7 ms·

My master plan for revolutionizing the future of publishing

83 points by olivercameron 14y ago

peterwiese 14y ago
clearly, he doesn't need the money
grinich 14y ago
"There’s no master plan. I wanted Instapaper to exist, so I made it. Five years later, I wanted The Magazine to exist, so I made that. I don’t know how to save journalism, but I’m also not qualified to. I’m not a journalist and I don’t know much about that industry." This is essentially what every successful founder thinks before they end up starting a billion dollar company... I'm not saying that Marco is going to flip this industry, but his general attitude is consistent with people like Zuck or Drew Houston.
- stdbrouw 14y ago
  So you're saying Drew Houston built Dropbox simply because he thought it'd be neat, but didn't care about whether it would change how people sync and share files, and didn't know anything about the industry either? "Eat your own dogfood" and "scratch your own itch" have always been good mottos... but they're not the secret sauce to success.
- jborden13 14y ago
  "This is essentially what every successful founder thinks before they end up starting a billion dollar company" This is also what an enumerable number of failed founders think as well. Shipping is the important portion of your quote - not the deprecating position about one's relative importance to an industry/cause.
  - grinich 14y ago
    Sure, but it's clear at this point that Marco knows how to ship and does it well.
- cjensen 14y ago
  I think Macro is making a huge error in deciding not to license out the Magazine code to others. He has shown the way, and I'd like to see him lead forward. If he licensed it to a smart political editor of the Obviously Correct persuasion who would commission stories for me to read, I'd subscribe. He's right that a gazillion clones is a Bad Thing. He should instead license it to serious editors only, and have a family of The Magazines each with a different focus. In order to enforce quality, he should only provide annual licenses to a few serious editors at a time, and then discontinue them if he feels the customers are getting a bad deal. He should start small: one magazine at first, then add on fast as he can while maintaining quality. In other words, the path to Quality for this type of thing is for him to retain control (and a bit of profit) rather than his current path of unintentionally encouraging others to clone his app badly.
  - woah 14y ago
    What he seems to be saying is that it's all in the editorial decisions he's made, and the quality of writing and other content in "The Magazine". If this is really the case, he should totally license out the code, or release it open source. He's saying that what differentiates "The Magazine" is not the app, but the publication. If this is the case, then there is no problem with letting other people use his platform to do what they will.
otakucode 14y ago
How much of the 'future of publishing' discussions do you think are driven purely by ardent desire not to lose the status quo? I mean, it seems to me that looking at it objectively, the future is very self-evident. What product did publishers provide? Among other things, their business model was completely built upon distribution being a valuable service and the entire industry being impossible without it. This made them rich. Now, distribution is a worthless service. In fact, the way in which they provided distribution for so many years, they are actually actively destroying value by having to adhere to all of the arcane, unnecessary geographic limitations that made distribution possible a decade or so ago. Now, they will either morph and stop even charging for distribution (since any 12 year old with an Internet connection could beat their ass at the task) and radically shink their business (from billions to thousands) as they have lost their golden goose, or they close their doors. They can still make money providing a few services like aggregation (when distribution is essentially free, aggregation becomes a valuable service... not as valuable as distribution used to be, but not worthless either). They can provide promotional services to their writers (who are now the bosses, while the publishers are starving service providers) and things like that too. If they're really smart, they will realize that the future is consumers getting their journalism from, gasp, journalists directly since distribution is now basically free. How can they profit from that? Well, finding journalists, managing logistics for journalists, etc could be valuable services. There is no question, they have to face the fact that there will no longer be The Fifth Estate and they will no longer be international power brokers, they won't even be reasonably wealthy businessmen. They're going to be working from home and shuffling bits unless they're willing to get on a plane and go where the danger is and become a journalist themselves. I understand from their perspective this is a scary prospect, the same for anyone who feels that the status quo gives them safety and predictability. And I can't help but think that a lot of these talks are based on that fear...
- stdbrouw 14y ago
  > How much of the 'future of publishing' discussions do you think are driven purely by ardent desire not to lose the status quo? Depends on what you're reading. If you read e.g. Clay Shirky et al.'s "Post Industrial Journalism" report [1], which is close to the consensus view among people talking about the future of journalism, you'll find that it aligns pretty well with what you outline in your comment. It's different when you talk to the owners and managers of newspapers and magazines because it's their job to make sure the ship doesn't sink, not follow the disruption to its logical conclusion as fast as possible but to delay it as long as they can so you can avoid social and financial drama. Yes, they're grasping at straws ("Let's license Marco's iPad app and everything will be better. Or let's put up a paywall."), but they're in a very unenviable position and I don't know what I'd do if I were in their shoes. [1] http://towcenter.org/research/post-industrial-journalism/ http://towcenter.org/research/post-industrial-journalism/
JohnsonB 14y ago
Well, if there would be enough general interest in "The Magazine"'s format, such that a service Marco sold would cause a flood of app-store clones, then whether Marco sells one or not, such a clone will inevitably be created and allow the flood of those clones. That would simply be a realization of basic market forces and not something Marco can control. However, the bigger issue is that Marco thinks that the editorial format is (one of) the key distinguishers between publications: >>A publication’s app should be designed and built with purpose and consideration. The Magazine works because I based decisions not on what everyone else was doing, but on what would be best for this magazine. Every publication has its own unique needs, audience, economics, and style, so their apps should reflect that. I don't think this is significant. The value of a publication is its content, primarily, and the creation and selection thereof. Yes, I do think that a general app store creation service should exist for publications, or even several. Should every publication be burdened with re-inventing the wheel for basic webb/app infrastructure? Looking at the web front-end of The Magazine, I see a basic hierarchy of Issue > Article List > Article Preview, which may not be perfect for every publication, but perhaps close enough? Presumably, the app functionality is also close enough to what a large number of publications would need in terms of UX. Wordpress isn't the perfectly ideal format either for every website with articles but the millions of installations out there still saves the industry a significant amount of time and money.
troymc 14y ago
There already are things that aim to be "the WordPress of Newsstand"; see: http://theperiodical.co/ http://theperiodical.co/ http://www.mobilechameleon.com/toolkits-to-develop-magazine-apps-and-book-apps.html http://www.mobilechameleon.com/toolkits-to-develop-magazine-...
programminggeek 14y ago
I think people looking at the Newsstand or apps for publishing are missing the point. It's not about formats or delivery mechanism. It's more of a fundamental business problem. I knew magazine apps were doomed when there was talk about how beautiful the ads would be in them. How they could faithfully reproduce the fantastic advertising in the print editions of the magazines. Media was able to charge both a subscription fee to the consumer and an advertising fee because they had high barriers to entry and a captive audience. People fundamentally don't want ads in their media, but media companies have made so much money for so long charging on both ends that they forgot why they were able to do so - there was a high barrier to entry. Now that technology has made the barriers to publishing $1,000 or less, there is a shift in business model. Either the media should be free and ad supported, or paid with no ads. There just isn't the same market for something that does both anymore. Their answer thus far seems to have been "just add more ads" or "put up a paywall in front of the ad-laden content". Also, with fewer barriers to entry, there will be fewer big content companies, and a lot of smaller ones. The economics don't make sense yet for a big media company that is Newsstand only yet, but there will probably be a lot of smaller, scrappier publishers like The Magazine that pop up. Again, it's not about The Magazine having some formula right, or its publishing platform being so amazing. It's that the business model and economics of publishing have changed and The Magazine is a lot closer to that reality than traditional publishing companies. One could make the same argument about Redbox and Netflix compared to Blockbuster and Hollywood Video.
- wallflower 14y ago
  > I think people looking at the Newsstand or apps for publishing are missing the point. It's not about formats or delivery mechanism. It's more of a fundamental business problem. If you have never read it, I highly recommend Clay Shirky's classic essay: "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable". It may make you think more about the economics of publishing and forced change. "It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem... The old difficulties and costs of printing forced everyone doing it into a similar set of organizational models; it was this similarity that made us regard Daily Racing Form and L’Osservatore Romano as being in the same business. That the relationship between advertisers, publishers, and journalists has been ratified by a century of cultural practice doesn’t make it any less accidental..." http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/ http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking...
Magenta 14y ago
Master plan for REVOLUTION: make an application that is double-paywalled. * You have to pay for the content (The Magazine). * You have to buy an expensive Apple product to access it.
yycom 14y ago
Step 1: make site readable on android
hymloth 14y ago
Imagine a platform for curating or writing your own intelligent magazine that edits itself autonomously to match the interests of every individual user. Now imagine a publishing network that users social filtering to identify the best articles and publications. Add adaptive web design never achieved before and you get NOOWIT.com (coming soon to change online publishing history).
johnrgrace 14y ago
The problem with digital magazine apps is they are pushing an analog business model into a connected world. Publishing! = Magazines. What is publishing? It used to be we print with a period of Y on paper type X, be that daily newsprint (newspapers), monthly super calendered paper (magazines), every few years on acid free paper (hardcover), and weekly super calendered Kraft paper (comics). With digital the lines between the different publishing families are simply erased. Content can be put out at any point in time, and on any format. Further, complete works don’t have to be published all, serialized content is back after having been almost dead for decades. What publishing needs is a business model that helps them sell content of all sorts of length that comes out at all sorts of time. Magazines have always been content buckets, where the taste and choices of the editor in chief and the publications self determined constraints determined if you wanted to buy that bucket. The magazine in the connected world is going to have the problem of most topics they pick to have someone write about will be outdone by many other places on the net and available for free. Take a blog like footnoted.com, they’re doing deep dive financial journalism better than the Wall Street journal. The future of "The Magazine" is BoingBoing.net, they deliver a bucket of curate content filtered through the tastes and choice of their editors. They make income off ads, referral links, and sponsored posts for $5k a pop.
barkingcat 14y ago
Does anyone know if the Magazine has become profitable yet?
barkingcat 14y ago
I really like these unique ways of approaching media / content. I just downloaded the trial of the Magazine and will try it out!

83 points by olivercameron 14y ago

clearly, he doesn't need the money

"There’s no master plan. I wanted Instapaper to exist, so I made it. Five years later, I wanted The Magazine to exist, so I made that. I don’t know how to save journalism, but I’m also not qualified to. I’m not a journalist and I don’t know much about that industry." This is essentially what every successful founder thinks before they end up starting a billion dollar company... I'm not saying that Marco is going to flip this industry, but his general attitude is consistent with people like Zuck or Drew Houston.

stdbrouw 14y ago
So you're saying Drew Houston built Dropbox simply because he thought it'd be neat, but didn't care about whether it would change how people sync and share files, and didn't know anything about the industry either? "Eat your own dogfood" and "scratch your own itch" have always been good mottos... but they're not the secret sauce to success.
jborden13 14y ago
"This is essentially what every successful founder thinks before they end up starting a billion dollar company" This is also what an enumerable number of failed founders think as well. Shipping is the important portion of your quote - not the deprecating position about one's relative importance to an industry/cause.
- grinich 14y ago
  Sure, but it's clear at this point that Marco knows how to ship and does it well.
cjensen 14y ago
I think Macro is making a huge error in deciding not to license out the Magazine code to others. He has shown the way, and I'd like to see him lead forward. If he licensed it to a smart political editor of the Obviously Correct persuasion who would commission stories for me to read, I'd subscribe. He's right that a gazillion clones is a Bad Thing. He should instead license it to serious editors only, and have a family of The Magazines each with a different focus. In order to enforce quality, he should only provide annual licenses to a few serious editors at a time, and then discontinue them if he feels the customers are getting a bad deal. He should start small: one magazine at first, then add on fast as he can while maintaining quality. In other words, the path to Quality for this type of thing is for him to retain control (and a bit of profit) rather than his current path of unintentionally encouraging others to clone his app badly.
- woah 14y ago
  What he seems to be saying is that it's all in the editorial decisions he's made, and the quality of writing and other content in "The Magazine". If this is really the case, he should totally license out the code, or release it open source. He's saying that what differentiates "The Magazine" is not the app, but the publication. If this is the case, then there is no problem with letting other people use his platform to do what they will.

otakucode 14y ago

How much of the 'future of publishing' discussions do you think are driven purely by ardent desire not to lose the status quo? I mean, it seems to me that looking at it objectively, the future is very self-evident. What product did publishers provide? Among other things, their business model was completely built upon distribution being a valuable service and the entire industry being impossible without it. This made them rich. Now, distribution is a worthless service. In fact, the way in which they provided distribution for so many years, they are actually actively destroying value by having to adhere to all of the arcane, unnecessary geographic limitations that made distribution possible a decade or so ago. Now, they will either morph and stop even charging for distribution (since any 12 year old with an Internet connection could beat their ass at the task) and radically shink their business (from billions to thousands) as they have lost their golden goose, or they close their doors. They can still make money providing a few services like aggregation (when distribution is essentially free, aggregation becomes a valuable service... not as valuable as distribution used to be, but not worthless either). They can provide promotional services to their writers (who are now the bosses, while the publishers are starving service providers) and things like that too. If they're really smart, they will realize that the future is consumers getting their journalism from, gasp, journalists directly since distribution is now basically free. How can they profit from that? Well, finding journalists, managing logistics for journalists, etc could be valuable services. There is no question, they have to face the fact that there will no longer be The Fifth Estate and they will no longer be international power brokers, they won't even be reasonably wealthy businessmen. They're going to be working from home and shuffling bits unless they're willing to get on a plane and go where the danger is and become a journalist themselves. I understand from their perspective this is a scary prospect, the same for anyone who feels that the status quo gives them safety and predictability. And I can't help but think that a lot of these talks are based on that fear...

stdbrouw 14y ago
> How much of the 'future of publishing' discussions do you think are driven purely by ardent desire not to lose the status quo? Depends on what you're reading. If you read e.g. Clay Shirky et al.'s "Post Industrial Journalism" report [1], which is close to the consensus view among people talking about the future of journalism, you'll find that it aligns pretty well with what you outline in your comment. It's different when you talk to the owners and managers of newspapers and magazines because it's their job to make sure the ship doesn't sink, not follow the disruption to its logical conclusion as fast as possible but to delay it as long as they can so you can avoid social and financial drama. Yes, they're grasping at straws ("Let's license Marco's iPad app and everything will be better. Or let's put up a paywall."), but they're in a very unenviable position and I don't know what I'd do if I were in their shoes. [1] http://towcenter.org/research/post-industrial-journalism/ http://towcenter.org/research/post-industrial-journalism/

JohnsonB 14y ago

Well, if there would be enough general interest in "The Magazine"'s format, such that a service Marco sold would cause a flood of app-store clones, then whether Marco sells one or not, such a clone will inevitably be created and allow the flood of those clones. That would simply be a realization of basic market forces and not something Marco can control. However, the bigger issue is that Marco thinks that the editorial format is (one of) the key distinguishers between publications: >>A publication’s app should be designed and built with purpose and consideration. The Magazine works because I based decisions not on what everyone else was doing, but on what would be best for this magazine. Every publication has its own unique needs, audience, economics, and style, so their apps should reflect that. I don't think this is significant. The value of a publication is its content, primarily, and the creation and selection thereof. Yes, I do think that a general app store creation service should exist for publications, or even several. Should every publication be burdened with re-inventing the wheel for basic webb/app infrastructure? Looking at the web front-end of The Magazine, I see a basic hierarchy of Issue > Article List > Article Preview, which may not be perfect for every publication, but perhaps close enough? Presumably, the app functionality is also close enough to what a large number of publications would need in terms of UX. Wordpress isn't the perfectly ideal format either for every website with articles but the millions of installations out there still saves the industry a significant amount of time and money.

troymc 14y ago

There already are things that aim to be "the WordPress of Newsstand"; see: http://theperiodical.co/ http://theperiodical.co/ http://www.mobilechameleon.com/toolkits-to-develop-magazine-apps-and-book-apps.html http://www.mobilechameleon.com/toolkits-to-develop-magazine-...

programminggeek 14y ago

I think people looking at the Newsstand or apps for publishing are missing the point. It's not about formats or delivery mechanism. It's more of a fundamental business problem. I knew magazine apps were doomed when there was talk about how beautiful the ads would be in them. How they could faithfully reproduce the fantastic advertising in the print editions of the magazines. Media was able to charge both a subscription fee to the consumer and an advertising fee because they had high barriers to entry and a captive audience. People fundamentally don't want ads in their media, but media companies have made so much money for so long charging on both ends that they forgot why they were able to do so - there was a high barrier to entry. Now that technology has made the barriers to publishing $1,000 or less, there is a shift in business model. Either the media should be free and ad supported, or paid with no ads. There just isn't the same market for something that does both anymore. Their answer thus far seems to have been "just add more ads" or "put up a paywall in front of the ad-laden content". Also, with fewer barriers to entry, there will be fewer big content companies, and a lot of smaller ones. The economics don't make sense yet for a big media company that is Newsstand only yet, but there will probably be a lot of smaller, scrappier publishers like The Magazine that pop up. Again, it's not about The Magazine having some formula right, or its publishing platform being so amazing. It's that the business model and economics of publishing have changed and The Magazine is a lot closer to that reality than traditional publishing companies. One could make the same argument about Redbox and Netflix compared to Blockbuster and Hollywood Video.

wallflower 14y ago
> I think people looking at the Newsstand or apps for publishing are missing the point. It's not about formats or delivery mechanism. It's more of a fundamental business problem. If you have never read it, I highly recommend Clay Shirky's classic essay: "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable". It may make you think more about the economics of publishing and forced change. "It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem... The old difficulties and costs of printing forced everyone doing it into a similar set of organizational models; it was this similarity that made us regard Daily Racing Form and L’Osservatore Romano as being in the same business. That the relationship between advertisers, publishers, and journalists has been ratified by a century of cultural practice doesn’t make it any less accidental..." http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/ http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking...

Magenta 14y ago

Master plan for REVOLUTION: make an application that is double-paywalled. * You have to pay for the content (The Magazine). * You have to buy an expensive Apple product to access it.

yycom 14y ago

Step 1: make site readable on android

hymloth 14y ago

Imagine a platform for curating or writing your own intelligent magazine that edits itself autonomously to match the interests of every individual user. Now imagine a publishing network that users social filtering to identify the best articles and publications. Add adaptive web design never achieved before and you get NOOWIT.com (coming soon to change online publishing history).

johnrgrace 14y ago

The problem with digital magazine apps is they are pushing an analog business model into a connected world. Publishing! = Magazines. What is publishing? It used to be we print with a period of Y on paper type X, be that daily newsprint (newspapers), monthly super calendered paper (magazines), every few years on acid free paper (hardcover), and weekly super calendered Kraft paper (comics). With digital the lines between the different publishing families are simply erased. Content can be put out at any point in time, and on any format. Further, complete works don’t have to be published all, serialized content is back after having been almost dead for decades. What publishing needs is a business model that helps them sell content of all sorts of length that comes out at all sorts of time. Magazines have always been content buckets, where the taste and choices of the editor in chief and the publications self determined constraints determined if you wanted to buy that bucket. The magazine in the connected world is going to have the problem of most topics they pick to have someone write about will be outdone by many other places on the net and available for free. Take a blog like footnoted.com, they’re doing deep dive financial journalism better than the Wall Street journal. The future of "The Magazine" is BoingBoing.net, they deliver a bucket of curate content filtered through the tastes and choice of their editors. They make income off ads, referral links, and sponsored posts for $5k a pop.

barkingcat 14y ago

Does anyone know if the Magazine has become profitable yet?

barkingcat 14y ago

I really like these unique ways of approaching media / content. I just downloaded the trial of the Magazine and will try it out!