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My master plan for revolutionizing the future of publishing

marco.org

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Re: My master plan for revolutionizing the future of publishing

#11

Post by addlepate »

pdog wrote: post #9
otakucode wrote: post #4

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…

> Now, distribution is a worthless service. Worthless? Distribution is about more than just shuffling bits from point A to point B. For one, it requires an building an audience.

Useless is the wrong word, but the point is that publications can no longer capture the value of the distribution itself.

Re: My master plan for revolutionizing the future of publishing

#12

Post by mjn »

jcurbo wrote: post #10
pdog wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now, distribution is a worthless service. Worthless? Distribution is about more than just shuffling bits from point A to point B. For one, it requires an building an audience.

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.

The distribution market is very unevenly commodified. Hence, Apple is able to take a 30% cut of The Magazine's gross, in return for distributing it.

Re: My master plan for revolutionizing the future of publishing

#13

Post by JohnsonB »

Well, if there would be enough general interest in "The Magazine"'s format, such that a service Marco sold would cause a flood of app-store clones, then whether Marco sells one or not, such a clone will inevitably be created and allow the flood of those clones. That would simply be a realization of basic market forces and not something Marco can control.

However, the bigger issue is that Marco thinks that the editorial format is (one of) the key distinguishers between publications:

>>A publication’s app should be designed and built with purpose and consideration. The Magazine works because I based decisions not on what everyone else was doing, but on what would be best for this magazine. Every publication has its own unique needs, audience, economics, and style, so their apps should reflect that.

I don't think this is significant. The value of a publication is its content, primarily, and the creation and selection thereof. Yes, I do think that a general app store creation service should exist for publications, or even several. Should every publication be burdened with re-inventing the wheel for basic webb/app infrastructure? Looking at the web front-end of The Magazine, I see a basic hierarchy of Issue > Article List > Article Preview, which may not be perfect for every publication, but perhaps close enough? Presumably, the app functionality is also close enough to what a large number of publications would need in terms of UX. Wordpress isn't the perfectly ideal format either for every website with articles but the millions of installations out there still saves the industry a significant amount of time and money.

Re: My master plan for revolutionizing the future of publishing

#15

Post by programminggeek »

I think people looking at the Newsstand or apps for publishing are missing the point. It's not about formats or delivery mechanism. It's more of a fundamental business problem.

I knew magazine apps were doomed when there was talk about how beautiful the ads would be in them. How they could faithfully reproduce the fantastic advertising in the print editions of the magazines.

Media was able to charge both a subscription fee to the consumer and an advertising fee because they had high barriers to entry and a captive audience. People fundamentally don't want ads in their media, but media companies have made so much money for so long charging on both ends that they forgot why they were able to do so - there was a high barrier to entry.

Now that technology has made the barriers to publishing $1,000 or less, there is a shift in business model. Either the media should be free and ad supported, or paid with no ads. There just isn't the same market for something that does both anymore. Their answer thus far seems to have been "just add more ads" or "put up a paywall in front of the ad-laden content".

Also, with fewer barriers to entry, there will be fewer big content companies, and a lot of smaller ones. The economics don't make sense yet for a big media company that is Newsstand only yet, but there will probably be a lot of smaller, scrappier publishers like The Magazine that pop up.

Again, it's not about The Magazine having some formula right, or its publishing platform being so amazing. It's that the business model and economics of publishing have changed and The Magazine is a lot closer to that reality than traditional publishing companies. One could make the same argument about Redbox and Netflix compared to Blockbuster and Hollywood Video.

Re: My master plan for revolutionizing the future of publishing

#16

Post by wallflower »

programminggeek wrote: post #15

I think people looking at the Newsstand or apps for publishing are missing the point. It's not about formats or delivery mechanism. It's more of a fundamental business problem. I knew magazine apps were doomed when there was talk about how beautiful the ads would be in them. How they could faithfully reproduce the fantastic advertising in the print editions of the magazines. Media was able to charge both a subscripti…

> I think people looking at the Newsstand or apps for publishing are missing the point. It's not about formats or delivery mechanism. It's more of a fundamental business problem.

If you have never read it, I highly recommend Clay Shirky's classic essay: "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable". It may make you think more about the economics of publishing and forced change.

"It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem...

The old difficulties and costs of printing forced everyone doing it into a similar set of organizational models; it was this similarity that made us regard Daily Racing Form and L’Osservatore Romano as being in the same business. That the relationship between advertisers, publishers, and journalists has been ratified by a century of cultural practice doesn’t make it any less accidental..."

http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking...

Re: My master plan for revolutionizing the future of publishing

#18

Post by woah »

cjensen wrote: post #8
grinich wrote: post #3

"There’s no master plan. I wanted Instapaper to exist, so I made it. Five years later, I wanted The Magazine to exist, so I made that. I don’t know how to save journalism, but I’m also not qualified to. I’m not a journalist and I don’t know much about that industry." This is essentially what every successful founder thinks before they end up starting a billion dollar company... I'm not saying that Marco is going to f…

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 famil…

What he seems to be saying is that it's all in the editorial decisions he's made, and the quality of writing and other content in "The Magazine". If this is really the case, he should totally license out the code, or release it open source. He's saying that what differentiates "The Magazine" is not the app, but the publication. If this is the case, then there is no problem with letting other people use his platform to do what they will.

Re: My master plan for revolutionizing the future of publishing

#20

Post by sdoering »

wallflower wrote: post #16
programminggeek wrote: post #15

I think people looking at the Newsstand or apps for publishing are missing the point. It's not about formats or delivery mechanism. It's more of a fundamental business problem. I knew magazine apps were doomed when there was talk about how beautiful the ads would be in them. How they could faithfully reproduce the fantastic advertising in the print editions of the magazines. Media was able to charge both a subscripti…

> I think people looking at the Newsstand or apps for publishing are missing the point. It's not about formats or delivery mechanism. It's more of a fundamental business problem. If you have never read it, I highly recommend Clay Shirky's classic essay: "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable". It may make you think more about the economics of publishing and forced change. "It makes increasingly less sense even to t…

Well the barriers of entry in respect to publishing my be lower today. But in terms of generating interesting content, they may be as high as ever.

For example, it just costs a ton of money to have really good people in every part of the world - not only to get the "news" or the pictures, but to reflect, to comment, to understand the relevant, cultural contexts - and to be able to communicate this in terms of intended target audience.

This form of journalism (as one example of publishing) is expensive. It was financed by the ads and subscriptions in times of printing on dead wood. And modern publishers try more and more, to outsource this to news-agencies - but with this outsourcing, everybody got the same dry content.

This is less and less working in print-journalism and it is even less working in digital-publishing.

If twitter - or some regional blog is better in explaining the happenings in, let's say: Egypt, why should I pay my local paper to deliver crap for the dustbin?

And then, it happens more and more, that (at least here in Germany), that the local content is getting worse. So their core-business, reporting and giving context on local things, is done in a bad way.

I am not willing to pay for a product, that treats its customers like crap.

The problem is, that the people (journalists) inside these organisations feel entitled to something, because a, it was done that way all the time, they can remember b, they are protected by the constitution and they really feel, they are doing a job, that is essential in keeping democracy alive (what the imho are really not doing anymore)

So as these people are really quite resilient to change (and to changing their ways), they cannot see the road ahead, they are blinded by their own worldview.

So probably, they have to go down - and I'm not sad to see them go. But I really fear what comes with these gone. Yes there will be some form of (good) journalism to emerge - but the time in between might be quite "interesting", as political players may feel like doing what they want, with the (pseudo-)watchdogs gone.

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