August 2012 – Anna Wahrman

Latest magazine numbers are pathetic

August 9, 2012 Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

How much longer will making magazines be a viable industry? Audit Bureau figures came out yesterday, and they’re straight-up painful. Basically, magazine profits are way, way down. And this is down not from the heyday before the economy tanked, it’s down from the post-recession numbers, which sucked in the first place. The New York Times acknowledges that the industry has been on the decline for years now, then quotes industry consultant John Harrington saying that the latest numbers were “the worst I’ve ever seen.” Great.

My summary of the ABC numbers for magazines:

↓ Overall: Down on newsstands almost 10%
↔ Digital: Up — doubled from this time last year, in fact — but to only 2% of total circ
↓ Women’s (Cosmo, O) and Celeb (People, Us, Star) titles: Down solidly
↓ Literary titles (New Yorker, VF): Down seriously
↓ Newsweeklies: Down significantly, especially Time
↑ Food titles: Up

I feel privileged to have caught the end, in the ’90s and early aughts, of the old media’s best days. The future is more uncertain than ever. I hope daily that the industry I love hasn’t seen better days, but the numbers and history aren’t on its side. “Adapt or die” is such a cliche that one tends to forget that some die. But die they do (or they start to adapt, get diluted enough from their original form that they cease to matter, and then they die).

The Magazine Publishers of America, which runs the ASME Awards, has been renamed and rebranded away from a name and logo that represents a page turning into one that looks like…well, whatever this is:

As much as I live online, I also love reading magazines, sitting with them, consuming them in a way you can’t on the Internet, or even on a tablet. (Print, though its revenues are paltry and getting paltrier by the day, does supply a massive amount of good-quality content online, let us not forget. Let us, however, try to better monetize?) I was recently away from the computer and Internet for a few days; instead I was informed and delighted by the magazines and books I’d brought with me. They were well written, well edited, well designed and well structured. I came back with torn-out bits, dog-eared pages — matter of fact, I tore out a whole article and sent it to my brother. In the mail. With a stamp.

I’m not a technophobe in the least, and I’m as much a participant in the immediate-gratification culture as the next guy. But I hope I’m not alone in my desire to see the rebirth of the magazine industry. It must find ways to matter to readers/users or face extinction, plain and simple.

Content farming and its runoff

August 8, 2012 Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

Content farms, or scaled content creators, have generally gotten a bad name in journalism. I know because when I worked for one — AOL Huffington Post’s Seed before it got shuttered in February — I got a lot of guff from traditional journalists. The line was that we paid writers — sometimes “writers” — a pittance to create crappy content. In truth, that did and does happen, especially at Demand Media (which creates content for eHow and Livestrong, among others sites) and other, low-quality, high-search-volume sites and site scrapers.

At Seed, we strove to find a middle ground between Demand’s formula and a slightly higher quality, slightly more expensive, hopefully higher ranking and better referring schema. This formula was experimental; I felt like oftentimes I worked at a journalism lab, where, just as a scientist might test a theory, we’d hypothesize, try, react, tweak, recast, and reattempt, repeatedly, until we had a winning formula.

I always thought of About.com as the proto-content farm, Demand as the next step (forward or backward I was never sure), and Seed as the next evolution.

Coincidentally, today brings news about both of these companies. And the lastest scoop reveals that both are in jeopardy, for reasons having to do with search rankings and algorithm changes, quality (reality and perception), user behavior changes, the rise of social media, and the evolution of the Internet at large.

About.com, which is owned by the New York Times Co. (this fact always lent it an air of ethics that the rest of its peers never shared) is being sold to Answers.com. According to Peter Kafka at All Things D, when the Times Co. bought it in 2005, it was for $410 million. It’s selling it today for $270 million.

Demand Media, according to Jeff Bercovici at Forbes, claims a profit for the quarter. Ahem. I guess $94,000 is a profit. For a publicly traded company that had loss of $2.4 million at this time last year, maybe that counts. But overall, I think we can say definitively at this point that the Internet is trending away from low-quality garbage and toward actually helpful articles — maybe even some that are well written enough that the user may delight in them and desire to share them.

Both companies would certainly benefit from not having to be so reliant on Google’s indiscriminate algorithm changes. Demand has already spiked millions of pieces of crappy content and improved others (presumably those it can win on in search) to curry favor with rankings and users. About.com, I think, due to its nature and structure, may have reached saturation, which isn’t to say that what’s already there isn’t of value — on the contrary. But the Internet is not a meritocracy, and having content that’s good doesn’t automatically mean it’s valuable monetarily.

For both companies, there’s nothing to do but evolve along with the web, take it where the Internet leads, try to keep up with the bruising pace of change, and respond accordingly. In other words, test theories, tweak them and try again, as we did at Seed, and hope that the company is patient enough (and/or its pockets are deep enough) that you come out on the other side with heads held high and a profit to show for blazing the trail. Whether that can actually happen with content farms (or algorithmic solutions to similar situations) remains to be seen.

UPDATE: About.com was sold to Barry Diller’s IAC, the company that owns Ask.com, for $300 million.

Yes, the cracks are showing in news apps

August 3, 2012 Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

Short post today, in response to Matthew Ingram at GigaOm, who asks, in light of the recent news about the Huffington app going free and The Daily laying off a good chunk of staff: “Are these two isolated cases, or a sign that cracks are starting to show in the content model that publishers have bought into with the iPad?”

Answer: The latter. Slightly longer answer: Publishers only dreamed that the iPad would create a new revenue stream. In most cases, it hasn’t, so back the the drawing board. I’ve said before that I don’t think the business case is there in most cases. A wing and a prayer is not a strategy.

Journalism 101: Telling the real story

August 2, 2012 Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

It’s always mystifying to me when journalists can’t see the story in the story they’re writing. They’re too busy rehashing the press release that they don’t bother to read between the lines of their own reporting. Perfectly illustrated today in Streaming Media.

“We really think consumers want content to be programmed, and they want content to be curated.”

–Ron Harnevo, senior vice president of video at AOL and CEO of 5Min Media, which was acquired by AOL in 2010

“HuffPost Live…won’t have shows. Instead, viewers will find a constant stream of discussion. ‘People don’t want to be talked at anymore. They don’t want somebody sitting up on high telling them, ‘Here’s what you need to know.’ People want to be talked with.'”

–Roy Sekoff, president of HuffPost Live and founding editor of The Huffington Post, which was acquired by AOL in 2011

If there was any doubt that AOL and The Huffington Post have different cultures, philosophies, goals and audience, I think that’s safely eradicated by these two quotes, which appear only grafs from each other in the same piece and contradict each other completely.

However, the resultant story, the one that got written, which was no doubt the one fed to the reporter from the company, is about the company’s so-called three-pronged approach to video. The actual story is either what the culture/audience split means to the bigger picture of the company; or it’s that very few companies, if any (including AOL/HuffPost), have any idea what consumers actually want. (Sekoff: “My metric isn’t going to be numbers.” No? OK. What is it going to be, then?) Perhaps the story is that AOL has no real long-term strategy (and certainly no long-term acquisition strategy), that it tries to survive from quarter to quarter and changes direction just as often. In any case, it’s certainly not “It’s a plan that’s worked well so far.” No, that kind of pablum is the height of irresponsible reporting — the writer might as well have penned a press release himself. And for future reference, when a person gets moved off brands s/he previously controlled, that’s not a promotion, no matter what the PR flack insists.

Ask questions that matter. Don’t take answers at face value. Believe that corporate hacks are trying to get one over on you and act accordingly. Let the story write itself; don’t go in with an agenda. It’s Journalism 101.

[Disclosure: I used to work at AOL HuffPost.]