Magazines in the Museum

My local library has a magazine newsstand that is about forty feet long and eight feet high.  There are a couple of offshoots, but I won’t go down that road.  Every magazine enjoys a full frontal display, enabling me to read the cover lines from ten feet away.  Each magazine is framed in its own canopy, hinting it will last forever.

I would be well within my right to complain at this point about the high taxes that pay for this sprawling newsstand, even though I have never seen it attract a crowd beyond the few locals who can really work up a sweat over “Vogue Knitting.”  But I won’t.  This is meant to be a paean to magazines, my modest song of joy prompted by a snarky, but thoroughly understandable, piece by Laura Hazard Owen @gigaom entitled, “It was great having you, magazines. Let’s just say goodbye now.”

Ms. Owen tells us she subscribed to 14 magazines as a teenager and only seven still exist.  “Jump,” the magazine that got her through those difficult years, doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry.  The writer gets a little closer to home when she talks about “The New Yorker” and that 20,000-word piece on Russia.  I’ve just tossed the premier issue of “Dr. Oz Magazine” and that decision prompted a degree of angst.  But dealing with “The New Yorker” is much more complex.

I have designated spots in my office where I place copies of TNY that I haven’t read.  I have a pile for the issues that I have browsed, cut out the cartoons, just dipped into, or am thinking about reading. I don’t have a pile for magazines I’ve finished because I rarely get to that point.  Or perhaps I don’t remember because one issue appears on top of the other and after a few years of dutiful subscription, one is looking at tonnage that reminds me of my responsibility to the profession that bred and fed me.

I was thinking about Ms. Owen’s remarks about the decline of print magazines as I strolled through the halls of my vast local library.  Of course, it is true.  Newsstand revenue, advertising revenue and subscription revenue are on an inextricable decline and digital revenues, though showing considerable promise, haven’t offset this decline.

When I was at MPA, the magazine association, we struggled to define a magazine in a digital, multi-platform world.  The prevailing notion was that a magazine represents branded, edited content and that characteristic would be the differentiator no matter what digital platform the content was displayed on.  The perceived value of the brand and an intelligent editing would be the differentiator that separated magazines from what was coming down the pike, such as Flipboard, which has said it wants to be like “Vogue” in terms of reader engagement.  One way to do this is to carry video ads sponsored by Chanel. That’s apparently in the works.

A magazine is curated by experienced and loving hands.  Publishers are reluctant to unbundle a magazine or curate content the way Flipboard does because that move strikes at the heart of the value proposition. Industry platforms like Next Issue Media have talked about curating content across content verticals from the various publishers, but that remains to be seen.

On my private library newsstand, I counted more than 200 popular consumer magazines displayed, which likely constitute 80-90% of total magazine circulation in the U.S.  Since I had the place to myself, I could walk the aisles, dip into a magazine, and peruse it at my leisure.  I first went to magazines I had been involved with as publisher or editor, including Bicycling, Runner’s World, Backpacker, Organic Gardening, Scientific American, Men’s Health and others. It was fun to scroll the mastheads looking for old friends and to congratulate, by moving my library lips, editors and designers for vast improvements in the titles.  But in the basic content and format, the special-interest magazines in this crowd were not remarkably different. I found “Bicycling” a little “cheekier”--perhaps they borrowed some of that tone from sister publication “Men’s Health” which has been able to maintain is muscular and irreverent editorial manner for more than fifteen years.  If imitation is the finest form of flattery, judging from how much “Men’s Fitness” has mimicked its competitor, “Men’s Health” has flattery in abundance.

I don’t subscribe to the special-interest sports magazines mentioned earlier and rarely read them. But I’m still a runner and cyclist and an overall fitness enthusiast. It’s just that I’m not often in the market for a $3000 bike or a $300 running shoe.  Moreover, I can get most of the basic, sports-related information online.  I had once thought that special-interest magazines might be largely immune to the ravages of digital.  Now I’m not so sure.

I flipped through the October issue of Time Magazine with the cover story, “How to Eat Now.”  I read the magazine in its entirety and don’t think I found anything new to me.  I felt the same about “The Week,” but understand that the magazine is profitable because when launched, the late Felix Dennis was smart enough not to take on a New York City publishing head count and cost structure.

To a large extent the fate of magazines seemed to be playing out in these spacious library shelves.  Vanity Fair, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, GQ, Esquire and others in the fashion and culture sectors are heavy, thick with ads, and breathing life.  If you are patient enough, you can find an article about a philosophy student who left a phenomenology class and took up mixed martial arts fighting.  Or, if you have the stomach, learn how to skin a rabbit after wading through 200 pages of advertising.  It’s all there in these rich, catalog offerings.

Others have predicted that high-end glossy magazines such as “Vogue” would survive, news magazines would disappear, and special-interest magazines would be a mixed bag.  I don’t disagree with that.  Whatever the trajectory for magazines, it seems inevitable, especially as mobile becomes the dominant platform, that magazines will become uncoupled, as least as an alternative, and personalized in the best sense of the word. 

On my library roaming, I was particularly surprised by “Scientific American,” where I worked a decade ago.  I recall at that time the magazine was struggling with its identity, trying to reach out to a larger constituency of consumers and advertisers. In the process, the editorial got a little softer and the magazine seemed to flounder. Now it looks beautiful and sophisticated, and doesn’t dumb down science.  The magazine has editors for biology, evolution, energy, medicine and the brain.  I enjoyed staring at the cover of Scientific American as much as looking at Jennifer Lawrence on “Vanity Fair.”

When I recall that the first issue of “Scientific American” was published August 28, 1845, I am reminded to be less glib about my predictions.

The Militarization of Our Discourse

I have been following media coverage of a deadly head-on collision on Interstate 87, just a few miles from where I live.  In and of itself, the story is not remarkable.  We see more than our share of accidents on this interstate, including head-on collisions.

I initially paid attention because the head-on collision was at 7:00 a.m. and one driver was heading south in the northbound lane.  Someone reported the car stopped for a time and the driver apparently asleep.  Another driver reported he had seen the suspect car turn around, apparently making a conscious choice to head in the wrong direction.

I was talking to the owner of a local wine store, and he said it was devilishly difficult to make that wrong turn, especially during rush hour.  One had to cross a concrete medium to get to the other side. The wine guy, who rides a motorcycle, suggested such a maneuver was unlikely to happen by chance.

A narrative began to take form through television, print and online.  The wrong-way driver was a police officer. He was also an Army veteran, having served in Bosnia and the Middle East.  He was a cop in the Bronx with the New York City Police Department.  Up to this point, there was only passing mention of the other fatality, except that he lived in the neighborhood, about ten miles from where the other driver resided.  We would eventually learn that he was a cook at a local Catholic college. 

The only television interviews I saw—and perhaps the only ones available--were with the police officer’s family.  The first I saw showed their understandable grief and anguish.  In later interviews, while there was no less grief, a clearer narrative began to form.  The dead man was “sleep-deprived.”  He was working overtime because his girlfriend was pregnant, and he wanted to be financially ready when the baby arrived.  During the various interviews, a young man said something to the effect that it definitely wasn’t a suicide.

None of this is remarkable in itself.  We understand that a grieving family wants to have a sustaining narrative they can live with.  And we just don’t know much.  Both men died from blunt force trauma. The toxicology reports won’t be available for two months.  Police report there was no evidence of drugs or alcohol at the scene.

My first thought when hearing about the accident and knowing the terrain very well, was that it must have been deliberate.  Understandably, this kind of conjecture, without any proof, is not ready for prime time.  But people in the community were talking about this possibility.

From a journalistic perspective, I found the media narrative a little uneven from the very beginning.  There was very little reporting about the actual naturalistic detail of the accident and the decisions that set it in motion.  There was little of the old-fashioned cause and effect.  Rather, most reports seemed to begin with the fact that the driver at “fault” was a veteran who served in the Middle East.  That fact was followed by the other fact that the man was also a police officer.  Now add this to the family’s narrative about workload, lack of sleep, concern about an unborn child and we have a rather sympathetic story about a young man who, according to the information we have to date, made a determined effort to head in the wrong direction and kill another man.  We can argue the motives but there is no disputing the deaths.

Let me be clear.  The forensics will fill in some of the remaining gaps.  I am more interested here in the storyline, the semantic froth and the verbal associations that too often kick in when we hear the words veteran, police office, father-to-be and the like.  The associations readily come to mind: honorable, disciplined, and someone in service to the community and nation.  I live in the shadow of New York and listen attentively to the police being routinely referred to as the Finest, always in capital letters.  If there is truth in these acclamations, there is also hubris.

After the shooting death in Ferguson, Missouri, and the subsequent unrest, we are hearing a lot about the militarization of America’s police departments with an estimated 400 nationwide indiscriminately awarded heavy equipment and automatic weapons that were used or intended for use in Iraq and Afghanistan.  These include: grenade launchers, automatic weapons, night-vision goggles and armored vehicles that are mine-resistant and ideal for protecting against ambushes.  We should be concerned about the militarization of our police departments because there is more at stake than bringing home the political bacon.  The September 2014 issue of The Atlantic Magazine provides an interesting perspective of how America is becoming a police state and explores the role of local authorities in this dynamic.  This is not a case of Big Brother, per se.  It’s a much more pervasive form of Big Little Brother, replete with local accents.

But we should also be concerned about the “militarization” of our language, immediately putting anything associated with the police, military, terrorism task forces, border patrols, and the like in the same box that holds platitudes about our patriotism, righteousness and exceptionalism.   Our War on Terror has also become a War on Language where reports, inferences and judgments—our semantic intelligence at work--are mixed together in a palatable political stew, dumbing us down, dumbing the country’s discourse down, and making it easier for us to wage a highly questionable war in Iraq and to “nation-build” in Afghanistan, demonstrating American hubris and simplemindedness at its best.  America’s rabid international behavior since 9/11 is as much a failure of language as it is of politics.  The just-announced war on ISIS smacks of the same grammar, inverted and unbelievable.

President Obama is criticized for wearing a tan suit during a news conference and for being cautious about committing American military forces in the Middle East, as if we are in some “King of the Castle” kid’s game.  The psychologist Carl Jung writes in The Undiscovered Self: “Insight that dawns slowly seems to me to have more lasting effect than a fitful idealism, which is unlikely to hold out for long.”  Unfortunately, this sentiment is currently out-of-vogue and so un-American.   

I come from a large family of police officers, veterans and active duty personnel who have served our time.  We’ve put in our collective half-century of military service since Vietnam.  I recall my four years in the Navy with appreciation and necessary understatement.   Anyone who has served understands the shadow side of our armed forces, and the subliminal echoes of Catch-22 that will always resonate in the ranks where mere humans serve.   I touch on some of these Navy treats in my new novel USS Bunker Kills: A Sea Story.

America loves its sea stories.

Rodale: When Organic Wants to Become a Noun

I keep an eye on Rodale out of both interest and fondness.  I got my start in publishing at Rodale and remain grateful for the generous publishing tutorials provided by ex-President Bob Teufel and other executives.  This newly minted PhD had a lot to learn about the media business.

When the late Chairman Bob Rodale interviewed me for a position, he asked me what I thought about the company’s magazines.  I said from what I had seen of Prevention and Organic Gardening, they looked a little scruffy.  He laughed and hired me anyway.  I would soon learn how powerful and profitable these two scruffy magazines were.

The 1980s and 1990s were a dizzying time for Rodale in terms of acquisitions and startups including Runner’s World, The Runner, Bicycling, Cross Country Skiing, Men’s Health and Backpacker, some no longer in the fold.  These initiatives substantially enlarged Rodale’s demographic and editorial base, bringing young men and upscale advertisers to a company that had been largely down-market. 

Rodale had just announced the launch of Organic Life, which would subsume Organic Gardening where I spent a few pleasurable years trying to find the right positioning for a back-to-the land, largely mail-order magazine that was losing some of its luster and margin.  Rodale has long wanted to define “organic” as both a marketing and an editorial category, one that could attract a substantial advertising base.

In the early 1990s, Rodale, with help from Martha Stewart as a consultant, took Organic Gardening from digest-size to a full-size magazine, at the same time expanding the editorial base from gardening to cooking and décor.  This was a major and expensive undertaking by a company that had long enjoyed the financial befits of digest-size magazines.  Neither the company nor the market was then ready for this kind of repositioning.  The magazine remained full-size but settled into a predictable how-to editorial offering.    

Rodale hasn’t always been lucky combining core company values with the vicissitudes of the marketplace. The company launched Spring, the Magazine of High Energy Living, in 1983 without fully thinking through its advertising policy which rejected cosmetics that were made with chemicals.  That was not the message Madison Avenue wanted to hear.  Spring was shut down in less than a year.

The company tried again in 2001 with Organic Style to push the definition of organic to include designer dresses, European makeup, and other upmarket offerings, but the magazine was closed in 2005.  The timing was bad, the editorial was not compelling and the market has apparently not yet ready to embraces “organic” as an advertising and marketing category--in other words, as a noun.

But the third time or so might be the charm.  Organic Life, with the existing Organic Gardening as its base property, will be launched in 2015 into the so-called healthy living category that includes Hearst’s Dr. Oz The Good Life and Naturally, Danny Seo, a joint venture with Harris publications.  Rodale has hired James Oseland, a well-regarded editor from Saveur, to run the show.

Both the Hearst and the Harris titles are selling briskly on the newsstand, a good indicator of the vitality of a new title.  These magazines have an advantage in that Dr. Oz and Danny Seo are well-known and are celebrities in their own right with multiple platforms available to promote their titles.  Rodale possesses the same assets.  Perhaps a strategic question is whether the management is willing to let the new editor become a celebrity of sorts to compete in this very personalized space.  The company wasn’t pleased when the editor at Men’s Health assumed an oversized role.

Perhaps even more important is that Rodale doesn’t try to too narrowly define “organic” as it has done in the past.  The word has entered the marketplace as both lifestyle and slogan.  On the practical level, there is no evidence that organic food is necessarily better for you, but there seems a growing interest in organic, holistic living and health.  Editor Oseland promises a magazine that is community and a “clearinghouse of beautiful, authoritative information that will weave together food, shelter, gardening and good living.”

I wish Oseland every success, although I have seen this memo before.  Rodale’s other entries in the category covered similar terrain.  The key will be in the tone and the editorial voice; it will be all in the weaving. 

The Biggest Sea Story of All

Former wrestler and ex-Governor of Minnesota Jesse Ventura was interviewed remotely on CBS This Morning by Charlie Rose and company about his successful defamation suit against the estate of late Navy SEAL Chris Kyle worth $1.845 million.  After the pleasantries, the hosts pressed Ventura on why he would sue and take money from the estate of a dead SEAL and his wife and children.  After all, Ventura was also a Navy SEAL.  Ventura responded that they should ask the jury who awarded the dollar amount.

When pressed further, he said the case was about his good name.  He had not in fact been punched out by Kyle in a bar fight in 2006 over comments about Navy SEALS’ actions during the Iraq War.  In Ventura’s words, that never happened and therefore when Kyle referred to the episode in a book and later identified the Governor in public, Ventura was defamed.  And no, he would make no attempt to talk to Kyle’s widow. But he would visit the office of Kyle’s book publisher HarperCollins to chat about the “incident.”  The publisher seemed to get the word and announced shortly after the interview that it would pull the episode in question from future editions.

It was a very strange interview. In the one corner was this relaxed, tanned and hulking ex-wrestler, politician, reality television “truth” seeker weighing in at around 280 pounds.  And by the way Ventura pointed out to his interlocutors that he was on blood thinner at the time of the “incident” and would have been marked by the alleged altercation and would surely have bled. He did not mention his titanium hip replacement.

And in the other corner three focused, professional journalists who asked and probed and did their best but seemed to get nowhere. But the last question got to the heart of the matter. Why would Chris Kyle, America’s most lethal sniper, make up such a bogus story and put it in his book?  Why would he need to?  Didn’t the man have enough “bona fides?”  

Ventura replied that it’s a sea story.  Sailors tell these stories all the time.  One sailor tells another who tells another and so on.  As a Navy veteran who just finished a novel about sea stories, I thought the Governor was reading my mind.

I don’t think this was the answer the hosts wanted or expected. In the dullness of the morning this remark from another time zone, whether “true” or not, seemed to land like a thud on the newsroom floor.  I’m not sure why this response about “tall tales” should have been particularly surprising.  Hiding behind various personas served Ventura well as a professional wrestler and politician.  His recent stint as host of Conspiracy Theories on truTV, which explored everything from FEMA preparing for a Police State to reptilians masquerading as humans in their quest to control the world, proved Ventura has a sense of humor.  And yes, he even sued TSA for aggressive pat-downs. He did mention to Atlantic.com that people should take his cancelled television show with a grain of salt.  But he did hint at a “conspiracy” in the cancellation.

I would not have been surprised if Gayle King or her associates asked Ventura that, when referring to sea stories was he referring to Moby-Dick, The Old Man and the Sea, or Treasure Island?  I’ve had this kind of conversation many times over the years while working on my novel, sometimes in earnest, sometimes in jest, and sometimes to send me packing.  After four years at sea and sleeping under too many stars, it’s reasonable to assume a sailor might need his head examined.     

I experienced this first hand, whether guys were bragging about previous engagements, surviving deadly typhoons or their sexual conquests.  I served during the Vietnam adventure and the sea stories ran apace with the military confusions, on-board conflicts and Vietcong in every sampan. There was certainly a psychological element to all of this.

Men and women who are far away from home, displaced, terrified or wounded often tell stories to lessen the pain and place memories, real or imagined in the “collective.”  The ship itself is a psychological container and “vessel” that can wear on a crew after months or years at sea.  In the Navy lexicon a sea story has more than a hint of exaggeration, such as when my ammunition ship swore it had an arsonist on board who grew more dangerous by the day.  I do wonder what the guys are telling their children and grandchildren about this event that hardly made it into the ship’s log book.  Sea stories can also be a contagion and spread fast when pushed by a punishing wind.  And ships can talk.

I can imagine the scene as if it were yesterday.  I am at the ship’s helm taking commands from my captain as we made our way through an Okinawa harbor.  From a distance I can see that the compass directions the skipper is giving me will put me on a collision course with an aircraft carrier.  My only recourse is to say, “Repeat Sir,” as if I did not understand the command.  The skipper repeated the order and I repeated my response at least four times until the captain gave me the final order, reminding me that I was disobeying a direct order. At that point, the Executive Officer assumed responsibilities for the deck and conn and ordered me to turn hard to starboard.  I did with the collision horn ringing in my ears. We missed the carrier by the skin of our teeth.  So I am able to tell this story again and again. Was I really looking through the early morning fog?  Was I seeing things?  Did the skipper have a death wish?

After the passage of time I like to keep my sea stories in deep water where they are well-feed and unpredictable with no respect for tides, time or compass. 

I have also called on the sea gods relentlessly, and they mercifully kept the wind at my back for 100,000 words or so.  Sea stories that contain a psychological resonance might well become narrative fiction or a novel.  Mine is called “USS Bunker Kills: A Sea Story.”  It’s available at Amazon in paperback and on Kindle. http://ow.ly/zTOLJ

        

LinkedIn and the End of an Affair

Not long ago, it was all the rage to ask, always rhetorically, whether Facebook, Twitter and Google were media companies. The answers, as convincing as the sound of one hand clapping, still hang in the air, largely ignored.  We now know every X, Y or Z will sooner or later become a media company, even LinkedIn.

LinkedIn, the trusty service that helped me network my way up through those treacherous New York media ranks, is more ubiquitous these days and therefore potentially a pain in the ass. What used to be a friendly reminder to congratulate friend John Smith for surviving one more year in that hell-hole of a company, is now a daily reminder to congratulate someone in my muscular network for crossing the street, showing up on time or having a tight epigram retweeted to the masses.  While I applaud the powers-that-are for trying to meld me and my LinkedIn connections into one highly-connected and indulgent family, I’d like to remind them that it is not necessary or even wise corporate policy.  Aren’t we doing enough for your business by letting you market our names to your growing list of advertisers who are improving your share price?  You don’t need to bombard me with tons of emails.  I will still love you in the morning.

Now let me count the ways.  I appreciate that LinkedIn sent me a personal invitation to write for their new Special Edition site.  How could I refuse?  The template is one click away and so are the instructions.  First, I should write thoughts, presumably my own.  Second, I should not misspell any words or offer images that don’t look good.  The example offered is about writing killer content for LinkedIn. 

Dear LinkedIn: for a site devoted to media professionals and anyone else you can collect, I am surprised you provide a writing template that might be better suited to a sixth grade class in the Bronx (no offense, Bronx).  I realize you are casting a wide net and are trying to be helpful. But we have been together a long time, and I thought you really knew something about me. Have all those data points I provided been wasted?  And what if I really want to write about the psychology of dreams or the Catholic Church’s suppression of the feminine?  Do I really have to go to medium.com to exercise these particular muscles?  What if that is a bridge too far? (medium.com/ChuckMcCullagh).

I don’t mean to sound like a spurned lover, but this is not the first time I’ve been disappointed.  Now about Pulse, the news readers you purchased in 2013 for a cool $90 million!  I liked Pulse before the purchase and was excited about the prospects after the purchase.  I’m sorry to say that I’m guessing all the “new” Pulse editors must work for LinkedIn because most of the content seemed very similar to the LinkedIn updates that I’ve grown accustomed to ignoring.  I like and have flown Virgin Airways but don’t think Richard Branson has much to teach me about hard-scrabble ways to manage my small business.  Or the other rich and famous you offer me on a regular basis.

Since we now have this personal thing going, I fully understand why you are shifting the company focus away from media professionals like me who just want to puff up our resumes and brag about our “connections” and move in the direction of a genuine B2B platform.  Though you might have been late to the game, your purchase of Slide Share for $119 million in 2012 makes sense.  Who doesn’t like to share a slide show?  And your recent acquisition of Bizo, the ad-tech platform for $170 million, is a dead giveaway that you are moving into that bland, impersonal, automatic ad sharing world that is driving Facebook stock price through the roof.  I understand that now I will be even more of a keyword, a data point, or a hiccup on a cluster.  Use me as you see fit.  Anyway, the arrangement has always been uneven.

I’m not saying you’re wrong and am definitely not pointing the finger.  I’m hardly a bystander.  But you’ll be the first to know when that # Executive Recruiter calls me for the very first time. 

Count on it. 

Felix Dennis: The Maximum Man

Felix Dennis, publisher, provocateur, entrepreneur, poet, and planter of a million trees is dead at 67 after a long battle with throat cancer.  Dennis, a very wealthy man, was the rare individual who wrote his life as he lived it, mainly over-the-top.  What else does one say about a man who claimed to have spent a cool $100 million on wine, women and drugs?  Well, he did hang with John Lennon and Mick Jagger.   And yes, he was jailed for his involvement in an edition of Oz magazine that showed the Rupert the Bear half-naked and wearing genitals. 

I got to know Dennis and his Maxim magazine when I was part of a team launching Men’s Health in the UK in the mid-1990s.  Special-interest magazines at this time largely catered to women but in the UK, with the launch of “lad” magazines such as FHM and Loaded, men were now being chased by publishers. By the splash, noise and notoriety that accompanied the Maxim launch, I knew this company was a force to be reckoned with.  Within two years, Maxim would be launched in the states and soon was outselling all the other men’s magazines in the category.

Dennis had a keen nose for finding business opportunities early, whether it was launching computer magazines, Star Wars and Jaws issues, or Kung-Fu specials.  And he knew when to get out of a business. After the advertising downturn following the 2007 recession, the “lad” magazines in the states felt the pinch.  Dennis sold Maxim, Stuff, and Blender to the Quadrangle Group for $250 million.  Today, Maxim is worth next to nothing, having been passed around by investment companies like an old shoe.

He told journalism students at Columbia University in 2008 that “You are all useless tossers, but I will be forced to employ you to provide content on the web.” In 2001, he warned European paper manufacturers of the coming digital tsunami. The man was equally comfortable with digital or print.  I recall him discussing a perpetual web business to celebrate the endless dead and dying and those who mourn them.  In his view, the latter would pay a pretty penny because they surely ignored the old man when he was alive.  Dennis’ wicked sense of humor never kept him from an interesting business opportunity.     

I recall our meetings in New York City during which Dennis was never reluctant to tell me what was wrong with American publishing.  Executive editors were spoiled and overpaid; the executive ranks were filled with people who would have trouble tying their shoelaces; and the cost of producing magazines was scandalous. Hyperbole aside, he has been proven prescient.  We have been watching for the last few years the downsizing and restructuring of media companies in the U.S. with Time Inc. the most public example.  Dennis never forgot he was an entrepreneur, the only position worthy of him.

What is remarkable about Dennis is that he developed such a rich interior life while still chasing the money.  He started writing poetry in 1999 and became seriously dedicated to his muse.  I still have a T-shirt that reads, “Did I mention the free wine,” an invitation to attend poetry readings delivered with a delicious hint of bribery.  Dennis said he would be pleased to leave behind two memorable lines of English verse. Felix, spoken like a true poet!

The letters to his friends in 2012, when Dennis was recovering from throat cancer surgery, are full of wit, despair, and ruthless reflection.  He mentions Freud and Jung in his ravings, but his self-analysis seems more fitting to the occasion. He knew his demons well (www.felixdennis.com).

Dennis’ gift of a forest of trees in “The Heart of England” says a lot about what this man considered to be permanent and for that reason must have come from a very old soul.

The NYT, Time Inc. and a Very Long Tale

The New York City media tends to get a little excited when covering one of their own.  We’ve seen that recently in the coverage of the dismissal of Executive Editor Jill Abramson, the first female editor of the New York Times.  I think Lewis DVorkin at Forbes online had the right response: download the leaked Times Innovation Report and re-read “The Kingdom and the Power” by Gay Talese, in which he quotes a NYT executive from a generation ago: most of our staff are “cathedral-builders, not stonecutters.”  The coverage of Ms. Abramson’s departure suggests that sentiment is still in the air at the newspaper.

Much more important than the termination, whatever the editor’s legitimate grievances, the Innovation document suggests that the paper has much deeper problems than egos in the newsroom.  The NYT deserves credit for the clarity and honesty of this report.  Having read and written my share of these white papers, I was astonished that the paper did not whitewash issues and shone a rare light on the interaction between the business and newsroom sides.  The report is brutally honest about the dangers posed by fast-rising competitors, including Vox Media, BuzzFeed, the Huffington Post, and others.  The report also acknowledges that website and news app traffic are declining. The authors of this paper understand the need for audience development, unlocking the power of data, and the importance of management agility.

The Times’ digital solutions appear to be focused, specific and probably late to the game.  I was a little surprised to read about a renewed effort to make better use of “evergreen” content through tagging, metadata and structured data.  By their count, the paper has 14,723,933 articles in its archives, dating back to 1851.  The need for more structured data has been in the publishing air for decades, spearheaded by IDEAlliance and others and embraced by companies including Time Inc.  Media companies have known that this is money in the bank as well as a way to deepen and personalize content.  It makes good sense for the report to recommend organizing the content by relevance rather than data.  For example, articles about art and culture have a long shelf life.  What an amazing perspective this company is sitting on.

The authors come out in favor of the “stonecutters,” suggesting that the paper’s staff needs to push back against perfectionists and focus on “minimal viable products;” not everything has to be perfect. The report notes that The Verge has redesigned its home page 53 times in the last year.  It also points out that Gawker “plundered” a NYT story about “12 Years a Slave” and milked it endlessly.  The Times tends to publish an article and forget it.  Their digital rivals carve out content in chunks and spoon feed an audience.

The management advice is familiar: reward entrepreneurs; kill off mediocre efforts; and focus on projects than are “replicable” rather than one-offs.  The gutsiest and most challenging part of the report is about Unbolting the Newsroom, which is an effort to build an audience-based collaboration between the business side and the newsroom, focused on reader experience.  There is still too much talk of tradition and turf and the church and state separation. The report suggests appointing evangelists who can help push the newsroom to embrace their digital futures.  This seems to be like a Super Committee.  The report says this with a straight face.

I think this well-charted effort might be a fantasy, and not for a lack of trying.  Lewis DVorkin, quoting from the report, puts his finger on the contradictions the NYT faces. “We still have a large and vital advertising arm that should be walled off.”  No company can win in the digital arena with this kind of restraint.  It seems a little surprising, given the recommendations of the leaked Innovation report, that the Times would appoint a new Executive Editor with little digital experience.

I’ve been thinking about the impending Time Inc. spin-off from Time Warner and how this company is trying to get out from under its legacy media shadow.  The New York Times might find some lessons here.  Even though Time Inc. might have been, by some measures, overstaffed with recent C-level staff lacking in digital acumen, its fundamentals are solid.  Time Inc. embraced early on the idea of structured data and generating income from its archives.  I know first-hand that this wasn’t always considered a high priority in-house (or in the publishing community for that matter) but the technical staff waged this battle and won.  Deep tagging of content significantly increases its value, especially as screens proliferate and advertisers seek more specific and personalized solutions.  

I’ve noted before that I think Time Inc. has had a somewhat muscular definition of “church and state” separation that was not always consistent with the fast-changing demands of the digital business.  That issue has been rendered moot by the new reporting structures at the company.  That Time magazine and Sports Illustrated ran a small Verizon ad on the cover of a recent issue suggests that this is a new beginning.  As a long-time editor, I’m not appalled at this development.

One gets the sense that a more streamlined Time Inc. will be able to move faster.  The recent purchase of Cozi, a free home-management app and website for meal-planning, calendars, and shopping, will likely be the first of many.  It has 10 million users and gives Time Inc. a leg up in the productivity category.

When I read the Times Innovation report, I thought that the company had a lot of digital catching up to do. When I read a report by Internet guru Mary Meeker about Internet Trends, delivered at the Code Conference recently, I realized that the newspaper and the rest of us better hurry up.  Not surprisingly, print is almost absent from this report but Meeker notes that “print remains over-indexed,” which means that there is a disproportionate relationship between the amount of advertising spent on print and the actual time consumers spend with print (19% of total advertising vs. 5% of consumer time spent).  The metrics for radio, TV, and the Internet are much closer and more consistent, except for mobile. Consumers spend 20% of their media time on mobile and this platform gets only 4% of the advertising.  Meeker says this gap represents a $30 billion opportunity for mobile in the USA.

I’ve heard the word “disruption” in media circles so often that these days it seems quite tame.  One could infer from Meeker’s numbers that advertisers are spending too much on print, though the print guy in me would say that the “over-index” exists because of the intrinsic value of print (engagement etc.).   I’m not sure how long I can hold out on this.  As display advertising gives way to more emphasis on programmatic sales, this print “over-index” will surely get more scrutiny.

If Meeker is correct, the Brave New World that we’ve been ploughing through for the last two decades will become even more interesting or frightening, depending on what chair one is sitting in.  Please don’t believe the hockey stick predictions for mobile growth, but do think about the fact that now there are almost as many mobile phone in the world as televisions. And in 2013, 25% of web usage was via mobile.

Just as I’m getting used to multi-purpose apps, Meeker tells me to pay attention to apps as a service layer that only opens when they have something to say to me that is informed by context, location sensors, history of use and predictive consumption.  Perhaps someone will remind me to buy “Mother Jones” magazine.

Meeker indicates that industry verticals are likely to change given the marriage of content, community, and commerce.  She cites Houzz, a site that brings together photos, professional consumers, and products in an ecosystem devoted to home renovation and design.  This sounds like a magazine to me.

The NYT Innovation report and the Meeker perspective, though different in intent, reside at distinct ends of a digital and existential divide.  But she has a lot to say to and about content companies.  According to her research, two-thirds of Digital Universal Content is created by consumers in the form of videos, social media, and image sharing.  That’s staggering.

As the authors note in their report, the NYT is perfectly positioned to experiment with collections comprised of videos and articles, such in the heavily-reported sex-trafficking, building at the same time a new frame around old content. The newspaper might learn from medium.com, founded by Evan Williams, ex-chairman of Twitter, which is built around specific content verticals written by people knowledgeable in specific fields (I contribute).  This could be a good way to extend the brand in a managed, professional way. Their fine professional journalists can’t do everything.

Or buy the company.  Lots of them.

The path to a digital future is probably not through the committee room door.

(The Mary Meeker presentation can be found at recode.net).