get through a book a month and the cost of buying physical books is still a lot cheaper.

E-readers will have to get a lot more competitive or offer features that we can't live without. Right now the average smartphone / laptop can do everything an e-reader can do, and in colour. The only real advantages an e-reader has is a screen that can be seen in bright daylight and long battery life, not enough for a lot of people, but if you read lots of books it can be worth it. I think back to breaking my back with college and university books; an e-reader would have come in handy back then.

The future is electronic paper
That said I do think the future is in electronic paper. Like any technology it is still in its infancy. Some day in the near future refresh rates which are pretty slow right now will be faster and the technology will be available in colour as E Ink has already demonstrated. I could even see monitors switching to this technology someday.

BoSacks Speaks Out: Why Esquire Mag is your Future?

2008-07-29T18:15:00.000-07:00

BoSacks Speaks Out: Why Esquire Mag is your Future?

BoSacks Speaks Out: Please, let's not all get crazy at the same time. So many people are over-reacting to the announcement that Esquire is using e-ink on their cover that I almost don't know where to begin. But almost isn't don't know.

First and foremost, this is a clever magazine cover gimmick for a 75th anniversary cover. Period, end of story, except for all the brouhaha. They deserve to do something special. And e-ink is going to be something special. In this case it is underutilizing the power and the possibilities of e-ink, but what the heck? You have to start somewhere. And this year our industry starts here on the cover of Esquire with a flexible, magazine-bindable production of e-ink.

We as an industry have been inserting and on-serting for generations. Believe me I know, as I was partly responsible for the AOL onslaught of on-serting and inserting first fragile plastic diskettes and then CD's into magazines. The computer and music sectors have been doing this for years. The women's service groups have inserted hundreds of items including such nutty ideas as shampoo samples which in the course of palatalizing squished and squeezed the samples all over the printer's bindery floor. So ease off on the condemnation that gimmicks are something new or distasteful.

And the same thing is true for the carbon footprint. Why is Esquire being singled out?
I'm the first to admit that we have been reckless as an industry when it comes to carbon foot-printing and inefficiencies, but to single out a single publisher . . . . pure and absolute rubbish. Anyone who is starting to condemn a single gimmick in a single magazine doesn't know the industry, the history, nor the true story of magazine sales and magazine production.

E-ink or e-paper is special, in fact it is very special, and it is an integral part of the future of the magazine business. If we are going to have a big future at all, it is going to be digital. We will combine the ease of use of digital editions of magazines with the portability of brilliantly colored WiFi connected epaper, with a drastically lower carbon footprint than today and dramatically reduced manufacturing costs. What's not to like? What part don't we understand?
Publishers sell words and thoughts, not paper and printing? For those who need to hear me say it again, printing ink on paper is not going to go away; it is also not going to be the dominant distribution vehicle of information.
BoSacks
-30-

Esquire's Granger: Magazine Medium 'So Compelling We All Should Do More with It'
Editor responds to news of flashing anniversary cover.
Jason Fell
www.FolioMag.com

Since the report last week about Esquire's flashy e-paper October anniversary cover-and our follow-up on the technology behind it-I've been hearing/reading a lot of negative opinions about it.

One Web site called it obnoxious. Rex Hammock said it was "the worst use of technology by a magazine." Fast Company, in a blog post, estimated that the manufacturing process increases the issue's carbon footprint by 16 percent over other typical print publications. But, if you ask Esquire editor-in-chief David Granger, the technology could help revolutionize the way we read magazines, beyond the printed page and online.

"When I talk to groups I sometimes speak about the days I had when I'd get the new issue of Esquire and go through it and think to myself, 'Fuck, it's still a magazine,'" Granger said in a recent interview with FOLIO:. "What I mean is that the medium is so compelling that I and we should all be able to do more with it. The magazine experience is one of the last remaining opportunities to enter a hermetically-sealed world, an edited experience of our culture created by someone else. And, more importantly, it's an experience that encourages you to stay in it rather than constantly bounce in and out of it.

"We have an amazing medium, print, and if we can enhance the experience of it by putting new technology to use, then all the better," he said.

Bob Sacks, an industry consultant and frequent proponent of technology, says that Esquire's flashy cover may be a small step overall but offers a glimpse of what's to come in the next few years.

"It's not a representation of what e-paper was designed for, but doing the cover is the right thing to do," Sacks says. "It will be a demonstration of what it can be used for. In the near future we all will have flexible e-paper readers in our pocket and will be able to access all the magazine and books you want."

Right now, the technology is expensive and, if you believe Fast Company, not very green. Granger says that, with time, he hopes the technology will become cheaper. Maybe, after some refining, the application will become more realistic and environmentally-friendly, too.

----------------------------------------------------

The Real Cost of E-Ink
posted by Anya Kamenetz
http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/anya-kamenetz/green-friday/real-cost-e-ink

An article in the New York Times earlier this week described an effort by the legendary print magazine Esquire to make "a nod to the digital age" by using something called E Ink on its cover. That's pretty much what it sounds like: electronic ink, so the cover can blink like a Times Square billboard, as opposed to a staid old highway billboard.

One problem: Did anyone stop to consider the environmental implications? Check out this description of the process, from the Times article:

The batteries and the display case are manufactured and put together in China. They are shipped to Texas and on to Mexico, where the device is inserted by hand into each magazine. The issues will then be shipped via trucks, which will be refrigerated to preserve the batteries, to the magazine's distributor in Glazer, Ky.
Editor David Granger described it as "a 21st-century technology" combined with "a 19th-century manufacturing process." Can't argue with the second part, at least. The article goes on to note that this process is expensive, and hence requires sponsorship from a Ford SUV (not exactly a 21st-century technology itself). But what about the other cost . . . the carbon one? Some back-of-the-envelope calculations show it's not small, and Ford's not picking up the tab.

Let's start at the beginning. According to the article, "The batteries and the display case are manufactured and put together in China." The manufacturing phase is the biggest question mark in the life cycle of any product. According to life cycle analysis by Nokia, the manufacturing phase, alone, of another battery-powered electronic device, their 3G phones, is responsible for 12.3 KG of CO2 equivalent per unit. Granted, the E Ink display is a lot simpler and uses much less material than a cell phone, so let's say the carbon footprint is one-tenth as much-1.2 KG per user. That would be 135 tons of CO2 for the entire run of 100,000 devices.
Next, the devices will be shipped to Texas. According to E-Ink, a comparable prototype device weighs about 150 grams (5.3 ounces). According to the calculator on ShipGreen.net, shipping 100,000 of those overseas from Shanghai to Houston is worth another 2.6 tons -189 tons if they for some reason chose air freight.

From there, the little magic doohickeys will make their way to a Mexican maquiladora (where the work conditions are certain to be just lovely-ditto the Chinese factory) to be inserted by hand into the magazine covers (1.28 tons from Houston to Monterrey, Mexico), and from there, the completed issues, about one-third heavier than normal, will travel about 1,400 miles to the magazine's distribution center in Kentucky (11 more tons). Oh, and because of the delicacy of the electronics, they'll have to travel in refrigerated trucks. Certain kinds of refrigeration units can consume a half gallon of fuel per operating hour - that's an additional 10 gallons for that 20 hour trip-per truck. So for 5 trucks (let's say), the refrigeration adds about another half a ton. Then the blinking magazines go to their final destinations.

So . . . the total outlay in greenhouse gas emissions for this little experiment-again, this is based on loose estimates-comes to 150 tons of CO2 equivalent, similar to the output of 15 Hummers or 20 average Americans for an entire year, and a 16% increase over the carbon footprint of a typical print publication (based on calculations by Discover Magazine, Time, and In Style). The potential environmental impact of the E Ink covers increases even more when you consider that the units are designed to be disposable after one use and they'll make it more difficult or impossible to recycle the paper portion of the magazines.
Maybe Esquire should go back to the drawing board for a truly forward-looking concept of the possibilities of print. Fast Company would be glad to advise them on where to go to get printed on 100% recycled paper

How Much Does Free Really Cost?

2008-07-15T19:39:00.000-07:00

BoSacks Speaks Out: Last week I wrote the following in my blog called Pub Talk.

How Much Does Free Really Cost?
There was an announcement this week from Google that the company plans to launch a new ad tool, called Ad Planner, designed to help agencies identify sites where their target audience might be active. This new, free service, if I understand it correctly, uses audience measurement data and combines that data with search engine information, to determine with extreme exactitude what sites attract the particulars of any unique demographic audience. It then creates a resource for ad agencies to determine where to precisely place ads.

This seems to me to be a two-edged sword. It is conducive for advertisers, publishers and webmasters to have as much data on their readership as is possible. But at what point is that pool of rich data just too intrusive and delving into our private lives, while we are numbly uninformed at the keyboard? At what point will the power to corrupt be so overwhelming a temptation by the "Google god" of personal information storage that it gets used against us?

This could be simple paranoia, a relic attitude from the last century when only I and my conscience knew where I was and what I was doing. Now it seems our very thoughts (Google searches) are on open display and for sale to the highest bidder. Does this mean that "big brother" is actually watching? The clear answer is yes. But it turns out that there are two big brothers: one is the government (phone tapping) and the other is the capitalist system. I'm not sure which one scares me more.

BoSacks
-30-
He that is of the opinion money will do everything may well be suspected of doing everything for money.
Benjamin Franklin

Resisting Google

What happens when a single company becomes the gateway to the Internet? Critics are raising concerns about Google, where over 60 percent of all internet searches in the U.S. originate. Boston Globe reporter Drake Bennett investigated the Google juggernaut.
BOB GARFIELD: In the novel 1984, George Orwell wrote, "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." In our anxious age of information and technology, some have seen the face of Big Brother, and they are calling him - Google.

According to Nielsen Online, the California based company, not yet ten years old, is now responsible for more than three-fifths of all Internet searches in the United States. Of course, Google doesn't just sift through information. It collects and compiles it too, which, as Boston Globe reporter Drake Bennett wrote recently, has some scholars and programmers pushing back. Drake, welcome to On the Media.

DRAKE BENNETT: Thanks very much.

BOB GARFIELD: So I go on and I do a series of searches during the course of a day, or a lifetime, and Google keeps track of all of that stuff. How long does it keep it and how can it connect it to me as an individual?

DRAKE BENNETT: Well, it can connect you through cookies, which are these little lines of text that identify the computer that did this search. And Google and other ISPs do now put a time limit on how long they keep cookies and other identifying information, but they do have this record of what the search was and what computer did it. For the first year, year and a half, that can be traced back to you.

And also, as Google has expanded into email and social networking and things like that, I mean, you're giving them more and more information, and they're holding onto it.

BOB GARFIELD: Now, in its privacy policy, Google, cross its heart, hope to die, swears it would never compromise anybody's personal information. And let's assume for a moment that Google would never risk [LAUGHS] its ten plus billion dollar a year golden goose by selling user data.

But the government, especially in the post 9/11 era, does have a frightening history of subpoenaing entire haystacks to locate potential needles. And, in 2005, Google itself was subpoenaed. Tell me about that case and how it turned out.

DRAKE BENNETT: That was a big Justice Department investigation into child pornography. The Justice Department wanted information about what sort of search terms were popular. They wanted to make the case that a lot of people were looking for child pornography.

Google, more than any other of the companies that were subpoenaed, really pushed back and fought the case in court and ended up having to release a much smaller amount of information than the government originally wanted. So Google, if you ask them about privacy issues, will hold this up as an example of how they're going to really go to bat for you.

There are other ways besides subpoenas, though, that the federal government goes after information. One of them is National Security Letters. That's a much lower profile thing and happens probably more often.

BOB GARFIELD: And, in fact, had Google received any National Security Letters we would have no way of knowing that. It could have been forced by the government to surrender information and be legally bound never to disclose that the letter was ever even received.

DRAKE BENNETT: Yes, exactly. That's a very good point. It's something we would not even hear about.

BOB GARFIELD: Now, you mentioned how Google pushed back against the subpoenas in 2005. Others are pushing back against Google. For example, in Finland, an employer is not [LAUGHS] allowed to do a google search about a prospective employee. But there's been other solutions for trying to stem the influence of this juggernaut. Can you go through some of them for me, please?

DRAKE BENNETT: Sure. There are programs one can use or websites one can go through. One of them is something called TrackMeNot. Basically what TrackMeNot does -- it's a Firefox plug in and every time you do a google search, it sends out three or four dummy searches based on, you know, what other people are searching at the time.

Google has no way of knowing which of those searches was your real search and which was the artificially generated one, and so it sort of creates this white noise and obscures your tracks.

Another thing that an increasing number of people are turning to is a site called Scroogle. You go to the Scroogle site and you type in your search query and Scroogle basically takes the search query and turns around and submits it to Google, so any attempt, any cookies that come back, don't make it all the way to you. They stop at the Scroogle site and Scroogle basically just throws them away. So it sort of serves as this buffer.

BOB GARFIELD: We've been talking about privacy issues up 'til now. You also wrote that there's a new worry arising, and the worry is about what it means when a single company becomes the world's doorway to the entire content of the Web. Those are mostly your words.

In what ways should we be concerned that Google has such dominance in the search sphere?

DRAKE BENNETT: Unlike the other organizing systems for information that we've had in the past, like the Dewey Decimal System, for example, Google's algorithm, the thing that decides what information is more and less important, is proprietary. It's a secret. And there's a worry that Google's own agenda, because it is a profit making entity, could impinge there. For example, there have been a couple of cases, lawsuits against Google, where companies have accused Google, Inc. of basically blackballing them.

The SearchKing is perhaps the more telling case. It's a company that marketed itself basically as a gamer of the Google algorithm. It sold a service to online companies that wanted to improve their Google ranking.

SearchKing, in its lawsuit, accused Google of basically kicking them out of the Google search results. And Google seems, in its response, to have basically admitted that it did so, although there's some debate about that. But, more importantly, what Google said was - that's none of your business. I mean, we get to decide how we rank information, and this is basically free speech.

BOB GARFIELD: It makes some people think of the railroads, which were owned by private companies but which nonetheless, because they were essential monopolies and because they so influenced the public economy, the federal government regulated them.

DRAKE BENNETT: It sort of gets at this larger question of, you know, what is a search engine? You know, do we treat them like newspapers, do we treat them like television stations or do we treat them like public utilities, where they're providing this service that people increasingly cannot live without and that, as a result, the government needs to decide the terms of access?

BOB GARFIELD: Drake, thank you.

DRAKE BENNETT: Thanks a lot.

BOB GARFIELD: Drake Bennett is a reporter for the Ideas section of The Boston Globe

BoSacks Speaks Out: Why Media See 'Depression' As Real

2008-07-14T18:15:00.000-07:00

BoSacks Speaks Out: It was Dr. Joe Webb who reminded me yesterday of the old Harry S. Truman quote, "It's a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it's a depression when you lose yours." The publishing industry along with the rest of the economy is hurting right now, although as is usually the case, some few titles are bucking the downward trend and showing some actual gains.

I think it is sadly a double whammy on print, because the economy will surely rise again, but will the advertisers return as they used to when the economy bounced back? At best the answer is yes for some and no for some others. We were struggling enough in this digital transition period and don't need an additional economic anxiety attack to have advertisers focus on identifiable ROI while tightening their belts and reducing their budgets.

If you add the increasingly visible sustainability factor into the publishing caldron of issues to contend with, you start to see the makings of a perfect storm. That storm is still on the horizon, but it is looming and it is large. As with any storm there is always hope it will remain distant with only the booms of thunder to remind us of our peril and help us keep our focus as we steer correctly towards open waters and profitable information distribution.

It is going to take very nimble, very aggressive, visionary management to lead the way.

I wrote a blog a few days ago for another site where I listed the following as the last of several predictions for the end of 2008 and that that seems fitting and appropriate to refer to here:

More publishing dinosaur management who don't already have their own facebook page, nor the knowledge of how to build one, will be asked to either jump from the executive terrace or take what's left of the money and run.
BoSacks
-30-

"We pay a heavy price for our fear of failure. It is a powerful obstacle to growth. It assures the progressive narrowing of the personality and prevents exploration and experimentation. There is no learning without some difficulty and fumbling. We are continually faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.
John W. Gardner (American Writer and Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, 1912-2002)

Layoffs And Closings Help Explain Why Media See 'Depression' As Real
By DAN GAINOR
http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=299972638233093

One of the hardest things for reporters to do is to distance themselves when they become part of a story. That's precisely the problem with journalists covering the U.S. economy.

We're a long way from it being what NBC claims is "a bust." We're not in another "Depression" either, despite dozens of network stories to that effect. But many journalists think things are that bad because their own industry is in chaos.

Ad sales have plummeted and online sales aren't making up for it. Media outlets are closing or laying off staff. There are at least 4,000 fewer jobs for reporters and editors than in 2000, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

The list of media laying off or buying out staff includes some of the best-known outlets: the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, St. Petersburg Times, Media General, Tribune and Thomson Reuters. And those are just since May.

Top names in journalism are walking out the door or being pushed. Such popular writers as David Broder and Tony Kornheiser joined more than 100 co-workers to take the latest buyouts at the Washington Post - the third round in just five years. The newsroom is down 25% as a result, according to the paper's media critic, Howard Kurtz.

In just a month and a half, a media blog run by the Poynter Institute cited roughly 40 stories detailing the red ink being spilled on the floors of newsrooms nationwide.

Dean Singleton, CEO of MediaNews Group (which owns almost 60 dailies), said recently that there will be two types of newspapers in the future - "those that survive, and those that die." He went on to claim "as many as 19 of the top 50 metro newspapers in America are losing money today, and that number will continue to grow."

That adds a little perspective when news reports dwell on problems at General Motors or the possible sale of Anheuser-Busch. Journalists have covered market changes in other industries with obvious anxiety.

An American Journalism Review analysis was titled "Why a lot of newspapers aren't going to survive" and included a prediction that "a lot of major metros" will close.

The few that survive will be smaller and possibly even free. Tribune has announced plans to trim the news hole in its papers. Stock pages have followed classifieds in moving to the Internet. Whole sections of newspapers have gone away.

Those are the news outlets reporters and producers turn to every day. TV and radio news departments have long been famous for "rip-and-read," where they lift an entire story from the newspaper.

That's the context for your economic news. Your paper screams disaster with every story about business. The evening news broadcast repeats the claim. Both reflect the media mind-set about their changing business as much as they do reality.

In December 2005, the big issue was the declining auto industry. CBS's Trish Regan might as well have been discussing journalism when she said: "Jobs in traditional industries, the ones that helped build this country, are slowly disappearing." That could be the epitaph for traditional journalism except for the word "slowly."

Journalists know it but seem unable or unwilling to adapt. Instead they do what they do best - they communicate. They tell stories. The news becomes one long ode to a dying economy. Mortgage crisis, debt crisis, housing crisis. Every story is a crisis, but the unstated crisis is the very one reporters are coping with.

The Washington Post's Neil Irwin recently tried explaining the disconnect between economic reality and ordinary Americans' opinions. People are saying, "It is not just bad, it is run-for-the-hills terrible," he said. Irwin's pathetic defense of the economy: "It's not all that grim."

What followed should have been a detailed analysis of how the mainstream media have misrepresented the economy of the greatest nation on Earth. But Irwin didn't even try. He mocked claims that the media could have a major role in the gloom.

"There is no obvious reason that it (media impact) would be more pronounced now than in 2001 or 1990, when consumer confidence did not drop as much as it has recently," he claimed.

But he ignored major changes in the media landscape - the rise of the 24-7 news cycle, the increased power of the Internet and, especially, the blurring of lines between unbiased journalism and so-called "analysis."

Reporters blur those lines every night on the evening news, convinced the problems impacting media must reflect society in general. That same sense of self-importance has undermined journalism for decades and now does the same to the U.S. economy.

Gainor is the Boone Pickens fellow and vice president of the Media Research Center's Business & Media Institute.

BoSacks Speaks Out: BoSacks Speaks Out: Who Should We Put On The Cover?

2008-06-26T04:50:00.000-07:00

BoSacks Speaks Out: BoSacks Speaks Out: Who Should We Put On The Cover?

I was cruising the web tonight, as is my habit and at Rex Hammock's Blog, he pointed me to the article below and noted the following quote:

"I look forward to the day when magazines can return to serving their audience and not the newsstand. Until then you're stuck with 109, free, biggest, hot, ultimate, travel, toys, secrets, great, perfect, best, sex, abs, weight-loss, getaway, new, insider, easy, delicious, shortcuts, paired with a celebrity you keep seeing over and over on the covers of magazines."

Those are true and in a way very scary words. We have homogenized and dumbed down our covers, with elating numbers, ridiculous claims and a plethora of nonsense freebies. Where is the focus on excellent content? Where is the compelling editorial that excites the reader after the newsstand purchase gets home?

I was just at a publishing convention a day ago, that had as usual an assortment of magazines on display. Not one, not two, but at least three were touting that we all could have flat abs in ten minutes. Hmmm. Would that, that could be true? It ain't.

I'm sure that it is successful and sells magazines to the twenty something crowd of ab busters each and every month. The publishers wouldn't do it if it wasn't successful. Or at least, I would like to think they wouldn't. Who the heck knows, it's brutal out there on the newsstand these days.

I guess what I'm getting at is that this process which might help sell newsstand titles seems to somehow cheapen the overall product. Maybe that's it. If we don't respect ourselves how can we expect others to do so?
For me it's late at night on a poker night and perhaps I'm off target. What do you think?

Who Should We Put On The Cover?
Photography Director Rob Haggart
http://aphotoeditor.com/2008/06/24/who-should-we-put-on-the-cover/

In my career I've gone from "let's see which of the stories we have this month will make a good cover" to "we're going to call every single A list celebrity that has a movie this month till someone says yes" and then of course, task some writer with throwing a story together in a week or less. The cover of the magazine was the single source of more anxiety, stress and nightmares than anything else I've ever worked on. There was always a deadline looming and unreturned phone calls to publicists, a photographer to figure out, location, wardrobe and then what will he be doing on the cover, it was always just hanging out there for weeks on end waiting for a date, time and place to land so the rest of the pieces could be jammed in.

I'm sure it's quite a different experience working at GQ, VF or Time where the celebrities and politicians have heard of your publication and are actually interested in appearing on the cover. I've always been in the hapless position of pitching a publicist and providing material to actually prove we're worthy enough for a celebrity to grace us with their presence.

The importance of the cover image, coverlines, background, expression, wardrobe is at an all time high these days because advertisers need some sign of the health of a magazine and newsstand sales are a decent indicator because consumers are free to decide what purchase to make that month. Except everyone is trying to game the system so the coverlines, subjects and many times the photography have turned into such predictable garbage, because everyone is using the same handful of words and subjects that have proven effective at capturing eyeballs.

Who should we put on the cover? How about someone who actually wants to be there and that the audience cares about. How about someone we can spend some time with a write a meaningful story and take interesting pictures of. I look forward to the day when magazines can return to serving their audience and not the newsstand. Until then you're stuck with 109, free, biggest, hot, ultimate, travel, toys, secrets, great, perfect, best, sex, abs, weight-loss, getaway, new, insider, easy, delicious, shortcuts, paired with a celebrity you keep seeing over and over on the covers of magazines.-------------------------

Rolling Stone: A Picture's Worth a Thousand Coverlines
by Matt Haber
via rollingstone.com
No Words: Obama
Mere words cannot express the awesomeness that is Barack Obama. At least that's what the new cover of Rolling Stone tells-or doesn't tell-us. The cover of the magazine's new issue features only a photograph of a smiling Senator Obama (with prominent flag pin!) and no text whatsoever. In keeping with the photo theme, Rolling Stone's Web site features a photo gallery called Barack Obama, a History in Pictures, with a whopping 98 (!) images of the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate.
The wordless cover is not Rolling Stone's first. The motif has also been used by the magazine for other important, "words are not enough" stories like the deaths of John Lennon and George Harrison.
It was also used to great effect on February 1995 for a cover story about Demi Moore.

BoSacks: Looking at the Future of New LaunchesBy

2008-06-02T19:05:00.000-07:00

BoSacks: Looking at the Future of New Launches

By BoSacks

http://www.pubexec.com/story/story.bsp?sid=107630&var=story

Will the increasing costs of entry make print publishing a world where only the brave and truly committed dare to go?

As you may know, my friend Samir Husni, also known as Mr. Magazine, tracks new magazine launches. He has done so for decades and has amassed a wealth of data. In his latest announcement, the overall numbers for our business are less than stellar. Many possible reasons exist for this decline. Both Husni and I can postulate about its causes, but neither of us actually knows.

According to Husni: "The number of new magazine launches in the first quarter of 2008 (150) increased by five titles compared to Q1 2007. [While it was an increase,] it is still a far cry from the introduction of 192 new magazines in the same time period in 2006. However . . . only 41 magazines were launched with the intention to be published at least four times a year compared with 50 in 2007, and 72 in 2006."

Husni goes on to ask: "So what does this mixed bag of numbers mean? Not much. Since I have started tracking new magazine launches, I have witnessed a two or three years' decline after a very healthy and busy year. [2005] was a very healthy year-1,013 new magazines were launched. The decline started in 2006. We are in our third year of decline. In 2006, we [saw] 901 new launches. The number dropped to 715 last year, and if the trend of the previous years continues, we will see another drop again this year before the numbers bounce back. Call it market correction if you please, but definitely it is not a sign that print is on its way out."

Well, on that last point, Mr. Magazine and I agree. Printed magazines are not on their way out. Not by a long shot. I believe that the printed magazine will have a prosperous run until the advent and adaptation of new technologies, which will finally surpass the printed magazine around 2025. So there is some breathing room left. And even in 2025, magazines will not be completely gone, and those publishers established to produce them will do just fine. But I do believe that by 2025, the printed magazine will not be the predominant way that the public will read, but rather only one of the ways. Sort of like it is now, only more so.

So what will happen to Husni's belief that there will be a predictable parabolic curve of highs and lows of new title releases? I think there will always be some high points of new releases and some low points. But as we move into the future there will be periods of lower highs and lower lows. And the long-term trend will be a decreased number of new printed titles, until we reach a new level of sustainability.

That new sustainability will be predicated on the dictates of the new information age, balanced with the cost structure of print-and-ship manufactured goods. This may not be a bad thing for the printing and publishing industry. Perhaps a more expensive entry fee to be a printed publisher will lead to a greater survival rate, as only the brave and the truly committed will apply. I believe we will reach a new successful, sustainable plateau of new releases more in line with the new business realities of the day.

The further the reach of a new digital infrastructure, the less drive there will be to spend money on printed products. Publishing has always had a component of vanity attached to it. Almost everybody wants to be a publisher. In the past, the only way to do that was to put ink on paper. It was significantly less costly than it is today to materialize those vanity impulses. I think we will find that the new world order is based on dematerialization.

The dematerialization business plan can send billions of words anywhere on the planet in an instant with no material form and no manufacturing expenditure. So, as usual, Mr. Magazine and I agree on some points and disagree on others. For today, we agree that the printed magazine is not going away any time soon, but disagree on the relevance of the decreasing trend in new startups.

Bob Sacks (aka BoSacks) is a printing/publishing industry consultant and president of The Precision Media Group (BoSacks.com). He is also the co-founder of the research company Media-Ideas (Media-Ideas.net), and publisher and editor of a daily international e-newsletter, Heard on the Web. Sacks has held posts as director of manufacturing and distribution, senior sales manager (paper), chief of operations, pressman, circulator and almost every other job this industry has to offer.

BoSacks Speaks Out: Truth on the IDG Story

2008-05-06T18:58:00.000-07:00

BoSacks Speaks Out: Truth on the IDG Story

BoSacks Speaks Out: This article has an interesting perspective on the IDG story I posted yesterday. Here is my take on this whole process.

Publishing and making money on the written word is not going out of style or business. We have been writing and recording our history for 25,000 years that I know of. Yes, I said 25,000 thousand years. But that publishing time line is another story for another day.

The only thing that is interesting and important now is that the medium upon which we survive is changing. If you think that people are going to stop writing and stop making a profit on that writing, then you are reading the wrong newsletter, at the wrong time, on the wrong day, and you are also grievously mistaken.

This planet will have profitable writing and advertising until we transcend the needs for any physical instrumentality at all. So what we need to focus on is this - where is the money? Where is the money coming from to pay for writing all the interesting words?

Do you think that in five years or ten or twenty no one will be writing, publishing and making a profit on the enterprising work? Do you think that organizations, both big and small, will not be distributing news, stories, and, perhaps most importantly of all, the "craft" information of how to do things to the general Public?

The real question is not if there is going to be any publishing; no, the real question on every body's mind is this - where do I fit in? What will my employment be like in five, ten and twenty years? How will I feed my family? Do I have the necessary skills to stay in this industry and make money? Those are the real questions.

And the answer to those questions is still in formation. There are still multi-billions of dollars in the print universe. Media that matters is in flux. Media that makes money is in flux. Our media universe is changing faster than we can possibly comprehend.

Here is Bo's last part of this rant. Stay loose. Stay informed. Broaden your professional interests and experiences to the maximum. You will never know what part of your training will be important until it is flying at you at Internet speeds. You need the smarts, the agility and the experience to recognize the next opportunity as it speeds by your desk. The future is bright for publishing, and there will be a need for employees to make that new world a profitable one. The only thing that is changing is the distribution platform, not the need for people to run the systems that distribute the words to the people who wish to read those words.

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900), The Importance of Being Earnest, 1895, Act I

Happy IDG story no salve for dying media companies
Posted by: Aaron Pressman
http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?t=monkzmcab.0.n6eujccab.cuf4zubab.1&ts=S0340&p=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.businessweek.com%2F

There's a happy-dappy profile of tech publishing and conference giant International Data Group in today's New York Times. The story notes how IDG's publishing arm got 86% of its revenue from print and 14% from the web five years ago but now its getting slightly over half its revenue from the web. Wow. Indeed, this is seen as some kind of important and hopeful sign for the publishing and media business at large, with a comparison to the decision by The Capital Times newspaper to abandon its print edition and a closing quote from venture capitalist Stewart Alsop that "what's happening at I.D.G. is a fairly accurate map for every other publishing organization."

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, especially for my own industry, but using what happened at IDG as a map for the rest of the publishing industry would be like using Christopher Columbus's charts to fly to the moon. There's a publishing pink elephant in the room that nobody in the NYT's story seems to notice. Most of IDG's publications are what's known as controlled circulation. Readers paid nothing but were selected to receive titles like Infoworld gratis based on their attraction to certain advertisers. There is no subscription revenue to the publisher and the publisher still bears all the costs of printing and mailing. So when IDG shifts a publication to the web and stops printing, it can cut costs to the bone and shift advertisers to its web site.

But most publishers charge for subscriptions - in fact they charge a lot. The New York Times collected $227 million from subscribers in the first quarter, for example, along with $458 million in ad revenue. For mainstream publishers, that's a much bigger potential loss from the seemingly obvious and simple shift online depicted in the IDG story.

The article also raises questions about advertiser behavior. A tech-industry trade publication's advertisers come from a narrow slice of the entire ad market, a slice that's likely more comfortable going online and more likely to be selling directly online than other segments. But when you look at the whole ecosystem of advertisers, especially the big players in mainstream publications, you find a rather different attitude. It's a lot easier to imagine Cisco Systems and Salesforce.com shifting ads to a web-based version of Infoworld than it is to see Tiffanys or Bulgari moving from the New York Times Sunday Magazine to the web. Research I've cited in the past examining the revenue shift for mainstream publishers concluded that its an almost insurmountable mountain.

Finally, I'm also a little wary of stories about private companies that don't disclose all their financial information the way public companies do. We know that publishing is only one part of IDG's business but not how big a part. We know the publishing division got a higher percentage of revenue from the web in 2007 than in 2002 but not anything about the dollar amounts involved. I emailed a PR rep at IDG to see if they'd disclose more info but haven't heard back. In the meantime, there's less than meets the eye for the rest of the publishing industry from IDG's transformation.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I worked at an IDG magazine called The Industry Standard for a few years that was shut down by the company.

BoSacks Speaks Out: What is happening in our industry?

2008-05-01T18:29:00.000-07:00

BoSacks Speaks Out: What is happening in our industry?
www.bosacks.com

What is happening in our industry? Where are we going? And if we are going anywhere, how are we going to get there? Being dead center of the publication information fulcrum as I am, I see it all, hear it all, and well know that I don't know it all. But I do know quite a few things.

I will briefly lay out a few thoughts for your perusal and feedback.

1) Although changing, the publishing industry is not leaving this planet. It is not dying, nor even unwell. It is robust and merely going through a mighty technological transformation, a metamorphosis if you will, of huge proportions and reach. We are growing into something else. Our reach, our ability to find readership is stronger than ever. Our once small pond of potential readers has grown to an ocean. And it is no longer a one-way street. We can write and distribute our product and our readers can write/vent/agree right back at us and to our other readers too. The old one-way street is now a multi-pathed intersection of six lane highways with traffic in all directions

2) Printers should have no fear; they will do fine in the next phase of publishing. They may print shorter runs of magazines, but will no doubt print more titles, not fewer. And as everybody knows, printers make most of their profit on make-readies. So this could/should be considered a good thing. Those printers that are efficient, technologically astute and embrace the new workflows will prosper.

3) It can be a writers/editors dream world. There are more ways for writers to have an outlet then ever before. The potential of sustained readership is almost unlimited. And as always the proof is in the pudding. If it is a worthwhile set of words strung together in an interesting fashion, there is always hope for writers' revenue. One man on a small island in a small lake in the upstate Berkshire Mountains of New York can communicate daily with the world at large. And they in turn can talk back to same niche global group.
It is a cultural and professional exchange and every member benefits from the exposure.

4) Production and circulation professionals will still be needed to put it all together and sling the written product around the globe, either in print or in a digital format. Will they be called production personnel or circulators? I have no idea. But the functions and the responsibilities remain the same. Somebody writes, somebody sells and somebody distributes with the best technology at hand.

So as we move forward through this transformation nothing has changed except our efficiency to do better at what we already do - distribute thought and ideas; that is, communication. We sell and monetize a compendium of stored memory, things that our readers didn't know or wanted to know more of.

What do you think? Do you think I overstate the case? Are you ready to fly? Are you ready to move into the next golden age of publishing?

BoSacks Speaks Out: The World's Newest Language

2008-04-23T04:40:00.000-07:00

BoSacks Speaks Out: The World's Newest Language

I found this article to be interesting and humorous. It's about the morphing of our language. When you get right down to it our publishing language has changed right along with our technology. The words and acronyms that we use and throw around so freely today would be nothing but gibberish to people of our industry one generation ago. And that will most likely not change in the near future. Even our job descriptions and responsibilities are changing.

I was at one of my favorite industry gatherings a few weeks ago. It is called the Publishers Production Forum. This special group of production directors never fails to have some of the best and most pointed dialog anywhere to be found in our industry. The last meeting was no exception. From that meeting I heard the following exclaimed, "Prepress, it's 10% of the budget and 90% of the talk." That is funny and that is true. I will add an additional thought of my own. What do you still consider prepress? Is what goes onto the web with no parallel print component still considered prepress? If not, what is it? See what I mean, our language is changing.

Let me take that question for you publishers and production people one step further. Do you production people still consider your job as a manufacturing job? Is that what you really do? Do you still manufacture multiple widgets in the shape and form of magazines or are you more and more moving electrons from place to place, rather than hard atoms. Clearly ten years ago Directors of Manufacturing mostly moved "things". They used industrial strength manufacturing skills and technology to make things and ship them. What percentage of your job would you still define as making and shipping tangible "things"?

What will your job be called 10 years from now? Will you be DIM? Digital Infrastructure Management?

Will you still use ADIS and AdsML with DISC to coordinate GRACoL and ICE? Will we still have papiNet and PROSE/XML working to deliver intelligently with JDF and SNL?
Yep . . . languages sure do change. Right now I'm sort of reminiscing about hot lead and M spaces, galleys and paste-ups and the odd science of shipping boards to my printer.

"The most important things are the hardest to say, because words diminish them"
Stephen King quotes (American Writer, best known for his horror novels. b.1947)

The world's newest language: Nerdic
It's the language you learned talking to tech support
By Heidi Dawley
http://www.medialifemagazine.com

It's long been a goal of one-worlders to develop a universal language, and for years their hopes were on Esperanto, a faux language developed in 1887 by a Dr. L.L. Zamenhof to serve as the word's official second language. It's not caught on.

But Nerdic has, or soon will. So many already speak it, even if they do not recognize it as a language as such, and no matter that academics pooh-pooh the entire notion.

Indeed, new research claims Nerdic is the fastest-growing language in Europe, evolving even faster than English, a language that morphs and evolves and recreates itself daily.

Nerdic is tech speak. It's the language we've all been forced to learn in order to use our computers and survive on the internet.

The new research, from Pixmania, an electronics retailer in Europe, contends Nerdic has become the shared language of Europe, allowing people to communicate across borders, and as evidence it marches out the fact that the language added 100 new words last year. That's three times the number of new English words added into the Oxford English Dictionary.

"It should be its own language to make it proper," says Stuart Miles, editor of Pocket-lint.co.uk, a consumer technology site. He argues that technology has revolutionized the way people talk and that Nerdic is the outcome of that revolution. "When I was young, if you didn't understand a word and asked someone about it, a grownup would say, 'look it up in the dictionary.' Now you can't do that."

Miles helped Pixmania by putting together a list of hip and happening Nerdic words.

Take RickRoll, for instance. That's the verb used to describe one of the latest practical jokes circulating the web. It occurs when someone sends you a great sounding link but instead you are intentionally misdirected to a video of "Never Gonna Give You Up," by the 1980s one-hit wonder Rick Astley.

There's also egosurfing, another verb, and something that is highly embarrassing to be caught doing. It's the act of surfing the web to find - you guessed it - your very own name.

Miles also points to some super techy words. There's Wimax, the name for supersized Wi-Fi networks. And there's femtocell, the name for the mini, in-home mobile phone masts due to become popular in the next few years.

Pixmania says it has applied to Britain's Foreign and Commonwealth Office to have Nerdic recognized as an official language on the basis that it is spoken by 750,000 Europeans, to say nothing of all the others around the world.

Here the question logically rises. Is Pixmania really serious, or is this just a prank to grab headlines? The latter seems to be the case.

For one thing, the press office for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office has yet to uncover anyone in their organization that has heard about this application.

Secondly, the chances of Nerdic succeeding in becoming a second language look slim. Pixmania may be having fun with the idea, but serious language people are not amused.

"Basically tech speak is just a variant of English," says David Crystal, honorary professor of linguistics at Britain's University of Bangor and the author of an upcoming book on texting called "Txtng: The Gr8 Db8."

He says that in order to make it a new language, you would need thousands and thousands of new words and, importantly, new grammar. "That's the critical thing." Crystal notes that Nerdic has none to speak of.

Colleen Cotter, lecturer in the linguistics department at Queen Mary, University of London, agrees, noting that, as fun and clever as it is, Nerdic really amounts to a lot of new words. It is more reminiscent of a pidgin form of a language.

In fact, Nerdic is going to have to work hard to live up to another language popular with techies, Klingon, the language of the Klingon people in the television series "Star Trek."

This language came complete with vocabulary and grammar. "Klingon is a real language. Nerdic is just a wannabe when you compare it with Klingon," says Cotter.

MPA Retail Conference and Time Inc's Green Thinking.

2008-04-01T19:20:00.000-07:00

BoSacks Speaks Out: Here is some news and thoughts about green publishing, paper consumption, and the consumer reaction. It is a worthwhile read and I have inserted a question to ponder at the end.

Everyone has the obligation to ponder well his own specific traits of character. He must also regulate them adequately and not wonder whether someone else's traits might suit him better. The more definitely his own a man's character is, the better it fits him.
Cicero (106 BC - 43 BC)

From the MPA Retail Conference Bill Mickey reported the following about Time Inc's thinking green.

Time Inc. has been monitoring its environmental impact to such a degree that it employs David Refkin as director of sustainable development. "Part of my job is risk management and promoting positive change and turning it into a business opportunity," he says, adding that the publisher buys 500,000 tons of paper from 53 mills per year.

As part of an operation-wide sustainability effort, Refkin says that the company has boosted its certified sustainable forestry paper content. Currently, 70 percent of its fiber meets CSF standards, up 25 percent from 2002. And paper is going increasingly global. "More and more of our wood will be coming from different countries," he says, noting that it's becoming important to work with countries to make sure they're following responsible foresting practices.

Bill Mickey also reported on the green thing that:

Consumer values--again, the intangibles--are increasingly including an awareness of a product's impact on the environment. In a panel discussion called "Consumers, Retail and the Environment," Steve French, managing partner of The Natural Marketing Institute, noted that "consumers are becoming much more eco-conscious. There's an alignment of personal values with companies and brands." And that, according to his research, one-third of Americans are willing to pay 20 percent more for environmentally-friendly products.

French pointed out that consumers are becoming more aware of, and interested in, the magazine production process, and warned publishers not to be surprised if consumers hold them "responsible" for ensuring unsold magazines are actually recycled. Indeed, Dave Sherman, partner at Blu Skye Sustainability Consulting, noted that despite the efforts of publishers to convert to recycled paper content, pushing unsold copies around the system essentially cancels that out.

I couldn't agree more. Although in my newsletter there has been some dispute of the actual percentages of unsold copies ending up in recycling centers, there is no dispute that on average we print 10 and sell 3. If we fix that part of the equation, then we don't have to worry as much about the recycling percentages. The eventual goal has to be no returns. It will take some time to get there, but there are at least some initiatives under way to bring us into at least thinking about those greater efficiencies.

Here is a legitimate question for my old friend David Refkin, out of the 500,000 tons of paper he buys each year, how much of that paper gets into the hands of the consumer?
BoSacks
-30-

BoSacks Speaks Out: Ad Revenues Plunge of 50%

2008-03-30T19:07:00.000-07:00

BoSacks Speaks Out: Ad Revenues Plunge of 50%
www.bosacks.com

I am about to dive into an old rant. I do it because it is an important concept and because I have almost a thousand new subscribers since I last vented about this subject. Everybody who reads this newsletter knows or should know that I am a magazine guy through and through. So, it's not unusual that I am continually barraged with questions like; "Bo, why do you keep such a strong focus on the newspaper industry?"

I have a dozen reasons why I think it is an important industry to track, not the least of which is my canary in the mine shaft theory. I used to explain this more often to my readership than I do now, and I believe that it has been at least a year since I have done so. I will now attempt to correct that oversight, because I still deem it a very important industry for magazine professionals to track.

Simply put, the newspaper industry has been a forecaster of magazine trends for over 60 years. I believe that the newspaper industry still acts for the magazine industry just like the vulnerable little canaries that coal miners carried into the coal mines in times past. When there was little clean air, the canaries "fainted" first, warning the miners of pending trouble. A similar process could/should be said for newspapers being more sensitive and vulnerable in the publishing world in these times of economic stress and business model upheavals. It is the newspapers who are "fainting" first, months, perhaps years, before the same conditions hit the magazine industry. But make no mistake, it is a very similar mineshaft that we are in. If they are fainting and croaking, we had best pay close attention and know the reasons why.

We all know that many of the old business models have changed. Newspapers and magazines have changed dramatically. Surely, the advertising community has changed in, if nothing else, the many different and new venues to spend advertising dollars in. Not to mention their obsessive search for accountability. Add into that volatile mixture the apparently unstoppable oncoming recession and you have a tsunami media/magazine advertising event.

So, yes, I track the newspaper industry pretty damn closely and only send out a fraction of what I read and know about it.

The newspaper industry is a media brother or sister. We have almost the same genetic code. They are us in different clothing. When they get mugged, we are next in line in the alley. We are in the same boat riding on a very similar platform.

Today's news about the ad revenue plunge is very important. Because newspapers are dailies, they more closely reflect the economy and the insights and wisdom, or lack thereof, of advertising spending. Whatever the trend is going to be, up or down, it is reflected first in newspapers and second in magazines.

With all this off my chest, I still think we are headed for a great second golden age of publishing (information distribution). Yes, it will be different. Yes, our business models will have to change. But if we are smart we will notice that what we can and do still provide is exactly what people have always wanted. They want information. They want information in the form of news or entertainment, or crafts or fashion, or culture or any of a thousand niche subjects. That is what we do best and will continue to do. We just need to be where the information seekers are and provide great content worth reading.

"We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects."

Herman Melville (American short-story Writer, Novelist and Poet. Best known for his novels of the sea, including his masterpiece, Moby Dick. 1819-1891)

NAA Reveals Biggest Ad Revenue Plunge in More Than 50 Years By Jennifer Saba Published: March 28, 2008 12:55 PM ET
NEW YORK The newspaper industry has experienced the worst drop in advertising revenue in more than 50 years. According to new data released by the Newspaper Association of America, total print advertising revenue in 2007 plunged 9.4% to $42 billion compared to 2006 -- the most severe percent decline since the association started measuring advertising expenditures in 1950. The drop-off points to an economic slowdown on top of the secular challenges faced by the industry. The second worst decline in advertising revenue occurred in 2001 when it fell 9.0%.Total advertising revenue in 2007 -- including online revenue -- decreased 7.9% to $45.3 billion compared to the prior year. There are signs that online revenue is beginning to slow as well. Internet ad revenue in 2007 grew 18.8% to $3.2 billion compared to 2006. In 2006, online ad revenue had soared 31.4% to $2.6 billion. In 2005, it jumped 31.4% to $2 billion. As newspaper Web sites generate more advertising revenue, the growth rate naturally slows. The NAA reported that online revenue now represents 7.5% of total newspaper ad revenue in 2007 compared to 5.7% in 2006.That growth could not stave off the losses in the print however. National print advertising revenue dropped 6.7% to $7 billion last year. Retail slipped 5% to $21 billion. Classified plunged 16.5% to $14.1 billion."Even with the near-term challenges posed to print media by a more fragmented information environment and the economic headwinds facing all advertising media, newspapers publishers are continuing to drive strong revenue growth from their increasingly robust Web platforms," John Sturm, president and CEO of the NAA, said in a statement.

BoSacks Speaks Out: The Economy, the Recession and Publishers

2008-03-27T14:14:00.000-07:00

BoSacks Speaks Out: The Economy, the Recession and Publishers
We are clearly headed into some dicey economic times. For some of us a recession will create new problems of instability where we are already under stress - from new competitors, the internet, and the demand for accountability. At the same time some of us will not only survive, but will actually thrive and prosper even under the conditions of a recession. How can this be?

There are lots of factors, but I put most of it down to creative management, market position, and stamina. Stamina is the easiest to understand. It is the wherewithal to have dogged determination to succeed.

Stamina is not enough though, you also need the proper market position, which is where you are in the "food chain" of information distribution. Do you own your media segment? Do you have a commanding share of your particular niche? Do you have the best editorial/content? If so, you have the proper market position.

And lastly, creative management. Do you have managers with the wit, the vision and, most importantly, the flexibility to adapt to changing market conditions?

Oh yes, and then there is luck. But a good deal of luck is recognizing any of the above conditions as it is flying by or landing near you. Once there is recognition, there needs to be an action plan to use that luck. And that brings us back to creative management,stamina, and market position.

What do you think?

Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882)

Bad news for Big Media
By John Simons, writer
http://money.cnn.com/2008/03/23/news/companies/simons_media.fortune/index.htm

The Following few paragraphs represent a synopsis of the full article:

As the United States slips into recession, advertising spending is set to fall - spelling trouble for traditional media companies already battered by Internet upstarts.

(Fortune) -- Media industry watchers are no longer debating whether the United States economy is in recession. Rather the question is, "how bad will it get?" If recent trends continue, the outlook is likely bleak for broadcasters, magazine publishers, newspapers, cable operators and the conglomerates that own them.

Advertising spending - the fuel that powers the media and entertainment industries - is poised for a downturn as corporations and consumers grow frugal. Cutbacks in consumer spending are expected to take a toll on everything from Disney's theme parks to Time Warner's magazines and News Corp.'s newspapers, according to analysts.

After some detail the article went on to conclude the following:

Cowen and Company analyst Doug Creutz is preparing for a rougher ride for this recession. "Our industry thesis is informed by our view that a recession in 2008 is likely, and that its impact could be more severe than those experienced in either 1990-91 or 2001," he says.

Creutz does see some companies' weathering and even prospering during a downturn. He likes Viacom's prospects, for instance, because cable networks can rely on subscriber and affiliate fees to help offset an advertising slowdown.

For the complete article: http://money.cnn.com/2008/03/23/news/companies/simons_media.fortune/index.htm

---------------

Then Think about this paragraph from the Wall Street Journal

IN THE LEAD
Executives Find Ways To Keep Moving Ahead Despite Economic Fears
By CAROL HYMOWITZ
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB120631928861158351-lMyQjAxMDI4MDI2NDMyMTQ5Wj.html

The collapse of financial titan Bear Stearns last week heightened concerns among executives across industries that the U.S. economy is in a recession. The mess on Wall Street has made it difficult for companies to get financing to do deals; slowed sales of cars, clothing, other consumer goods; and prompted managers to scuttle hiring plans and consider layoffs.

The worst thing business leaders can do, however, is panic, especially because the length and severity of a slowdown is impossible to predict. Here are some management lessons gleaned from recent events to help executives navigate successfully in coming months.

After some details the article goes on the following thought, a great one for all publishers:
Look overseas for growth. The weak dollar and continued growth in India, China and other emerging economics are a boon to small, and some big, U.S. companies with broad global reach. Cleveland-based Horizons, a maker of specialty metals and aluminum, expects overseas sales, which already account for 25% of its revenue, to double this year after also doubling in 2007. The company started expanding overseas five years ago -- first to Western Europe, Japan, Korea and Russia, then to Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Egypt and India.
"We'd be scrambling now if we weren't already global," says Wayne Duignan, director of international sales.
For the complete article:
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB120631928861158351-lMyQjAxMDI4MDI2NDMyMTQ5Wj.html

BoSacks Speaks Out: Is Dematerialization on your Horizon?

2008-03-23T18:11:00.000-07:00

BoSacks Speaks Out: Is Dematerialization on your Horizon?

The best part of this article is the term, phrase and concept of "Dematerialization". It truly conjures science fiction and, I think, soon to be real science fact. As the article points out we are not there yet, a fact that my friend Samir Husni, Mr. Magazine, takes great pride and joy in reminding me about. But that joy will be a short lived moment of glee.

This article states:
. . . dematerialization is also how the French refer to the use of technology to do away with paperwork in their everyday lives. That's an idea that might equally belong to the realms of science fiction -- or "littérature d'anticipation," as it's sometimes called here.

For me, I truly don't understand the naysayers. In the last ten years we have digitalized the entire publishing process. I mean everything from key stroke capture through web transmission to digital variable plateless printing presses anywhere on the globe. Is it so hard to think of the next logical step, which is the advent of electronic paper? Look around, it is already here, and commercialized. The only thing left to do next is to improve on the already existent technologies. Do you think epaper is just going to go away? Is there a single reader out there that thinks that epaper technology is at its apex and will not improve ten fold? It will. It is no longer an if or when question, but rather how soon. And the answer to that is in less than five years we will have flexible color-rich epaper. That would be epaper that will be able to reproduce millions of colors, connected to the WiFi environment, and inexpensive.

Does this mean that print will go away? No. The printing press and the printed magazine will still have a long and honorable history. But it does mean a change of business plans and information distribution pathways. And among other things it gives the modern publisher the accountability we have been craving but unable to attain.

If you have a better way of getting a one to one relationship with the reader, I would like to hear about it, and so would the advertising community. It's time to wake up and listen to the buzz as the electrons fly by.

I am Locutus of Borg. Resistance is futile. Your life as it has been is over. From this time forward, you service us.
Captain Jean-Luc Picard -Star Ship Enterprise

Still Seeking a Truly Digital Life
Analysis: The French call it 'dematerialization' but the search for a paperless existence continues to elude even technophiles.
BY Peter Sayer, IDG News Service
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,143745-c,futuretechnology/article.html

Dematerialization: The word has always had connotations of science fiction for me.

When I hear it, I picture the transporter room in the television series Star Trek or the Invisible Man in the novel by H.G. Wells. (Well, I try to picture him ...)

But dematerialization is also how the French refer to the use of technology to do away with paperwork in their everyday lives. That's an idea that might equally belong to the realms of science fiction -- or "littérature d'anticipation," as it's sometimes called here.

Little Progress Toward Paperless
Whatever you call it, the computers I've had on my desk over the past 20 years have done little to deliver on the promise of turning my workspace into a paperless office, and despite the enthusiastic efforts of different sectors of French society, it looks as though dematerialization has had little effect here, either.

In April 2001, the Ministry of Economics and Finance was keen to dematerialize tax forms. Yet the large number of Parisians that I met frantically stuffing their tax returns into the tax office mailbox as the midnight deadline approached suggests that the ministry might have been more popular if it had done away with taxes instead. Suspicion of new technology -- and the risk of an audit -- meant that adoption was slow: Just 17,000 of France's 19 million tax-paying households filed online in 2001, and 100,000 filed the following year. As one of the late-night filers, a graphic designer, told me back then: "If my return goes missing, there's no way to keep a copy for myself to prove what I sent."

That pack-rat instinct is what prompted French company Xamance to launch the Xambox, a gadget it exhibited at the Cebit trade show this month. A cunning combination of hardware and software, the Xambox appealed to me with its promise that I would be able to keep track of paperwork, yet never have to file anything again.

While I had high hopes that the Xambox would beam documents up to some dematerialized filing system in the sky, the reality is more mundane. As documents are scanned, they drop into a numbered box that you then stick in a cupboard. Not so much dematerialized as out of sight, out of mind.

With a combination of optical character recognition and a huge database, the Xambox should be able to show you a scan of whatever document you search for, its makers say. By occasionally dropping a bar-coded divider into the stream of documents to scan, you give the database enough clues to tell you exactly where to find the original document too, should you need it: Box number five, third document after the seventh divider, it might tell you, as you look for the papers to justify last year's tax filing.

Books of the Future?
This week Paris played host to another demonstration of dematerialization, at the intersection of science fiction and finance.

The Salon du Livre, an annual book fair, included for the first time an exhibit entitled "Tomorrow's reading." Amazon's Kindle was there, in a glass case, as was a prototype bi-stable LCD (liquid crystal display), a form of e-paper developed by French manufacturer Nemoptic.

The manufacturers of the iRex and Cybook e-readers also had stands. Their devices were technologically impressive: lightweight, with crisp, readable displays and interfaces that were, for the most part, well thought out.

Cybook had cheekily loaded its demo models with a novella entitled "I, Robot" by online rights campaigner, academic -- and author -- Cory Doctorow. I say cheekily, because although Doctorow distributes much of his work under a Creative Commons license, he has no faith in e-readers, as he explained in a column in the March issue of Locus , a magazine for science fiction fans.

Apart from their presence on the demonstration devices at the show, e-book publishers kept a low profile.

Even daily newspaper Les Echos had real newspapers, piles and piles of them, on its stand, but couldn't show me samples of the e-reader or the e-paper edition that it launched at the show last year.

Publishers at the show said that e-books will cost about the same as paper books. That wouldn't be so bad (the authors and publishers still have to eat), but on top of that they want me to pay for the "e-printing," and the e-readers exhibited cost from €330 (US$520) to €650.

With prices like that, I think I can afford to put off dematerializing my reading habits until tomorrow.

BoSacks Speaks Out: On Editors and Deviant Reading Behavior

2008-03-02T19:28:00.000-08:00

BoSacks Speaks Out: The following editoral is posted by Noelle Skodzinski, who is one of the finest and hardest working trade magazine editors I have ever associated with. She is representative of a new breed of publishing talent with the determined wherewithal to succeed.

All you other trade magazine editors know exactly what I'm talking about. You didn't create the concept of multi-tasking, but trade publishers have sure honed it to a fine science. It is representative of the apparent need to collapse our work force to its lowest common denominator, combining and condensing skill sets of multiple disparate job disciplines into a single semi-cohesive unit of one - one person now doing the former tasks of many. Can it be done? Yes! But I ask you all, should it be done? Or perhaps better stated, must it be done?

In our industry's zeal for the holy grail of the bottom-most line, how will we know when we have past it? How will we know when we have diminished our workforce to the point that we have diminished the product itself? I have had over the past years hundreds of conversations with editors, publishers, circulators and every other member of our industry. There are many common threads that link people in the same industry, who have never met, to the same conclusions. One of those commonalities is that they are working harder and harder for less and less. And among the less that I make reference to is less satisfaction in the jobs that they hold. There was a time when most publishing employees felt empowered by their jobs and loved being in such a noble and exciting industry. More and more now I get a sense of stress and strain and recognition that in some publishing houses what we produce is more of a cog than a piece of art, more of a mass produced commodity then a unique and valued book or magazine.

Competition is a funny thing. It does bring out the best and worst in people and corporations alike. I suppose that at the end of the day, if under extremely stressful condidtions and a general lack of sustained support and well being, quality will still rise to the top and allow success. This falls somewhere under the addage that those that can will, and those that can't, will fold their cards, thier jobs and thier magazines. In that order.

Retirement kills more people than hard work ever did.
Malcolm S. Forbes

On The Onion . . . and Deviant Reading BehaviorBy Noelle Skodzinski
http://www.bookbusinessmag.com/
A recent story from satirical news source The Onion (www.TheOnion.com), entitled "Area Eccentric Reads Entire Book," read:
Sitting in a quiet, downtown diner, local hospital administrator Philip Meyer looks as normal and well-adjusted as can be. Yet, there's more to this 27-year-old than first meets the eye: Meyer has recently finished reading a book.

Yes, the whole thing.

"It was great," said the peculiar Indiana native, who, despite owning a television set and having an active social life, read every single page of "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee. . . .
Meyer, who never once jumped ahead to see what would happen and avoided skimming large passages of text in search of pictures, first began his oddball feat a week ago. Three days later, the eccentric Midwesterner was still at it, completing chapter after chapter, seemingly of his own free will.
. . . Over the years, Meyer has read dozens of books from beginning to end, regardless of whether he was forced to do so by a professor in school or whether a film version of the reading material already existed. . . .

According to behavioral psychologist Dr. Elizabeth Schulz, Meyer's reading of entire books is abnormal and may be indicative of a more serious obsession with reading.

"Instead of just zoning out during a bus ride or spending hour after hour watching YouTube videos at night, Mr. Meyer, unlike most healthy males, looks to books for gratification," Schulz said. "Really, it's a classic case of deviant behavior." . . .
After the humor of this story wore off a bit, I began to wonder: How far off is society at large from being in such a state that a story like this is no longer funny, but a horrible reality? I believe so far off that we can still laugh (and will be able to for quite some time) about The Onion's story of Philip Meyer; but obviously there is mounting concern about the nation's reading habits, and I can see why-among other reasons, I seem to question the intelligence of much of the population on a daily basis, especially while driving on the highway or watching the news.

Fortunately, the industry isn't waiting until the Philip Meyer story evolves from satire to widespread truth. The "Get Caught Reading" campaign, sponsored by the Association of American Publishers, comes to mind as one of the more well-known literacy efforts (even Yoda "got caught" reading during 2007's Get Caught Reading Month!). The National Education Association's Read Across America, which launched more than a decade ago, is another one. Of course, there are other national efforts, as well as many, many local efforts.

This year, a new national advocacy effort was launched in January, with the Library of Congress' Center for the Book, the Children's Book Council (CBC) and the CBC Foundation appointing Jon Scieszka as the first-ever National Ambassador for Young People's Literature. Coughing up funds for the effort are a number of major publishers, including Penguin Young Readers Group, Scholastic, HarperCollins Children's Books, Random House Children's Books, Holiday House, Charlesbridge, National Geographic Children's Books, Candlewick Press and Marshall Cavendish Publishers.

Fortunately, Scieszka's perspective suggests that Philip Meyer's story will remain in satire for some time, but he's not leaving that to chance. In a recent interview with Book Business Extra, he said, "I've started a literacy group for boys called Guys Read (www.GuysRead.com). The more research I looked into, [the more I found data that] showed that boys are reading. It's just not how schools define it. It's not all novels. There are other kinds of reading. We should let kids read what they enjoy. There are graphic novels, and a lot of what kids want to read is nonfiction."

I have to say I can relate wholeheartedly to his point and can offer my first-hand perspective on the fact that kids may not be reading what we might expect them to read. My 12-year-old stepson is reading something right now that is definitely not literature. It's not a graphic novel. It's-and I am not being satirical-The Onion's "Our Dumb World: Atlas Of Planet Earth." Must be a classic case of deviant behavior.

Brothers and Sisters Be Warned

2008-02-25T18:34:00.000-08:00

BoSacks Speaks Out: In 1995 I coined the expression EL-CID, Electronically Coordinated Information Distribution. In this article you will read about one aspect and the power of El-CID. We are in it now, but we are going deeper and deeper. The net is going to get stickier and more all-encompassing. Your refrigerators, toasters, and MP3 players all on the same connected grid. Your car that has Easy Pass (RFID) and your GPS-locate-me-anywhere cell phone, not to mention your inter-connected networked home and the new cars that talk to you and tell you where you are and where to go.

Oh yes, my friends, we are just putting our toes into the EL-CID matrix and it effects us all. Doesn't matter if you are a steel worker, gardener, belly dancer or publisher, we are all connected to EL-CID.

Like it or not, believe it or not, it is an advertiser's dream come to fruition. Direct contact and meaningful dialog with the exact client any time and any where they choose.

George Orwell almost got it right, when he wrote 1984 about Big Brother. Well, he forgot about Big Sister, and Giant Uncle, not to mention, the rest of the overly interconnected, oversight family. EL-Cid is really here and we are all related now. Welcome to the family.

"Big Brother isn't watching. He's singing and dancing. He's pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother's busy holding your attention every moment you're awake. He's making sure you're always distracted. He's making sure you're fully absorbed."
Chuck Palahniuk (American freelance Journalist, Satirist and Novelist. b.1961)

In media, the new mantra of dialogue
Buyers be warned: The era of pushing ads is fast ending
By Kevin Downey
http://www.medialifemagazine.com

Media buying agencies just don't get it. They'd better start getting it pretty soon.

How people use media is changing dramatically, and the era of force-fed commercials is nearing an end.

What's taking its place--and has been for several years at least--is a dialogue between advertiser and consumer, and more and more the consumer is in charge.

Media buying agencies need to become part of that dialogue. They need to learn how to spark that exchange. Those that fail to do so will face extinction. Or that's the clear warning in a new study from Forrester.

"Today's agencies fail to help marketers engage with consumers, who, as a result, are becoming less brand loyal," writes Peter Kim, a senior analyst at Forrester and author of the report.

"To turn the tide, marketers will move to the connected agency, one that shifts from making messages to nurturing consumer connections."

The forces killing off the old system are twofold, and one is the explosion of media options that make no one medium a must-have experience. It's the end of mass media in which advertisers could push out their message and consumers were forced to accept that message as the price of admission.

Nobody's a captive audience anymore, argues Kim. Expensive ad campaigns across mass media no longer work in this new media landscape.

Pushing out messages has become particularly ineffective in reaching a generation that's grown up with social networking sites, videogames, interactive television and video-on-demand. They use those media as they please, often skipping commercials.

The other major force of change is the internet experience that allows consumers to respond and react to those messages. Though initially threatening--do we want our competitors to know how little folks think of our product?--it wasn't long before shrewd marketers saw how this backtalk could be harnessed for good.
In listening to these voices, they saw that some voices stood out. They were the ones others listened to, the influencers. In effect, the internet created for marketers a listening post from which, for the first time, they could listen in on what's long been recognized as the most powerful form of advertising of them all, word of mouth.

As Kim sees it, the new model is all about media agencies capturing the hearts of these influential people--bloggers, for example--who can help them create ad messages that resonate with their friends.
Kim suggests agencies need to become something of a hangout where agency people and regular Joes talk about products and ads.

This is not a new idea. It's been around since the early days of the internet.

Putting it to work will prove to be a huge challenge, going as it does against the fundamental notions of mass-market advertising. Agencies make their money creating ads and spending great bundles to buy ads across many media.

But as Kim observes, while it benefits agencies, it isn't doing much for advertisers, and that failure to deliver will force agencies to change.
"The talent and processes [in] creative and media agencies focus on delivering work efficiently for above-the-line media with large audiences and large budgets," writes Kim. "As new media grows and asks for agility and speed, agencies can't expect a quick fix of widening capability gaps."

Marketers Say eMail Strongest Performing Media Buy

2008-01-30T20:52:00.000-08:00

BoSacks Speaks Out: Call me a skeptic or just a realist, but I don't believe these statistics. And I am a guy who has sent out more emails in the last 15 years than Bayer has pills. But I pass it along for you to make up your own minds and draw your own conclusions. Is email powerful? Yes, you're reading one now, right? Is it the best ad platform money can buy? No, at least not alone. And that may be the answer to this and several other studies. The possibilities of media dilution are now endless and there is no longer a single answer as the best media buy. So take this info with either a grain of salt or a Bayer Aspirin.

"If you have a lot of tension and you get a headache, do what it says on the aspirin bottle: "Take two aspirin" and "Keep away from children"."
-Unknown

Marketers Say eMail Strongest Performing Media Buy

http://success.datranmedia.com/research/2008survey.php
Datran Media recently released the results of its second annual survey of over 2000 online marketing professionals, finding that 82 percent of the marketers surveyed indicated that they plan to increase their use of email marketing in 2008, and 55 percent of the respondents cite that they expect ROI from email to be higher than any other channel. The reports says that the survey results are consistent with the Direct Marketing Association's recent report, which found that email ROI will hit $45.65 for every dollar spent in 2008, more than twice the ROI of other mediums including search and display.

In addition to increased use of email as a media and lead generation channel, the Datran Media survey found:

80 percent of respondents indicated email was the strongest performing media buy ahead of search and display.
Search is the favored channel for complementing the email channel.
More than 80 percent of marketers send targeted email campaigns.
Selected key findings include the following...

Company Email plans for 2008, compared to 2007:

82.4% to increase use of email marketing
15.3% to stay the same
2.4% to decrease email marketing expenditures
Source: Datran Media, January 2008

Expectations for company's Email marketing ROI in 2008:

55.3% say higher than other channels
25.9% feel ROI roughly equal
18.8% say lower
Source: Datran Media, January 2008

Advertising media buys that perform strongly for your company: (multiple response OK)

80% say eMail
37.6% display
70.6% say Search
16.5% feel Print
10.6 say Broadcast
7.1% Cable
1.2% think Mobile
2.4% report RSS
34.7% say Ad Network
8.2% uncertain
Source: Datran Media, January 2008

Media channels that complement the eMail media channel: (multiple response OK)

51.8% say Display
71.8% say Search
24.7% think Mobile
17.6% say Broadcast
10.6% Cable
41.2% report Direct
Source: Datran Media, January 2008

Of those who plan to employ eMail, they also expect:

80% to send newsletters
78.8% drive sales
67.1% will increase upsell or cross sell opportunities
50.6% will sent transactional messages
52.9% to reactivate dormant customers
70.6% plan to enhance customer relationships
64.7% expect to increase brand awareness or lift
Source: Datran Media, January 2008

The respondents say eMail planning includes these elements in 2008:

74.1% to conduct content or creative split testing
36.5% will test creative across inbox devices
29.4% to pay for eMail marketing based on CPM model
58.8% will pay on a CPC or CPA model
36.5% will include banner ads
25.9% will measure effect on Brand lift
36.5% will measure effect on customer satisfaction
64.7% will measure eMail effect on sales
Source: Datran Media, January 2008

Response to... "use and/or plan on using an outside vendor for email marketing?"

69.4% say Yes
20% say NO
10.6% Not Sure
Source: Datran Media, January 2008

BoSacks Speaks Out: 3 Concepts for Every Publisher's Success

2008-01-03T19:08:00.001-08:00

This article comes from the most recent issue of Publishing Executive Magazine.

This is not one of those usual tips and tricks issues, because the editor, managing editor, and most of the writers are personal friends of mine, and from my perspective that means that they know "stuff" worth knowing. The fact that I'm a monthly columnist for said publication has nothing to do with my aforesaid observation.

"You are the embodiment of the information you choose to accept and act upon. To change your circumstances you need to change your thinking and subsequent actions."
Adlin Sinclair (British born Businessman, motivational speaker and Humanitarian,)

3 Concepts for Every Publisher's Success

By Robert M. Sacks
Publishing Executive Magazine
http://www.pubexec.com/

My friend Dr. Joe Webb is one of the graphic arts industry's well-known and outspoken consultants, economic forecasters, commentators and pundits. As director of WhatTheyThink.com's Economics and Research Center, he was pontificating and predicting in a recent online column the future of our industry, and he threw out the following ideas.

1. "Managing" content is not the issue; deploying content is.

As my readers know, I have been suggesting similar concepts in this column for years. I think we can all agree that today's print publishers have attained and acquired an excellence in creating and managing vast amounts of content. In fact, nobody does it better than we do, and that is why we get paid the big bucks to continue plying our chosen trade. But, as we move forward, we will be continuously challenged and even threatened by the need to deploy our content. These deployment tactics will require increasing needs for greater global reach, efficiency and accountability. It is/will be the deployment of this well-managed content that will be at the core of any successful franchise.

2. Reaching desired targets is not as important as having targets find the content.

This has always been an intriguing exercise for print publishers, but now it gets harder. There was, at one time, a finite playing field for print publishers. You had either the newsstand circulation or subscription circulation or, in the best of both worlds, you had both. Here, you were limited to the actual number of newsstands available to you and the efficient use of the U.S. Postal Service. In the new and future tier of publishing, you enter the infinite world of global digital publishing.

Now, instead of trying to maximize a limited number of newsstands to attract loyal readers, you have to attract them in the forest of unlimited competition of the worldwide Internet. This shouldn't scare any publisher; it can be just a matter of perspective. You now have the ability to reach a far greater number of potential readers than ever before. That is the good part of the equation.

The down side is that, where once you had, at best, 7,000 consumer titles to compete with in a limited newsstand arena, you now have an unlimited number of writers, bloggers and publishers seeking the attention of as many readers as possible, just as you are.

3. Rules may change, but the objectives do not. Long-term profitability and innovation never go out of style.
This, my friends, is what we must take to heart. We have always had the content, and we have adapted technologically quite well as an industry to bring superior efficiencies to content distribution.

Now we need to adapt once again to a new paradigm of content distribution. The rules are, indeed, changing-and changing quickly. But with creative innovation and smart leadership, any title or series of titles can not only exist in the new world order, but prosper as never before. Where once the best possible execution of a well-rounded business plan had somewhat narrow parameters of possible success, we can now pursue and sell our content to an unlimited number of readers.

The new performance possibilities, paralleled with new, innovative technologic practices, may yet prove to be the best candidates for initiating the biggest revolution in successful publishing since Gutenberg's moveable type.

Bob Sacks (aka BoSacks) is a consultant to the printing/publishing industry and president of The Precision Media Group (www.BoSacks.com). He is publisher and editor of a daily international e-newsletter, Heard on the Web. Sacks has held posts as director of manufacturing and distribution, senior sales manager (paper), chief of operations, pressman, cameraman, publisher, columnist, politician, volunteer fireman and well known corporate janitor.

BoSacks Speaks Out; Steering the New World Digital Order

2007-12-09T14:22:00.000-08:00

Steering the New World Digital OrderBy BoSacks
http://www.pubexec.com/story/story.bsp?sid=83154&var=story

There is a book by Ray Kurzweil called "The Singularity Is Near." In this book, Mr. Kurzweil has a theory about The Law of Accelerating Returns, which states that in today's business environment, "Change happens faster than we are able to forecast or predict it." This is a departure not only from long ago, but from our more recent past as well. There was, in our lifetime, the possibility of accurately predicting technologic growth. Those days have gone up in digital smoke. Technologic growth that once took multiple generations to achieve now happens in months.

Another of Mr. Kurzweil's concepts is that the rate of technologic change is not linear, but exponential. This is not a new concept to anyone in the publishing field.

Everyone knows that I love technology and the possibilities that it holds, especially for those in our industry. We are, no doubt, on the bleeding edge compared to most other professionals. Retailers, lawyers, cabbies, mothers and most others, although impacted every day by the new world digital order, are affected somewhat less visibly than those of us who transmit information in the forms of magazines, newspapers, newsletters and the like. We are pushing and prodding the system to go ever faster.

Over the past decade, publishers have digitally married the electronic workflow. It occurred to me this morning that a magazine can no longer be produced without a computer. This is not a shocking discovery, but it did make me stop and think. From the written word pecked out on a keyboard, e-mailed and clipped by the editor, formatted and manipulated by the art director, spun with great skill and digital alchemy by the production elite, and converted by the printer magically to CTP, there is no longer any step in the process that is not fully and completely computerized. The presses are controlled by digits, the bindery is efficiently automated, and the bundling and shipping is all tagged and directed by database files. In the near future, magazines will likely have little computer chips called RFID imbedded into them for further electronic enhancement and accountability.

But what exactly have we produced with all this speed and technology? We have precision-engineered a book, a magazine or a newspaper--all three printed on paper. We have created a product that requires no electricity to operate. You don't need to plug it in or even attach a cord. In fact, if you do have a cord, it won't fit. It is not sensitive to magnetic surges or system failures of any kind. If left alone, it retains its imagery indefinitely. It can be dropped, stepped upon and will still be totally functional. And if, God forbid, you should spill coffee on it, for a few bucks you can get an exact duplicate. Basically, the format can never become outdated.

So now that that is out of my system, I can move on. Mr. Kurzweil is right about the dramatic speed of change, and that change has affected society as well as technology. And although the printed product is near perfection, there is one thing that it just cannot do, and that is refresh, change and update itself. Once, these were unnecessary, unsought-after functions. Now, we may have a society that demands them.

Here is another interesting thought on technology and our new society that comes from the findings of an in-depth, seven-month study by MTV and the Associated Press on happiness and young people: How happy are they, what makes them happy, and what are they doing to ensure future happiness? The results are that cell phones, the Internet and other technologies are woven into the lives of today's young people, and nearly two-thirds say that technology makes them happier.

What we have now in "screenagers" is a generation that has the ability to be in touch with each other immediately starting at earlier and earlier ages. This new generation of kids is naturally adept with technology and the speed of its change. They are comfortable with having virtual access to friends, family and the world at large. This is a generation that is just as comfortable with digital delivery as it is with bound books.

My conclusion from all this is that there is a very positive and robust future for publishers. We have the technology to print perfect books and magazines for those who desire them. We also have the ability to reach out to new generations of readers in new formats such as e-paper, cell phones and PDAs, and who knows what is right around the corner. All that matters is that we monetize our franchise and deliver our product to readers everywhere and anywhere they would like it.

Bob Sacks (aka BoSacks) is a consultant to the printing/publishing industry and president of The Precision Media Group (www.BoSacks.com). He is publisher and editor of a daily international e-newsletter, Heard on the Web. Sacks has held posts as director of manufacturing and distribution, senior sales manager (paper), chief of operations, pressman, cameraman and often called a new age corporate janitor.

Bob Sacks: In an Iconoclast By Himself

2007-11-04T18:37:00.000-08:00

Bob Sacks: In an Iconoclast By Himself
By John Parsons
The Seybold Report
Volume 7, Number 21 · November 1, 2007

Bob Sacks ("BoSacks" to his readers) is an outspoken columnist and lecturer to the
media and marketing industries. A veteran of many printing and publishing ventures since the 1970s, Sacks has been an advocate for innovation and change, as evidenced by his popular e-newsletter, "Heard on the Web" (www.bosacks.com), and the BoSacks blog.

Sacks straddles the past, present and future. "I've had every position there is to have in our industry," he said. He's been an editor, a publisher, a columnist, a director of manufacturing and distribution and a chief operating officer. He's also been a pressman, sold advertising for print and radio and worked for International Paper, "selling dead trees to major publishers." Sacks is sometimes cast in an adversarial, Jeremiad role, usually opposite the optimism of Prof. Samir Husni ("Mr. Magazine") in the debate over magazines and their fate. Far from being a prophet of doom, however, Sacks views technical innovation as the key to successful publishing - in whatever forms it ultimately takes. He consistently challenges past assumptions and his measured skepticism, combined with his vast expertise in media of all kinds (his first publishing venture used hot type), make him a valuable voice in the publishing industry. We asked Sacks about the future of publishing as we know it.

TSR: On your Web site, one of your lecture topics is something known as "El-Cid."
What is that?

BoSacks: It's all about the future of publishing. El-Cid is a key component to what
I'm trying to project. It means electronically coordinated information distribution.
It's imperative that we no longer consider ourselves as just publishers. We are information distributors. El-Cid is the ability to deliver information anywhere instantly, which is where our business models have to be. The future of publishing is the ability to access any information - all the time, effortlessly and accurately.

TSR: So you're talking about all forms of media, including browsers and readers?

BoSacks: I'm totally indifferent to the platform. Our franchise is information, and we shouldn't be hung up on atoms. That's a good way to distribute it; it's just not the only way.

TSR: Speaking of digital distribution, there are a number of digital edition vendors, the equivalent of a turn-the-page book or magazine on your screen. Do you think people are ready to turn virtual pages instead of paper ones?

BoSacks: I'm uncomfortable with your phrase "ready." We're getting there. It took us 600 years to perfect the magazine, and it works. It's easy to read, usually beautifully designed. How many Web pages can carry that description? Electronic magazines are improving every day and they have something else that no other Web page can emulate: a beginning, middle and an end. That's critical. Once the correct platform is developed for the digital magazine experience, it will readily be adopted.

TSR: What do you think the correct platform needs or what is it missing right now?

BoSacks: Touch-screen e-paper. When you can emulate the magazine experience, fly
your hand across your page and it will flip for you - what the iPhone does today -
that's the correct platform. A sheet of plastic, polymer, e-paper - looks like paper,
feels like paper, smells like paper but it isn't paper. It's a screen that works on reflective technology. Light doesn't shine through it or from it. It uses ambient light, which makes it a pleasant reading experience. It needs to be four colors, it needs to be wifi connected and it needs to be scalable.

TSR: Does size matter?

BoSacks: Yes, for some, but the beauty of publishing platforms of the future is that we don't care. You want it little? I'll deliver it little. You want it medium? I'll do that. You want e-paper? I'll do that. Would you like dead trees? I've got plenty of them, too.

TSR: The old print advocate saying is that they want media they can take to the beach
or read in the bathtub. Is that realistic? Is e-paper going to get there eventually, and how do you think it's going to happen?

BoSacks: I predict in five years we'll have a workable e-paper solution, commercially
affordable. We're predicting under $50 in five years. Comfort level, ease of readability is really important. It's interpreted as wanting paper and books, but that's a learned exercise. What they really want is to get their intellectual fix, the information that they're addicted to. It could be news, it could be about Britney, it could be wooden boat building, whatever your focus or passion is. People want that and that want it in an easy-to-read, portable format. This could be e-paper or something we haven't invented or thought of yet. E-paper seems like the most likely next mechanism of change. There is also nanotechnology, which is not what e-paper is about currently. Nanotechnology might jump ahead of e-paper or follow behind it, but I see e-paper as the next defining moment in information distribution.

TSR: What do you see as the future of printing on dead trees, as you put it?

BoSacks: I see it just like vinyl records. That used to be the way people used to listen to music, and the majority of the public now uses MP3s and MP3 players. There is still a market out there for audiophiles who swear by records and they still make some records. Collectors are out there. My friend Samir Husni is a collector, and I think that's a part of his philosophy. He's a dead-tree hugger. He loves his magazines, and he's a vinyl record collector.

TSR: How long do you think there are going to be printed publications on paper?

BoSacks: I could foresee there are a couple of generations left. The number of titles is clearly going up, but the number of printed pages is clearly going down. Magazine circulation is going down. Printed products will be around for quite some time, but I think the right question is, how long will printed products be the dominant source of information distribution? The answer is, not that long.

TSR: A couple of generations?

BoSacks: It doesn't matter. The inevitable conclusion is that digital media will be the dominant way that we distribute and monetize our franchise, and printing will be less dominant as we move forward - not disappear, but be less dominant.

TSR: What about the business of publishing bothers you the most? What's your pet
peeve about magazine publishers?

BoSacks: It's the distribution model, which once worked and once worked well but is
archaic. Today, for newsstands, we print 10 copies and sell three. This is not a successful formula to compete with the digital world. I want to distribute 10 copies to the 7-Eleven and sell 10. I don't want to have the infrastructure to go back and pick up seven out of the 10 and take it back and shred it. It's inefficient. Compound that with the circulation side, where Samir and I are in agreement. We basically tell our newsstand readers that they're stupid. Here, you just spent $6.95 for this magazine on the newsstand, but we'll give you 12 issues for $4 if you subscribe. What is going on there? That is a model that only exists in this country. In Europe, newsstand and subscriptions are the same price, as it ought to be.

TSR: What is it about the magazine world that gratifies you the most?

BoSacks: I love being in the thick of it. This has to be one of the most exciting times in the history of information distribution. My first magazine was typeset in hot lead, pretty much what Gutenberg did and we've done for 600 years. Now, in one lifetime we're making these technological evolutionary jumps. It's exciting. I love being around and involved in this part of publishing history. In my lectures, I say, "What Gutenberg did was democratize knowledge." I think this digital process is doing the same thing, democratizing knowledge all over again, empowering and teaching people, giving them access to information that they never had before. The libraries of the world are now available to damn near everybody. Admittedly, you have to have an Internet connection, but the barriers to that connection are fewer and fewer. I love that about what we can do.

TSR: Don't we have a ways to go with finding all that information? It seems to be
pretty well buried.

BoSacks: You're absolutely right. But I'm not sure that anything has really changed.
Before the Internet, let's say 10 or 15 years ago, there were literally millions of books: hard, dead-tree books. How did people find them? They went to a bookstore and asked for recommendations. You need experienced professionals. In those days it was
the bookstore manager, and now you have Web sites and editors of Web sites who
can make recommendations to get you the information you want. Search engines also
are only going to get better. I'm not daunted by the amount of information out there. I think it will continually improve the filtration process, and this may be fee- based, because everything has to revolve around revenue. How do we monetize our information? That's what we do. We own information. We distribute words. How do we place enough value on those words to monetize it?

TSR: So it'll be democratized for those who can afford it?

BoSacks: It's democratized now without the structure. It takes a certain skill set to really find what you want. Anybody can get on Google, put in the name "Bob," and they'll probably get 2 million hits. You want to find Bob Sacks, you have to have the skill set to say, "I want Bob Sacks," and you'll only get 1,000 responses. Of course, if you do put in my name, it will be top of the list. That's just my ego talking.

So it's out there, but as we move forward, I think the question is, what's the next business model going to be? One path may be the cable TV model. People will pay and publishers will sign them up for programs. You can get the basic package, which might include your local newspaper and a magazine of your choice for $6 a month. Then you get the silver package, the gold package, all the way to the platinum package - everything that's been ever printed - for $79 a month. You refine your research, you refine your sources, much like the 500 channels we have now, and combine that with the value of editors. Editors can help you sort and deliver the information that's relevant. I do that for the industry. For my newsletter, I'm the editor, the sorter, the filter. Based on 37 years in the business, I decide what's important to know and I pretty much have a successful handle on what's worth knowing. That's a human intervention.

TSR: What's your long-term prognosis for publishers of information and their business?

BoSacks: The most important thing that publishers need to know is that their franchise is nothing more or nothing less than words and ideas. They don't own paper companies. Publishers don't own computer companies. They sell words. If they put the words in the proper order, those words have value. So they shouldn't care about the distribution path; all they should care about is monetizing their franchise, their franchise's words, and words aren't going to go away. We've been at this a long time. To go way back in history, we used to do cave paintings. That's how we communicated and took out-of-brain memory and shared it. Then we scratched on bones or wooden sticks and passed them on from generation to generation 25,000 years ago. Those were the first books. Then we get into parchment, then Gutenberg, now we're into electronic transmission. We're doing the same thing we've done for 25,000 years. We're reading words. The platform doesn't matter.

BoSacks Speaks Out: This is Very Important

2007-11-04T09:39:00.001-08:00

BoSacks Speaks Out: This is Very Important
by Bosacks
www.bosacks.com

I have received a few letters of late asking me if I could distribute news items that are upbeat and constructive to the printed side of information distribution. That seems a fair request made to a guy who has spent 36 years putting ink in just the right place on a formulation of dead trees, starch and assorted fillers.

My answer is thus: You have no idea how very hard I try to find upbeat, balanced and thoughtful information about our industry. I spend many extra hours each week pounding the internet to find a modicum of "good news". Please make special note here, that there is actually some good news out there once and a while, and when I find it, I pounce on it and send it out. There just isn't enough good news for the dead tree guys, these days.

At the end of the day the truth is the truth. We are a diminishing race. We are not, nor will we be extinct. But we are getting smaller every day. Niche titles will be around for a very long time to come. But they will not be mainstream communication devices. It is never going to turn around and be like it was. There just is no turning back. As my buddy Omar Khayyam once wrote:

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it

So in my writings and my daily newsletter, I am offering a new kind of hope. Nature abhors a vacuum. For every job that is eliminated in print there are even more new jobs created in the digital arena. Look it up. It is in the US census bureau data. Graphics jobs, editorial jobs, production jobs, and jobs we have never heard of. Those jobs are the new frontier. And it is growing by leaps and bounds.

I can't help those that are at the end of their career in a dead industry, who won't help themselves. I too am a dinosaur of sorts. But I have reinvented what I was and have transformed myself into something else. Forward thinking and not wistfully wishing I was still a VP at McCall's Publishing. I will never be a Director of Manufacturing at McCall's again. It is DEAD. gone, finished.

But there is hope for others. There is a huge future out there for those that can see the forest for the trees.

My readership on the most part seems grateful for my honest portrayal of where we are and even more importantly, where we are going. Sometimes I get a note that has a depressed angle to it. I do my best to respond with hope and encouragement.

I have a worldwide audience. I take that as a responsibility to deliver the best most accurate information I can, regardless of the implications.

I make several claims as to who I am and what I know. What I am dead sure of is the future direction of information distribution. The king of the information forest is not tree based life, but silicon based information distribution.

BoSacks Speaks Out: Why the Newsstand is Dead

2007-07-01T19:20:00.001-07:00

BoSacks Speaks Out: Why the Newsstand is Dead
www.bosacks.com

I'm still on the road today after Thursday's big event, but wanted to report in about the successful Periodical and Book Association of America Convention in Philadelphia. I have been to a few PBAA conventions and I always find their focus and energy to create the strong and necessary dialog and idea exchanges between publishers and distributors a noble cause. In my opinion, there are too many important issues that have long been left unanswered, unattended to, and other wise left to linger and rot. The PBAA attempts to correct that general industry oversight.

The big debate between Samir and myself, if I can judge by the ovation at breakfast the next day as a clue to its success, went very well, and I am hoping to receive some unbiased reports from readers as to which side was more convincing. If you were there please send me a report.

Another highlight for me was a conversation and presentation with some Russian distributors. It was a terrific hour of exchanges and insights.

That's some good news of the event. The bad news is that I have seen a damning demonstration of the death of the newsstand in a forum on the last morning. This panel had a national distributor, a national wholesaler, a national retailer, and a publisher. I applaud the open dialog and for that I am very grateful. We need more conversation, not less, about supply-chain and you have to start somewhere. But, why here?

The disconnect for me was amazing and not in a good way. Not if you are hoping for new ideas and the creativity necessary to drive our businesses out of their lengthy doldrums. Although I paraphrase, the conversation went something like this:

We acknowledge that the ship is sinking, but, dear friends and business partners, it is sinking very slowly. We take great pride that we have been sinking slowly for fifteen years. We are adrift on the seas and sales have been flat for so long that flat is starting to look good, something like up, only different. And flat is good, isn't it?

Do you know that when the wholesaler described an interesting and well-thought-out program of efficiency in the newsstand arena that successfully reduced wasted product, yet convincingly provided real data of same percentage of sales, someone on the panel, I don't remember who, was angry that such an operation was even being discussed, let alone put into operation. Yes, that someone had the nerve to say openly the tired, old, mantra, "lower the draw, lower the sale." To that I say, fine, buddy - you go down with the ship. I'm getting off the Titanic and creating a newer, more stable, efficient business model. Anyone that tells you there absolutely cannot be improvement in the print-ten-copies-and-sell-three model is leading you towards a big iceberg in an increasingly digitized sea. Get off now or get off later, it's your decision, but I guarantee you are getting off that ship or sinking with it.

So, this is the death of the magazine newsstand business right before our eyes. The collusion on the stage of non-aggressive thought, the inability to recognize the icebergs, the captains yelling, damn it all, this business is the Titanic and nothing can sink this ship. BoSacks says this ship is headed in the wrong direction and needs to turn mighty quickly.

Would you entice your children to join an industry, any industry, that is barely treading water for a decade and a half and has completely lost the ability to detect up from down.

As I sat there at the breakfast table, I was shocked at some of the inflexible positions and the thought of clinging on to the same business models that have keep us stagnant and without growth for over fifteen years. Yet as annoyed as I was, here was a panel that was attempting to discuss problems long kept in our dark boiler rooms in the bottom of our perspective ships. Here were some industry professionals, in an open forum seeking answers, and in front of their peers. They must get some real credit for that. They agreed to meet again and with that perhaps there will be progress. I can only hope for it.

This industry needs new ideas, new distribution models, greater efficiencies and above all else appropriate leadership for the times. We need captains that are willing to turn the ship and not hit that damned iceberg head on. Only an insane person keeps repeating the same thing over and over again expecting different results. So, I'm asking the industry at large, are you insane or just getting paid too much.

Upton Sinclair said it much better than I, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it".

BoSacks Speaks Out - Printed Magazines as Plastic Records

2007-06-19T19:17:00.001-07:00

"To be a book-collector is to combine the worst characteristics of a dope fiend with those of a miser."
Robertson Davies (Canadian Journalist and Author. 1913-1995)

Printed Magazines Will Follow the Path of the Plastic Record
By BoSacks
Publishing Executive Magazine
http://www.pubexec.com/story/story.bsp?sid=64337&var=story

To paraphrase the sages, publishing is a journey, not a destination. We have been on a very long journey, reaching out to more and more readers as our business models, our technology and our society have progressed and morphed to the challenges and changes of the reading public.

There are enormous new pressures on publishers now, and I think a case can be made that they are different and more complex than ever before. As I stated in a previous column in this magazine, we have been storing out-of-memory text for more than 25,000 years-a very long and noble tradition of teaching and sharing. But where once we had functionally slow and predictable growth strategies, we now seem to have almost instantaneous structural change and a mandatory global outreach program.

As far back as you can go, publishing was always local. Whether it was books, newspapers or magazines, it was a locally constructed, man-made event that required a certain amount of craftsmanship. (Is that term even used anymore?)

That localization included, in almost every case, the "thinking" as well as the physical product. If there was a broader distribution, in most cases it was an aftereffect, not a planned affair.

Until very recently, publishing, writing and printing were handmade products. Until the advent of the typewriter, authorship was constructed by hand with ink and paper.
Even the use of the elegant typewriter was still a process of pecking on a keyboard, which used a mechanical and understandable process of levers and gears to affect the keystroke. I wonder how many of my readers have ever used a typewriter? No, not you geezers-the question really is directed at the younglings.

How many readers understand that paste-up of mechanical boards was just that? Artists took galleys--paper that had typography or ink on paper in columnar, long sheets--spread glue on the back and actually, by hand, pasted the type onto a cardboard sheet, hopefully in an artistic and readable style.

This handmade construct then was photographed by craftsmen, and their product was turned over to a different set of tradesmen, who would, by hand, make printing plates. Then the plates were put, by hand, onto a printing press, and the color adjustments were set, by hand, by a pressman who also was a craftsman of the trade.

So, where am I headed with this nostalgic trip down publishing's man-made history? Magazines are unquestionably printed better and more precisely than ever before. What was once typed or even penned by hand now is instantly spell-checked and corrected without intervention by the author. And the speed of global delivery can be instantaneous if so desired.

In the 21st century, we have a new breed of craftsmanship learning an ever-widening path of information distribution. Where once the written word only was available as ink on paper, we now have a universe of distribution models and methods. There is a debate in our industry about the life and/or death of the printed page. In my opinion, it is an unnecessary debate.

Let me use the music industry as an example. Once, the recorded music industry depended on pressed plastic--records--to reproduce music. Then in 1982, the CD was launched. There were years of transition as the listening public graduated to the new storage system. Now we have MP3s, and the same transformation is taking place. Did you know that there are still audiophiles that cling to the old records as preferable? They are known as the "collectors." And yes, there is still an industry that supports them.

To bring that perspective to the magazine industry, I think we always will have printed magazines, much like we still have plastic records. But the majority of readers eventually will move on to the digital delivery of the printed word with new technology and a globally instant reach. Dead trees with type on them always will be available to the collectors who can afford them, while the general mass of the reading public most likely will pull out their e-paper, and read anything and everything they want to their hearts' content. It's not a matter of if, it's only a matter of when. PE

Bob Sacks (aka BoSacks) is a consultant to the printing/publishing industry and president of The Precision Media Group (www.BoSacks.com). He is publisher and editor of a daily, international e-newsletter, Heard on the Web. Sacks has held posts as director of manufacturing and distribution, senior sales manager (paper), chief of operations, pressman, cameraman and corporate janitor

BoSacks Speaks Out: Selling Ads on the Front Page

2007-06-08T03:56:00.000-07:00

BoSacks Speaks Out: Is it just me, or is the selling of prime real estate on your front cover a betrayal of principles? Whose principles you might ask? Good question. And I don't claim to have the answer. No really, as hard as it is to believe, this time I only have questions.

There are many reasons to be in the publishing business, and surely one of the top two is to make money. I accept that fully, and that is one of the reasons I went into the business in the first place. That being said there should, it seems to me, be some room left over for publishers to exhibit principles, patience, strength of character and display some sound business practices.

Now why do you think the industry is having accountability problems? Could it be because we have long ago abandoned strong principles, reasonable patience, a modicum of character and any resemblance of sound business practices? Well, yes, I think it could.

The selling of the front cover is just one more step in the pitfalls of publishing greed and continuing the downward spiraling loss of integrity.

What's with you guys? Somebody strap a 2x4 to the publisher's spine. What will you sell next - your grandmother? And if you do, will that be an off-rate card sale too?

The reason we are in this mess and have lost our integrity has nothing to do with the Internet. These problems are all self-made. The problem is that somewhere in the past we as an industry sold our affections to the lowest bidder like a street walker. And once down that road, it is very hard to regain your personal integrity or the respect of your past John's.

"Thus were they defiled with their own works, and went a whoring with their own inventions."
The Bible

Fashion Paper Joins Bottom-of-the-Front-Page Club
By PATRICIA WINTERS LAURO
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/07/business/media/07adco.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
With today's issue, Women's Wear Daily, the longtime chronicler of the fashion world, becomes the latest newspaper to sell a piece of valuable real estate: advertising space on its front page.

Women's Wear Daily is running a front-page advertisement, a slim banner promoting a bracelet by Cartier.

A slim banner, about an inch-and-a-half wide, runs across the bottom of the cover and promotes Cartier's Love bracelet, a popular gold band. Not only is the image a familiar one - particularly to fashion-oriented readers of Women's Wear - but the sight of a strip ad on the face of a daily paper is becoming increasingly common, too.

Indeed, the latest debates in journalism seem no longer to be about whether or not it is prudent or ethical to run ads in places they haven't historically appeared, but how to do so in a way that makes the most of the property being sold.

"Women's Wear Daily has had a heritage of creativity when it comes to advertising, and this is moving it to an entirely new place, " said Daniel Lagani, president of the Fairchild Fashion Group, the unit of Advance Publications that owns the paper. "We are making our best real estate available for our best advertisers."

The paper, he said, is following the leads of other newspapers that have opened their cover pages to ads in recent months. The trend was apparent just yesterday in New York, where the free daily Metro New York had a strip ad for Avalon Communities, a rental housing chain, while its rival, amNew York, another free paper, had a so-called cover-wrap - an overleaf featuring the paper's logo and advertising content by a sponsor, in this case, Starbucks. The New York Observer, meanwhile, which recently switched to a tabloid format, arrived on newsstands with a banner ad for Wempe watches and jewelry.
·
So many newspapers are now running advertising on either the front page or the front pages of sections within the newspaper that the phenomenon was labeled "A Fading Taboo" in the headline of an article in the June/July issue of The American Journalism Review. Among the papers that have started accepting front-page ads are The San Francisco Chronicle, The Wall Street Journal, The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Hartford Courant, the article said. Papers that now run ads on section fronts include The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and The Minneapolis Star Tribune.

Journalists lament the trend as a potential sign that the boundaries between editorial and advertising content are weakening, and because the advertisements reduce the amount of prime space for news and feature articles. But front-page ads seem destined to stay, given the declines in advertising and circulation that newspapers have endured in the Internet age. Prominent ads command premium prices.

Edward Nardoza, editor in chief of Women's Wear Daily, said that while journalists would prefer commercial-free front pages forever, ads are acceptable there as long as they are well conceived and pose no ethical conflicts. "We've come to terms that it's part of doing business today," Mr. Nardoza said. "I can't stress enough that it will have no effect at all on the independence of our editorial coverage or our decision-making process. There will be a strict delineation of all editorial material."

Most readers do not find front-page ads intrusive, said Gilbert Bailon, president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors and the publisher and editor of Al Día, a Spanish language newspaper in Texas.

"People are bombarded with advertising every day, from their cellphones to the Internet and every other way - seeing a front page ad strip isn't going to move the earth," he said. "I think some hard-core readers won't like it, but they get adjusted very quickly."
·
Timing, and not desperation, led Women's Wear Daily to its decision to introduce a front-page ad, Mr. Lagani of Fairchild said. The paper did run smaller black-and-white ads called tombstones at the bottom of the front page until the 1970s, for companies like Jantzen and Peter Pan Fashions. In 2000, it ran some cover-wraps with ads for Gucci. The new front-page banners will be limited, Mr. Lagani said, to prevent overexposure.
"In the case of Women's Wear Daily, business has never been better," he said. "This is simply a smart business decision."

He would not say how much the Cartier ads cost, but said the paper charged a premium for the prime space and required a commitment to a package that included a full-page ad inside the paper and a series of ads on the Women's Wear Web site.

The Web site component was a draw for Cartier, which strives to be a trendsetter among luxury retailers on the Web, said Frédéric de Narp, president and chief executive of Cartier North America. Cartier advertises on Yahoo, MSN.com and other sites, and the ads on wwd.com link to Cartier's own site, where the company plays up its designation of June 8 as "love day." On that day, Cartier will give 10 percent of sales of the Love collection to charity.

Mr. Bailon of Al Día, who started accepting front-page ads shortly after starting the paper four years ago, said that journalists should look on the bright side of the trend. "Every company has to find new ways to develop revenue, and this is an opportunity," he said. "If this is the new way, then you have to give a serious look."

BoSacks Speaks Out: MRI Audience Numbers

2007-05-25T03:47:00.000-07:00

BoSacks Speaks Out: OK, Call me a skeptic, call me a curmudgeon, you can even call me a dinosaur, but don't call me a believer in the lost city of Atlantis or absurdly grotesque phantom circulation figures. Even if it's true that that the statistics say that Handgun Magazine gets 47.1 readers per copy, it ain't so. That is more than one new person reading each printed copy every day of the month. Are these office copies left in some doctor's office? Perhaps they are from the firing range. I get it, it's the guys sitting around the 'ol cracker barrel sharing their single copy of the magazine. Sorry, I just don't buy the premise.

"I'm not going to lie. . . The only stat that counts is if you win games. I understand that, but still, I don't want my stats to look bad or not be up to par."
Michael Vick

First Half 2007 MRI Audience Numbers Released

By Bill Mickey

http://foliomag.com/viewmedia.asp?prmMID=7732

Small-circ enthusiast magazines have astonishing reader-per-copy rates.

Top-line spring readership data detailing circulation, audience and readers per copy for 254 titles for the first half of 2007 were released yesterday by media and consumer research firm Mediamark Research Inc. (MRI). The data presents an interesting opportunity to examine the relationships of these numbers. For example, according to MRI's data, there is a huge disparity between readers per copy figures for small enthusiast magazines and large mass-market titles.

The widest stretch from circulation to readers per copy, according to MRI, belongs to Handguns, which has a circulation of 114,000 and an astonishing 47.15 readers per copy, bringing total audience to 5.4 million. And, in general, the smaller enthusiast publications dominate in readers per copy, with the top ten titles in this category below 300,000 circulation.

But MRI arrives at the reader per copy category by dividing audience figures, which MRI generates, into circulation figures, which ABC or BPA provide. "We're pulling the audience [data] from our own study. We're pulling the circulation from either ABC or BPA, and we're dividing the readers that we obtain from our survey by the claimed circulation," says Julian Baim, chief research officer at MRI. "Handguns, for whatever reason, that number is on the exceptionally high side. We measure audience and then we take the circulation statement from either ABC or BPA and we take one and divide by the other."

Baim says that MRI measures audience by surveying consumers across a number of factors, including subscribers, single-copy purchasers, pass-along readers and public-place readers.

The figures in the report do not include electronic or digital copies of the magazines as reported on ABC statements. And Circulation figures are based on ABC and BPA publishers' statements.

Also interesting to note: AARP The Magazine, the largest circulation magazine in the U.S. at 23,171,000, has an audience of 31.5 million. Yet Meredith's Better Homes and Gardens, at a 7.7 million circulation, has an audience of 38 million. This is because AARP is almost flat in their readers per copy category at 1.36, according to MRI figures, while Better Homes and Gardens has almost 5 readers per copy.

In a separate release, AARP The Magazine compared its 31.5 million audience reach to YouTube (30 million U.S. audience), iPods (30 million units sold) and The Oprah Winfrey Show (30 million viewers).

Top Five Circulation

Magazine
Circulation
Audience
Readers Per Copy

AARP The Magazine
23,171,000
31,492,000
1.36

Reader's Digest
10,178,000
36,880,000
3.62

Better Homes and Gardens
7,698,000
38,037,000
4.94

Consumer Reports
5,000,000
18,131,000
3.63

National Geographic
4,732,000
31,284,000
6.61

Top Five Audience

Magazine
Audience
Circulation
Readers Per Copy

People
42,375,000
3,793,000
11.17

Better Homes and Gardens
38,037,000
7,698,000
4.94

Reader's Digest
36,880,000
10,178,000
3.62

AARP The Magazine
31,492,000
23,171,000
1.36

National Geographic
31,284,000
4,732,000
6.61

Top Five Readers Per Copy

Magazine
Readers Per Copy
Circulation
Audience

Handguns
47.15
114,000
5,375,000

Sport Truck
35.26
71,000
2,503,000

Popular Hot Rodding
29.92
117,000
3,501,000

Stock Car Racing
29.76
91,000
2,708,000

Bridal Guide
24.56
178,000
4,372,000

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BoSacks Speaks Out: Paid Circ Is What Matters

2007-05-16T17:17:00.001-07:00

BoSacks Speaks Out: Paid Circ Is What Matters

Well, here you have it. Right out of the very mouths that feeds us. Please read this article and think about our pursuit of metric changes. And while you're mulling it over . . . I have these two statements for you from the article below:

" . . . our business decisions, like yours, are driven by facts and results,"

Publishers of newspapers and magazines have tried to shift advertisers' focus to overall audience from the established metric, paying subscribers and newsstand buyers.

Get that? . . . The advertisers want facts and results . . They want paying buyers and paid subscribers . . . not fluff, not subterfuge, and surely not smoke and mirrors.

So it seems that we need to look deeply within ourselves and our current business models to deliver what is increasingly becoming the demand and mantra of advertisers and media buyers: Accountability
-30-

"Bush, Congress, the mayor - each of them are symptoms of a bigger problem, that we don't have accountability for disasters or challenges of this scale. That's all the public wants in trying times - accountability."
Michael Chertoff

Macy's Ad Chief to Newspapers: Paid Circ Is What Matters
At NAA: Readership May Be Up, but Macy's Wants to Target
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- When the latest round of newspaper circulation reports again revealed that paid circulation was continuing to fall, industry advocates pointed out that newspaper readership -- including websites and pass-along copies -- is growing. But Macy's ad chief told newspaper executives today that paid circulation still matters more.

Winning ad dollars, says Macy's Anne MacDonald, requires one thing above all: 'You need to be winning in the marketplace.'

That's because the brand wants to reach its target customer repeatedly and through a platform that matters to her, said Anne MacDonald, president-CMO, Macy's corporate marketing, during a talk at the annual Newspaper Association of America conference. "What we try and do is make sure that we talk to her on a continuous basis," she said.

Not swayed by emotion
Earlier Ms. MacDonald told the crowd she is an "absolute newspaper junkie" and wants to see the business regain its footing. "But our business decisions, like yours, are driven by facts and results," she said. "And they can't be driven by emotion or personal predilection."

Winning ad dollars, she said, requires one thing above all: "You need to be winning in the marketplace."

Publishers of newspapers and magazines have tried to shift advertisers' focus to overall audience from the established metric, paying subscribers and newsstand buyers. Part of the drive reflects growing research suggesting that eyeballs are eyeballs -- as they are in other media -- regardless if anyone paid 50 cents, a dollar or $5 for a publication. But it also dovetails with the reality that free readership, particularly online, is the one circulation measure showing growth.

The perspective from Macy's is particularly important because its parent, Federated Department Stores, buys more than $1 billion in measured media each year, including around $830 million worth of newspaper space. But Federated and Macy's are increasingly looking at national TV and magazines over its stores' traditional homes such as spot TV and newspapers.

Leveraging content online
Ms. MacDonald agreed that newspapers' online plays are important, to the point that publishers' frantic recent efforts aren't close to sufficient. "You need to be much, much more aggressive in leveraging your content online," she said.

But turning around paid circulation declines will require an advertiser's approach, Ms. MacDonald said. "Newspaper will need to think more like brands and more like marketers," she said. "Show the consumer the value in your reports and your columnists."

---------------------------------------------------

Macy's to Newspapers: Engage Audiences

By Seth Sutel, AP Business Writer
Macy's Chief Marketing Officer Delivers Tough Love Speech to Newspapers

NEW YORK (AP) -- The chief marketing officer of Macy's department stores delivered tough talk to the newspaper industry Tuesday, telling a publishing conference why her company is moving ad dollars to other media such as TV, magazines and the Internet. Anne MacDonald, a self-proclaimed newspaper "junkie" who keeps stacks of them around her home and reads several each day, told publishers they need to do more to win back business from Macy's, which is part of Federated Department Stores Inc.

With Macy's now a national brand following Federated's acquisition of May Department Stores, the chain is turning increasingly to media with a national reach such as fashion magazines, television and Web sites, she said.

Newspapers are still effective at delivering local messages, she said, but need to do more to engage Macy's shoppers -- primarily women aged 18- 54.

"In order for your newspapers to be winning our advertising dollars, you need to be winning in the marketplace, and that's not currently the case," MacDonald said in a keynote talk at the conference held by the Newspaper Association of America.

Analysts and investors have long been concerned about the decline in ad spending by department stores, and in particular Macy's, as they become national brands and less likely to use local media such as newspapers. Also, newspapers have been struggling with declining circulation and ad dollars as more people get their news online.

Among MacDonald's several suggestions for change was for newspapers to collaborate more effectively across regions and with each other in selling advertising, which would allow national companies such as Macy's to reach a broader audience.

As it is, individual ad buyers for Macy's stores deal with individual newspapers on advertising plans. "That's not productive for either of us," MacDonald said.

She pointed to her own industry, department stores, which had to undergo significant changes over the past several years to adapt to competition from online stores, television shopping channels, big box retailers and discounting clubs.

Macy's, she said, is seeking to establish itself as a more upscale, fashionable brand and drive foot traffic even when there aren't promotions, and is still trying to understand how customers are changing the ways they shop. "Like us, you must change the way you think," she said.

MacDonald pointed to the example of her two favorite sections of her hometown newspaper, The New York Times. Every week she pulls out the science and dining sections and reads them first.

If the Times were to somehow deliver those sections to her wrapped on the outside, she would be impressed that the publisher had learned something about her reading habits, she said.

She also issued a plea to publishers to collaborate with advertisers on research to better understand the rapidly evolving habits of their customers. The idea was immediately embraced by Jack Sweeney, publisher of the Houston Chronicle, who asked MacDonald how to find out what questions they needed answered.

Mark Contreras, senior vice president for newspapers at E.W. Scripps Co., called MacDonald's remarks a "very thoughtful call to action for newspapers to pay very close attention to. .. . We have the wherewithal to meet many of their needs."

BoSacks Speaks Out: The $70 Magazine!

2007-05-16T17:12:00.000-07:00

"Such labored nothings, in so strange a style, Amaze th' unlearned, and make the learned smile"
Alexander Pope (English Poet, 1688-1744)

BoSacks Speaks Out: Thanks to my author- friend David Renard, I have been introduced to the style press phenomenon. Until David actually grabbed me by the sleeve and showed me, I will confess that I had no idea there were large stores selling magazines for $89 and up, hundreds of them. That is right, a whole newsstand store of magazines with price tags that would boggle the mind of the average publisher. Just to be very clear, that price I mentioned of $89 is for each issue. And that was not the most expensive . . . not by a long shot.

Having a strong manufacturing background, I have to tell you that for that kind of pricing I was mighty disappointed in the printing quality of most of them. They were OK, but at that price level I would have expected more. . . much more.

Anyway, not only do they have magazines at these price levels but David tells me that the sell through rates are much higher than our industry standard.

So Mr. and Ms. Publisher. . . What do you make of that? Here is where Mr. Magazine will be correct about the future of magazines. Expensive niche printed publishing only for those who can afford it.

Have you got an opinion on any of this? I would love to hear it.

The $70 Magazine! Boutique Glossies Rampant in Soho
by Nicholas Boston
http://thebridalblog.observer.com/2007/70-magazine- boutique-glossies-rampant-soho

The new issue of aRUDE, an outsized independent style and culture magazine, is offering something new for its cover price of $9.95: empty pages. It's a "vanity issue dedicated to Paris Hilton," said its Nigerian- born editor and publisher, Iké Udé. Save for a Mondrian-inspired centerfold collage of the socialite herself, the issue contains only page after page of empty space, punctuated with questions to the reader. "Is she a genius because she works smart and not necessarily hard?" "Aren't you jealous of her?" "Who should she marry?" Readers are instructed to fill in the blank space with their answers, artwork and any shout-outs to or about Ms. Hilton, then to return this material in the envelopes provided to aRUDE's headquarters on 17th Street in Chelsea, where the content will be scanned and re-edited into a "real" magazine, to be re-issued in late summer.

"We want to democratize the editorial contribution in a magazine framework, where it's open to readers to become creators," said the Nigerian-born Mr. Udé, whose contributors include the professional dandy and partygoer Patrick McDonald, F.I.T. professor Valerie Steele and reedy Russian model Larissa Kulikova. "It's kind of like"-you know what's coming- "a blog in print, in a way."

Just what is the deal with those expensive downtown glossies like aRUDE, euphemistically referred to as the "style press"?

"It's a term that came out of France, where magazines that were high-end boutique magazines would be called la presse de style," said David Renard, author of the recently released book The Last Magazine (Universe), in which he argues that the survival of the magazine-publishing industry at large lies in innovations made by the independents. "But instead of just being style as in fashion, style in essence means more design, in a sense, or trendy or cool."

Lafayette Smoke Shop, located at the corner of Lafayette and Spring, is a hotbed of the pricey publications. "All tourists; many, many tourists" is how the store's manager described his clientele-along with the moneyed Soho residents who need to fill coffee-table space, of course.

"I bought one called SOON, in Chinese, French and in English-$70 cover price!" said Samir Husni, chair of the journalism department at the University of Mississippi and author of the annual Samir Husni's Guide to New Magazines, now in its 22nd year. "You can tell that those boutique magazines are done for the people within the industry, rather than the people outside the industry. It's a celebration of our inner circle. Most of them you can find in New York, but the minute you reach Des Moines, they're gone!"

But most of the style press is sustained not by newsstand sales but from ads taken out by-and sometimes custom-designed by-high-end fashion houses, retailers and other luxury brands. "There's no way they can make money without advertising," Mr. Renard said. "They'd have to be selling at $20, $30 a piece-sometimes that's impossible! They want to keep the American concept of low prices."

To get the most desirable advertisers, editors have to woo first-rate style mavens, photographers and graphic designers-usually friends or friends of friends-to contribute work for free. ("Diane"-as in von Furstenberg-"will always take out an ad with us," Mr. Udé said.) Then they have to get the finished product into the right hands. "In New York, with the right wholesaler for New York City, you can make 500 copies look like you are everywhere. Everywhere!" Mr. Renard said. "To whom? To the advertisers and to the tribe that you're trying to attract, let's say the downtown 'cool set.' Only 500 copies-that's 30 stores."

Most of the magazines are primarily visual, repositories for art photography. One exception is 032c, published by partners Jörg Koch and Sandra von Mayer-Myrtenhain out of Berlin; the latest issue, which will retail for $20.99, arrives in New York at the end of May and contains lengthy essays on contemporary art and politics. "Readers are editors, artists, gallerists, architects, students at Columbia and N.Y.U., and, of course, fashion people- designers, P.R., photographers, stylists," Mr. Koch said of his shiny export.

Trace ($5.99) is one title that has extended its brand beyond print. In 2003, the magazine started Trace TV, a cable-television channel in France, which is now available in the U.S. on the Dish Network. In Trace's editorial offices on Broome Street, editors converse in a kind of lingua universale, lapsing from English into French and occasionally Spanish, with intermittent exclamations in other tongues. Editor in chief Claude Grunitzky, 36, the son of a West African diplomat who himself speaks six languages, founded the magazine in 1996 in modest digs in London. Over the next 10 years, he relocated the operation to downtown Manhattan and morphed into a kind of style-press mogul. The magazine is now published in three separate editions-American, British and French- with each distributed to appropriate linguistic markets worldwide. Mr. Grunitzky calls himself a "cross-cultural guru."

"When you look at these 'style press,' what they give us is the cornerstone from which we can build the future for print," Mr. Husni grandly claimed. "Because those magazines cannot exist or have the impact that they have if they existed in any other medium - not online, not on TV."

At any rate, Mr. Udé eagerly awaits the results of his little editorial experiment. "It's not easy to do this," he said. "But thank God it's not easy! If it would be easy, then every Dick and Harry would be doing it."

BoSacks Readers Speak Out: On Mr. Magazine, Time Inc, MPA, Editorial Integrity, and More

2007-05-13T17:38:00.000-07:00

BoSacks Speaks Out: Mia Culpa

Friends, I have received dozens of letters and even a few phone calls from long time readers asking me about my missing vents, prognostications, and poignant punditry.

What happened to the irregularly regular BoSacks Speaks Out?

I have plenty of excuses but none of them really work.

I think the true line in the sand for me was drawn with my entry into political life. When I got elected as a town councilman, I had no idea how all consuming it could become. The previous roll models that went before me spent little or no time between meetings, preparing and working for the future of the town. So I figured I could do nothing a whole lot better than those guys, who are doing nothing.

But actually, I have taken a decidedly different approach. If you will allow me the bravado, I have taken a typical Bo-Approach to governance, and that would include speaking out, and working very hard on many town issues. Duh! What a surprise?

So how much speaking out, and in how many venues can one man achieve? I don't really know. But I have seen less speaking out in my newsletter and more speaking out in my town.

All that being said, I will do my best to return to the forefront of media venting, wherever it seems necessary, pontificating whenever possible, and prognosticating as the future unveils it's unexpected twists and turns.
BoSacks
-30-

PS: As an FYI - -I have completely reorganized my web site. It now has a wealth of new information and is updated daily with news items that are very important but just didn't make the cut for the daily newsletter. It also has the often asked for archive of old articles and Bo- Rants. It has updated information on everything we do for a living, and some things we don't do, including dozens of excellent media/publishing links. It is still a work in progress and I hope you enjoy it.

I have come to the conclusion that politics are too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.
Charles De Gaulle (1890 - 1970)

BoSacks Readers Speak Out: On the MPA, Editors, Integrity, Time Inc, Circ, Ads and More
http://www.bosacks.co m

Re: BoSacks Speaks Out: GM Wants More Newspaper Advertorials
. . . my company doesn't do advertorial. Ever. I throw a screaming fit at any (potential) advertiser that even suggests it. In fact, I've been known to pillory books put out by our largest advertisers (when they deserve it.) Our readers trust us for it. Readers come first.
(Submitted by a Publisher)

Re: BoSacks Speaks Out: GM Wants More Newspaper Advertorials
hey, didn't that pcworld editor get canned for not running favorable articles? an advertorial is where you bribe the sales staff with money and free content. A p.r. placement is where you bribe them with lunch. :)
(Submitted by an Industry Consultant)

Re: If They Write It, Will They Come?
"Gannett has done more than any other newspaper company to incorporate user-generated content in its Web sites," he said, and I'm sure he's right. They're also doing it in the daily printed paper: "Hey, write to us about your experience of the Easter egg hunt." [If we can't afford journalists, we'll get the public to do the work for nothing.] And a self-respecting fish wouldn't want to be wrapped in the once world-famous Des Moines Register.
(Submitted by Writer)

Re: If They Write It, Will They Come?
You need people who can tell stories well and who understand enough about what they cover to see and convey what is most touching and interesting. Saying "give me user-generated, high-quality content" is all well and good, but just how many editors do you have to sift through all the crap that will come in? Hell, they spend tons of time sifting through what staff and freelance writers generate. This is abdication in the name of relevance that is actually an admission of incapability. People like this don't know what to do, so they come up with something that sounds good. So follow the model and you're still screwed, because you're working on the assumption that the essence of what you've done and chosen to do is right, even if the mechanism is wrong. If readers are the ones to tell the stories, then what are the papers there for? No wonder circulation is down.
(Submitted by a Writer)

Re: Editor re-instated after dispute with PC World
As one of the angry protesters in writing to PC World hoping they would realized that in sacrificing the integrity of their editor they were sacrificing the integrity of their brand and there are few faster paths to destruction I think McCracken's return is a cause to cheer for all of us who believe journalism is first about integrity. Let this lesson be both to Editors, for gods' sake have the courage to stand up for what you know is right, and for Ad executives (or Conde Nast Webisode producers) to realize that if we sell away the integrity of journalism our industry will be forever damaged . . . . and become TV.
(Submitted by a Senior Director)

Re: Editor re-instated after dispute with PC World
Wow! Integrity wins! And the supreme judge in this case was at the top of the company food chain! There IS practical value to virtue. Always has been.
(Submitted by a Senior Sales Rep - Retired)

Re: Editor re-instated after dispute with PC World
Bo, you are wrong about this one. Integrity has nothing to do with it. All this is a reaction to a strong readership out cry.
It still boils down to chasing the almighty dollar and nothing to do with management making the correct decision with any integrity.
(Submitted by a Senior editor)

Re: Editor re-instated after dispute with PC World
Great - the guy who saw the future and said that it's pandering to the advertisers is again the one in charge of online. Now wasn't it an IDG executive who noted a month or two ago that online was their future? In the long run, I'm not sure that this sounds like integrity winning over sales. It's more a case of, "Oh, how embarrassing, and in public no less."
(Submitted by a Senior Director of Mfg and Dst)

Re: Editor re-instated after dispute with PC World
Integrity is for underpaid suckers . . . and the world is filled with them.
(Submitted by a Sales Rep)

Re: NEWS FLASH * * * Elimination of Publishers Periodical Rates for Foreign Subscribers
it can't be the stupidest thing. claiming to not be a government agency while operating like one is dumber yet! Zinio and adobe must be behind this particular change :)
(Submitted by an Industry Consultant)

Re: NEWS FLASH * * * Elimination of Publishers Periodical Rates for Foreign Subscribers.
Unfortunately this is not new news but seems to have been over looked by many. Many printers will not offer ISAL, so re-mailers or first class international may be the only options. The postal service is also eliminating air and surface letter post.

REMINDER:
You cannot mail Periodicals foreign and Canadian mail after 12:01 AM May 14.
You must make other arrangements for this mail.
(Submitted by a Postal Director)

Re: Newsweek Editor: 'Dead Tree' Magazines Will Continue
Bob: As a former Newsweeker, I feel Meacham is correct; there will always be a future and a place for good, timely, relevant writing. Newsweeklies have the advantage of pictures and graphics to support their editorial, but the writer still needs to follow the NPR maxim: 'Can you see what I'm saying?'

4,000 words is about 3,700 more than I care to read from a computer screen. There are some ideas that cannot be sufficiently concentrated and packaged onto one page. The answer is simple. Print the article and read it at your leisure. I guess that is why people continue to buy print.
(Submitted by a Print Salesperson)

RE: Newsweek Editor: 'Dead Tree' Magazines Will Continue
Prediction 1: "Green" magazines and catalogs will not be printed on recycled, de-inked, or FSC certified paper. They just won't be printed at all.

Prediction 2: Before the end of 2007, the "disposable celebrity" bubble is going to burst. This category is soley responsible for the strength of the newsstand performance. I spend about $50 on the newsstand every month, and before I discovered the guilty pleasure of various "celebretard" websites, there was always a representative mix of this category in my briefcase. I haven't purchased one issue of a Bauer weekly in months. I'm actually spending more on magazines than before, but my purchases are in completely different categories.

I work with the paper industry and have (for the past 10 years) been trying to help my clients find ways to make print relevant. I NEED your service. You do a fantastic job.
(Submitted by a Paper Person)

Re: Why "Mr. Magazine" canceled his Newsweek subscription
I never thought I'd say this (I haven't always been a fan of Mr. Magazine) but this article is right on. In my market, at least, there are NO online competitors that actually make money. (The largest websites in our market are strictly not-for-profit and carry no advertising whatsoever.) Our readers are our customers, not our advertisers. We should do what our readers want, and the advertisers will follow.
(Submitted by a Publisher)

Re: Why "Mr. Magazine" canceled his Newsweek subscription
It's the number one reason our industry is in freefall. ALL our problems -- lack of interest in our products, newsstand sellthrough decline, phantom circulation (or just plain circ fraud) which leads to lack of trust by advertisers in our product -- all of these stem from one primary failure:
not serving our readers first.
I've been in this industry for over a decade, and it still amazes me to see how people in this business abuse their customers. None of my titles exceeds 25% advertising (I sell out an issue and say "try next time" if we are about to exceed 25%) . We screen our advertisers heavily (for example requiring written references for personal/professional services like psychic readers -- common in our market.) We mail in envelopes to protect reader privacy. We never, ever sell or rent our list. And our readers have responded by incredible loyalty and support. People will respect you if you respect them.

More and more, I see "industry experts" in Folio and elsewhere recommending the policies we have thought were purely common decency (as above) and have followed for years. Hopefully, it's not too late to save our industry. Thanks for a wealth of great information,
(Submitted by a Publisher)

Re: Why "Mr. Magazine" canceled his Newsweek subscription
As a former client, I can vouch for the fact that Samir is really the most knowledgeable magazine guy in the world!!!!!!
(Submitted by a Publisher)

Re: Why "Mr. Magazine" canceled his Newsweek subscription
Bo, I think you and Samir are the two brightest light bulbs in the industry. I've had many a conversation with fellow publishers about you. We all agree, that you bring needed fresh air into some very stagnant smoke filled rooms. The MPA, ABC, BPA and all the others, need your criticisms and your approach to our problems. Please keep up the good work and the continued pressure you apply by speaking out.
(Submitted by a Senior Publisher)

It’s All in the Delivery

2007-05-04T05:30:00.000-07:00

It’s All in the Delivery

In 25,000 years, nothing has really changed except the method of sharing content.

No matter how far back in history you go, humans have captured the moment and written it down, somewhere. Whether you look at the 25,000-year-old Ishango baton from the Congo that recorded a six-month lunar calendar, which was the first known non-cerebral memory device, now called a book … or the cave paintings of France … or the scrolls of the Library of Alexandria … or the retooled olive press of Mr. Gutenberg, you couldn’t find a more interesting and complex period of our industry, of information distribution, than now. OK, maybe Mr. Gutenberg’s era was pretty exciting too.

From the moment movable type was invented till just a few years ago our path was crystal clear and unavoidable. Gutenberg created movable type from soft metal, and an industry was born from the rapid distribution of information.

Did you know he swore his printing partners to secrecy? And upon their deaths, the contract read that the “idea and process” of movable type defaulted back to Gutenberg and his heirs. Nice try, Johannes. Too bad that he died in poverty. Imagine that—the man who invented the world’s first real mass-information distribution system dies in poverty.

An Irresistible Force
The growth of the printing press and the distribution of information was an irresistible force, whose only combatant at the time was ignorance and what seems to us now extremely limited technology.

Of course that limitation is only apparent to us as we look back with tremendous hindsight. The technology of that day was nothing less than amazing, as is our reaching out to the stars. It took a single scribe over a year to copy a single book. Did you know that it took 200 to 300 sheepskins to make a bible? And there was no “preflighting” and “spell checking” to make sure that the scribe got it right.

But Gutenberg could turn out hundreds of books in a week, each one identical to the next. So it is not hard to envision the exponential growth of … well, everything. You no longer needed old wise men to learn from. You didn’t need to be an apprentice. You could learn anything and everything from a book.

Well, we all know the story of how the first book was a bible. But do you know what the very next books were? The topics were exactly the same things that are popular today. Craft books, then scientific books, then the explosion of thought and free thinking.

The printing press reduced the cost of books, increased their availability and encouraged the spread of literacy. It helped alter the economic, scientific and ideological outlooks for the next five centuries. It must have spread something like a virus, and the net result was that it democratized knowledge. And that is no small thing. Yes, that is the business Gutenberg was in, and so are you.

From Storytellers to E-tellers
We have gone from the storytellers of the oral tradition and cave paintings to memory devices like batons and parchment scribed by hand. We have gone from the printing press to new forms of electronic communication. Each new development in the history of communication has always further democratized the delivery of information. Nothing has really changed, except the method of delivery.

So if you think about it, printing on dead trees is no longer the only way of reproducing books and magazines. The process of reading, however, has not changed an iota; it is the same as it has always been.

We are still reading exactly the same way we did 25,000 years ago—we are still mentally interpreting written symbols. We are exploring new ways to do the same things the Ishango shaman did. Capturing ideas, storing it outside of the brain, and passing it on to other humans. Nothing has changed in 25,000 years except the method of delivery. PE

Bob Sacks (aka BoSacks) is a consultant to the printing/publishing industry and president of The Precision Media Group (www.BoSacks.com). He is publisher and editor of a daily, international e-newsletter, Heard on the Web. Sacks has held posts as director of manufacturing and distribution, senior sales manager (paper), chief of operations, pressman, cameraman and corporate janitor.

BoSacks Speaks Out: Where are Today's Mentors?

2007-05-02T12:23:00.001-07:00

"If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader."
John Quincy Adams (American 6th US President (1825-29), eldest son of John Adams, 2nd US president. 1767-1848)

BoSacks Speaks Out: Where are Today's Mentors?
By BoSacks
Publishing Executive Magazine
http://www.pubexec.com/story/story.bsp? sid=48494&var=story

In these pages I have pontificated many times about the positive nature and direction of our industry, about the belief that we are headed to a new golden age of publishing, and that new technologies should be considered the friend of information distributors. But there is one aspect in this new world environment that has me worried and concerned. It is the area of mentorship where, it seems to me, we have fallen behind and by that loss as an industry we have been greatly diminished.

What has happened? When and where did we loose the skill set and the will to teach the younglings? Have we so trimmed our business models and our work force that there is just no time to teach and mentor? Have we lost sight of the power of the properly groomed apprentice? Is there just not enough time now with the diminished workforces to add the burden of schooling for the future?

I do not know how to quantify the value of a properly mentored apprentice except through my own experience. But I know that as I passed up the corporate ladder, each of my teachers built upon the foundation of the other guild members that went before them. And I can tell you this, having been a mentor myself, there is a tremendous joy in the successful transfer of knowledge and power.

I have had the great pleasure to be mentored by supervisors, many of whom were great leaders in an era that fostered and promoted genuine leadership. Today I am paying homage to the process and naming names of those friends and giants.

For me, Vito Coliprico, (NY Times Magazine Group), Lowell Logan (McCall's Publishing) and Irving Herschbein (Conde Nast) were giants in their day and took the time to reach out to a young and inquisitive subordinate. The results of their tutorship is the man who stands before you. I have attempted to return the favor to them and the industry by using the technology of the day to mentor others, through my e-newsletter, and my column in this magazine.

Without mentorship we are collectively less than we might have been. It is the aggregate of this loss that will be felt and perhaps is being felt now. Who are the leaders of your corporation? Who are the genuine leaders of this industry? I don't mean who is your immediate supervisor or who is the CEO - those are just job titles. I am asking, where is the leadership? A generation ago if you asked anyone in publishing who the leaders were, the names I mentioned above would be high on the list. Who is on the real leadership list now?

We have many problems ahead of us as an industry. We will need good leaders to provide direction. If you think about it, we are trying to prepare publishing personnel for jobs that don't yet exist. These publishing students will be using technologies and concepts that haven't yet been invented, and they will be trying to find the solutions to problems we don't even know are problems yet. What we can do is take the time to teach our subordinates to think and reason. We can teach them to take reasonable risks. We can teach them to be leaders.

Here is an idea taken and amended from my mentor Vito Colaprico. Each and every one of you should start a "publishing school" in your company. It doesn't matter how big or small your company is. It could meet once a week or once a month. Here is how it works.

All magazines have the basic components of editing, production, ad selling, ad management, circulation and distribution. In most corporations there are walls around those functions. I say it is time to breakdown those walls. Have the apprentices teach their disciplines to the apprentices of the other departments. What happens is, in order to teach you must learn your own skill set first. In order to teach, you must learn to stand up in front of a group and be articulate. The learning of your own field and the capacity to teach it is the start of leadership skills.

The byproduct of this process is the cross-pollination of skill sets. Various departments will have comprehension of exactly what the guys in the other departments in fact do for a living. This will promote a greater team spirit throughout the company and facilitate unimagined efficiencies, and perhaps even camaraderie. And among those students will be the leadership of tomorrow that we so desperately need today.

Where the Heck is the Industry Going?

2007-05-02T12:16:00.000-07:00

Where the Heck is the Industry Going?
By BoSacks
www.bosacks.com

As an industry, who are we, where are we going, and will we recognize ourselves when we get there? This rant is intended to be a look in the media mirror—call it a “State of the Union” address of sorts.

There has been a lot of news, conjecture and posturing about what the media industry may be morphing into. These changes are not only affecting the industry, but the psyche of the people who work in it. As I travel around the country, I see some members of our industry who are terrified, some who are exhilarated, some who are fearful of losing their jobs, and some who have already lost them. On the other hand, some are adapting to new business models and thriving.

Where are you in this cycle?

There is wild positive speculation mixed in with some doom, gloom and panic. My good friend and industry analyst Dr. Joe Webb says that some people call him Dr. Doom for stating the facts of an industry in transition. Dr. Joe and I forecast change, but in no way do we forecast doom. In fact, I see it in the opposite light. It is an era of tremendous opportunity and growth for electronically coordinated information distributors (publishers).

Look at the past 10 years. Ten years ago, we were arguing about whether or not digital plate-making was a good idea. Ten years ago, we were wondering what the heck a PDF was, and why we would ever use it. Ten years ago—that’s right only 10 years ago—the Internet was in its infancy. Ten years ago, we all had job security.

But, one thing has not changed in 10 years. Publishers still hire writers and editors. Production personnel still format the information, and send it to vendors for global distribution.

You could say that nothing has changed except the speed and mechanism of delivery.

The underlying conclusion is that we, as an industry, will not be going out of business. We have a fine and honorable future ahead of us, just not quite as we knew it. So what? It is time to get used to it. Your career depends on you adapting to these inevitable facts of change.

Printing ink on paper is a science. Analog publishers had to learn and fine-tune that science to distribute their products. Now, in the Internet age, there are several methods of distributing content. It is still nothing more nor less than a science. This new technology is actually an advantage to publishers and their age-old franchise of information distribution.

Are people getting laid off all over the place? Yes, but new jobs are being created just as fast, if not faster. Page make-up and design is off the scale in actual growth, even production jobs are up, but not producing only ink-on-paper products. Writers are still writing, editors are still editing, and publishers are still publishing, but in new creative mediums, as well as old ones. Even printers are still printing, but they are consolidating like crazy and trying to establish a new survival mode in preparation of the “screenager” years, when today’s tech-savvy teens enter the adult consumer market.

Eventually, even the screenagers will grow up and be expected to perform in the work force. They will grow up with some type of real bona fide reading. The lawyers can’t practice law, the doctors can’t doctor, and the engineers can’t engineer without real reading. And they will be reading what publishers publish. There still will be money to be made with words that have meaning that equates to value.

Bob Sacks (aka BoSacks) is a consultant to the printing/publishing industry and president of The Precision Media Group (www.BoSacks.com). He is publisher and editor of a daily, international e-newsletter, “Heard on the Web.” Sacks has held posts as director of manufacturing and distribution, senior sales manager (paper), chief of operations, pressman, cameraman and corporate janitor.

BoSacks Speaks Out: On Publishing Prognosticators

2007-05-01T14:11:00.001-07:00

BoSacks Speaks Out: On Publishing Prognosticators

Perhaps I have finally been in the publishing business long enough (30 Years) to reach the state of sage-ability. At this time we are obviously experiencing a negative, if somewhat common, business trend. I say common because from a historical perspective it's clear this happens on a regular basis. It's not fun, it's hard on everyone, but it is an oft-repeated event. To deny its reoccurrence is ridiculous. We have had large downturns before and we will have them again. Unless you really believe that America is going out of business, there is nothing to fear but the fear of being laid off.

I have been laid off in other bad economic times and now I'm a self-appointed publishing sage. Bad times like this happen, in fact must happen, at least once in a while. It is hard on me and no doubt hard on you. But to think that we are going to just ride some alchemist's pipe dream of growth upon growth upon more extended growth is no less foolish than turning lead type into golden bestsellers.

The following article is gloomy in its truthfulness, but just a tad too short sighted for my tastes. As I've been saying, my experience has shown me that healthy business has an ebb and a flow, a pulse if you will, not unlike the story of Joseph and the dreams of a distant Pharaoh, the old story where a dream of seven years of feast was followed by a dream of seven years of famine.

Let me say here that I do not believe we are in for seven years or five years or even four of famine after the last amazing long bull market and it's effects on our industry and on others. But I do think we will be in for another 12-month period of belt tightening and business model deliberation. Here is where Goethe gets it right, at least in a business sense, "That which does not kill me makes me stronger."

Is it time to reassess our business plans? Yes. Is it time to develop new and creative sales programs? Yes. Is it time to seek new avenues of diversified distribution? Yes. Is it time to pack in the tent poles of publishing and become plumbers, carpenters and god forbid anything other than the fifth estate. Nah. Not at all.

All I see is that we are in a common economic trough and from deep in the trench it is very hard to see the way out. Now I am not crass enough to forget that there are people, humans, in this equation, real people with children, people with plans, people who need a comfortable retirement, that are going to get hurt. I am a father, a grandfather and a husband myself, who would shelter as best as I can/could the pain and angst that these cycles bring to my family and my publishing compatriots. I cannot succor you or predict the upswing other than it will happen. Oh yes, I can tell you that it will happen when the best of the prognosticators say it won't happen. That is the way of it all. Those who say they know really don't know at all, including me.

Bosacks Speaks Out: What is content?

2007-05-01T14:08:00.000-07:00

Bosacks Speaks Out: What is content?

Content, Content, Content What is it good for? Nothing!
All this talk of content and mergers and increased content and increased
mergers. Phooey!

It's not about the content. Piles and piles of content is just that -- piles and
piles of junk. Useless to most, perhaps somewhat useful to some few dogged
focused pursuers of information. Content is not king, but quality content
might be queen. And focused quality content might be considered a king.
And Presorted Personalized Focused Quality Content might be the "Emperor of All Information" Content is the workshop where I store all my tools. Information is the exact and only "hexagonal wrench" I need to finish the damn job. Now where was that wrench? When did I use it last? I don't remember. It could be anywhere.

Here is a question -- what makes this newsletter useful to you? I think it is
the fact that I have spent 30 years doing a job very similar to yours. Not
exactly the same, but close enough. My experience empowers me to act as your "agent." I sort through the information of our industry and forward to you the best that I can find that might be useful for you to know, based on my parallel experience to yours. Am I 100% correct? No, not even close. But I am useful enough to have a very large readership. So where am I going with all this? It is not the volume of content that is important; it is the focused practical usefulness of information that makes the content valuable.

All this talk of content and the power of mergers, and the power of combined
content... Phooey! Mergers are good for business due to tangible efficiencies. Smaller head count, less office space and greater buying power. The rest is bull! Synergies? BULL! All this jabber of a "volume of content" is terribly misleading.

AOL ... and Time and Warner... Think of them as three separate companies for
a minute who have more content than the Great Library of Alexandria. So What?
Do you know that in the old great Library of Alexandria they had no idea
what they had? All they had were rolled up scrolls. Piles and piles, shelf
after shelf, room after room. I'm mean huge! For that time, it was the combined knowledge of all the ages. Awesome Huh?. NOT!

Most scrolls were not labeled at all, Just rolled up and tied parchment, placed in piles. They had little or no titles once unrolled. And absolutely none had an index or a table of contents on any publication. The concept of indexing or a TOC wasn't invented yet. So what did they have? They had tons and tons of content, without the ability to get to what they needed, when they needed it. There were no labels. Where would you begin? How would you find what you want? How would you even know what you want? Sound familiar?

I am a huge Internet user, and the truth is I love it. But there is still so
much to do. The billions of pages of information out there are for the most
part useless, until we reinvent indexing and a new system of personalized
delivery. What we need is a "true" personal agent. A computer program so
sophisticated and detailed that it does the searching and sorting based upon
our unique and personalized individual needs.

We need that computerized personalized agent that I have spoken of several times in this newsletter. An "agent" or "concierge" of cyberspace. An "agent" that fits where our wristwatches fit now. A total voice recognition system, answerable only to us. A program that will know all that is knowable about us. An "electronic friend" that will send birthday cards and meaningful presents to friends and family. It will pay all the bills and make all appointments with coworkers and doctors. An agent so integrated into the

cyber paths that my agent will call your agent to confirm or deny our availability to meet without our intervention. An agent that knows so much about us that it knows not only what we want to read, but also what we didn't know we wanted to read. That is to me the key to growth. This agent has to be so "smart" it will deliver to us not only what we have "asked for," but also information that we need to know about, but didn't know that we didn't know.

This "thing" or something very like it will happen. In fact I think it will
happen in our lifetime.

BoSacks Speaks Out: On Paper, Advertising and, Oh yes... Commodities

2007-05-01T14:06:00.000-07:00

BoSacks Speaks Out: On Paper, Advertising and, Oh yes... Commodities
www.bosacks.com

I just want to take a time out here to point out, no suggest, that the paper people reading this newsletter read the following article twice. Why, you may ask? Because reading and not understanding what you are reading can be dangerous, and I think that there has been a misunderstanding of the current advertising climate and a confusion of economic facts by the paper community. After all, as the Japanese proverb goes, "If you believe everything you read, you better not read."

What the heck is Bo talking about this time? It is this - the belief and actions of the paper companies that, with all the predictions and prognostications of increased advertising spending, it is a good time for paper price increases. In my humble opinion it is not, and will not, indeed cannot, be supported. It is among other things, the simple dynamic of supply and demand. Magazine circulations and the paper they draw upon are on the decrease. Paper supply is on the increase. All this "talk" that I freely distribute to you about the advertising recovery can be very misleading. Yes, advertising spending is on the rise from the worst business climate in several generations. So what? Increased advertising across the "board" does not necessarily equate to increased magazine pages. The "board" has changed; it has grown, and has become an uncontrollable and annoying monster. Ads are everywhere, from the Internet, to taxi cabs, to the public toilets we frequent. All these new format ads cost money and that money is coming from and being siphoned from more traditional vehicles, such as magazines and newspapers.

Let's get real here. With a few exceptions, magazines are still hurting, laying off people, and decreasing ad rate bases. And that means less paper, not more. Less paper by publishers means, more paper in inventory. And that means, by the law of commodities denied by most paper companies, not a good time for an increase.

BoSacks
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Bosacks Speaks Out: The Future of Publishing Revisited

2007-05-01T14:04:00.000-07:00

Bosacks Speaks Out: The Future of Publishing Revisited
www.bosacks.com

The second item in the following news story is about ebooks. And that leads me to ezines. Have any of you tried www.Zinio.com or www.Newsstand.com?

They are similar in nature and both pretty damn good. I have a preference, but that is not worth the telling here. Both represent a piece of the future of publishing. My future? No, your future.

I highly recommend that all publishing professionals check out both sites. Check it out and use it, at least once. Come on, you can do it. The first one is free. You will be doing yourself and your career a favor. To me they represent a fair guess at how we may slowly switch from a dead tree information distribution system to an all-electronic one. If you can use your imagination and slip epaper or eink into this forecast, then you've really got something. The future of publishing is right here. Are you ready for it? There are some major and some minor magazines already on track here. Both consumer titles and BtoB titles are available, not to mention the newspapers.

Here is my prediction. In five years - OK shoot me if it is ten - we will all have a sheet or set of sheets that are composed of flexible epaper. This will be foldable like a newspaper or magazine and fully downloadable from one publisher or many publishers. In one set of epapers, you can have your favorite morning newspapers, magazines and books. When you are done, you erase it, or save it, for the next download. Electronic memory will be inexhaustible and so will be the power source. It will be part of a wifi-of-the-day network, meaning that anywhere you are - and I mean anywhere - you can get updates, new editions, or the local movie schedule of any town you just happen to be in.

This will happen whether you like it or not. Whether you are prepared or not. We as a publishing industry will use less paper. Paper will not go away, nor will print editions. But publishers will use less paper. That will be an adjustment for printers, circulators, mailers and production people; in fact the entire process will be different. The only ones that I can see escaping the job transformation gambit will be the keyboardists. That would be the writers, editors, proofreaders and the like. Those that capture the "word" are almost unchanged. Those that distribute the "word" are forever altered in what they do and how they do it.

This is just one man's opinion, but I know I'm close to correct. Not exactly, because the real future and it's coexisting technology is unknowable. But I am damn close, of that I am sure.

BoSacks
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BoSacks Speaks Out: Fastest-Growing Ad Medium?

2007-05-01T14:02:00.000-07:00

BoSacks Speaks Out: Fastest-Growing Ad Medium?

Does anyone on this list think that advertising in the Cinema is not an absolute abominable intrusion?

How would you feel if you paid for Broadway tickets to see Phantom of the Opera and before the Curtain rises for your expensive evening's entertainment, you had to sit through 10 or 15 minutes of advertising? Why should going to the movies be considered any different?

My reaction is pure disgust. We now have a situation where it costs over $10.00 per person to see a movie, and then I get the privilege of getting assaulted by unwanted advertising before my paid for entertainment starts. I must admit that I like the coming attractions, which is of course a style of advertising, but that is okay with me. It is consistent with the evening's expectations and agenda. But being forced to watch generalized consumer advertising is wrong, and I shutter to think, as the article below suggests, that it will be growing at a faster pace then the Internet, TV or magazine advertising.

We better get a consumer watch group started right now, and at the very least put a legal limit on cinema advertising. How about this -- five years from now the ads can't play for a longer time than the actual movie runs? Does that seem fair to you? 50% advertising and 50% movie? If not that, where should we draw the line?

BoSacks
-30-

BoSacks Speaks Out: Positive News Only from BoSacks?

2007-05-01T14:00:00.000-07:00

BoSacks Speaks Out: Positive News Only from BoSacks?
www.bosacks.com

I received a letter from a reader who said that some of his friends have stopped reading BoSacks because of all the bad news. I wasn’t shocked at the note, but I was a little disappointed. I thought that my position was clear. I wrote back that I did not think that the industry is in death mode, nor has that ever been the intent of my coverage.

Indeed I am very upbeat about our industry, and I see a bright future for the industry and the people in it. But there are a few things that have to be stated. The industry is never going to be the way it was, it is not even going to be the way it is. But the stories I send out give my readers a chance to see how the future may bend, blend and hopefully offer a place of employment if they’re smart enough to read between the lines.

The industry is changing. So what? Do you find that depressing? I do not. Change is an elixir, and should be treated that way. The possibilities of information distribution in the next few years will be nothing less than staggering. Quite possibly we could be heading into the great, golden years of publishing. Is that a downer? Not in my book.

There are no age qualifiers on my web site when you sign up, so I’ll ask this question: What were you doing five years ago? If you were in the business, what were you doing ten years ago? Are you doing the same thing now that you were doing then? I doubt it. What do you think you will be doing ten years from now?

Our technology is growing geometrically. What used to take ten technologic years to advance now takes five, perhaps even less. My advice is to be very prepared to face the future with full frontal aggressiveness and make it your friend and not your combative enemy. If technology and the future are not your friend, you are fighting a battle you can not possibly win. Basically the future is here now; it is just not widely distributed yet.

Oh, yes and I might mention that I do try my hardest to find articles that are positive about our industry. It’s just that they are very few and far between. When I find them, I send them. I also think most negative articles are not fully understood by the authors and are written with a very limited perspective. But what I do send out is important to any one in the industry. Remember, this industry's future is your future. The world of publishing is not going to evaporate. I think it will grow and prosper, in fact, I guarantee it.

As I suggested to my reader, there are two options -- we can stick our heads in the ground in denial and hope that the industry problems will somehow go away, or do our very best to stay informed about the industry and grow with it. Information is our power. That is why I am bullish about the publishing industry. We own the content. I do not care how we distribute that content. Some of it will always be on dead trees and some will be distributed electronically. So what? Once writers needed quill pens to write. Many years later came fountain pens, and then typewriters. Now we have computers. Are my words, typed on a laptop and distributed by electrons, any less important because of the method of delivery? The reading of the written word is what is important, not the pathway to receiving them. The truth is they are more important when they are as fresh as possible and only a few electronic hours old.

BoSacks Speaks Out: Shakespeare Was Wrong!

2007-05-01T13:59:00.000-07:00

BoSacks Speaks Out: Shakespeare Was Wrong!
www.bosacks.com

“What's in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet”
William Shakespeare quotes (English Dramatist, Playwright and Poet, 1564-1616)

I was collaborating on a new project with some fellow publishing futurists today. Communicating internationally via SKYPE, as makes sense to us futurists, I came across a new term that I had not heard of before. I think it is brilliantly simple in describing this particular next generation.

The term is Screenager. This would be the demographic born into the world of ever present computerization. Screenagers are technologically proficient young people at the earliest of ages. They are the first generation who at the time of their birth, grow up with 500 television channels, multiple computers and the ability to use them. They have MP3’s, instant messaging, cellular phones with cameras and an instant connection to the Internet anywhere at any time. They absorb and retrieve information like no other generation before. They have a googolplex, (the number not the company) of global information possibilities that is unprecedented and still endlessly growing.

How Screenagers affect the publishing world is still being played out. Do they read? I think the answer is yes. Yes, but not like us pre-screeners. Are they knowledgeable? Again I think the answer is yes. Yes, but, but they do not absorb and process information like us pre-screeners.

And the final question tonight for us publishers is, will Screeners need and want actual books, magazines and newspapers as we pre-screeners have grown accustomed to? Will they be comfortable reading our valued content in the traditional method of dead tree delivery, or will they in fact insist on the screened version?

BoSacks
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Have You Started Planning for E-Paper?

2007-05-01T13:56:00.000-07:00

Have You Started Planning for E-Paper?
By Bob Sacks
Publishing Executive Magazine
http://www.printmediamag.com/doc/28808071312222 4.bsp

“Human subtlety will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does nature because in her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous.”

Leonardo da Vinci (Italian draftsman, Painter, Sculptor, Architect and Engineer whose genius epitomized the Renaissance humanist ideal. 1452- 1519)

Sometimes I think our industry tries to predict the future by looking at the past and assumes that if its holds its collective breath long enough, the conditions will remain constant. This is like driving a car by looking in the rear-view mirror. Where you have been is not necessarily a good predictor of where you are going. But it can be enlightening, if you know where to look.

Let's, for a paragraph or two, intentionally look in the rear-view mirror. In the 1970s, magazines were still setting type using hot lead. In the early 1980s, long- run magazines were still printing with letterpresses— the same letterpress technology Gutenberg invented 500 years ago. In the 1990s, we learned to make digital plates that gave us unheard of speed and accuracy. Now, in the 21st century, we have adapted into an entirely new phase of publishing, exploring new and more effective ways of distributing information in the digital universe.

We now have the ability to deliver information to multiple platforms in an instant and on a global basis. We no longer consider ourselves publishers, printers, journalists and media professionals; we are information distributors. Well, at least those that are going to survive think that way.

New information delivery methods, combined with the potential for customization, promise to level the playing field for the industry's established players.

E-paper 'Ready for prime time'
One of the most exciting developments in the delivery of our franchised content is e-paper. What is e-paper? Or, perhaps I should start with, what is it not? It is not an electronic simulation of a magazine. It is not downloaded facsimiles of printed magazines, although that is an offshoot of what e-paper can produce.

E-paper is essentially a tool, a new technology for an age old format. To the publishing community, it will provide an electronic substrate that can be connected to the Internet and acts as a direct alternative to traditional paper. It's not a replacement for all paper, but much that is printed today could be reproduced by e-paper.

E-paper, in general, uses thin, lightweight displays that simulate the form and flexibility of traditional paper while providing the immediacy of a computer screen. It is a thin layer of transparent plastic that contains millions of small microcapsules randomly dispersed. When a voltage is applied to the sheet's surface, the microcapsules move to present one side to the viewer according to the polarity of the charge. So, in order to display text, microcapsules targeted to serve as the "ink" would move to the top of the sheet.

Importantly, the beads do not require a constant voltage to hold their position. Electronic ink allows a fixed image to remain on the screen even after the power source is shut off.

Companies are developing mass-production techniques for these materials that would allow them to be manufactured inexpensively in a variety of shapes and sizes. For example, Plastic Logic Ltd. (www.PlasticLogic .com) is investigating locations for a large-scale manufacturing plant for its flexible- plastic electronics displays. A director of the company says it's "ready for prime time."

Many of the devices we take for granted today, such as handheld computers, digital cameras and color printers, were once in the realm of science fiction. E- paper is not science fiction.

Is this in your business plan?

When e-paper is finally perfected will it mean the death of the printing press? Not by any means. But it will mean the end to the status quo and the creation of yet another parallel universe in the digital information age.

The future of publishing is actually something we create with our minds, our technologies, our will and our unique business plans.

5 Easy Steps to Publishing Nirvana

2007-05-01T13:54:00.000-07:00

5 Easy Steps to Publishing Nirvana
By Robert M. Sacks
Publishing Executive Magazine
http://www.pubexec.com/doc/291275178443975.bsp

Let's get down to some serious business. Does anyone in their right mind think that writing, journalism or publishing is just going to fade away and disappear? Does anyone think that there isn't going to be the need to be informed, be knowledgeable, or just know stuff? Here is news for those in doubt of their careers and the continuance of the honest profession of being a publisher/printer. People have always had the need for information and will always require news, instructions, directions and knowledge.

The only difference now from yesterday or last year or last century is how they get to know what they know. The human race has always required and worked to improve information distribution. As far back as the caveman, they processed the information of the day, and transferred those ideas and thoughts to the walls of their homes and religious places. As society progressed, we improved the process.

The first tool for storing portable information outside of the brain is called, in today's terms, a baton. It carried thoughts and stored information on an inscribed stick to be carried about by a shaman. It stored the phases of the moon and other important astrologically dependent information, such as the best time to plant seeds. Planting seeds at the proper time is a good idea if you like to eat on a regular basis. Think of the baton as the first Flash memory JumpDrive.

We have been drawing on walls, carving on rocks, inking on papyrus, and cloistering men in monasteries who repeatedly copied information ad infinitum with mistakes and all.

So have no fear about your chosen profession. The process of information distribution is not going to go away. Indeed, it is accelerating at an unprecedented rate.

What you need to consider is the true value of your information to the general public and the process by which you distribute this knowledge.

Five easy steps to publishing nirvana:

1 Who is my target audience?

2 Where is my targeted audience?

3 What is the real value of my edit (information) to that audience?

4 What is the most efficient method to reach the maximum targeted audience?

5 How do I keep my information valuable and fresh for my targeted audience?

These may seem like simple concepts on the surface, but they are not. They constitute a complex, Zen- like formula. Success is measured by the antique term called profit. And to achieve the Zen-like state of profit, you must follow the Bo-formula to publishing nirvana (in the box above). On the atomic level, it can all be distilled down to the simple equation of RV = RP or, for the laymen, real value equals real profit.

In this era of abundant information, is your edit of any real value? If so, how valuable is it? If it is valuable, to whom is it valuable? This is where the concept of niche comes into play. The value of when to plant seeds is only valuable to a select few. And to those few, only information on certain types of seeds would be of value.

In today's publishing world there are three key components: the jewels of extremely valuable edit, the readers who need and desire those gems, and the ability to get the booty into the clients' hands by the most efficient means possible. In my experience great edit trumps the other two. To paraphrase loosely, if you have the appropriately precious edit, they will come.

The last necessary element to the so-stated condition of publishing nirvana is the honest and sometimes brutal truth. This can be the hardest part of the Bo-formula. Like an alchemist of old lore, here is a Bo-exercise for you to try. Find a hand-held mirror and hold it up about 18 inches from your face. Look into the mirror and ask yourself the five questions listed to the left. Did you flinch? Did you grimace? Did you honestly know all the answers? Did you divine the truth? Only you know that for sure.

BoSacks Speaks Out: Where are Today's Mentors?

2007-04-29T11:28:00.000-07:00