Tag: Laura Hazard Owen

It’s now less than a month before Google Reader shuts down, meaning that anyone who relies on the service better be testing the alternatives right about now. Feedly, which has emerged as one of the top contenders, made the choice a little easier Monday when it announced that it’s partnered with a number of other RSS apps — among them the popular iOS app Reeder.

Feedly wrote on its blog:

“We have been working behind the curtains with the developers of Reeder, Press, Nextgen Reader, Newsify and gReader as design partners for our Normandy project. Today we are excited to announce that you will be able to access your feedly from all these apps before Google Reader retires and that the access to feedly API will be free. More details soon.”

(The Normandy project, by the way, is how Feedly makes its API available to developers. The API is free and Feedly said it’s rolling out access gradually; developers can request access here.)

If you’re already using one of the above services, expect integration in the next couple of weeks: Newsify noted on its blog that users should “look for an update before the end of June to start using the Feedly service,” while Press said its “plan is to provide an app update in a couple weeks that will allow you to easily add your Feedly account and have the same RSS experience you’ve always enjoyed using Press.”

via paidContent http://paidcontent.org/2013/06/04/feedly-partners-with-rss-apps-like-reeder-as-google-readers-end-draws-near/

Over a thousand organizations are now using subscription site Politico Pro, the politics website announced Tuesday. Politico says the site reaches 7,000 professionals per month and has a renewal rate of 96 percent.

Politico launched Politico Pro in February 2011; while it was originally aimed at individual subscribers, Pro quickly switched its focus to the group subscriptions that now make up the vast majority of its base. Pro offers some subscriber-only articles, early access to morning newsletters, customizable instant alerts and other perks. Pro started out covering energy, health care and technology and added more coverage areas — defense, financial services, tax and transportation — last year. Starting this month, Pro subscribers can also receive an afternoon policy newsletter called Pro Report.

In an attempt to drive more Pro subscriptions, Politico is launching a free quarterly print magazine that will feature past Pro coverage. On March 22, it will be delivered to “every member of Congress, the White House and all federal agencies as well as to 160 newspaper boxes and 100 Washington-area Starbucks.”

Politico is tight-lipped on what a subscription to Pro actually costs. Subscription fees vary based on the type of organization (government, nonprofit and so on) and how many employees it has, as well as the number of coverage areas an organization wants. Nieman Journalism Lab reported last year that an individual subscription starts at $3,295 a year, with group memberships starting at $8,000 for five people and one coverage area.

via paidContent http://paidcontent.org/2013/03/12/politico-hits-1000-pro-subscriptions-and-plans-to-launch-a-magazine/

Several publishers have launched digital-first imprints for genre titles — science fiction/fantasy, romance and so on. In these instances, books are published first as ebooks and aren’t released in print unless they take off. Until now, though, we haven’t seen a major publisher launch an e-imprint focused on new literary fiction — more serious fiction of the type that wins awards and gets major reviews.

That appears to be changing with Little, Brown U.K.’s launch of Blackfriars, a digital-only imprint that will focus on new literary fiction and serious nonfiction. The Bookseller reports that the imprint will publish nine to twelve titles a year, and they’ll be eligible for submission to major literary prizes like the Man Booker Prize. The Bookseller notes:

Digital titles are accepted by prizes including the Man Booker Prize and the Women’s Prize for Fiction, with the condition that they are published by “established” houses and made available for sale in print if the title is selected by the judges at the shortlisting or longlisting stage, respectively.

Blackfriars’ first titles will be published in June. Two of them were previously published in the US: The Painted Girls by Cathy Marie Buchanan by Penguin’s Riverhead and Benjamin Anastas’s Too Good to be True: A Memoir by Amazon. According to The Bookseller, the “royalty rates on the titles are largely the same as those on standard combined print and e-deals.” Traditional publishers’ standard royalty on ebooks is 25 percent. (I’ve asked Blackfriars if it is paying advances, and what its ebooks will cost.)

Without the promise of higher royalties, digital-first imprints are not likely to be many authors’ first choice when they consider their publishing options — especially when it comes to literary fiction, which generally has not sold as well in digital formats as genre fiction has. But imprints like Blackfriars could provide a home for books that have had a little trouble taking off, and the books will get additional marketing support from Little, Brown.

via paidContent http://paidcontent.org/2013/02/22/heres-something-new-little-brown-uk-launches-digital-first-imprint-for-literary-fiction/

Barnes & Noble plans to close about twenty retail stores a year over the next ten years, the company’s retail CEO Marshall Klipper told the Wall Street Journal . Today, there are 689 Barnes & Noble stores nationwide, plus 674 college stores.

The WSJ notes that “the chain shut an average of about 15 stores a year in the past decade, but until 2009 it also was opening 30 or more a year,” with a peak of 726 stores in 2008. Klipper may have chosen to talk to the WSJ to show investors that the company has a plan. He said that fewer than 20 of the chain’s retail stores are unprofitable.

Barnes & Noble is threatened by the shift to online book shopping at Amazon. The company has rolled out a host of Nook e-readers and tablets that face stiff competition in a market dominated by Kindle e-readers and saturated with cheap tablets from Amazon, Google, Apple and others. Barnes & Noble just delivered a terrible holiday earnings report, showing Nook, BN.com and retail sales all down, with a particularly large decline in Nook device sales. The company plans to spin off the Nook and college stores into a separate unit called Nook Media, with Microsoft and Pearson both holding stakes.

When Borders, then the nation’s second-largest bookstore chain, went bankrupt and liquidated all its stores in 2011, it seemed as if it could be good news for Barnes & Noble, which would have a chance to grab former Borders customers. But it appears that former Borders customers largely switched their book buying over to Amazon.

via paidContent http://paidcontent.org/2013/01/28/barnes-noble-will-close-up-to-a-third-of-its-stores-over-the-next-decade/

Paragraph, a New York-based startup that provides a range of digital author services like apps, released the first issue of its new weekly short story iPad magazine, Paragraph Shorts, on Thursday.

Paragraph Shorts is a little like a Flipboard for short stories, but rather than an algorithm, it uses humans to find short stories — in text, video and audio formats — across the web (from outlets like The New Yorker, The Paris Review and The Moth), then aggregates them and distributes them through a free iPad app. When a Paragraph Shorts reader flips his or her iPad to landscape mode, social features appear, including the Twitter and Facebook streams of the stories’ authors and the magazines they were published in.

Paragraph Shorts aims to add value through curation, introducing readers to authors and publications they might not have known about otherwise. “By curating the best short stories, and offering them to people who might not have known they existed, Paragraph will create a link between great literary magazines and readers who are eager to kill fifteen minutes in a quality manner,” Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review, said in a statement.

Of course, killing fifteen minutes reading a short story through an app doesn’t necessarily extend to a subscription to the publication it came from. But all the stories that Paragraph features are already free online, so the app’s main benefit to the stories’ publishers is to drive traffic to their websites and to increase social media around them. The company is also considering exclusive content at some point.

Paragraph founder Ziv Navoth previously ran marketing and partnerships at AOL. Paragraph is self-funded by Navoth and his partner, Edo Segal, who also run two other businesses: Enhanced ebook and app platform Holopad and ebook distribution platform Convertabook.com.

via paidContent http://paidcontent.org/2013/01/10/paragraph-launches-an-aggregated-lit-mag-for-the-ipad-age/

Media flops

Microsoft rolls out the Zune to go up against the iPod in 2006. And then, three years later, a new Zune HD to vie with the iPod Touch.  The Zune gets more traction with late-night talk-show comedians than with consumers. Both the player and the brand are now dead.

Burger King gives away a free AOL Music download with every Original Whopper. The download code is on the burger wrapper — try not to get grease on your screen!

McDonald’s begins renting DVDs. Actually, this one wasn’t a total flop: Turns out people don’t want DVDs with their fries, but Redbox, which now has over 30,000 kiosks, got its start in McDonald’s.

News Corp says consumers are “desperate” for $30 HD movie rentals. Well, that desperation was pretty short-lived: Today, you can rent an HD movie on iTunes for $4.99, or buy one for under $20.

Simon & Schuster decides ebooks need more video, and introduces the Vook. Vooks never takes off — it’s kind of hard to get immersed in a book when videos and Twitter hashtags are competing for your attention – and neither do these ebooks with built-in soundtracks). Vook pivots and is now an ebook publishing platform.

Yahoo introduces Twitter competitor “Yahoo Meme.”  The tagline is “No time or patience to blog?” with a picture of dogs saying “wow!” and “yum!”

Sears launches its own movie download service. Walmart and Best Buy both have download services, so why not Sears too! “Alphaline” goes under in less than a year.

Not the next Facebook

Walmart’s social network “The Hub”

Lycos’ social movie service “Lycos Cinema”

MySpace’s social news service (MySpace itself, for that matter)

Nielsen’s social network/market research combo “Hey Nielsen”

Conde Nast’s teen social network “Flip”

AOL’s AIM Pages

Martha Stewart’s social network

The art of making predictions

The next great American newspaper will be online only. “Instead of writing one longish piece, reporters will write (say) five short ones–will belt out little stories all the time, as things happen.”  – David Gelernter in “The Weekly Standard,” 2003

Did it come true? Yes. The Huffington Post may not be a “great American newspaper,” but it — and hundreds of other news blogs — follow the constantly updated news model that Gelernter envisioned.

The average person will spend 10 hours a day with media by 2009. – Private equity firm Veronis Suhler Stevenson, 2005

Did it come true? Yes: A 2010 eMarketer survey found that the average American spent 10.6 hours per day with media in 2008 and 11 hours in 2010.

MySpace will be worth $15 billion within a few years. – RBC Capital analyst Jordan Rohan in 2006

Did it come true? Definitely not. In 2011, News Corp sold off MySpace for just $35 million.

Warren Buffett says he won’t buy more newspapers “at any price.” — Warren Buffett, 2010

Did it come true? No. Buffett bought 63 local newspapers in a $142 million deal in 2012.

via paidContent http://paidcontent.org/2012/07/25/decade-of-digital-media-flops-flips-and-predictions/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+pcorg+%28paidContent%29