Saturday, October 25, 2008
Will NYT be around in 10 years?
"The heart of the answer must be that we can't care," says Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. "We do care. I care very much, but we must be where people want us to be for their information. Print is going to be here, I believe, for a very long time." The Times is more comfortable than ever with experimentation and launching services in beta, he says. "The thought is that we have to get past the thought that it has to be perfect" on day one. "If you're not prepared to occasionally fail, you're not trying hard enough."
More from paidContent.org here.
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Maghound: possibly new business model for magazines
Picard talks about how newspaper business model has been changing rapidly in his book. While I was reading the book, I kind of got tried on newspaper business model since we have read and talked about it a few times. Instead, I wanted to know a new business model for magazines. And I found this interesting new service based on a new business model called “Maghound.com.”
There are numerous magazines in this century and it is natural for people to want more personalized stuffs. Maghound allows people to select a number of magazines for monthly subscription, and people can change the list whenever they want to. I thought this idea was brilliant new business model for magazine industries. This was probably possible in magazine industries because most magazines are specialized in their specific areas such as sports, fashions and computers. Thus, people can select some magazines from various fields they are interestd in, and they don't have to worry about a number of sperate subscription for each magazine thanks to Maghound. This model, however, would not work with newspapers because most newspapers are not specialized in its unique fields compared to magaines.
Here is an interesting point of view about the Web site: "Why MagHound is Brilliant -- And Why It Won’t Work"
Since I just discoverd about this interesting service, I might do my presentation on this Web site. If that happens, I will talk more about the new business model for magazines and MagHound during my presentation.
Monday, October 20, 2008
business model for socialnetworking sites
“Now it doesn’t matter if you want scale first because you just can’t have it,” said Paul Kedrosky, a senior fellow at the Kauffman Foundation. “You have the luxury of being able to decide between small and focused on revenues or large when you have capital. When there isn’t money, there’s no choice.”
a couple alternate takes
Anyway...
There was a prediction today that newspapers may become primarily for news junkies who don't mind forking out a little cash. The idea was also that they'd be published less frequently and contain more investigative pieces. This would be interesting because it would be a return to many paper's roots, or those of their predecessors.
However, I don't think this is the only possible scenario. I think the somewhat different business model of newsletters and industry oriented publications might be where many newspapers are headed. As Garlock said when he talked to our class last week, very topically focused magazines that are sent to members of various organizations or industries may be where it's at. For example, AARP Magazine is sent to all of the organization's 40+ million members and calls itself the largest circulation magazine in the world.
Another similar example, but one that is subscription oriented, are the handful of political newsletters here in town. They are pretty small operations but are relatively costly to receive as publications go. But subscribers get dozens of articles and other short news alert blurbs each day on the very targeted topic that they're interested in. Some of these publications let non-subscribers receive headlines for free but all other content is strictly controlled and certainly not easily available on the web.
Houston, being an oil and energy center, hosts many similar publications for those industries.
