Tuesday, December 1, 2009

TIME Magazine and Digital Media

The end of Gourmet Magazine's nearly seventy year reign as arbiter of the best in cooking in America came as a blow even to non-subscribers. If devoted foodies couldn't keep Gourmet afloat, what hope was there for magazines with a less loyal audience?

In late November rival magazine publishers embarked on a joint effort to chart a path toward the digital future. Time, Inc, Conde Nast and Hearst were poised to join together under the leadership of John Squires, who up until June was an executive VP at TIME running the business side of the news. Squires is forming a new company that will prepare magazines (The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Time, People, Sports Illustrated, Esquire and O, The Oprah Magazines) for multiple digital platforms (iPhone, BlackBerry, Kindle, Sony, etc). The plans are not set in stone and no one has signed on the dotted line, but the deal might be announced in a matter of weeks.

The new company, according to reports in The New York Observer article by John Koblin (http://www.observer.com/2009/media/time-incs-squires-assembles-team-rivals-harness-digital-media), won't focus on devices but on an iTunes-like site where readers can buy "new and distinct iterations" of the magazines. It comes too late for Gourmet which had a pretty good web presence on epicurious.com.

It will be interesting to see if this new venture can take flight. The New York Observer article seemed to focus on the problem of getting consumers to pay for online content. "Each magazine publisher now believes it's too risky to go it alone to find new ways to get consumers to pay. If they all joined together, the reasoning goes, they stand a better chance of producing greater revenue."

The issue isn't new. Earlier this year Rupert Murdoch announced plans to charge for web access to News Corp's publications. He also campaigned for an online news consortium of daily newspapers much like that which TIME's Squire proposes for magazines.

Finding a way to "monetize" the web is essential for transformation of old media into the new digital future. But as important is the conundrum of creating a new relationship with audiences in an environment where digital tools give audiences a way of participating in a conversation with magazines and newspapers. Oddly, non-media corporations seem to be better equipped to give audiences a voice in the creation of their products. The one-way distribution of content is a hard habit for old-media to kick, but they will have to find a new equilibrium to be successful in the digital media future.