The Plight Of The Subscription Model aka Act 3, the long delayed conclusion to With A Passion On Print Media
March 24th, 2009 § 1 Comment
Yes, there are two copies and both are fucked for the same reason.
So why do print magazines need to pour their journalistic creations onto the internet?
Because there are so many flaws in the production and distribution of analog journalism that they really ought to give digital a go. This is one of my longstanding and heretofore unblogged about pet peeves: magazine subscribers take it in the ear when it comes to quality service. Sure, the subscriber saves an unbelievable % off the cover price, but if you don’t subscribe or buy, (instead reading online if said magazine offers their content for free, ala The Fader’s free PDFs) the method that former subscribers tend to lean towards, you save 100% off the cover price.
Here’s an exact quote from the customer support from The Atlantic Monthly, for some context, they release their issues around the end of the 2nd to last week of the month prior to the one named on the cover of said issue:
Please allow until March 16, 2009 for delivery of your March 2009 issue.
So that means you are forced to give them three and a half weeks after the newsstand release until that issue can be considered late. Thanks to this fact, I canceled my trial subscription with The Atlantic.
In previous ages this may not have been an issue, but now we are in the aughts, aka the On Demand decade, where time + knowledge = money in a more off balance ratio than it’s ever been.
The Atlantic puts their articles online when their issues hit the newsstand, so there’s no point in subscribing aside from the fact that the magazine’s articles look better on the printed page than they do on my screen. Is this because of some culturally placed value inherent in something that was printed on paper with ink? Probably, but I also just find it easier to read on paper. That’s how I was educated for the majority of that section of my life, so that’s how my brain is wired.
Why does it take so long for The Atlantic to get their content to me? Postage costs have risen tremendously over the years, something anyone on The Nation of McSweeney’s e-mail lists know well already, so to cut costs, magazines have to ship at lower rates, is one of the major reasons.
But the Atlantic isn’t the only publication with suffering with getting their pulpy goodness into my hands or mailbox.
The Fader magazine at the jump of this post has a two-fer when it comes to demonstrating the problems of the subscription method, which is reccomended by only a few more doctors than the withdrawl method is.
1) The USPS loves to fray the edges of your mail. you know you’ve seen this before. also, this may happen because your landlord installed a half assed mail flap or tiny ass mailboxes.
For more evidence, see the below image, or imagine the torn up netflix envelopes I take out of my tiny ass mailbox, because I don’t have my mail come to my home anymore, it all comes to me at work.
2) The databases of these publishers can get fucked right quickly resulting in wasteful doubled-up subscriptions, as seen in the pic of the Fader issues, from when I used to have a subscript (hey they gave me free tix for Bonnaroo).
So with the risks of unbelievable wait times, damaged goods, and wasteful methods in convervationalistic (well, you’re subscribing to print already, so you’re not clean at all on this) times, it’s easy to see why people don’t want to be subscribers anymore.
So with subscriber numbers dipping despite the quality inherent in the product, the publishers decided to try and publish online. Also, some mags, the New Yorker, for example, lets their staff writers blog exclusive-to-the-net content, and Hendrik Hertzberg and Sasha Frere-Jones make great use of this function of their employer’s network of info/wit distribution.
Paper or Pixel? Why Not Both? Act 2 of With A Passion About The Printed Word
March 10th, 2009 § 2 Comments
The view from my bar stool at Wildwood BBQ tonight as I continued to drink the good drink and consume the piece on Iceland in the New Yorker
So, Collin replied to my post with this comment. The line from the comment I found worth jumping off from towards my next thought about print journalism was:
My point of leading with Ben McGrath’s New Yorker piece wasn’t to discredit his story. Pieces like that have their place in journalism, and that specific story is full of worth (it’s in the New Yorker, ’nuff said). I just thought it was a great example of the traditional print voice that is seeping online.
And the thing is I wouldn’t say that it’s “seeping online” because there’s no real problem with the internet being used as a means for distributing material, at least as long as the material is worthwhile (no point in copying and pasting crap, which is why it’s great that Dane Cook started online, so his bullshit wasn’t redundant on top of being bullshit) presented in a visually palatable manner and there’s a decent business model behind it. And unlike many other publications that use the internet to mirror their physical product, The New Yorker has a pretty good handle on it’s online presence.
First of all, the New Yorker does it right because they let their writers have blogs on site, such as Sasha Frere-Jones, whose blog is definitely worth the click it will take you to get there … once you’re done here. I promise there’s a funny clip at the end of this, but it will disappear if you just scroll down right now.
The New Yorker also offers the smaller pieces for free to entice the would be spenders, then putting a premium on the meatier works as well a crazy little thing called Design. I don’t know about you, dear reader, but I don’t like the web design that most sites employ. The New Yorker’s standard web isn’t the big offender, that award goes to Rolling Stone and the combination of the teeny-teeeeeeny-teeeeeeeney-tiny (©Maddow) thin column of text and their insistence on splitting a piece displayed so think across four fucking pages, without a “one page” option that many including the NYTimes offer.
But how does The New Yorker manage to get it right? Well, what I’ll assume are well-padded coiffures were able to put as many net application designers in all of their open-space offices on the same task, and this resulted in The New Yorker’s Digital Reader. The simplest way to browse is click on the arrows on the sides of the layouts, and then, as you’ll see below, after you click on the page, you zoom in to read the page.
The New Yorker Digital Reader Means Business
Works like Parker’s article, the creme de la creme, are kept “behind the curtain,” as The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates put it, in the premium content section of The New Yorker’s site. This is done for one very good reason: good work doesn’t come free. Sure we’ve hit a point where admitting you still pay for music illicits stares akin to suggesting you just sharted, but journalism is a key ingredient in a well functioning and self questioning society, and we should be paying for it, hand over fist. Buy those NYTimes’ or whichever local paper is worth your money, (and no The USA Today does not count) not just when Obama’s won an election as I now endorse buying the Times (not that this was always the way I rolled over the W. Bush years) on any day of the week.
The New Yorker Digital Reader Zooms In.
A few weeks ago, TIME had a cover story about the ways to save the newspaper. The problem the industry is currently facing is the fact that internet ad revenue for the news site industry is down. This trend results in oddities like the ginormous screen-estate that the Apple ad on the front page of the NYT that you may see when you go online to check your digital news, a stunt done wherein a high end company promotes itself to an audience that is presumably able to afford the product. The problem, though, is that these sites are all free, so their customers have no proof they’d actually be able to afford the ginormous 17″ Macbook Pro.
With The New Yorker’s digital reader, only available to those who will pay for it or actually subscribe to the publication, the people at Chevron know their product hawking won’t fall on broke ears. Admittedly, it would be great if all news would be available for free, but money doesn’t grow on KFC Famous Bowls yet, so we’ll have to pay for quality for the time being. And I have to reiterate that I think that as hard as it’s been for the journalistic commuity to get a grip on the net world, I think the New Yorker has a good start.
The author of the above TIME article then went on The Daily Show and Jon Stewart admitted that he shares the same crippling addiction to newspapers that I boldly revealed in my lede yesterday. Here’s the clip:
