Quote, unquote: The virtues of cheapness and flexibility

If our experience of the internet in the last ten years teaches one thing, it's that cheap and cheerful beats expensive and polished most days of the week. One of the core skills of magazine publishers is being able to develop formats that can be affordably repeated. Once you stray into moving pictures and copyright music, you're into a different model altogether. If there's anything my friends in TV envy about magazines, it's the medium's cheapness and flexibility. There's no point trading that in for a whole new set of problems, which is what we'll be doing if we start adopting TV's production values in our effort to make everything move. Instead of spending money on enhancements in the unproven belief that they will prove attractive to people who are currently getting along without us, we should be thinking how we can use this technology to provide better services for and thereby make more money out of our current user base.

-- David Hepworth, media commentator and former editorial director of Emap consumer magazines, writing in In Publishing magazine, cautioning magazine publishers about getting ahead of themselves in their embrace of new technologies like the iPad and expensive ventures such as video.