DISQUS

Michael · 2 years ago

Again, Scott, you synthesize brilliantly a number of diverging topics....and best of all? Your insights are 100% free.

In the book "Made to Stick" there is a chapter on a local newspaper that has over 112% community penetration.n. The reason? NAMES NAMES NAMES. The paper does an incredible job of keeping a laser beam focus on LOCAL activities and all the PEOPLE that are apart of these events.

In much the same way, I have established my magazine - we are now global with correspondents covering a vast part of the planet. We also feature over 70 short stories in the first 8 pages of the magazine about new companies, new products and events.

However, there is one thing my magazine has done that takes things a step further. We have decided to make it an item of value that we want our readership to keep. We don't scrimp on the phyisical production cost and we are very careful about the types of advertising we accept.

It makes for a very unique package that appeals to a certain segment. Then again, we don't have the typical overheads that most magazines have....but that's story for another post.

Thanks Scott! Terrific read!

Mark Dykeman · 2 years ago

You know, I see a bit of a parallel between the emergeance of portable video and E-books or electronic documents. I read an article a number of months ago that talked about a change in viewing habits developing with today's teenagers and 20-somethings (the Millenials, I guess).

The generations preceeding the Millenials are used to seeing video on something the size of a TV screen or a movie screen. Now you've got a new generation that's getting used to watching video on a screen that's the size of a Zippo lighter - namely, the Video iPod. Portable DVD players have relatively small screens, as do most notebook PCs. We used to take for granted that video was supposed to be (or seem) larger than life.

Documents have thousands of years of history as physical objects that could be picked up and "paged" through. It's hard to fit an entire page of a document on a PC screen. Scratch that: it's easy to fit an entire document page on a screen... but most of the time the print is so small that it's unreadable. Electronic documents are going to have to fight that battle in order to replace paper. Until we have a viable unit that's portable, yet able to allow a viewing screen the size of a sheet of 8x11 or A4 paper, I don't think paper will completely disappear.

David Cohn · 2 years ago

Also at the Summit was Dan Pacheco from the Northwest Voice. As you remember - I did write-ups (quick interviews) with lots of the participants: Dan's wording was different but he also explained that what motivated people to buy Northwest Voice was to see their stories (and their neighbors stories) in old-fashioned print.

Jawfish · 1 year ago

A couple of late notes directed at the author:

I know an O'Reilly author, and I can tell you Tim O, while widely acknowledged to be a smart fella, doesn't understand digital distribution at all. I guess that he just has too much investment in making ( admittedly great) computer books to learn a new bag of tricks. Safari bombed to start with, and has not taken off. The subscription model just didn't work. or, it was too expensive.

The other factor attacking paper publishing and especially newspapers is the environmental cost. Just as its ridiculous to ship bottles of tap water by truck, its wildly inefficient to make paper-> print and distribute copy->pickup and recycle paper just to get digital data from the reporter's laptop to mine.

I still pay for my morning newspaper, and many magazines, but I have already dropped some subscriptions down to on-line only. It's easy for me to see publishers abandoning printing of their ephemeral copy, just as soon as the reader tech is good enough, or the carbon-footprint costs get too high.

John · 1 year ago

Most of the publishers are focused on digitization in order to increase their circulations. In this digital age, most of the people are looking for digital editions of print publications. I saw recently a website www.pressmart.net provides the digital versions for print publications like news papers, books, magazines, journals, etc. Most of the publishers are using pressmart.net services.