That’s quite the headline, Vanity Fair
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Archive for the 'magazines' Category
Is Variety retreating from its paywall?
In late 2009, Variety closed its website doors to the public, placing a paywall around all its content.
Today, we find out it’s launching some kind of “breaking news” blog, sending out a letter to “friends of Variety” that encourages them to link to it. Reading between the lines, it seems that Variety launched the blog in reaction to the lack of links it has been receiving:
This is not a strategy shift for Variety.com. The paywall lives on. Each entry on Showblitz – short, timely, punchy and art-centric – will include links to the full stories within Variety.com. In fact, what better way to entice eventual new subscribers than great, compelling, timely and newsy content they can’t get anywhere else?
I’d say that last question is meant to be rhetorical, but my initial reaction was to think, “I dunno, what is a better way to entice eventual new subscribers?”
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Are we too skeptical about major media launches?
Though the debut of Rupert Murdoch’s The Daily received widespread press coverage, it was treated more as a novelty than an actual attempt at creating a viable news organization. Most tech pundits quickly dismissed it if they hadn’t already pre-launch. Bloggers gleefully listed other failed Rupert Murdoch internet ventures and a quick rundown of the newsonomics of the venture found that there’s really not much of a market for an expensively-run tablet-only newspaper. The sale of Huffington Post to AOL was met with slightly less pessimism, but few writers outright declared that the move would save AOL. Demand Media’s high IPO was met with much derision and a widespread assumption that its days are numbered.
In fact the only major launch of a news product that was met with widespread praise has been TBD, which recently disappointed everyone with the announcement that it would be laying off most its staff.
I was thinking of all this pessimism when reading this Adweek piece on the merger between the Daily Beast and Newsweek. Count me among a group — comprised of nearly everyone — who assumes the merger will fail to do anything to make either publication profitable. Given this, Adweek questions why the New York Times decided to promote the merger on its front page:
Anyone outside of New York City’s media fishbowl could be forgiven for waking up last Monday and wondering what the heck some lady named Tina Brown was doing on the front page of The New York Times. In the 21st century, Brown has edited a failed magazine, hosted a failed talk show, written one well-received book, and launched a Web site that loses an estimated $10 million a year and attracts relatively few readers. Even Jeremy Peters, the author of the Times article, acknowledged that Brown’s greatest achievements—as editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker back in the 20th century—were long behind her.
Even in the case of The New Yorker, the magazine wasn’t even profitable until Brown left and David Remnick took over. I don’t think it’s mean-spirited or jumping the gun to assume that this latest media venture will not be a success.
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Andrew Sullivan’s plea for Atlantic print subscribers works
Andrew Sullivan has a built-in arsenal with his 100k+ readers a day on his blog, and last week he deployed it, arguing that The Atlantic had taken a risk by putting his open letter to George Bush on the cover.
“The MSM has largely moved on from this issue. The Atlantic hasn’t, because it’s one of the few magazines left that makes major editorial decisions that may not make sense commercially,” he wrote. “In this economic climate, especially with old media in crisis, a decision like that is understandably making some general interest magazines an endangered species.”
He made a plea for readers to reward the magazine by subscribing to its print edition, and the New York Times reports that it worked: “Within two days after last Monday’s post, Mr. Sullivan’s appeal pulled in 75 percent of the subscriptions that the Web site draws in a typical month, the magazine’s publisher, Jay Lauf, said. The Atlantic expects this month’s subscription orders to be double an average month’s.”
Variety to go behind pay wall. Will movie bloggers rejoice?
Last year I reported on the break-neck competition that has emerged in film industry news because of reporting from independent blogs. Several of the bloggers even accused the big players like Variety of stealing their scoops without credit.
Paid Content is reporting that Variety will soon be retreating behind the pay wall, possibly leaving a vacuum that the independent blogs will be more than happy to fill.
Diet and fitness bloggers lash out against Time Magazine piece on exercise
The premise of the article seemed provocative enough: despite convention wisdom, exercise does not do a whole lot to help people lose weight. Written by Time Magazine’s John Cloud, the article loosely strings together a series of anecdotes and studies to argue that exercise, in the end, isn’t worth all the hype. It even goes further to suggest that in addition to not causing weight loss, exercise can actually result in weight gain because of increase hunger after workouts.
Such health trend pieces are common in mainstream journalism — headlines that challenge whatever commonly-held health belief we’ve harbored over the last decade or so. The piece hit the web over a week ago and within days over a hundred blogs had linked to it, many of which reacted negatively to its premise. Dozens of health and fitness bloggers were not happy that the magazine was pushing a theory that exercise wasn’t very beneficial.
Mike Howard is a health and fitness consultant and has been blogging over at the popular Diet Blog for about two years. Over the weekend he joined his colleagues in attempting to “debunk” the Time piece in a long blog post.
“In summary, the article essentially claims that exercise won’t help you lose weight, and may in fact be responsible for people GAINING weight,” Howard wrote. “Hmmm… The author, John Cloud (ooh the irony in that surname) goes on an anecdotally-based tirade, side-stepping contradictory evidence and common sense on route to his perplexing hypothesis.”
Like many of the other bloggers who reacted to the piece, he noted that there is general truth in what the article is saying — that exercise alone would not cause weight loss. He then went on to differentiate between the various forms of exercise that were lumped into one category in the piece, explaining the long-term health benefits that would result from each.
“I wanted to basically take a step back, see what he was trying to say, and make sure I didn’t misinterpret it,” Howard told me in a phone interview. “And I just picked apart little things; I find generally speaking there are certain pitfalls that mainstream media journalists fall short when reporting on exercise and diet, so I decided that I need to set the record straight.”
Howard said that some online communities were receptive to the article; many took their own anecdotal experiences with exercise — and there lack of success doing it — and so they took the piece as confirmation of their own experiences.
The diet blogger explained that mainstream news often tries to offer provocative, black-and-white statements to grab reader eyeballs, rather than explaining the much more nuanced facts.
“It’s not a black or white issue,” he said. “The headline ‘Exercise does not help much when not combined with proper dietary compliance’ is not going to get many readers, so you have to be on the edge, you have to have a pull, or something like that, and that’s basically a trap that a lot of mainstream media falls into to grab our attention.”
I asked Howard about the blogosphere’s response to the article, and whether fitness experts were able to counter-balance Time Magazine’s coverage.
“I think [blogging] is a very important medium, because I think a lot of people will read this and say, ‘exercise doesn’t do anything for me at all, why bother?’ And I think it’s just a wrong message, so it’s great that we have the rallying cry, sort of that equalizer, where we have that voice that we put out there and at least give people a second opinion.”
Salon.com lays off several editorial staff
Gawker is reporting that Salon.com has announced layoffs for six staff members as it preps for a new design launch. This publication has weathered harsh storms for years; I still remember the article ages ago announcing it had finally turned a profit.
The site has a lot of quality reporting — and star blogger Glenn Greenwald — but coincidentally I was just complaining on Twitter the other day that it didn’t provide contact details for one of its main bloggers. Not to kick a publication when its down, but this flaw is a staple of so many news organizations as they practically turn away any semblance of crowd sourcing benefits. I could have provided valuable feedback to one of Salon’s bloggers over the weekend, and yet a publication that was net savvy didn’t even provide me the option.
