4 ms·

Hope Glenn keeps up the good work. As a journalist The Magazine has been eye-opening to me. Almost non-existing staff (Glenn and Marco), handpicked contributors

by wklauss 13y ago

Hope Glenn keeps up the good work. As a journalist The Magazine has been eye-opening to me. Almost non-existing staff (Glenn and Marco), handpicked contributors and you get a excellent magazine running profitable in less then one month. Shows how much baggage traditional media carries from the past and how convoluted a news organization can get once you start adding sales, advertising, and other departments that can be avoided now with the proper strategy.

elmuchoprez 13y ago
I think it's unclear how scalable and replicable The Magazine's success is (or even how successful it is). Marco Arment has a sizable niche following which provided an initial boost when The Magazine launched. His personal connections have allowed him to snag a handful of known names within that same niche circle. But more importantly, I think there's a different level of burden on a niche, under-the-radar type publication like this as compared to much of traditional media. I don't think Marco has a research staff to vet every article, so it's possible that they have or will eventually publish false information thanks to a lack of due diligence. Will anyone care? I guess it depends what falsehood they publish. What if the falsehood results in a libel claim? Now you're talking about significant legal involvement (and costs). Or maybe they end up running a story that has been plagiarized. What happens then? I think that what Marco has done with the Magazine has been great, but I often find that when you start dissecting "broken industries", you can start to see a method to the madness that led to the current state of affairs, and I question if big media is no different. Simplified money transfers were (still are?) a booming concept when PayPal launched, providing a simple alternative to the major banking networks that were slow and full of red tape. But as time has gone by, most of these payment services have gotten equally complex (holds on money, automatic reversals, etc...) because they slowly discovered that there was a reason for all the red tape. I find myself wondering if The Magazine's business model will discover a similar situation.
- smackfu 13y ago
  >Marco Arment has a sizable niche following which provided an initial boost when The Magazine launched. I think it was a pretty brilliant idea to have a lot of the pieces be written by popular bloggers and people with lots of twitter followers. Then they organically advertise The Magazine "for free", right when it needs the biggest pop. (And yes, they were mainly his friends, but I bet offering people a few grand for a longer blog post, cold, would work pretty well.)
- tptacek 13y ago
  There's a huge cottage industry of for-profit political and current-events "blogs" (really, magazines of small-form journalism) that have been coping with whatever these legal risks might be for ~10 years now. The Magazine is cool and all, but it's presumably dwarfed by Talking Points Memo, which has physical offices in multiple cities and full-time technical staff to back it up.
  - elmuchoprez 13y ago
    Political blogs/sites arguably have less legal exposure because they specifically deal with public figures and legally public figures have less protections (or at least a higher burden of proof) when it comes to things like libel. That said, I can't really think of a plausible example of something The Magazine could hastily publish that could land them into legal trouble. I suppose a story full of falsehoods could tarnish its reputation, but I'm not sure it has a reputation to tarnish in the firs place.
    - pseut 13y ago
      TPM and other political blogs often cover national security, etc. Recent posts on that site indicate that they spend at least some time and money on legal counsel, but not necessarily for libel.
      - deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
  - _pius 13y ago
    It might also be useful context that TPM — to which I subscribe — took a round of funding lead by Marc Andreessen a few years ago.
- Anechoic 13y ago
  What if the falsehood results in a libel claim? Now you're talking about significant legal involvement (and costs). Liability insurance (http://www.authorsguild.org/services/media-liability-insurance/ http://www.authorsguild.org/services/media-liability-insuran... for example) would help to mitigate this risk. I can't find premium cost info for a writer's policy, but our premiums for engineering general liability and E&O are a few thousand dollars. I don't imagine a writer's policy could be significantly more than that (our policies cover injury and death).
- Osmium 13y ago
  > I think it's unclear how scalable and replicable The Magazine's success is (or even how successful it is). At the very least, any publications that follow in The Magazine's footsteps stand a far better chance of success than the current lot of broken-by-design Newsstand apps. Every time I see a magazine app whose thumbnail is the cover from their print edition which is too small to even read it's obvious they haven't thought much about what it means to make a publication for a smartphone. "Exporting to app" from InDesign just isn't going to cut it. Marco's app is among the first that seems to have actually taken design of a mobile publication seriously.
  - wklauss 13y ago
    Exactly! But coming form traditional media, I can see why some of these bad choices are made. It's not easy to convince this big publishers to adopt a complete new workflow.
stdbrouw 13y ago
Well, I really do agree that you can create awesome media with hardly any resources these days, and that that's actually a better way to go about it... but I would hesitate to call The Magazine excellent. The writing has been hit-and-miss: some awesome articles, some weird ones, some navelgazing ones in every issue thus far. It feels more like "a promising start" to me. YMMV.
smackfu 13y ago
> As a journalist The Magazine has been eye-opening to me. Almost non-existing staff (Glenn and Marco), handpicked contributors and you get a excellent magazine running profitable in less then one month. OTOH, this is basically the business model of most niche paper magazines. You essentially have one editor, a bunch of freelance writers given assignments, and then photos are either freelance or stock. I guess they also have an ad sales department, unless that it outsourced too. But shoe-string permanent staffs are very common.
- wklauss 13y ago
  Except niche paper magazine have to run through printing and distribution costs. For small digital magazines the traditional way to finance is through advertisement and most of them are vanishing and surviving on the kindness of the contributors or turning into something that resembles a blog. Marco did something interesting: stick to one platform, play by Apple rules and see what you can build with that scheme. Id say that him being a developer was a huge advantage. Finding a developer for a small project these days is costly. But starting from zero he avoided the trap a lot of magazines fall into, like trying to create a enriched PDF that use the design guidelines we use on paper (multicolumn, etc..). I read somewhere that his contributors get paid the standard going rate in most big magazines (Time, New Yorker,...) Not a lot of small magazines can say the same. The Magazine did not have ads, so he didn't need to manage/outsource that part of the business. By no means is this the only way of doing things, of course, and it might not work for everybody but I found it inspiring. It was (is) a tight, lean and simple product.
triplesec 13y ago
Can you say something about what you found useful in he articles? I've never seen the mag and the website says subscription, and no obvious "read example articles here", but I'd like an idea of the kind of stuff it does before buying.
itsgettingcold 13y ago
> get a excellent magazine running profitable in less then one month That is primarily due to his large influential niche audience and friends in the tech media. Joe Schmoe could do the same thing, better, but without that free media exposure it would go nowhere, lost in the open sea that is the App Store.
- wklauss 13y ago
  Be that as it may, he pulled it off. A lot of journalist have a great following and a brand name these days as well.
  - itsgettingcold 13y ago
    I suspect the same model will flourish for those with similar niche audiences

by wklauss 13y ago

elmuchoprez 13y ago

I think it's unclear how scalable and replicable The Magazine's success is (or even how successful it is). Marco Arment has a sizable niche following which provided an initial boost when The Magazine launched. His personal connections have allowed him to snag a handful of known names within that same niche circle. But more importantly, I think there's a different level of burden on a niche, under-the-radar type publication like this as compared to much of traditional media. I don't think Marco has a research staff to vet every article, so it's possible that they have or will eventually publish false information thanks to a lack of due diligence. Will anyone care? I guess it depends what falsehood they publish. What if the falsehood results in a libel claim? Now you're talking about significant legal involvement (and costs). Or maybe they end up running a story that has been plagiarized. What happens then? I think that what Marco has done with the Magazine has been great, but I often find that when you start dissecting "broken industries", you can start to see a method to the madness that led to the current state of affairs, and I question if big media is no different. Simplified money transfers were (still are?) a booming concept when PayPal launched, providing a simple alternative to the major banking networks that were slow and full of red tape. But as time has gone by, most of these payment services have gotten equally complex (holds on money, automatic reversals, etc...) because they slowly discovered that there was a reason for all the red tape. I find myself wondering if The Magazine's business model will discover a similar situation.

smackfu 13y ago
>Marco Arment has a sizable niche following which provided an initial boost when The Magazine launched. I think it was a pretty brilliant idea to have a lot of the pieces be written by popular bloggers and people with lots of twitter followers. Then they organically advertise The Magazine "for free", right when it needs the biggest pop. (And yes, they were mainly his friends, but I bet offering people a few grand for a longer blog post, cold, would work pretty well.)
tptacek 13y ago
There's a huge cottage industry of for-profit political and current-events "blogs" (really, magazines of small-form journalism) that have been coping with whatever these legal risks might be for ~10 years now. The Magazine is cool and all, but it's presumably dwarfed by Talking Points Memo, which has physical offices in multiple cities and full-time technical staff to back it up.
- elmuchoprez 13y ago
  Political blogs/sites arguably have less legal exposure because they specifically deal with public figures and legally public figures have less protections (or at least a higher burden of proof) when it comes to things like libel. That said, I can't really think of a plausible example of something The Magazine could hastily publish that could land them into legal trouble. I suppose a story full of falsehoods could tarnish its reputation, but I'm not sure it has a reputation to tarnish in the firs place.
  - pseut 13y ago
    TPM and other political blogs often cover national security, etc. Recent posts on that site indicate that they spend at least some time and money on legal counsel, but not necessarily for libel.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
- _pius 13y ago
  It might also be useful context that TPM — to which I subscribe — took a round of funding lead by Marc Andreessen a few years ago.
Anechoic 13y ago
What if the falsehood results in a libel claim? Now you're talking about significant legal involvement (and costs). Liability insurance (http://www.authorsguild.org/services/media-liability-insurance/ http://www.authorsguild.org/services/media-liability-insuran... for example) would help to mitigate this risk. I can't find premium cost info for a writer's policy, but our premiums for engineering general liability and E&O are a few thousand dollars. I don't imagine a writer's policy could be significantly more than that (our policies cover injury and death).
Osmium 13y ago
> I think it's unclear how scalable and replicable The Magazine's success is (or even how successful it is). At the very least, any publications that follow in The Magazine's footsteps stand a far better chance of success than the current lot of broken-by-design Newsstand apps. Every time I see a magazine app whose thumbnail is the cover from their print edition which is too small to even read it's obvious they haven't thought much about what it means to make a publication for a smartphone. "Exporting to app" from InDesign just isn't going to cut it. Marco's app is among the first that seems to have actually taken design of a mobile publication seriously.
- wklauss 13y ago
  Exactly! But coming form traditional media, I can see why some of these bad choices are made. It's not easy to convince this big publishers to adopt a complete new workflow.

stdbrouw 13y ago

Well, I really do agree that you can create awesome media with hardly any resources these days, and that that's actually a better way to go about it... but I would hesitate to call The Magazine excellent. The writing has been hit-and-miss: some awesome articles, some weird ones, some navelgazing ones in every issue thus far. It feels more like "a promising start" to me. YMMV.

smackfu 13y ago

> As a journalist The Magazine has been eye-opening to me. Almost non-existing staff (Glenn and Marco), handpicked contributors and you get a excellent magazine running profitable in less then one month. OTOH, this is basically the business model of most niche paper magazines. You essentially have one editor, a bunch of freelance writers given assignments, and then photos are either freelance or stock. I guess they also have an ad sales department, unless that it outsourced too. But shoe-string permanent staffs are very common.

wklauss 13y ago
Except niche paper magazine have to run through printing and distribution costs. For small digital magazines the traditional way to finance is through advertisement and most of them are vanishing and surviving on the kindness of the contributors or turning into something that resembles a blog. Marco did something interesting: stick to one platform, play by Apple rules and see what you can build with that scheme. Id say that him being a developer was a huge advantage. Finding a developer for a small project these days is costly. But starting from zero he avoided the trap a lot of magazines fall into, like trying to create a enriched PDF that use the design guidelines we use on paper (multicolumn, etc..). I read somewhere that his contributors get paid the standard going rate in most big magazines (Time, New Yorker,...) Not a lot of small magazines can say the same. The Magazine did not have ads, so he didn't need to manage/outsource that part of the business. By no means is this the only way of doing things, of course, and it might not work for everybody but I found it inspiring. It was (is) a tight, lean and simple product.

triplesec 13y ago

Can you say something about what you found useful in he articles? I've never seen the mag and the website says subscription, and no obvious "read example articles here", but I'd like an idea of the kind of stuff it does before buying.

itsgettingcold 13y ago

> get a excellent magazine running profitable in less then one month That is primarily due to his large influential niche audience and friends in the tech media. Joe Schmoe could do the same thing, better, but without that free media exposure it would go nowhere, lost in the open sea that is the App Store.

wklauss 13y ago
Be that as it may, he pulled it off. A lot of journalist have a great following and a brand name these days as well.
- itsgettingcold 13y ago
  I suspect the same model will flourish for those with similar niche audiences