BuzzMachine

Time Magazine just made a rash of brash decisions: cutting its rate base from 4 to 3.25 million (now barely ahead of Newsweek’s 3.1) by getting rid of junk circulation; raising its cover price by a buck to a rather ballsy $4.95; cutting five of its eight special demographic editions; and trying to convince advertisers to buy based on the alleged count of readers vs. the actual count of magazines sold. It’s looking bad for the old beast.

Just before I read the Time press release announcing this yesterday (on my Treo, not in print), I ran into my former colleague, Conde Nast Editorial Director Tom Wallace, at FourSquare, and I was downright optimistic about his magazines.

The difference? I think that general-interest magazines may well be fated to fade away. General-interest anything is probably cursed. For the truth is that interest never was as general editors and publishers thought it was, back in the mass-media age. Old media just assumed we were interested in what they told us to be interested in. But we weren’t. We’re proving that with every new choice the internet enables.

Yet special-interest magazines — community magazines, to put it another way — have a brighter prospect — if they understand how to enable that community.

When I spoke on a panel at the American Society of Magazine Editors sometime ago, the guy who invited me asked a favor: “If you’re going to say that magazines are doomed, Jeff, could you not come?” So I thought about it and decided that magazines aren’t doomed, not necessarily.

And mind you, this comes from someone who buys a fraction the number of the magazines I used to. That’s partly because I no longer have an expense account from a magazine-publishing employer, but also because I just found the issues piling up, unread, as only The New Yorker once did, a mountain of guilt in the corner. I love magazines. Hell, I started one. But I’m just too busy reading — or listening or watching — fresher, more focused, more personal, higher interest content on the internet. But some of that is still from or around magazines (see Business Week’s Blogspotting, for example). I still have a relationship with these brands, only not always in print anymore. And even when I do still read the magazine in print, I want a relationship with the magazine — and, more important, my fellow readers — online.

Magazines aren’t doomed if they can figure out that relationship. And it starts here: The editor of a magazine finds the good stuff and the people who make it. That attracts the rest of us, who like the same good stuff they like. That has always been the essence of the magazine value and brand. But now the internet makes it possible for me to find the good stuff my fellow readers have found. In that sense, magazines were the original collaborative filtering algorithm — only I couldn’t see the stuff my fellow readers liked. Now we can, thanks to the internet — if, that is, the magazine in the middle allows it.

The wise magazine will enable its community to speak among themselves. And it will also find ways to extract and share the wisdom of its crowd. This is true not just of magazines but of other, similar brands in other media (The New York Times, The Guardian, 60 Minutes, the Food Network, and most any trade publication. . .). I don’t want to know what the nation’s best-sellers are — the top books in the general-interest mass market. I want to know the best-selling and best-reviewed books among New Yorker or Times or Economist or Guardian readers. I want to know what EW’s community thinks of Borat. I want to see what Advertising Age’s crowd thinks of Time Magazine’s moves.

To gather a community together today and then not enable them to be a community is a waste or worse: It could be fatal to the brand.

I ran into a magazine circulation exec I respect not long ago and he lamented that too many magazines don’t update online nearly often enough with nearly enough good stuff. Others in his job would — and often do — say the opposite; they would fear that a robust internet site would cannibalize circulation. Not this guy; he’s smart. He said that without a strong online relationship with a magazine’s public, he has no opportunity to sell to them, to maintain and build the relationship and thus the brand and the business. Are the economics different online? Of course, they are. But so are the opportunities. At FourSquare, I heard Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg talk about ways they’ve exploded the usage of the service among the same people. Magazines should think that way.

Some magazines — like fashion and design books — will continue in print. Some — like trade publications — will morph entirely online. But in all cases, they must enable their communities to join together online.

So what about Time? Does it have a community? I don’t think so, no more than NBC does or Warner Brothers. Well, somewhat more. But you get the point. What would I do with Time? Man, that’s a tough one. I hear the new boss, Rick Stengel, is a helluva good editor and when I met him at a panel, I was impressed. But it’s one tough job. Can Time become a collection of communities? Can it become a new kind of news service? Can it invent new, broad forms of networked journalism? Can it survive? We’ll see.

What Time did this week is just what TV Guide did more than a year ago when it cut its rate base and junk circulation and reduced its editions and changed its focus to online with new community enabling features like blogs. They can only hope it’s not too late.

: LATER: See friend Rex Hammock on b-to-b magazines’ lead over the masses:

As I’ve blogged here many times, the consumer magazine arena often claims “community” but rarely actually hosts or facilitates or even recognizes it. However, in the business-to-business media, you often find the leading publisher in a vertical will be the same company that puts on the largest seminars, conferences and conventions; collects and analyzes and packages the data; and, yes, even hosts the dominant space on the web in that category.

While B2B media companies may not “be there” yet, they are far ahead of consumer (mass) media companies in understanding community — or, as I’d refer to it in the business context — the marketplace of human beings who are buyers and human beings who are sellers.

Yes, and why shouldn’t there be New Yorker Meetups?

: Michael Parekh adds:

I have the same problem…love the magazines, but am seemingly unable to MAKE the time to attack the increasing pile in the corner on a regular basis.

Much in the same way that by RSS feeds pile up in the hundreds everyday in my blog reader, as do dozens upon dozens of podcasts in my iTunes and on my iPod.

Too much good stuff, way too little time.

Not necessarily an old media vs. new media problem.

Just a new problem for ALL media.

And one of the solutions to that is the link: taking in what your friends and editors tell you is the good stuff. That is a key value of the content community.

David Carr imagines Time Warner without Time Inc. The old magazines are a drag on corporate performance. They have not managed to start new successes. They’ve started selling off their lesser titles. Can a sale of the publishing division be next? Sure, it can. Did it need to be this way? No, it didn’t. But Time Inc., like other magazine companies, never managed to figure out the internet. Oh, they tried. Who can forget — try as they might —
Pathfinder?

Magazines could have had a unique benefit in the internet if they had thought of themselves not as slick paper but instead of networks of interest and information. The New Yorker is a good illustration: David Remnick et al pick good shit. People like the shit they pick. So they gather around and subscribe. That was as far as the relationship could go in years past. But The New Yorker is more than its content. It is truly a community of smart people, a wise and select crowd, who all like the same shit. And all those people could join in and contribute to the community. Wouldn’t you like to know the books that New Yorker readers are reading? Wouldn’t you be eager to have them recommend articles they’ve read elsewhere? Wouldn’t you enjoy contributing yourself to that exchange? I would. And would this make my relationship with the magazine, its brand, its value, and its community stronger? Yes, it would.

I ran into a few smart magazine executives I respect last week and they are frustrated that magazine brands don’t have greater presences online because they want to build stronger relationships, which will yield better business. Sadly, not many in the business view it this way. They’re still thinking content and control. They’re still thinking centralized. Break out and think distributed and think community and new things become possible.

Newsmagazines are particularly screwed in a world of commodity news (who needs one-size-fits-all Time to give you the news — late — when you have friends to point you to what you really care about?). But even they could have become more than just repositories of content their own staffs created but instead gateways to what larger worlds know.

The strength of these brands is that they had — note the tense — a headstart. They could have used their promotional clout and reputations to enable these communities to form around them. But they didn’t. Too late? Maybe.

Five magazines are giving away subscriptions to five magazines on five campuses — not to the print but to digital facsimiles of the print — in an effort to get these darned kids to read mags. Paint me dubious. Reading PDFs or equivalents is a pain. Either go online fully or don’t. There’s no wading into this new world, only a deepend.

Reports are swirling that News Corp. is considering starting a magazine out of MySpace, with Nylon as a partner. Says AdAge: “The editorial mix would likely cover standout MySpace members and their interests, from music to their social scenes.”

Years ago now, when Time Warner made its disastrous merger with AOL, I suggested to editors there that they should start an AOL magazine making the people in its boards and chats the stars. Went nowhere. Even right after the merger, there was no hope of synergy within what as then AOL Time Warner.

If I were to make that suggestion today, I’m not sure I’d push for a magazine, especially to News Corp. (where I used to work, on a magazine). Why not a TV show? You want a reality show? MySpace is a reality show. Or make a show out of all the YouTubes that the MySpacers make famous; it already is a network. MySpace as a brand could be everything that Current isn’t.

: LATER: J-prof Andrew Grant-Adamson reports that students in his class couldn’t rustle up enough support for a MySpace magazine. Doesn’t bode well.

Conde Nast and CondeNet have finally gone blog. I didn’t get very far in that crusade when I was there. Maybe it was me. But now, clearly, if Conde’s doing it, that means you’re nobody if you’re not blogging. Can Graydon be far behind? Anna?

BloggersBlog features a Glamour dating blog, See Alyssa Date, in which she promises to tell us the intimate details of her nights out with her guys and then follow the advice of readers in polls (should she “jump” him?). That sounds tantalizing, perhaps, until you watch her video. That voice. Anyway, imagine the guys waking up to read a review of their performance and a poll about them.

But meanwhile, over at Jane, we have the saga of Sarah on her “quest to lose her virginity before her 30th birthday.” And there, the men send in their reviews of her.

Well, if blogging turns out to be a way to get laid, everybody will be doing it.

Jon Friedman thinks he has the solution to Time magazine’s woes: distribute on Thursday instead of Monday. I tried that years ago when I launched Entertainment Weekly. I badly wanted it to arrive just before the weekend, at its freshest. But the distribution infrastructure makes that essentially impossible; the trucks roll on Mondays. We were supposed to have few newsstands, so I looked into special shipments directly to them (how about using this new thing called FedEx?) but that was horribly expensive. The Week magazine manages to do this but it is almost entirely subscription based and has very few newsstands.

Now that Time has a new editor — the word was that they’d get someone from the outside, but they got a veteran of the magazine — maybe he can explain to me why the magazine exists. Everytime I pick up Time, I come away feeling as if I just chewed their cud. If you read news on the web today, you get a better, quicker, more up-to-date overview. When I see a cover billing that interests me and buy the thing, it’s inevitably a mistake, because I’m reading a stone-skipping summary of something I know about. So why do we need Time? New managing editor Richard Stengel explains:

Mr. Stengel said yesterday that in some ways, the Internet poses the same kind of challenge to newsweeklies that the plethora of competing newspapers posed to Time when Henry Luce founded it in 1923.

“In a similar way, people were looking for one source to speak with authority and explain the world, and in many ways, that’s still our mission,” Mr. Stengel said. “We can be your guide through the forest of confusing information.”

No, actually, I don’t want you to explain the world to me. A guide, perhaps. But I’m sorry, I just don’t see Time as the one source to speak with authority and explain the world. I am quite glad the days are gone when anyone thought they could be that one source.

I don’t know why I would ever sign up to have GQ magazine send me mobile spam. What of value could they possibly say in an SMS: “Remmber your collar stays today”?

The most quoted and quotable bit from Kurt Andersen’s interview with Time Inc. editor-in-chief John Huey:

Near the end of our breakfast, I ask about the Future of Magazines. “The big question in everyone’s mind [at Time Inc.],” he says, “is how much [of the present struggle] is cyclical and how much is secular.”

A lot is secular—that is, permanent. We would like to believe that Internet-versus-print is analogous to TV-versus-radio in the fifties: The new doesn’t necessarily wipe out the old. But I think paper media today are more like sailing ships around 1860—still dominant but enjoying their last hurrah. I think it’s late in the magazine era. “I hope not,” says Huey. “If I thought they were dead, I’d do something else.” My elegiac turn has made this funny, enthusiastic man a little morose. “And [Time is] something that most people in America want to see survive, even if they don’t know it.”

That’s like saying most people want me to be President, they just don’t know it. No, I’d say that Time is hardly a necessity of life.

Jon Friedman has a funny column watching a focus group put on for show filled with readers of Entertainment Weekly, my baby, who were forced to give up the magazine for a month.

It was endearing, even heartwarming, to observe the obsessive loyalty of these subscribers. The dinner occurred smack in the middle of a horrendous industry slump. Magazines are desperately seeking advertising dollars these days….

That said, I’d hasten to add that these 12 EW subscribers truly need to get out and smell the flowers once in a while, too. (One of them talked about renting a hotel room while in college so she could watch the Oscars ceremony without having her roommates milling around and distracting her from the broadcast. She said that, by the way, with a shrug, as if this amounted to perfectly normal behavior. I don’t know about you, but I could barely afford to buy a slice of pizza when I was in college)….

They dearly missed EW during their period of deprivation. Zoe, a charming lawyer-turned-aspiring-actress, confessed to the group: “I felt lonely,” before smiling gamely and adding reassuredly, “just to the not-pathetic-side of lonely.”

The other panelists nodded knowingly….

Juan commiserated with Kevin, saying: “It was like not having a pen-pal write to me.” He then paused and added sheepishly: “You probably think it’s kind of … freaky.”

I’d like to hear more from those fans and not about the magazine but about the movies. Did Zoe find King Kong sexy? Did Juan get into arguments about Munich?

The point of this little show Friedman attended was, of course, to show the wonders of magazines. It’s all about the magazine. But see the post below about newspapers and community.

EW, I’m glad to see, does exactly what we hoped it would do: It attracts an community of people who love entertainment. But the internet didn’t exist when the magazine was born. Now it does. So now they could bring those people together to share their reviews with fellow movie fans. The magazine has a community. The magazine is a community. So now what?

Business Week is abandoning print for its international editions to emphasize online instead:

BusinessWeek announced today that it will reposition its approach to global markets. A greater emphasis will be placed on providing online news, analysis and information and on developing local language publications while maintaining a single flagship print product.

“We have decided to create robust, customized Asian and European versions of our popular BusinessWeek Online Web site, while delivering a single global edition of BusinessWeek magazine instead of providing separate regional versions,” said Stephen J. Adler, Editor-in-Chief of BusinessWeek. “We are taking this action to harness the growing power of the Web globally and to serve readers and advertisers in a more timely, efficient, and targeted way.”

I have no idea how the international print editions were doing and whether this is more of a retreat from international or a push into online; obviously, it’s positioned as the latter.

You’ll see a frightening image on the back page of Fast Company this month: Me arguing. I was half of a dialogue. The other half: John Griffin, president of the National Geographic Society’s magazine group. The question, Is print dead? The first volley, mine:

Print is not dead. Print is where words go to die.

Too many of the ideas trapped on pages end up, at best, in unused archives or, at worst, in recyclers’ pulp, when they should be online: searchable, discoverable, linkable, part of the conversation.

In this new world, the medium is meaningless. Media define themselves by the pipes that feed them but the public does not; we want what we want when, where, and how we want it. The wise media company will be there with us; the stubborn ones will die.

Look at the hoo-ha it took to create this page: lots of photographic, editorial, and production tsuris, and for what? Is our conversation better for being on this slick paper? No, it’s not, because only two of us are in it when we know that the collective wisdom of the people holding this page is greater than our own. We should be having this conversation together.

But that’s the problem with print: It is far too one-way for this two-way world.

I’ll confess that I recycle my lines like a bum homeless person street entrepreneur recycles cans. The rest of what I have to say would be familiar even to a casual Buzzmachinist.

The funny thing is that the end of the page has a link saying this dialogue will be online here. Only it’s not, two weeks after the magazine hit the newsstands. Ding-dong, the words are dead.