My master plan for revolutionizing the future of publishing

While I agree with many of your thoughts on distribution losing its value, as someone in book publishing, I would argue that aggregation, though not in the exact same sense in which you use it, has always been and continues to be the special, important, and valuable product that publishers provide.

A lot of your insights make a tremendous amount of sense from the writer's/journalist's perspective, as in, 'what can I get out of my publisher, since I can distribute my content so easily... only their marketing team is valuable to me now, and they're not tremendously good at their jobs anyway.'

I think a good objection to raise to that way of looking at the situation is that we should really be considering the value of publishers from the consumer's perspective.

'The future of publishing' discussions are driven not only by some weird desire for the status quo (which can be found in any industry) but, in my experience, also by the huge fear that we will be living in a world in which there are no gatekeepers. The stodgy traditional industry chugs on because it serves as a quality stamp. I don't mean to just cite anecdotal experience but it's pretty clear to me that the majority of self-published 'journalism' is simply not up to the level of say, The Economist, and I know that the Amazon self-published scene is full of both unreadable, horribly formatted, typo-heavy books and straight up nutjobs, which doesn't happen too often in the big six. Another way of saying this, if I haven't gotten the point across, is that publishers DO find journalists and manage logistics for journalists. They also give them a soapbox that has a big stamp on it that reads, 'trust us, she's a great writer. All this stuff is true.' So yes, I do fear a world in which anyone can become a 'journalist.'

Building an audience is not distribution. That's a separate service. Distribution is, by definition, just shuffling bits from point A to point B. This was for the longest time the single most valuable product the publishers offered both to consumers AND to journalists (most people seem to ignore that employers are required to provide a service to their employees in order to be able to obtain their services at a rate low enough that they can profit from it).

Building an audience is now handled by search engines and somewhat by marketing services... marketing services operate on a flat rate, not taking royalties let alone the 90%+ cut publishers want, and the sheer scale and reach of the Internet makes building an audience not terribly difficult. In addition, a MUCH smaller audience is necessary to support a single journalist than to support a large inefficient corporate publisher. Whereas you needed millions of readers to stay afloat, now far fewer are necessary and niche markets are entirely exploitable by individuals.

The problem with digital magazine apps is they are pushing an analog business model into a connected world.

Publishing! = Magazines. What is publishing? It used to be we print with a period of Y on paper type X, be that daily newsprint (newspapers), monthly super calendered paper (magazines), every few years on acid free paper (hardcover), and weekly super calendered Kraft paper (comics).

With digital the lines between the different publishing families are simply erased. Content can be put out at any point in time, and on any format. Further, complete works don’t have to be published all, serialized content is back after having been almost dead for decades.

What publishing needs is a business model that helps them sell content of all sorts of length that comes out at all sorts of time. Magazines have always been content buckets, where the taste and choices of the editor in chief and the publications self determined constraints determined if you wanted to buy that bucket.

The magazine in the connected world is going to have the problem of most topics they pick to have someone write about will be outdone by many other places on the net and available for free. Take a blog like footnoted.com, they’re doing deep dive financial journalism better than the Wall Street journal.

The future of "The Magazine" is BoingBoing.net, they deliver a bucket of curate content filtered through the tastes and choice of their editors. They make income off ads, referral links, and sponsored posts for $5k a pop.

Does anyone know if the Magazine has become profitable yet?

Sure, but it's clear at this point that Marco knows how to ship and does it well.