Village Voice sold its soul, says NOW founder

Michael Hollett the co-founder of NOW magazine in Toronto has said in an article in the Toronto Star reflecting on the announced end of the printed Village Voice paper, that 

"The end of the Village Voice in print is not a statement about the state of publishing but a morality tale about what happens when a values-based business sells its soul."

 He says that the takeover of the original Village Voice by New Times.

"ripped the heart out of the alt weekly world. When we should have been savoring the glory years before the internet’s assault on our young readers, we were consumed by which of the two companies was courting us."

Hollett recalls that NOW was being courted as part of an extended empire of alt-weeklies, a bargain that NOW eventually walked away from  when conversations veered from journalism to a 35 per cent return on investment.  

St. Joseph explores the blurring of lines between print and digital

St. Joseph Communications, the publishers of, among other magazines, Toronto Life, has released a trend report called 2017 Print in a Digital World. It's aimed at marketers and is part of a major series about trends in the multi-channel universe. It showcases over 65 global examples of brands that are blurring the lines between print and digital.

“We are in an information revolution, powered by the intersection of two of the most commanding knowledge transfer mechanisms of our time – the Gutenberg Press and the Internet,” says Michael Chase, chief marketing officer at St. Joseph Communications. “This means that the period in which we now live is unique and we benefit from the mixing and mingling of print and digital.”

Among the trends it identifies:

• Creating Immersive Experiences  "From smartphones to desktops and tablets to wearables, we cannot escape real-time digital experiences. Real disruption goes beyond swipes and taps. It comes from creating a wider sensory and immersive experience."
• Art Not Ads"  The beauty of print is that you can reach out and touch it, and now you can even eat it. It’s about more than paper and ink. Print advertising is a fine art, bringing together craftsmanship, design and storytelling in a way that engages and inspires."
• More Than Ink On The Page"We can’t think of ink and paper in the same way anymore. It illuminates. It saves the environment. It excels in the digital world. And most importantly, it creates deep connections with consumers. Today, print is anything but traditional."

http://trends.stjoseph.com/wp-content/themes/html5blank/pdf/2017_Print_in_a_Digital_World.pdf

MediaEdge launches two new digital products to augment restaurant and foodservice magazine

Business media publisher MediaEdge Communications has announced the launch of two new digital products -- a new website Restobiz.ca and e-newsletter RestoBiz Bytes as extensions of print magazine Restaurant and Foodservice News (CRFN). 

The twice-a-month e-newsletter has a circulation to over 22,000 foodservice and restaurant owners and operators. The print magazine will continue to be produced 6 times a year with an annual circulation of 70,000 and a total readership of 280,000.

"We are very excited to be in this active and ever-changing space, and are equally proud of the print and digital products and events that we offer the foodservice and restaurant industry," says Chuck Nervick, senior vice president at MediaEdge Communications.

Ryerson Review of Journalism will continue in both print and digital form

It has been decided after a thorough review* that the Ryerson Review of Journalism is to continue as a multi-platform magazine, including an annual print edition. A note to readers from Ivor Shapiro, the chair of the Ryerson School of Journalism and the publisher says that there is a recognition that the Review is "a serious asset for students' career preparedness." 

Occupying a lot of the conversation about what the RRJ should be like in future, the outcome was pretty much what might have been predicted. The loyal readers of the magazine want to see continuation of  the annual print edition as a sort of anchor tenant for a menu of digital offerings ranging across a variety of platforms such as social media, a digital edition, a blog, a podcast and a regular e-letter. In other words, it is not an either-or proposition, print or digital, but an "audience-first" approach.

Students value the RRJ as a laboratory for learning the business. The challenge is for Ryerson, its students and those loyal readers to find a consistent and sustainable way to pay for it. It means that more readers/supporters than the current roughly 300 subscribers need to step up. (As a canny slogan of The Nation magazine used to put it "It's not enough to just subscribe to our principles.") It also means that part of being on the staff will mean asking for those orders; expanding the magazine's audience and hustling for donations.

Among the expectations coming out of the review is that students on the RRJ masthead will now be given a set publishing budget made up by the school, part of the students' ancillary fees, donations and subscriptions and that the students will be expected to make their own decisions on how to grow and spend that budget. There will also probably be more collaboration between the RRJ and  the J-Source, produced by the Canadian Journalism Project and housed in the same offices right next door. 

Readers of this blog know that I am a subscriber and have been a booster and proponent for the RRJ for a long time and that I think it is a very important venture holding the magazine and wider publishing business to account.  The annual does outstanding research, reporting and writing and if the people in this business know what's good for them, they'll see that it continues to do so. It's very much needed.  

[*Disclosure: I was one of the people consulted during the review.] 

Association publishers find professional readers prefer print over digital

Association publishers are consistently finding that their professional readers prefer print over digital versions of magazines, according to a column in Folio: by Debra Stratton, president of Stratton Media Strategies LLC, which  has worked with more than 300 associations over the past 30 years.

"Still, association publishers continually have to battle to maintain print, often pressured by boards and finance officers to convert to go digital-only to save on printing and postage expenses."

Print isn't cheap,the article acknowledges, but has some undeniable value:

• Generally preferred for in-depth reading
• For advertising-supported magazines, converting to all-digital may reduce or even eliminate the revenue base
• Image or branding are best conveyed in print
• Print magazine offer valuable portability for travel
• Readability is often improved with print 
• Digital technology can be clunky

Pink Triangle Press closes down all print editions of Xtra; to go all-digital in February

Pink Triangle Press, the leading gay and lesbian publisher in Canada, is discontinuing all print editions of Xtra newspapers in Toronto, Vancouver and Ottawa. The company is repositioning into an all-digital publisher.

The final issues of Xtra Vancouver and Xtra Ottawa will appear on streets February 12, 2015. The Toronto edition of Xtra will close on the newspaper's 31st anniversary; final issue on streets on February 19, 2015. In a release, Pink Triangle explained

PTP will focus on developing its journalism website DailyXtra.com and gay adult dating website Squirt.org. The all-digital direction is a result of an eight-month strategic assessment process senior management at PTP began in spring 2014. 

"We have concluded that a complete transition to digital media offers the best opportunity to continue to engage our audiences over the long term. The move to all-digital journalism will bring with it significant benefits — a wider audience for PTP's message, greater currency, more effective advocacy, and, global news combined with local action," says Ken Popert, executive director and president of PTP. 

"We have a good track record of online engagement through Daily Xtra and other channels like YouTube. Most of our revenues already come through digital membership sales in the adult dating space, where we've had great success building a growing online community. We are looking to hone our journalism focus and develop a number of our unique strengths," says David Walberg, CEO of digital media at PTP.

With the discontinuation of the printed papers will go the jobs of 12 full-time employees; as a digital publisher, PTP will employ 57 in Ottawa, Toronto and Vancouver. 

Pink Triangle began in 1971 when it launched The Body Politic, Canada's gay newspaper of record. Xtra Toronto was launched in 1984 and The Body Politic was closed down in 1987 so the company could concentrate on Xtra; Vancouver and Ottawa editions were launched in 1993. In 2010, Pink Triangle closed down a printed gay travel guide and moved it strictly online. In 2013 it closed its Fab magazine after 20 years of publication. 

In its release about going all-digital, the company said it had grown from a small, grassroots organization to "one of the most diversified gay multi-media enterprises in the world, with a roster of brands ranging from print to online publishing and television production."

“Although the scale of the Press has grown hugely since 1971, we remain true to our founding principles. We have no owners or shareholders profiting from our work and our overriding message remains that collective action is the way to advance the common good,” says Popert.

Replica digital editions of British mags average 2.5% of total print circulation

Interesting information out of Great Britain and data from ABC UK. It shows that replica digital edition sales for 94 magazines which do them (of the 214 mags ABC measured in the first half of 2014) average 2.5% of total print circulation. According to a story in Press Gazette, the outstanding performer is The Economist, United Kingdom edition, which has 21,780 digital edition circ, about 16% of its print circulation. The top 10 in digital circ average 9%.

Tablet magazine ads get same reader recall as print

GfK MRI Starch Advertising Research says advertising in magazines on tablets have the same degree of impact and recall as the same ads in print. According to a story in Talking New Media, Starch compared reader recall for 28,624 magazine ads in 805 tablet magazines published in 2013 with consumer print recall data. The result was an average of 52% of readers in both recalled ads; over 80% of readers "noted" ads in both. 

Tablet edition readers like the interactivity of tablets and saw advertising as an essential part of the magazine experience (exactly what print readers say.)

“We have found that tablet magazine readers not only are engaged with the editorial and advertising content, but that digital ads have the power to grab attention,” said Mickey Galin, EVP, GfK Starch Advertising Research. “This speaks to what is most likely unrecognized value in digital magazine advertising, and the ability of tablet ads to raise the effectiveness of print/digital campaigns. We see that both static and interactive tablet ads are able to capture readers’ attention and earn strong ‘Noted’ scores.”

Print on paper plus retail has been very good to Monocle, says EIC Tyler Brûlé

Monocle magazine editor Tyler Brûlé recently said in a Bloomberg video interview that profitability for the company has been and continues to be in print and retail. 

"Month in, month out, where is the profitability for our business? It is on paper." 

He said that ad growth for the internationally distributed magazine's last four issues (80,000 paid-up subscribers) has been up about 50% compared with the same period a year ago and he is looking for an "extraordinary" 2013. And he said that retail,including the company-owned store in Toronto (others in New York, London, Hong Kong), will this year represent as much as 25% of the total turnover of Monocle's business.

5 ways that publishers screw up when it comes to mobile

If the future is mobile, many publishers didn't get the memo. According to a post on Digiday, there are several ways in which newspaper and magazine publishers screw up when transmitting their sites to smartphones and tablets, mostly because they are still wedded to a desktop paradigm. The post cites five "deadly sins" of mobile:

• Porting -- simply moving your desktop site over to the mobile web, resulting in clutter and tiny displays.
• Pinch and zoom -- font sizes need to be readable and not require users to reverse-pinch their screens.
• Pagination -- breaking stories into pages and expecting readers to look at a slide show or a 15-page article on a smartphone.
• Hover -- publishers forget there isn't a mouse on a mobile device, so readers can't scroll over images to get more information.
• Load time -- Publishers aren't economical with images, taking account of the slower connection and load times on a mobile phone. Readers may consider whether it's worth waiting for, and decide it's not.

The Dance Current brings together 15 years of content with launch of new website

The Dance Current magazine is marking Canada's National Dance Week by launching a brand new website which, along with regular new content, is bringing together a 10-year archive of exclusively digital content and a print collection of over 140 back issues. 

"We invite professionals, practitioners, dance students and fans to visit thedancecurrent.com  throughout the week and learn something new about dance in your country,” says executive director, publisher and founding editor Megan Andrews.

By moving to one, integrated platform, The Dance Current makes possible public access to dance in Canada through event listings, videos, columns, features, interviews, news and reviews. 
The magazine has been published by Dance Media Group/Groupe Danse Média since 1998. The editor has been Kathleen Smith since 2011.

"While fully bilingual publication is beyond our resources," the magazine says in a release, "we are committed to inclusive coverage of the country’s diverse regions. Québec dance artists have appeared frequently in the magazine and we provide French summaries of our feature print articles and selected full French translation where possible. Through our projects and programs, The Dance Current contributes to a culture of literacy, critical insight and collective memory about dance in Canada both within and beyond the milieu."

The new website was developed by Toronto company Razorbraille Creative, Inc. and funded by the Ontario Trillium Foundation.

Zoomer magazine launches "super site"

Zoomer magazine has launched a new "super site" called Everything Zoomer.com. Like previous web presence, the new lifestyle portal features content for the 45-plus demographic, ranging from breaking news classifieds, dating, health, travel, rich media and a social network layer. It also has a daily joke.

Wired is a lonely genius when it comes to Digital IQ

Wired magazine is the only brand out of 80 U.S. magazines measured in the 2nd annual Digital IQ Index produced by the market research firm L2 to achieve "Genius" status. (The index ranks digital strategy execution.) "While Wired was the only brand out of the 80 to receive a Genius-level ranking, other rankings in the study are Gifted, Average, Challenged and Feeble, which included 28, 36, 11 and 4 brands respectively," says Folio:

The study measures brand competence across website, digital marketing, social media and mobile platforms; this year it also includes use of tablets. Points are given for how well content, marketing, engagement and advertising tactics are deployed within and across five segments. 

The top-ranked titles were:

1. Wired
2. The New Yorker
3. Entertainment Weekly and Glamour (tie)
5. Better Homes and Gardens
6. Time
7. Elle
8. Seventeen
9. Sports Illustrated
10. Cosmopolitan, Forbes, People, The Economist (tie)

Rogers's closure of Sweetspot.ca sends "terrible message", says its founder

Rogers Publishing didn't seem to know what to do with the various digital properties it acquired, according to the founder of Sweetspot.ca, Joanna Track. In a very unusual move, she has written a highly critical article in the Globe and Mail about the closure of Sweetspot and 7 other of Rogers's sites last week. She describes the  "big fail" as not integrating the properties into the larger company's ecosystem.

"Rogers had gone blazing into the market acquiring digital properties, but there seemed to be no thought or foresight about how to integrate them into its (behemoth) system. It would be an understatement to say that the company’s digital strategy has not performed well. It doesn’t appear to have had a digital strategy."

She was critical of the treatment of the people working for the site, saying the company "started pulling them out like Jenga pieces and leveraging their skills to grow other properties."

Track saw her management contract cease late in 2010 after Rogers -- which had originally taken a minority stake -- took full ownership. She went on last year to create an online fashion and beauty site called Dealuxe. 

"Clearly I’m not objective, but I think Rogers has sent a terrible message to Canadians about big companies, about their future direction – instead of evolving with the times they are going back to the same old stuff they’ve been doing forever – and to entrepreneurs across the country.

iPad Newsstand making sales of $70,000 a month for in-app publication apps

The top 100 grossing publication apps in the iPad Newsstand are bringing in about $70,000 a month, according to a two-year study carried out by analytics firm Distimo. In that top rank are the New York Times, TheDaily and The New Yorker. According to a story in Minonline, the Newsstand  -- which is only about six months old -- represents about 7% of the top 200 grossing apps.

Almost all of this revenue is coming from in-app purchasing. For February the top 5 grossing Newsstand apps were The Daily, NYTimes for iPad, New Yorker Magazine, National Geographic and Cosmopolitan.

Finkle plans to market long-form journalism by the piece, online

Derek Finkle, the director of the Canadian Writers Group is planning to launch a pay-as-you-go online digital publishing venture this spring to market single, long-form articles in much the way that this is now being done by Byliner and Guardian Shorts. 

According to a story by Jason McBride in the January 1, 2012 issue of Quill & Quire magazine, the as-yet-unnamed company is part of a growing trend towards new models for the publishing and monetizing of non-fiction writing, comparable to e-books. Byliner, for instance, markets original articles for from $0.99 to $5.99.

Finkle, who represents about 120 writers across the country ... is frustrated by both the shrinking magazine and newspaper markets and by how writers are being squeezed out of revenues generated by new digital platforms....

“No one is fostering and paying talent in this country,” he says. “And there are really very few places left to publish long-form stuff.” Unlike Byliner, Finkle also intends to focus on local stories, at lengths and depths that newspapers and magazines can’t realistically accommodate.

Finkle can imagine publishing, say, a controversial story about a Bay Street law firm that would potentially be downloaded by tens of thousands of lawyers taking the train home from work, with each reader actively contributing to the writer’s bottom line. “It’s subversive,” he says. “It’s an entrepreneurial opportunity that magazine writers haven’t had before. If you can make $40,000 on a story, that’s a game changer.”

OOPs...The Economist (finally) realizes it was giving free digital subscriptions

The Economist magazine has been serving some people a digital subscription to its magazine for free, sometimes for as long as five years. According to a story in paidContent, the magazine will revoke those premium digital subs next week and insist that people pay for them.

“There was an error in our database which resulted in a number of people being assigned full subscription rights by mistake,” [said] Economist digital editions publisher Oscar Grut. A digital-only, multi-device sub is worth US$110 a year.

Answer, educate, inspire: how readers searches work

With magazine engagement with their audiences increasingly dependent on canny use of the web, it may pay off to give some attention to research about how readers search for what they want. A proprietary study conducted by About.com (part of the New York Times) in collaboration with Latitude, looked at how users exhibit three distinct search behaviours.Though the research is pitched to advertisers and marketers, it may be particularly interesting to editors to see which topic areas align with which search mode:

• Answer Me (46% of all searches): People in an Answer Me search want exactly what they ask for, and no more, delivered in a way that allows them to get to it as directly as possible. The top categories in Answer Me search are Entertainment, Fashion and Beauty & Style.

• Educate Me (26% of all searches): People in an Educate Me search want 360 degrees of understanding, and multiple perspectives on critical topics. They will search until their goal is achieved, which may stretch over long periods of time and through related topics. The top categories in Educate Me search are Health and Finance.

• Inspire Me (28% of all searches): The fun, “browsy” type of search, where people are looking for surprises, have open minds and want to be led. The top categories in Inspire Me search are Travel and Home & Garden.

Some U.S. publishers leap on Apple's new iOS newsstand feature

"It's kind of like having the paper delivered to your front door. Only better."

-- from the Apple website, referring to a feature in its new iOS --  a virtual newsstand which lets readers access magazines and newspapers quickly on iPods and iPads and alerts them automatically when a new issue is available.

According to a story on Folio:, 

When viewing the Newsstand in iTunes, some featured titles include Wired, The New York Times, National Geographic Magazine, The Daily and Reader's Digest. Bonnier, always an early adopter with almost everything app-related, says Popular Science, Popular Photography and Sound + Vision are available on the iOS 5 newsstand as well.

Is the wired generation actually a re-wired generation?

A study commissioned by Time Inc.and previewed Monday at a New York conference appears to show that millenials, the people who grew up after the explosion of digital media, have become wired differently because of this changed environment. According to a story in MediaDailyNews, young people had biometric sensors attached that tracked their heart rates, breathing, sweating and even how and what they are looking at. It was followed up by interviews.

Final data from the study, dubbed "A (Biometric) Day In The Life," will not be released until early 2012, but a glimpse of preliminary findings from two respondents - Rachel, a 23-year-old "digital native," and Dan, a 47-year-old "digital immigrant" - suggests it will reveal profound differences in the way generations process media. Rachel, who cannot live without her smartphone, incessantly multitasks media options, and could care less about television, averaged more emotional engagement, but fewer "peaks" and "valleys" of intensity compared with Dan, a "digital immigrant" who could care less about his smartphone, loves TV, and didn't exhibit one instance of media multitasking in the day he was observed consuming media.

"We like Dan," quipped Betsy Frank, Chief Research and Insights Officer of Time Inc., while presenting the preliminary findings with Dr. Carl Marci, CEO and Chief Science Officer of Boston-based Innerscope Research, which is conducting the study.

Frank said that the results are critical to publishers migrating their content from traditional platforms such as print to digital. The company has created a panel of tablet users to conduct studies about the differences between their use of print and digital media.