May 16th, 2008 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | No Comments
On the heels of CBS acquiring CNET for $1.8-billion comes another deal involving “old” media and “new” media: according to TechCrunch, the folks over at Conde Nast — the magazine publishing family that owns Vogue, the New Yorker and Wired — have plunked down about $25-million for Ars Technica, the tech site that recently caused a minor blog storm over an alleged lack of attribution in their blogs posts.
Although Conde Nast is mostly known for print magazines, it has been making inroads into digital publishing, including the purchase of Wired (for about $25-million) last year, as well as the acquisition of Digg competitor Reddit. Conde also owns Epicurious.com and the recently-launched online magazine Portfolio, and has other online assets including Style.com and Brides.com. Conde Nast is a unit of Advance Publications, a private company controlled by the Newhouse family that also owns a number of local business journals and U.S. newspapers.
According to FM Publishing’s page on Ars Technica, the site gets about 19 million page views a month (TechCrunch says the site gets 4.5 million uniques a month, according to a source). With a CPM fee of about $36 per ad, that means the site could make as much as $2-million a month in advertising revenue — and it apparently has just eight employees, including co-founders Ken “Caesar” Fisher and Jon “Hannibal” Stokes, who started the site in 1998.
Sep 21st, 2007 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | No Comments
Congratulations to Mike Arrington on hiring Erick Schonfeld as co-editor of TechCrunch — extending his hand to the Business 2.0 writer and editor as he stepped from the wreckage of Time Warner-owned magazine, which has gone down in flames. Erick seems like a solid writer and a pretty good blogger too, and should be a great addition to TechCrunch.
As Ashkan Karbasfrooshan also discusses here, this is just another in a series of dots connecting the decline of magazines — particularly tech-related magazines, although celebrity-oriented mags aren’t doing all that well either — and the rise of blogs. As Ash points out, Jason Calacanis and Nick Denton both gave the process a big push with Gawker and Weblogs Inc.
Om Malik gave things another boost when he left Business 2.0 to run GigaOm. That spurred editor Josh Quittner to give all of his writers blogs, in an attempt to blend the immediacy and community that blogs generate with the relatively stale environment of a monthly magazine. He even tried to compensate them based on the traffic they generated. And now, Business 2.0 is no more.
The inescapable fact is that if you’re interested in anything remotely time-sensitive — technology (and particularly the Internet), news about celebrities (where TMZ.com and PerezHilton rule) and even sports or investment-related news (Marketwatch) — then some kind of blog platform or Web-based magazine just makes more sense than print.
It’s not that the two can’t co-exist — they can, and Business 2.0 may have given up the fight too soon — but the Web is the most important part now, instead of just an add-on or afterthought. Tony Hung wonders whether TechCrunch will still be a blog, but in many ways it and GigaOm and the Gawker and Weblog sites are hybrids. Maybe we should call them blog-azines 
Dec 13th, 2006 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
If anybody is in a position to help Wired magazine think about new media and the “long tail” theory, it’s the magazine’s editor Chris Anderson, who just finished publishing a book called The Long Tail. Chris, who has obviously thought a lot about these kinds of issues, has a great two-part post up about how he wants to change Wired magazine’s website, now that the print magazine and the web service are once again part of the same company.
The first part is an overview of how the media landscape has changed, and how people’s expectations have changed, structured in a “then and now” format, including:
THEN: Bookmarks and habit drive traffic to the home page; site architecture and editorial hierarchy determines where readers goes next. Portals rule.
NOW: Search and blog links drive readers to individual stories; they leave as quickly as they come. “De-portalization” rules.
and
THEN: Media as Lecture: we create content, you read it.
NOW: Media as Conversation: a total blur between traditional journalism, blogging and user comment/contributions.
And the second part of the post deals with how to change a magazine and a website to better reflect some of those changes in attitude. Chris deals with six things that he says a truly “transparent” and interactive media organization would do — and the possible benefits and downsides of those approaches — including:
Show who we are. All staff edit their own personal “about” pages, giving bios, contact details and job functions. Encourage anyone who wants to blog to do so. Have a masthead that actually means something to people who aren’t on it.
and
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.
and
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?
Well worth a read for anyone interested in the future of online media. Some things Anderson says he’s not sure will work (wikis for stories, for example, which Wired has experimented with) but thinks should probably be tried anyway. I wish more editors would think about that kind of thing. There’s more commentary about the piece at Rex Hammock’s blog, at Publishing 2.0 and over at the Bivings Report
Update:
Josh Quittner, editor of Business 2.0 magazine — who recently asked all of his writers to start blogging (and who I’m pretty sure used to write for Wired) — has posted a bit of a rebuttal to Chris’s piece, in which he says that publishers of print magazines are going to have to decide which is more important, online or print, because telegraphing what your cover story is going to be doesn’t really work for print mags. Thanks to Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 for pointing to Josh’s post, and for writing one of his own.
Oct 25th, 2006 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
Paul Bradshaw, a former journalist and lecturer from the UK, has a long-ish post on his blog (which is called Online Journalism Blog) about the future of online media and the relaunch of ZDNet’s UK website. One of the things the editor of ZDNet UK says he plans is to make the site more social and allow people to contribute:
At first glance, it’s easy to dismiss this as another organisation jumping on the MySpace bandwagon, but look a bit deeper and we may be seeing a window into the future of magazines.
To begin with, ZDNet plans to create a new post of community editor: “a hybrid marketing/editorial job - to moderate discussions, grow the community and create a dialogue with the readership.”
This role is not a new idea, but it’s an indication of where the ‘Editor’ role in magazines may be heading: not managing the publication, but managing the community.
In that kind of model, Bradshaw says, the readers become part of the editing and selection process, and their discussions help to determine where coverage goes.
