The clarity of The Magazine is exciting. It’s doubly exciting because it’s precisely the sort of app at which incumbent publishers balk. This is expected. Again, from Christensen:

Generally, disruptive technologies underperform established products in mainstream markets. But they have other features that a few fringe (and generally new) customers value. Products based on disruptive technologies are typically cheaper, simpler, smaller, and, frequently, more convenient to use.

We are the new customers: The new readers, the new writers, the new publishers. The Magazine is indeed cheaper, simpler, smaller, and more convenient than most other publishing apps.

Read the whole thing here.

Data from Asymco.

Digging deeper, though, another interesting behavior emerges as well: While Android’s installed base has grown immensely over the past three years, the percentage of online purchases made on Android phones vs. iPhones has actually slipped noticeably.

Horace asks the right question: Why is this?

I believe this could be a simple matter of who is buying Android phones and for what reasons.

At first, Android purchasers were a lot like iPhone purchasers in that they were seeking out the device itself. They wanted the specific computer-like behavior and many of them wanted the greater customizability that they saw in Android over iPhone.

Now, I believe, many more Android buyers are simply getting an Android as their new phone as their carrier contract renews, replacing their old feature phones as the prices for Android devices get better and the ubiquity of touch-screen devices suggests to even the most casual observer that feature phones are now old tech. It’s entirely possible that these are much more casual users who rarely if ever fully use the capabilities of their devices (and, because of this, have the most-limited data plan) because they want a phone first, and a pocket-computer as a distant second. 

Most iPhone buyers, though, still are seeking the device first, even as more of them come into the fold later, after waiting for the next cycle of their two-year contracts. Think of it this way: These new iPhone buyers could have gotten a perfectly good Android phone for a much lower cost but chose the higher-priced iPhone for specific reasons. Discounting whatever percentage of those “reasons” are status only, I would imagine that most iPhone buyers are seeking ‘pocket-computer” features and not the core phone functionality (and who could blame them — when was the last iPhone ad that showed phone use?).

Simplified: New iPhone users are still actively seeking out the device and its computer-like features while new Android users include a growing percentage of their installed base that are choosing, essentially, a more advanced feature phone.

At least that’s my hypothesis. Perhaps it could be tested if there is any information available about the size of data packages (and usage) by platform.

Horace?

Link.

1. He launched a new, digital publication.
2. He charged for it.
3. He began making a profit on it. By the second issue.

Marco Arment, a developer, small business owner, blogger and technology-focused podcaster, launched The Magazine a few weeks ago. It’s a stripped-down, gorgeous, text-only (for now) iOS Newsstand publication that gathers a biweekly collection of topics that Marco says is not limited to technology but which will “appeal to people who love technology.” After reading the first two issues, I’m thinking of it as something close to the experience of reading Harper’s in the 80s and 90s, when each issue begged to be read from cover-to-cover. Or, perhaps a very thin New Yorker, without the cartoons. Point being, this is a good solid read, albeit one you can make your way through in a couple of quick subway rides or bedtime reading sessions.

The Magazine is a lean, bi-weekly (though that could change) collection of mid-length articles that so far have tended toward the kind of personal essay that shines a pin-spot on a small slice of life that ultimately reveals something of the bigger picture. In the current issue, for example, there’s Gina Trapani’s visit to the sperm bank as she and her wife do the pre-work that goes into two women having a child, Lex Friedman’s  paean to the joys of wet-shaving and John Siracusa writing movingly about something you thought did not exist: a video game with a good heart.

The price for this and a few other pieces, every other week: two dollars a month.

Is this a bargain? Dollar-for-dollar, no, in the days when you can pick up a year of Wired or Vanity Fair for half that. But that’s not really the point. Because, if it weren’t for those two dollars, these stories would not exist. In the footsteps of similarly independent-minded Louis C.K., whom Marco invokes in his first issue, The Magazine is the result of a refreshingly single-minded purpose: to create something unique, not just as an artistic outlet, but as a business — a business, it turns out, that was given an extremely short runway.

Marco explains:

I’m starting this with a staff of one. I can develop the app, procure and edit the articles, and write occasional articles myself. There’s no venture capital funding, no corporate backer, and very little starting capital. My biggest fixed cost is the up-front design and development of the app, and my biggest recurring cost is paying writers. If it doesn’t turn a profit within two months — just four issues — I’ll shut it down.

Partially from these constraints, and partially in the spirit of Louis C.K.’s anecdote, The Magazine’s articles won’t be laid out separately for portrait and landscape orientations. Articles won’t have custom designs at all. You won’t see any infographics, slideshows, or interactive panoramas. These multimedia features can all be valuable, and they have their places in other publications, but not here.

So, it would appear, the experiment part is over. The Magazine, young as it is, is a profitable success. It has no photos. It has no massive multi-hundred megabyte downloads. Instead of taking minutes (or hours on slow hotel or departure-gate wi-fi), The Magazine downloads in seconds.

And it’s profitable.

Will people pay for content? Ask Marco.

When I started working on this in August, it was definitely a risk. And until a few hours after it launched, I didn’t know whether it was going to be successful and well-received, or a huge waste of three months and a lot of money.

In hindsight, it was obvious, but only because it succeeded. Had it been received poorly, its failure would have seemed obvious in hindsight, too.Of course that wouldn’t work.

All these years, publishers have been trying to figure out new and better ways to force people to pay for their content — whether through increasingly intrusive advertising models, selling user data or putting up paywalls and meters. And the whole time, the answer was right there:

People will pay for content.

They just have to want to.

Keep an eye on The Magazine and other independent publishing efforts. You just might learn something.

It makes three important points:

1. Overall, journalists have very little idea what Fair Use really is.
2. Somehow, thought, many journalists intuitively apply its principles correctly, despite point #1.
3. The overall lack of knowledge often leads to self-censorship in order to avoid potential (but, often, non-existent) legal threats.

The most common erroneous fair use understandings were:

• Fixed amount. They often believed that there was an absolute number out there somewhere, beyond which lay lawsuits. (This common misapprehension is reinforced by a plethora of misguided attempts, available on the Web, to simplify fair use decisions.) Examples varied: “three graphs from a New York Times Magazine,” or “two to five paragraphs but make damn sure you source and attribute and are transparent and don’t use a whole page” or “keep it under 30 seconds” or “100 words in an article and 300 words in a book.” The comments of one print journalist—“the rule in the back of my head was it should only be a few seconds”—embodied the typical rule-of-thumb understanding many articulated.
• Noncommerciality. A journalist working in public media said, “there’s an attitude that it’s more loose because it’s not for profit.” In fact, the dispositive factor in fair use is transformativeness—recontextualizing. While noncommerciality can feature in a decision, it is a secondary feature and never one that can make the difference. Furthermore, most journalism, including public broadcasting, has commercial elements.
• Market loss. Another common but erroneous belief was that the “fourth factor” of fair use—effect on the market—was key. One academic said, “Infringement on the copyright holder’s ability to make money from their original work is the issue.” While relevant up to a point and within context, this factor is not dispositive in today’s legal climate. The key concept of transformativeness will safely ensure that a new user will not sap the market for the original work, even if the owner suffers the (hypothetical) loss of a licensing opportunity.

I’ve seen all of this, and more, in action. Sadly, so far this hasn’t resulted in an epic Supreme Court case settling the matter once and for all, but rather a creeping over-cautiousness — the study calls it self-censorship — among news organizations which should know better, but don’t.

One speck of potential good news in the study:

In a convening of leading journalists and journalism professors to assess the implications of these findings, attendees formulated an expectation that journalists should shape a set of principles that would articulate an appropriate interpretation for the field of a fair use doctrine. Subsequently, the Society of Professional Journalists undertook this project, with the help of the Washington College of Law’s Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property and the Center for Social Media at American University. The set of principles is expected in 2013.

 

(I found the link to this study in an article by Andrew Beaujon on Poynter.)

I can’t be the only one that thinks Craigslist is ripe for a disruption, because there is so much wrong with it that goes beyond the hideous and user hostile design of the site…

I would remind you that no matter the size of your network, if your service becomes too douchey the users will flee for greener pastures. Primes examples: MySpace and Digg — both relics of a different time (though Digg is trying a comeback)…

By far, the most interesting of his five suggestions of what to do toward that end is the last one:

5. Charge per listing, like $2 to post an ad. This does two things: removes ads; and helps cut down on SPAM listings.

I think he’s right. The very thing that rocketed Craigslist to popularity and destroyed, utterly, an entire category of income for local newspapers – the ads are free! — is now the piece that’s getting in the way of a quality user experience. Because no matter how much you spruce up the interface (#1 on Ben’s list), when it comes to ads, content actually IS king. Charging something nominal for an ad* doesn’t just create a revenue stream, it ensures that the ad itself is real and has value.

But how to stand up such an effort quickly? How could, say, the daily newspapers in our major cities take this advice and run with it (even if Ben wasn’t necessarily thinking of newspapers when he wrote his post)?

Given that so many metro dailies have thrown in with Press+ for their paywall initiatives, perhaps this could be a good line extension (and one that, unlike the paywall, is user-friendly) for the service which has already crossed two important hurdles: It’s in widespread use but managed centrally and it is capable of completing transactions.

Your ball, newspaper people…

–

* This is not to say that the newspaper industry biz wouldn’t screw this up by getting greedy and charging by the word, with upcharges for “premiums” like photos, maps and video or some other such genius move. Great ideas sometimes do turn out to be Ishtar in execution.

So how come no one’s writing about the odd and forbidding art of eluding the news when you want to watch a race on tape delay in prime time?

The answer I had when I was with The Baltimore Sun now seems quaint, based on what I’m seeing on most news sites this week.

Back then, we decided that, even though the result of an event was “news” in the strictest sense, it wasn’t exactly the kind of life-or-death news that we felt that site visitors absolutely had to get, no matter what. So we wrote home-page headlines that said the race had been run, but required the user to click through for the result. On the sports home page, though, we went with the results unfiltered. The thinking here was that anyone actively visiting a sports section during an Olympics should expect to see all of the most recent news in that category, but that more-casual visitors to the home page should at least be given the benefit of the doubt.

It came down to this: If someone has decided that they want to spend three hours in the evening, unspoiled, with the tape-delayed coverage, why should we ruin that for them?

This week, at The Sun, different rules are in place, as every result of hometown hero Michael Phelps is trumpeted on the home page the moment it’s known.

Given that such news is almost impossible to miss if you dip into Twitter or Facebook or your email for just a moment this week, doesn’t that make sense? Shouldn’t news organizations now just assume that everyone is spoiled and run with the story on the home page?

At the risk of sounding out of touch with the prevailing wisdom, no.

Yes NBC is blowing it on many key details, and they should have both live-streams online and the nightly recap, but they’re mounting a massive, two-week-long entertainment that, it turns out, a lot of people want to watch. The viewers all know they’re being “lied” to, that the result is long-settled and the athletes chilled out with their beverage of choice hours ago, but it’s how they’ve chosen to spend their evenings and, really, will a democratic society collapse if we make them click on one more link to find out the result as it happens?

I don’t begrudge the team their success; my complaint is simply that a great thing that I get to use every day is now going to start bit-rotting and will, eventually, no longer work.

By then, I hope, GMail will have become Sparrowfied and this won’t matter. But that part of me that loves supporting indie developers won’t get its itch scratched when I’m using my free and vastly improved Google webmail.

What’s really interesting about this, though, is that it’s looking more and more that the developers really didn’t have much choice, as this seemingly successful app family may have actually been unsustainable as a business.

David Barnard, developer of another essential iOS app — Launch Center Pro — used his experience and numbers selling Launch Center Pro to make an educated guess as to whether Sparrow was making enough money to survive. His analysis is sobering: making money in the low-priced app business is neither easy nor automatic:

We’ve all read stories about and been enthralled by the idea of App Store millionaires. As the story goes… individual app developers are making money hand over fist in the App Store! And if you can just come up with a great app idea, you’ll be a millionaire in no time!

That may seem a bit hyperbolic, but that is honestly the way the public perceives success in the App Store…

After 4 years in the racket, this is my best advice for making millions in the App Store: build a game, a gimmick, or an app that has some sort of revenue outside a one-time purchase. Oh, and if it’s a game, make it “free-to-play”. You might be able to build a sustainable business selling useful apps, and carve out a decent living for yourself, but it’s almost impossible to make millions.

Unless Google buys your company.

For anyone who enjoys the richness and relative affordability of the current OS X and iOS app universe, David’s post should give pause.

It’s really not that much different from a good linkblog, except that a) it’s not a blog — it’s an email and b) like Evening Edition, it’s published just once a day.

Not long ago, I did a major, weeks-long purge of my inbox, removing tons of opt-in and not-so-opt-in newsletters, so Next Draft has a pretty good chance of being a welcome “Ding!” in my email reader.

What’s your experience? Is the “just-enough” approach of Evening Edition and Next Draft a welcome change? For me, so far, it is.

But the point holds. Writing short and tight takes time.

Which might explain why the news web site I used to run has 485 links today on its home page. It’s just easier to include everything and let the reader sort it all out.

But what would a news site look like if editors actually, you know, edited.

One answer arrived this week. This was not a Knight News Challenge winner or the result of months of research and development. It’s a quick side-project from Mule Design, and it’s called Evening Edition.

This is what the news world could look like If simplicity-appreciating geeks ran it.

Jon Mitchell of Read Write Web has the back-story, in his article These Designers Did for Fun What News Sites Can’t Do to Save Their Business:

It’s edited by Anna Rascouët-Paz, online media editor at Annual Reviews. She combs the day’s political and economic news from around the world, picks out the stories she finds important, and writes a paragraph explaining the significance of each story, including links to the reporting.

“It’s not aggregation,” (the agency’s design director Mike) Monteiro makes clear. She often combines several sources into a concise summary. It draws on other people’s reporting, like just about all of what passes as news these days – but Evening Edition performs a critical journalistic function that often falls by the wayside online: It elevates the significant information above the noise.

Oh and this: They took it from concept to live site in about a week.

I’m making a conscious choice here. I’m going to celebrate what’s right with Evening Edition, rather than focus on what feels wrong (most notably that it wears its once-a-day-with-no-updates ethos with a pride that’s weird in a medium that is built upon being live and linked).

There’s a lot to like.

What’s right: It’s edited. Like it or not, Evening Edition is the result of choices by a human editor. What you get is there because she decided that’s what you get. Great Ceasar’s Ghost!

What’s right: It’s clean. Look at this on your laptop and you’ll see a simple two-column layout. Open it on your phone, and the responsive single-column design is there in all its scroll-friendly glory.

What’s right: It’s just enough news. Assuming the editor does her job well, this could very well be all you need to read to feel as if you’re reasonably well caught-up on the day’s important stories.

What’s right: It exists. This isn’t a scribble in a notebook, it’s not a mind-map and it most assuredly is not a committee meeting that’s scheduled for every other Thursday. This is a swing at an answer to the question of how to present news to a busy modern reader. It may not be the perfect answer but, as the bold-face says, it exists, here and now.

What do you think? Is just-enough news a concept whose time has come?

But those are all fixable issues. What rankles about Journatic (and, in some executions, the eerily-almost-self-aware robots of Narrative Science) is that they’re taking perfectly good data and hiding it inside sentences and paragraphs.

Call it narrativization.

Basic information — exactly the kind of information people who care about digital news-gathering and reporting have worked the past 15 years trying to figure out how to extract from the traditional inverted-pyramid narratives called “articles” or “stories” — is now being systematically re-obfuscated. Journatic is built on the misguided sense that the news of a Peewee League game or the local police blotter would be more enjoyable or edifying if only it could be taken out of that oh-so-cold box score or database and “written” as if the reporter had actually been on the scene of the story. Nothing of value is added; the few known facts are merely rearranged into headline, body-copy and the centuries-old conventions of daily journalism.

Which leaves us with cold, bloodless and unnecessarily long (even at 150 words!) articles, inside of which hide the facts that we already had access to to begin with.

And don’t even get me started on calendar events. Say what you want about the “smallness” of hyperlocal news, but it really is small events and gatherings that a) make a difference in a community and b) will never get covered by metro-wide media.

So, put that information into your calendar widget on your site. Do not, however, do this:

Grief Recovery Group meets Wednesdays

Liberty Baptist Church is hosting a Grief Recovery Group from 6-7:30 p.m. Wednesdays.

The group, “GriefShare,” is a Christian centered support group. The group meets as a large group and breaks off into small group discussions. The large group meetings will feature a 30 minute video with a workbook session.

The church is located at 1021 Big Bethel Road, Hampton.

Congratulations. You’ve just created an “article” that will, maybe, garner you a page-view or, if you’re a print/digital hybrid, will fill a few inches in the paper. It can’t be ported to a phone, it’s less findable online, and you’ve ruined a perfectly good bit of data (recurring data, at that) by narrativizing it in the mistaken belief that this is a leap forward.

As we sift through the aftermath of this phase of Journatic’s history, let’s not neglect to question whether, absent any of the ethical breaches, there were bigger miscalculations about how best to mobilize algorithms and a distributed workforce in service of better understanding of the news and issues of importance to local communities.

–

Alan Mutter says recent moves and rumblings in newspaperland point to a coalescing around three possible routes to the future in the ink-by-the-barrellful business:

Not so very long ago, the newspaper business was a snap:  Build the largest possible audience, sell the most possible ads, charge the highest possible rates, print the fattest possible papers and pump out the biggest possible profits.

This enviable model worked exquisitely for generations, because publishers had little, if any competition.  But it is now clear, as attested by the 50% drop in newspaper advertising since 2005, that the old ways can no longer succeed.

So, most publishers – after arguably procrastinating far too long – are faced with choosing the best possible going-forward strategy for their mature, if not to say declining, businesses…

Here’s a quick way to think about the three approaches:

- Farm It – Keep doing what you do today as well as you can in the hopes of optimizing the existing franchise for as long as possible. This presumes that (a) the company will operate in a reasonably hospitable and predictable market environment and (b) management is sufficiently skillful to execute smartly with the available resources.

- Milk It – Accept the inevitable decline and fall of the traditional newspaper model and then whack costs to extract the most profits from the decaying business for as long as possible. On the day you no longer can turn a profit, throw the keys on the table and call it quits.

- Feed It – Determine that even the most proficient management cannot overcome the fundamental changes in the marketplace that have been cutting readership and revenues since the Internet arrived two decades ago. Instead of retreating, however, you leverage the waning strengths of the legacy business and invest aggressively in new digital products to reposition it for the future.

Read the whole post here.

Mutter mentions 2005 as the baseline for the massive drop-off in revenue. But 2005 wasn’t just the moment in time before Wile E. Newspaperman realized he’d stepped off the cliff, it was also the year that an unlikely evangelist — Rupert Murdoch — stood in front of them at the ASNE convention and tried to shake them our of their obliviousness. The gathered brain-trust was too polite to hiss in his face but more than willing to roll its eyes upon return to newsrooms around the country, wrongly conflating the message with the messenger.

Murdoch’s words are uncannily like Alan’s own above. But remember, these were spoken more than seven years ago, before the collapse that, somehow, nobody saw coming.

In the face of this revolution, however, we’ve been slow to react. We’ve sat by and watched while our newspapers have gradually lost circulation. We all know of great and expensive exceptions to this – but the technology is now moving much faster than in the past.

Where four out of every five americans in 1964 read a paper every day, today, only half do. Among just younger readers, the numbers are even worse, as I’ve just shown.

…

There are a number of reasons for our inertia in the face of this advance. First, newspapers as a medium for centuries enjoyed a virtual information monopoly – roughly from the birth of the printing press to the rise of radio. We never had a reason to second-guess what we were doing. Second, even after the advent of television, a slow but steady decline in readership was masked by population growth that kept circulations reasonably intact. Third, even after absolute circulations started to decline in the 1990s, profitability did not.

But those days are gone. The trends are against us…

So unless we awaken to these changes, which are quite different to those of 5 or 6 years ago, we will, as an industry, be relegated to the status of also-rans.

You can read all of Murdoch’s speech here.

Seven years ago. Seven. But, hey, committees take time.

(And, yes, Rupert Murdoch carries his own issues along with him, including his stampede to the comfort of a paywall a few years ago, but who else — other than their underlings and people like Jarvis, Rosen, Shirky and, of course, Alan Mutter — was speaking this kind of brutal truth to newspaper leadership in 2005? Here’s hoping we don’t have to do this same exercise again in 2019.)

And yet, this just happened on a podcast I listen to — The Talk Show — in which John Gruber and Merlin Mann burned through almost 700 seconds talking about a new iPhone app, Launch Center Pro. It’s an ad, to be sure, but it’s a also a damned informative and entertaining chunk of audio, perfectly integrated with the programming around it:

I never once thought about reaching for the fast-forward button.

But I did click on “Buy.”

And this isn’t all that unusual. Podcasts have figured out what old-time radio and television nailed long before the internet age: Sponsorships. Not all ads are of this epic length, of course, and they do tend to vary wildly in quality depending on the hosts’ passion for and knowledge of the product itself. But I think this is exactly the right direction for advertising to go in the digital and mobile world.

“And now a word from our sponsor…” isn’t a grudging interruption — at least it shouldn’t be — but rather a shared wink between host and listener that what’s about to follow is not programming, but is worth your attention nonetheless. And it works, because the listener learns that the podcaster won’t simply start screaming “PUNCH THE MONKEY!!!” at the top of his lungs but, rather, is taking a commercial detour into an area that’s likely to be aligned with the interests of the show and its listeners.

It takes work. More work than just jamming in a sixty-second spot or reading cold-blooded copy. It means thinking about why this product might make sense to the listener and, then, telling them, without affectation or pretense, in a human voice.

I don’t have access to Gruber’s advertiser stats, of course, but I bet this works really, really well. I know it does for Leo Laporte’s TWIT network — which I profiled for Nieman Labs in 2009 — where they’ve been doing ads like this for years with great results.

Do people listen to long ads? They do if they’re relevant to their needs. Or if they’re somehow useful. Or entertaining. After all, we all claim to hate advertising, but whenever one of those bells is rung, the ad moves into another realm, where it’s something that we pay attention to. The ad becomes valuable content.

Imagine how great this same approach could be if local publishers did something similar with the advertising on their sites, if they respected their site users and site advertisers enough to try to find a way to present commercial information (advertising) in a way that worked as well for both sides of the equation as the Gruber/Mann conversation about Launch Center Pro does.

Instead, the average local site is, at best, a NASCARish nightmare of tiny, flashing competing banner ads, the vast majority of which will a) add nothing to the brand’s value and b) never be clicked.

Where’s the money in local publishing? It’s at the intersection of consumer desire and advertiser need. Sometimes just a banner screaming “SALE!!” will work, but most times, the site and its advertisers will have to work harder to present a compelling argument at that intersection.

Think of what podcasters like Gruber and Dan Benjamin and Leo Laporte are doing and get creative on behalf of your advertisers and users. Otherwise, you’re just stealing money from advertisers and missing a great opportunity to put relevant, useful and entertaining information in the hands (or ears) of your users.

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary to cover the news ourselves, that’s probably a really good idea.

And, according to a report from The Edward R. Murrow College of Communication at Washington State University, there’s a crying need as well, in Washington state and, one would imagine, from sea to shining sea.

In its “Rural Information Initiative,” (“rural” being defined more as non-metro than “time to milk the cows” territory) the college notes that, even a state as technologically advanced as Washington is a “rural information ghetto when it comes to local news for smaller communities.”

It is particularly ironic that at a time when the circulation reach of “mainstream” news organizations is dramatically expanding thanks to digital technologies, the physical areas regional newspapers and broadcasters are able to directly cover are being dramatically reduced by budget cuts that mean fewer “boots on the ground” outside the borders of the major metros. This means that even digitally-­literate rural citizens who do have high-­speed Internet access are often still without a source of local news.

The solution: make it easier for citizen journalists to use that mobile newsroom in their pockets — their smartphone — to fill in the gaps and help keep their communities informed.

Among the specific recommendations:

Developers and election watchers take note: The Huffington Post just released a polling data API. The Huffpost Pollster API will allow anyone to dig into more than 13,000 opinion polls on the presidential election as well as U.S. House and Senate races.

The data will be available through the API in XML and JSON formats at first and, eventually, in downloadable .csv files for researchers, reporters and bloggers to dive into.

There’s more at Nieman Journalism Lab on the HuffPost data, as well as on other publicly accessible data APIs from The New York Times, USA Today and others.