BuzzMachine

That’s the provocative headline I saw in Folio’s report from its conference and a speech by Meredith president Jack Griffin. The fuller context:

As a result, the company invested in its interactive and integrated marketing businesses—spending roughly $600 million since 2002 on launches, acquisitions and building out its existing Web sites, Griffin said, as well as redefining its editorial hiring approach. “We don’t hire editors anymore,” he said. “We hire content strategists.”

I’m not sure what that means. But it made for a good headline.

Magazines won’t die. But I wonder how many new ones will be born. House & Garden is folding. Business 2.0 is dead. Ditto Jane, Cargo, ElleGirl, Teen People — all relatively recent launches. A launch can easily cost $40 million before break-even. Entertainment WEekly, my baby, went through $200 million before turning profitable (that wasn’t my fault!). It’s a $300-million-plus-a-year franchise now. But you can bet that it wouldn’t be launched today. Nor should it. EW should and would be a web network instead if I had my way.

So the question is: Who will have the balls to start a new magazine today?

Oh, once you already have one, if it’s profitable and if you’re smart, it can still prosper, especially if it learns how to gather and serve its community online. So I don’t think those magazines will die. But starting a new one? That’s just too high risk.

In London, I’m seeing freesheets turn into magazines. There’s a free men’s magazine and a free sport magazine. They also bring challenges: mainly distribution and, I’ll bet, ad rates associated with something given away. But they don’t have the incredible costs of subscriber acquisition; they don’t hang on their churn and renewal numbers; they aren’t building big brands. They’re just slick and free.

If there ever was a magazine that should have been primarily online and primarily a community, it was Business 2.0. But no, it’s dead now. And that’s a shame.

Why the hell it didn’t start online or transition to online is beyond me. Business 2.0 should not have been a product but a community; it could have been the magazine that shows how that’s done. It even had a community on Facebook eager to save it. But, sadly, this magazine was made by a 1.0 company that just didn’t understand how to think like a place instead of a thing.

This being a product of Time Inc., I suspect that politics also played a role. (That’s on my mind as I teach my CUNY course in entrepreneurial journalism and for the first class, I took the students through the saga of starting Entertainment Weekly.) Time Inc. refused to sell Business 2.0 to Mansueto Ventures, publisher of Fast Company and Inc., which are competitive. And Fortune, inside Time Inc., is also competitive. So out went the baby with the bathwater. Too bad.

Nick Denton has wanted his Gawker Media to be the plugged-in Conde Nast. He has even talked about having the same number of sites as Si has magazines. But now he bites the hand that inspires him with the antimatter to the matter of 4 Times Square: Jezebel, Celebrity, Sex, Fashion without airbrushing. It even comes with a manifesto:

Basically, we wanted to make the sort of women’s magazine we’d want to read, a magazine that would never actually see glossy paper because big-name advertisers and the publishers who kowtow to them don’t much like it when you point out the vulgarity of a $2000 handbag. Women deserve some of the blame here: if men ever bought $2000 handbags, Esquire and GQ might be as bad — and profitable — as Glamour and Vogue. . . .

[W]omen’s magazine covers display what are essentially female forgeries, smothered in makeup, lit and fanned and shot with equipment that could be eBayed to finance an Ivy League education, and computer-aided-artistry involving heavy airbrushing, contouring and rearranging to make hips look leaner and eyes that extra-special, inhuman hue of aquamarine. . . .

When a magazine editor highlights a must-have new creme eyeshadow, pore clarifying serum or sporty little capelet, she not only probably got it for free, she also probably got a meal out of it, and a celeb-studded party, and possibly a trip to Miami to learn of its merits from a carefully cultivated crop of experts, and oh yeah maybe a video iPod from the grateful publicist (with whom she is BFF!) Magazine editors are so buried in free shit that they don’t even realize how much they get, that when the time comes for them to exhort you to invest in the new important color that isn’t black they actually believe their own hype. The truth: black goes with everything, and you probably don’t need any more assistance going broke. . . .

It’s such a hip idea, Si might do it.

I was given an exclusive preview of the web site for Conde Nast’s Portfolio magazine, which has had all its business-publication competitors buzzing, wondering what they could be up. It’s set to launch online and on newsstands next week. I

But before I tell you what I saw, I need to unravel my Gordian knot of disclosures, conflicts, and caveats in this story: I worked for 11 years for Conde’s parent company, often with CondeNet (which is not running Portfolio’s site). I had lunch with the Portfolio guys early on, giving them free — meal aside — political advice. I still consult for titles at Conde and Advance. Portfolio is working with Inform, a competitor to Daylife, a venture where I work. I ended up pitching the professional education services of CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism, where I teach. And I know people working for all their competitors. Because of all that and the grain of salt the size of Utah you’d have to take with my views — and because I didn’t get to dive into the site on my own but was guided by Portfolio.com Managing Editor Chris Jones and General Manager Ari Brandt — I won’t review it so much as give you a preview.

My first reaction is that it’s very content-y, very magazine-y: stories, pieces, photos, their stuff as the value, the center of the universe. I understand that, but for this new magazine — and others that are for various reasons breaking away from old partnerships and rebuilding (e.g., Hearst, post iVillage) or losing their print companions (e.g, Premier, post profit) — I think there is a tremendous opportunity to reinvent the magazine relationship with the people formerly known as the audience, to enable the wisdom of the crowd, to put them at the center. But that’s my agenda (another caveat). Besides, there isn’t a community here yet.

Having said that, Portfolio is doing some things quite right. Start with the fact that all the content of the magazine, with the exception of a few difficult-to-translate graphics — will come online the same time that the magazine goes on sale. That’s just not done at many magazines and that hurts them every time a new reader comes to find an article. In Portfolio’s case, they’re all new readers. The site creates lots of content just for online. It also enables comments on every article and every blog post with community powered (like a fair number of other sites lately) by Pluck. They have a stable of bloggers, three of whom write for the magazine, the rest don’t, in areas such as politics, technology, entertainment, travel, and fashion. (Yes, they cover fashion. It’s Conde Nast, remember.) One of their bloggers is a name we blog people know: Felix Salmon. He’s the one who will still blog outside. (I would have set up a loose network with a score of Felixes, all writing wherever they write; that’s the beginning of the community I was looking for earlier.) The site does not try to replicate the news that business readers already know but links out to news elsewhere at Portfolio’s competitors; for this, they are using Inform to display headlines from top sources in various slices. They seem to know what they’re not; they’re also not offering portfolio services (yes, it’s a name challenge). Another Advance division, American City Business Journals, is providing local business coverage with stories hosted at Portfolio. And they are using Nielsen Buzzmetrics to track blog talk about top executives — though, oddly, you can’t then link out to that talk (yes, of course, I looked askance at that). For a big, albeit new magazine, I’d say that’s a decent collection of reasonably web-smart decisions.

So how do the site and the magazine view business? From what I can tell, in buckets of my own labeling, I see equal doses of executives-as-celebrities and business-as-lifestyle with some efforts to add in some business-y data with magazine-y voices. Here, it’s OK to both earn and spend a lot of money. In fact, it’s encouraged.

Though all those buzzing competitors wonder what room is left in this crowded and — in ad terms — shrunken field, David Carey, the head of the business, sees an unmined opening. I’ll need to see a few issues to decide whether I agree, but at the outset, I don’t disagree. My prescription for Wired magazine years ago (pre-Chris Anderson) was to make it an online, digital lifestyle magazine from the kind of taste-making perch Conde Nast always occupies: travel as lifestyle (CN Traveler), food as lifestyle (Gourmet, Bon Ap), overpriced furnishing as lifestyle (AD), sex and thin thighs as lifestyle (Glamour). Is there room for business as lifestyle with executives as celebrity role models? Maybe there is. Will there be plenty to ridicule among the recently rich? I hope so.

When you come to the site, you’ll see what they say are the five top stories shaping the market now. With it, they boast, will be a Conde-class photo. They’ve emphasized photography from the beginning. I have to say I still don’t quite get that. Yes, in its day, Fortune had magnificent photography, much of it iconic to its age. But now, in the post-post-post Life Magazine era, I’m not sure photography is so universal in its topical appeal. There’s only so much you can do with craggy-faced moguls. On the home page, you’ll see what they call a well — magazine-y talk — promoting their features, online and print, and promos for their blogs. Inside, they cover executives with feature stories, videos, and a nice little feature annotating what’s in a mogul’s office. (Pardon me a moment’s nostalgia: In the prototype for Entertainment Weekly, we had a similar feature explaining everything that dressed the set of Murphy Brown. It was always the thing that made people say wow. This is equally fun but now it’s all Flashed up.) They have spottings of CEOs on the red carpet. They have resource links for the overcompensated (my adjective) CEO — plastic surgeons, security firms, and white-collar prison-prep firms that executives recommend — and survival guides to plugging boardroom leaks and more modern-day inconveniences. Executives are busy, so they don’t review but summarize books — c-level CliffsNotes. They have profiles of 100 top executives and of 1 million companies. They cover careers — job of the week, profiles of headhunters. They work with Conde Nast Traveler (not CondeNet’s Concierge) to provide travel guides to more than a dozen cities aimed specifically at the first-class road warrior. And, given that this is Conde, they cover culture and lifestyle: food, arts, sports, and stuff (when you have $400 to burn on a shirt, here’s where to light the match). All this is sprinkled with cute Flash aps, slick video, and, again, photos.

The first issue of Portfolio, the magazine, comes out next week but the next doesn’t come out until September. This, Carey explained, enables them to better sell advertising into early issues and to sell subs; it’s how Conde launches magazines lately. But between the first and second issue, Portfolio’s site will keep churning all summer. And it has plenty of people to churn: 15 edit staff, 15 tech staff, 15 business staff, plus lots of freelancers. That’s huge. I guess it takes big money to cover big money.

I’ll be curious to see your reviews when the site and magazine come out next week.

I had breakfast this morning with the leadership of TimesOnline.co.uk talking about innovation and the subject was the same yesterday morning at breakfast with the Project Red Stripe team at the Economist: six people — from editorial, classified, marketing, data sales, technology — who have been given six months, $200,000, and the freedom to use any content from any Economist property to come up with something new for the magapaper. They made it onto the team by applying and sharing their ideas. Their only instructions: to make it innovative and put it on the web. They say they will know they have succeeded when they present their big idea and get someone saying, “I don’t get this at all.”

I am hearing the smart people in media — those who do get it — talking urgently about innovation. It’s almost to the point where that is the thing the most value, that is the commodity over which they are competing (but, thank goodness, there is no scarcity at work here). I don’t hear them talking as much about getting another new print subscriber — so much for that — as I hear them racing for innovation ahead of the other guys.

The Project Red Stripe team and I started off with a debate about blogging. The Economist is blogging but, in Economist tradition, they are doing so anonymously. I said this is a clash of orthodoxies. Blogs are conversations with people. The irony is that the other side of this debate came from the guy who got on this team by pushing blogging and who acts as the team blogger, Tom Shelley. He defends the Economist voice as a human voice of its own. Fun discussion. We talked about community and they raised provocative, Economistian questions about the fragility of communities and the value. And more.

Afterwards, I questioned Alan Rusbridger and Carolyn McCall of the Guardian in front of the Online Publishers Association about the pace and culture of change. I asked Alan whether he is more worried about changing too much or too little. No doubt, he said, he worried about changing too little. But read his principles again; he is not changing to throw out the value of journalism but to preserve and advance it. At this morning’s OPA, I got into the predictable, well-rehearsed conference tussle with Martin Nisenholtz of The Times — we should take the show on the road — about blogs and MSM, but what it really was about was centralized architecture (the value of coming to The Times, what I now call the Yahoo model) vs. decentralized, distributed structure (going to where the people are; the Google model). The question is how the fundamental model, the architecture of media and information is changing. It’s important to keep in mind that change should not be sought for change’s sake. Nor innovation. But the only way to change successfully as the world changes around us is to innovate. Thus the race.

What makes a week in London so damned exciting for me — professionally and intellectually invigorating — is the competitive race for innovation I see all around here. It has been a great week.

: LATER: Demonstrating the point, Shane Richmond of the Telegraph — with whom I breakfasted three days ago (video when I get near good bandwidth) — notes Rusbridger’s speech about shifting the Guardian to 27/7 preeminent-web journalism and argues that they got there first:

The Guardian will be following us into integration. . . . Alan Rusbridger’s statement to staff yesterday contained the ‘draft principles of 24/7 working’. Almost all of them are already in practice here, where we work on a ‘web first’ basis.

It amused me. These guys are all rushing to innovate first. That is healthy for newspapering, for no matter who brags about starting it, good ideas are good ideas and if someone does it first others will quickly follow. And as I said above, innovation is not a scarce resource. So have at it. If we’re smart in America, we’ll watch and copy, too.

: LATER STILL: Just got a link from the Economist Red Stripe team to their invitation to submit ideas to them. That openness is smart. The pity is that the damned lawyers got to them with dreaded terms & conditions, which makes it quite unappetizing to submit things to them on their form, giving up rights and your first born. I’d suggest that a better way to share is openly on your own blog, which they are free to read and to use as inspiration and should still — as they will with their form — give credit where it is due. Indeed, if the idea is open, so will the discussion be and any good idea can get even better. If you want to innovate, follow Shakespeare’s advice: Kill the lawyers first.

Premiere magazine is folding (cough) going online. Almost 20 years ago, when it launched ahead of Entertainment Weekly, we at Time Inc. fretted that it would get in the way. The business guys considered buying it but passed, saying the business plan wouldn’t work. Well, it worked for a few years. What didn’t work was transitioning its community and content and value to online years ago. They still thought like a magazine. And now it’s as good as gone. Let other magazines be warned: If people would rather talk about your subject matter online, then you’d better be there to help them do what they want to do. Your community is there, with or without you.

Andy Plesser of Beet TV made the mistake of handing me a microphone at Always On, but I had the pleasure of interviewing Mark Whitaker, former editor of Newsweek and new the overseer of the future at Washington Post Newsweek Interactive, and my friend David Weinberger, author of the soon-to-be-released Everything is Miscellaneous. Whitaker, part I:

Whitaker, part II:

Weinberger:

Of course, we feel bad for the 289 people who lost their jobs at Time Inc. yesterday, but the place was — and always has been — incredibly inefficient.

When I went to People for a tryout in the ’80s, they were dubious: We don’t hire newspaper people, they said with a sneer. But they gave me a shot. The first day, I was given 30 pages of correspondents’ notes and wrote a 400-word story in the morning. Piece of cake. I was a newspaper rewriteman used to writing a handful of stories a day and then a columnist writing 1,500 words a day, six days a week. I asked for the next story. They had nothing. For five days straight, it was the same tale. At the end of the week, they offered me the job. But one of the old hands from Time Inc. pulled me aside and growled, “Don’t ever do that again.” I couldn’t figure out what he was telling me until I arrived and sat in a meeting of writers with then-Managing Editor Pat Ryan as she told them, “Listen, people we really need to improve productivity; I expect you all to get up to writing one story a week.”

Mind you, once reported by a cadre of correspondents and written by a staff writer in New York, it was edited (read: rewritten) by a senior editor and edited (yes, rewritten), by an assistant managing editor, and then edited (and, with surprising freqency, rewritten) by the managing editor. And then the research came along to try to correct all the errors this process inserted in the story. (This is how People famous declared Abe Vigoda dead; he was next see in an ad in Variety holding up a copy of that magazine while sitting up in a coffin.) And alongside all this, there were photo researchers and editors and layout artists and production people galore — all to perfect that 400-word tome about some small moment in life. Oh, and to make sure they had the very best 400-word celebrity haiku, they “slashed” two to four stories for every slot in the magazine — that is, they went through this entire process for at least twice as many stories as would actually be printed.

I left people in the late ’80s to start Entertainment Weekly (where I proudly started a weekly magazine with a total edit staff of 60 — fewer editorial staffers than any monthly magazine in the company). I returned about a year ago to talk to the staff about blogs and I was gobsmacked at how huge it had grown: One floor had become two; the place was jammed with people, all doing essentially the same job we had done 20 years before, quite inefficiently, with too many people even then.

So it’s hard to imagine that the layoffs will hurt. They will change the tone of the magazines as stories are now to be reported, written, and researched by single authors. The point of that entire Time Inc. system was to homogenize the style, to make it all sound like Time or People, no matter who wrote it. But now Rick Stengel, ME of Time, is filling the book with columnists: with distinct voices. And People is closing bureaus filled with full-time reporters (rather than writers).

But looming over all this is the fate of magazine, especially the newsmagazine. I’ve been arguing that magazines with communities can be in good shape if they learn to enable those communities to share their knowledge and passions — and that will happen online, not in print. But I also argued that general-interest magazines could be doomed in the age of the mass of niches.

Chris Anderson, editor of Wired, puts forth the means of what he calls radical transparency. Pardon my blog triumphalism, but I think it takes the culture he has learned in the blog world and tries to lay it over the big-media world. And that is good.

But I do think the truly radical transformation would be to stop looking at the magazine as a thing — a product in print or online — but as a community, for that is what magazines really are and always have been: people who rather around the stuff they all like or need. See my earlier blather on the notion here. The point is that what you really want to do is open the windows on either side of your house and let the people standing around talk directly to each other, with or without you. You do your job, still, creating some stuff that people want to gather around. But then you enable them to share more. And now you have a new role — helping them. So you end up bigger than a magazine.

That said, I like Anderson’s tactics and I think they’ll work:

1) Show who we are. All staff edit their own personal “about” pages, giving bios, contact details and job functions. [e.g. -ED] Encourage anyone who wants to blog to do so. Have a masthead that actually means something to people who aren’t on it. While we’re at it, how about a real org chart, revealing the second dimension that’s purposely obscured in the linear ranking on a traditional masthead? . . .

2) Show what we’re working on. We already have internal wikis that are common scratch pads for teams working on projects. And most writers have their own thread-gathering processes, often online. Why no open them to all? Who knows, perhaps other people will have good ideas, too. . . .

3) “Process as Content”*. Why not share the reporting as it happens, uploading the text of each interview as soon as you can get it processed by your flat-world transcription service in India? . . . After you’ve woven together enough of the threads to have a semi-coherent draft, why not ask your readers to help edit it? . . .

4) Privilege the crowd. Why not give comments equal status to the story they’re commenting on? Why not publish all letters to the editor as they’re submitted (we did that here), and let the readers vote on which are the best? We could promise to publish the top five each month, whether we like them or not: “Harness our tools of production! Make us print your words! Voting is Power!” . . .

5) Let readers decide what’s best. We own Reddit, which (among other things) is a terrific way of measuring popularity. Why should we guess at which stories will be most popular and give those preferential treatment? Why not just measure what people really think and let statistics determine the hierarchy of the front page?

Ah, but those two tactics still separate the magazine from the crowd. It’s still about commenting on what the magazine does (’but enough about you…’). Go the next step, Chris: Recognize that the crowd has stuff to say that may have nothing to do with what the magazine may be working on but that is of value to the rest. Or as a group, they have information that is valuable to the group. I’ve been saying I want to know the best-selling books among New Yorker readers. I also want to know the best-selling phones among Wired readers (and why).

The magazine is the crowd.

6) Wikifiy everything. The realities of publishing is that at some point you push the publish button. In the traditional world, that’s the end of the story. It is a snapshot in time, as good as we could make it but inevitably imperfect. The errors (and all articles have them) are a mix of commission and omission–we hope for the best yet brace ourselves for the worst. But what if we published every story on a wiki platform, so they could evolve over time, just like Wikipedia itself? . . .

Believe it or not, I almost think that last one may go too far. There is still a role for authorial responsibility. That doesn’t mean control — yes, by all means, show us the corrections and suggestions ,but then do the work to verify and edit. I don’t think you can necessarily hand over your work to the public but you can , indeed, improve your work with the public.

Again, I think the starting point is not what the magazine had but perhaps what the magazine doesn’t have: A wiki of helpful knowledge the public wants to share. And then the editors can come in and polish and verify and report. So then the editors becomes the handmaidens of the crowd. Now that’s radical transparency.

The Bivings Report surveys magazine sites.

After finishing the research, it became clear that magazines are not making use of Web 2.0.

Despite their failure in terms of Web features, it should be recognized that magazines have taken on a more effective general strategy than newspapers when it comes to the Internet. Instead of replicating printed content online, as newspapers do, magazines have made efforts to publish unique, Web specific, and easily digestible materials on their websites. In this way, magazines are using the Internet as a supplement to, rather than a replacement of, their printed publications. Magazine websites limit their article content and focus on pushing customers to purchasing printed subscriptions.

Here was my advice to magazines.

The latest Glenn & Helen Show talks with folks from Popular Mechanics about running a magazine the modern way, as more than a magazine.