My master plan for revolutionizing the future of publishing

clearly, he doesn't need the money

How much of the 'future of publishing' discussions do you think are driven purely by ardent desire not to lose the status quo? I mean, it seems to me that looking at it objectively, the future is very self-evident. What product did publishers provide? Among other things, their business model was completely built upon distribution being a valuable service and the entire industry being impossible without it. This made them rich. Now, distribution is a worthless service. In fact, the way in which they provided distribution for so many years, they are actually actively destroying value by having to adhere to all of the arcane, unnecessary geographic limitations that made distribution possible a decade or so ago.

Now, they will either morph and stop even charging for distribution (since any 12 year old with an Internet connection could beat their ass at the task) and radically shink their business (from billions to thousands) as they have lost their golden goose, or they close their doors. They can still make money providing a few services like aggregation (when distribution is essentially free, aggregation becomes a valuable service... not as valuable as distribution used to be, but not worthless either). They can provide promotional services to their writers (who are now the bosses, while the publishers are starving service providers) and things like that too.

If they're really smart, they will realize that the future is consumers getting their journalism from, gasp, journalists directly since distribution is now basically free. How can they profit from that? Well, finding journalists, managing logistics for journalists, etc could be valuable services. There is no question, they have to face the fact that there will no longer be The Fifth Estate and they will no longer be international power brokers, they won't even be reasonably wealthy businessmen. They're going to be working from home and shuffling bits unless they're willing to get on a plane and go where the danger is and become a journalist themselves. I understand from their perspective this is a scary prospect, the same for anyone who feels that the status quo gives them safety and predictability. And I can't help but think that a lot of these talks are based on that fear...

> How much of the 'future of publishing' discussions do you think are driven purely by ardent desire not to lose the status quo?

Depends on what you're reading. If you read e.g. Clay Shirky et al.'s "Post Industrial Journalism" report [1], which is close to the consensus view among people talking about the future of journalism, you'll find that it aligns pretty well with what you outline in your comment.

It's different when you talk to the owners and managers of newspapers and magazines because it's their job to make sure the ship doesn't sink, not follow the disruption to its logical conclusion as fast as possible but to delay it as long as they can so you can avoid social and financial drama. Yes, they're grasping at straws ("Let's license Marco's iPad app and everything will be better. Or let's put up a paywall."), but they're in a very unenviable position and I don't know what I'd do if I were in their shoes.

[1] http://towcenter.org/research/post-industrial-journalism/

I think Macro is making a huge error in deciding not to license out the Magazine code to others. He has shown the way, and I'd like to see him lead forward.

If he licensed it to a smart political editor of the Obviously Correct persuasion who would commission stories for me to read, I'd subscribe.

He's right that a gazillion clones is a Bad Thing. He should instead license it to serious editors only, and have a family of The Magazines each with a different focus. In order to enforce quality, he should only provide annual licenses to a few serious editors at a time, and then discontinue them if he feels the customers are getting a bad deal. He should start small: one magazine at first, then add on fast as he can while maintaining quality.

In other words, the path to Quality for this type of thing is for him to retain control (and a bit of profit) rather than his current path of unintentionally encouraging others to clone his app badly.

I think a better way of saying it is that distribution is a commodity. It is easy and painless to distribute newspaper-style information these days compared to 100 years ago. Not to say there aren't ways to make money - look at Newsstand for example.