One Last Question...

What are the best authoring tools for creating magazine-like experiences for the iPad?

I posted that question on Quora and got no answers, sorry to say. But in the meantime I was researching the answer  in connection with the creation of  an app based on GoFISHn.com, which is a user-generated content site about fishing I started two years ago.

We're calling the app, "The Best of GoFISHn 2011," and we're building it from the best of the more than 10,000 posts members made on the site. It's gorgeous and unlike anything that's ever been tried in the fishing media world. The app (think interactive magazine, or picture book) has about 50 sections, and they feature the images and video from some great fishing guide members of GoFISHn as well as sections we dreamed up based on compliations of great posts in areas like world records, celebrity, danger, disasters, invasives, and more. Below is a sample screen layout from an early prototype.

We've learned a lot in the past two months putting this together and working with Dmitry Paperny at Cohere Studio, so I wrote up my own answer to the question.  It's not comprehensive, but it's a good starting point. I hope it saves some time and effort for folks on the same track. 

I am beginning to understand how moblie,and tablets in particular, will change everything.

Life.com's spectacular re-launch

The Life magazine franchise has had its up and downs for many years, the latest was a failed effort to distribute a revived print edition as part of major metro newspapers' weekend editions. But this re-launch just may be the right way to bring the brand back to life (sorry). The magazine was always first and foremost about the best of photojournalism, the work of extraordinary photographers carefully chosen by really fine editors. The new LIfe.com, a joint venture with Getty Images,  recovers that simple idea and brings it online with photo galleries built around the news of the day (thanks to a partnership with Getty) as well as timeless subjects you would never come up with on your own...like, "LIFE salutes the bikini" and "Cassius Clay: Before he became Ali." It's addictive, this blend of the old and the new, especially because it's so well "curated" to use a term the Life.com editors like.

Full disclosure, I was close to this project before I left Time Inc. last year, so I am more than a little partial. But I would argue that this is one of those rare media sites that's really compelling by virtue of being simple and clear on delivery of a timeless and appealing idea -- absorbing, wonderfully curated photography. And the irony is that the Web can do more for this promise than print ever could. It's everywhere, it's boundless and and it's 24/7.

So here's the over-the-top  prediction: Life.com will be a run-away success from both an audience and a revenue perspective -- love that big Rolex ad and there's lots of ecommerce possibilities . It will become one of Time Inc.'s most important businesses online.

A great magazine is born (and yes, they still matter)

The name, Garden & Gun, might throw you, though the tagline, Soul of the New South, should steady you a bit. Sid Evans, the former award winning editor of Field & Stream,  has launched a really notable, even irresistible, new monthly that tells us a lot about why no one, I repeat, no one should give up on magazines. True, not all magazines are created equal, and some will not survive these bitter times. But there are those that really work, and no one would want them to be anything other than what they are: beautifully conceived, balanced and executed marriages of word, image and layout that deliver on a proposition at once elusive and completely satisfying. For generations, great editors at enduring magazines have delivered that immersive experience, readers have embraced it, and advertisers have paid well to join in.

Garden & Gun has all those attributes, except, sadly, the advertising. But set that aside for a second: What Evans has created is a magazine that celebrates the south in a way that effortlessly sidesteps the corniness and self-consciousness and draws readers in (even a Yankee like me) with intriguingly well chosen and very well written stories, great pacing and variety, and wonderful photography and design. This is the new south, richly present in the here and now and no less deeply connected to the many cultural legacies of the south.

The current issue (Feb.-March), for example, has a cover story "Great Southern Homes" that is a photo essay of the "grand and humble, antebellum and modern, but all bound by land, heat, and history"  -- from sharecropper shacks to Frank Lloyd Wright. There is an interview with  the singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams and her father, the distinguished poet, Miller Williams (President Clinton's poet laureate), in which among other things they discuss their friendship years ago with the wonderful Flannery O'Connor. Turn the page and there's a remarkable feature story about a Connecticut Shotgun Manufacturing Company, a firm that has brought high-quality, custom shotgun manufacture back to the U.S. in part by reviving classic lines from makers who disappeared over decades gone by.

Speaking the unspeakable: paid content?

Yesterday PaidContent.org carried remarks from The New York Times editor Bill Keller suggesting that the Times may resume charging consumers for at least some access to the Times site. He mentioned no particulars, but Keller seemed pretty firm in his conviction that consumers are willing to pay for world class journalism. Keller's point came down to this: 'A lot of people in the news business, myself included, don’t buy as a matter of theology that information “wants to be free."'

Good. It's about time this debate gets renewed. Display advertising online is tumbling for a variety of reasons, and the core print business at both magazines and newspapers faces crushing reversals. Our astonishing economic catastrophe is the accelerant, but when it comes to online, not necessarily the cause of this conflagration. That's harder to get at, but some of the elements include:

The costly complexities of the online display advertising business. Is it a branding medium, or a direct response medium? Is it best targeted against contexts or user data or user behavior?  The Web is a medium that can do it all, and the wants and needs of agencies and clients are all over the map, as are the capabilities of publishers. It's a very tough marketplace.

The "unsolds" problem. In 2008, many publishers were selling a signficant percentage of their display inventory to ad networks for a fraction of the price they received in "premium" deals. No one quite knows how to solve this problem and it has led to a lot of handwringing about the real value of online inventory. As inventory expands, will publishers' pricing power increase or decrease?

The headlong race to scale.  If there was one axiom in the online media industry in recent years, it was the centrality of scale. If your site was in your category's top three in terms of audience size, you were golden. The big agencies would call to talk about their big clients and big buys. Agencies wanted efficiency. Online buys are notoriously time-consuming to manage. Fewer buys means less work. So buy the biggest audiences. Hence the race to scale.

The Google factor. Getting huge has many dimensions, but performing well in Google search results is  universal. Everyone wants top results in Google, and one key attribute to success in Google is the importance of  "free." If Google's algorithm understands that content is behind a paid or registration subscriber wall, then it's likely to be poorly ranked or excluded. It's been a core belief at Google that information should be free online, and that sensibility is embedded in Google's search technology. (As a practical matter, publishers with paid content can mitigate this problem by following Google's sensible  "First Click Free" policy, which says Google will index subscription or "paid" content if the Google users can click to what they see in results for free -- even if any subsequent clicks hit the pay wall. The Wall Street Journal online, for example, follows this practice.)

So in recent years, the free, ad-supported model ruled because of this simple proposition: Scale was the #1 issue for sales; Google was a key ingredient to get big scale; and paid content didn't play well in Google. So keep it free. Keller recognized that in his remarks: "But if Web advertising takes a long dive — or if some clever engineer figures out how to decouple a paid Web site from the search function — a subscription model might be worth a closer look.”

Where does this leave publishers who are watching their businesses burn to the ground?

Magazine digital advertising revenues: Nat Ives' scorecard

Advertising Age's Nat Ives did some serious homework to estimate the 2008 digital advertising revenues for the big magazine publishers. It's hard to be accurate using PIB numbers and other speculative sources, but I'd wager he got pretty close most of the time. Here are the results:

Publisher                Estimated or self-reported* percent
                               ad revenue from digital
New York mag*         20%     (revenues not available)
The Economist*        16%      (not available)
Martha Stewart        12%      ($14 million)
Maxim*                   12%     (not available)
Time Inc.                 10%      ($245 million)
Hachette                >10%      ($118 million)
Rodale                       9%      ($39 million)
Meredith                    7%      ($90 million)
Hearst magazines       6.5%   ($124 million)
Bonnier                      5%      ($27 million)
Wenner                      5%      ($22 million)
American Express       4%      ($11 million)
Conde Nast                 3%     ($104 million)

His accompanying piece gets at big issues. One is free content online, which, he points out, is really the cousin of very cheap subscription prices for magazines in general. Both strategies were designed to drive up readership and thereby advertising revenues. But clearly that strategy is pretty beaten up at the start of 2009, and it's not clear what's next, apart from lay-offs, closures and consolidations.

Ives also asks what other revenues are out there, especially online, and the most eye-popping number he cites is a service-book publisher Rodale's reported 40% of total digital revenue from ecommerce. Rodale has clearly learned one big secret of the Web for service-oriented magzines: Online you can not only write about services, you can actually provide them and charge for them. I've long been surprised by how slow most magazines were to take up that opportunity.

Of course all this flows into the larger question: where will digital media businesses find the revenues to become more profitable, especially in the face of disappointing display results for 2008 and even questionable sponsored links revevue. Ives cites experiments pending at People.com, including paid game downloads and a paid iPhone app, as one little indication of where things are going.

Paid content? or Paid services and free content? All of the above? The era of dogmatic, pure-play "free, ad-supported content" is over, in case anyone didn't notice, and it doesn't take a lot of smarts to see what's next: a more wide-reaching and pragmatic approach to online business models.