Ladies' Home Journal now to be written almost entirely by its readers

In a surprising development, the venerable Ladies' Home Journal  (Meredith Corporation) will now be featuring reader-written content in almost every story in the magazine, starting with its March issue, which will also be substantially redesigned by Pentagram, the well-known New York design firm.

This is carrying to an extreme the trend of traditional magazines to connect to the demands of modern, younger readers who are not satisfied to have professionals curate, write and present journalism. Quoted in a post on Folio:, publisher Diane Malloy says

“At Meredith, we do a lot of research to stay in touch with our core consumers. What they’re thinking about, how they’re consuming their media; what we found throughout our research is that women inherently want to share and connect.They’re blogging, they’re online more often and they’re looking for their print to involve some of the same pillars they get online.”

Reader-contributors will be identified largely through Meredith's network of blogs and the contributors will be paid on a similar scale to staff writers (a significant departure from blogs like the Huffington Post, which pay their contributors with "exposure".)  Staffers won't lose their jobs; they will fact-check and work with reader-contributors on their stories.

“We will blend the authority of print and expertise of editors, with the authenticity of experience,” says Malloy. “All of our stories are going to be either done in first person, then overlaid with experts’ opinions, or vice versa.” 

Torstar buys a piece of Blue Ant, which bought a piece of Quarto, and so on...

Last summer, Blue Ant Media Inc. bought a 15% stake in Quarto Communications, the publishers of Cottage Life, Explore, Canadian Home Workshop and Outdoor Canada. It has an option to raise its stake to 25%. And almost immediately, Quarto plunged ahead with a television project carrying the Cottage Life brand.

Blue Ant is controlled by Michael MacMillan, the former head of Alliance Atlantis Communications Inc. and he is clearly on a roll building a media company. It recently entered into an agreement to buy High Fidelity TV, which in turn owns four premium HD channels: Oasis HD,  eqhd, radX, and HIFI HD. It also owns a majority stake in GlassBOX, which in turn owns Bite TV, Aux TV and the Travel + Escape channel. 

Now Torstar has bought a 25% stake in Blue Ant.  According to a story in Marketing, David Holland of Torstar said that the company viewed the investment as a strategic way to further diversify its media assets.

“We see the potential in Michael’s vision for a new kind of media company in Canada,” said Holland. 
So, by our math, Torstar nominally now owns 6.25% of Cottage Life et al. Ah, what a complicated web -- one that is typical of the kinds of convergence we will be seeing more of in 2012.