4 ms·
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 pro
by 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 agoThere'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 agoPolitical 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 agoTPM 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 agoIt 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 agoWhat 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 agoExactly! 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.