Business

Publishing Powerhouses Unite to Sell Digital Periodicals

Five of the world’s major periodical publishers have joined forces to port print magazines and newspapers onto digital devices with enough print mojo to entice people to pay print-like prices for digital content — and to provide advertisers with a rich multimedia environment in which to pitch those readers. The consortium, whose formation was an […]

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Five of the world's major periodical publishers have joined forces to port print magazines and newspapers onto digital devices with enough print mojo to entice people to pay print-like prices for digital content -- and to provide advertisers with a rich multimedia environment in which to pitch those readers. The consortium, whose formation was an open secret, is comprised of Condé Nast, Hearst, Meredith, News Corp. and Time and was formally announced on Tuesday (disclosure: Condé Nast publishes Wired Magazine and Wired.com).

The group hopes to create digital standards that will allow a wide variety of devices to display the articles properly while allowing each publication to retain its own "distinctive look and feel," according to the announcement.

"For the consumer, this digital initiative will provide access to an extraordinary selection of engaging content products, all customized for easy download on the device of their choice, including smartphones, e-readers and laptops," said the initiative's interim managing director John Squires in a statement. "Once purchased, this content will be 'unlocked' for consumers to enjoy anywhere, anytime, on any platform."

The challenge is to transpose the somewhat intangible, Gestalt experience of reading a magazine or newspaper onto the emerging platform of portable tablets, which would sport crisp, multi-touch screens. In (mostly) theory these portable computers would provide a stable platform for compelling content — editorial and advertising. They represent the next generation of e-readers, which currently do impulse buying and gray-scale text great, and nothing else particularly well.

The problem is that consumers are abandoning print and have been conditioned to cough up exactly nothing for most digital content. As any newspaper and magazine executive can tell you, reclaiming this business isn't simply a matter of shoveling content onto the web, or onto an open mobile standard -- strategies that have been in play for a dozen years.

As a practical matter, much of this initiative centers around portable tablets real and imagined; the highly-anticipated Apple tablet falls into that latter category although Condé Nast has acknowledged that its prototypical digital magazine was designed with this non-existent product in mind. Other initiatives run the gamut from the creation of new paywalls (a favorite topic of consortium member News Corp Chairman Rupert Murdoch) to some sort of pay-for-lots-but-not-for-everything model, like Steve Brill's Journalism Online venture.

The five founding members invited other publishers to join the as-yet-unnamed venture on Tuesday, in return for a share of revenue from content sales and advertisements in digital periodicals. The consortium will begin by offering magazine and newspaper articles, and possibly expand later to include "books, comic books, blogs and other media."

These publishers hope advertisers will embrace their "innovative formats that benefit from the highly engaging, interactive nature of this new medium." Hardware manufacturers, software developers and retailers also stand to benefit if the idea takes off, because it will give people another reason to buy or upgrade to new devices, such as the rumored Apple Tablet.

Still, questions remain. Will people pay for digital articles in order to have them forever on the devices of their choice, the way some do with their favorite albums or movies? After all, magazines and newspapers are not printed in hardcover. The publishers also face stiff competition, of course, from even themselves -- in the form of free advertiser-supported online content that would presumably be available via web browsers on the same devices to which these publishers hope to publish premium-ized but similar content.

Nonetheless, if they manage to create a new form of media that sits somewhere between a website and a stack of processed trees, charge the right price for it and make it easy to access, they just might be able to pull yesterday's rabbit out of tomorrow's hat.

The five participating publishers own the following periodicals:

Condé Nast: Allure, Architectural Digest, Bon Appétit, Brides, Condé Nast Traveler, Details, Elegant Bride, GQ, Glamour, Golf Digest, Golf World, Lucky, Modern Bride, The New Yorker, Self, Teen Vogue, Vanity Fair, W and Wired

Hearst: Cosmopolitan, Country Living, Esquire, Food Network Magazine, Good Housekeeping, House Beautiful, Harper's Bazaar, Marie Claire, O (The Oprah Magazine), Popular Mechanic, Redbook, Seventeen, SmartMoney, Town & Country and Veranda

Meredith: *Baby, Better Homes and Gardens, Easy Family Food, Family Circle, Fitness, Ladies' Home Journal, Midwest Living, More, Mujer, Nature's Garden, Padres, Parents, Quilting, ReadyMade, Scrapbooks, Storage, Successful Farming, Traditional Home and Wood *

News Corp.: Alpha, Big League, Daily Telegraph, Donna Hay, Fiji Times, Gold Coast Bulletin, Herald Sun, Inside Out, New York Post, News International, News of the World, Newsphotos, Newspix, Newstext, NT News, Post-Courier, Sunday Herald Sun, Sunday Mail, Sunday Tasmanian, Sunday Territorian, Sunday Times, The Advertiser, The Australian, The Courier-Mail, The Mercury, The Sun, The Sunday Mail, The Sunday Telegraph, The Sunday Times, The Wall Street Journal, Times Literary Supplement, and Weekly Times

Time, Inc.: All You, Coastal Living, Cooking Light, Entertainment Weekly, Essence, Fortune, Fortune Small Business, Golf Magazine, Grupo Editorial Expansión (includes 15 publications in Mexico), *Health, In Style, IPC Media (includes 80 publications in the United Kingdom) Life, My Home Ideas, Money, My Recipes, People, People Style Watch, People en Espanol, Real Simple, This Old House, Southern Accents, Southern Living, Sports Illustrated, Sports Illustrated Kids, Sunset, Time, *and Time for Kids

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Photo: Flickr/stevegarfield