On Sat, 03 Aug 2013 18:50:35 -0400, Joe Gwinn
wrote:

In article , Ed Huntress
wrote:

On Fri, 02 Aug 2013 21:14:58 -0400, Joe Gwinn
wrote:

In article , Ed Huntress
wrote:

On Fri, 02 Aug 2013 19:27:26 -0400, Joe Gwinn
wrote:

In article , Ed Huntress
wrote:

On Fri, 02 Aug 2013 17:16:31 -0400, Joe Gwinn
wrote:

In article , Ed Huntress
wrote:

On Fri, 02 Aug 2013 13:16:23 -0400, Joe Gwinn
wrote:

[snip]

People on dialup will not be happy with this. (No, I'm on cable.)

If they're on dialup, they probably won't be reading our issues.
We're
"direct": we send out 71,000 copies by e-mail.

And we're on the Web with the same material. But it's a byte-heavy
online-reader format, and I think what's left of my hair would fall
out before I paged through an issue with dialup. g

A lot of the trade mags are going this way, and it's a problem. I've
stopped reading a number of old standbys because the interface is just
too awkward.

Yes, they have been awkward. The latest ones are a lot better.

I haven't stumbled on any just yet.

My latest adventure is with PCWorld, a paid-subscription magazine that
just went all-digital using Zinio. It has not been smooth. And I
still cannot print an article. I'm working with Zinio tech support,
but this should not be necessary, and will deflect many potential
readers. Actually, pdf would work far better.


[snip]

The online magazine business is still evolving, and some models have
already been abandoned. And you're right, many of them are little more
than cut-and-paste press releases. That's what's happened to the
greatest of them all, _American Machinist_. When I was there, we had 7
full-time editors, of which 3 or 4 were degreed engineers. Today, it
has one editor, and it's an empty shell.

Magazines are "push" communications. The Web is inherently a "pull"
medium for people who are looking for something. Most of the models
try to emulate the push model. Ours is halfway in between, but I'm
sure it will become more "pull" as it evolves.

The problem with pull is that I have to know what to ask for.

The core advantage of a magazine is the hordes of editors toiling to
find interesting things for me to read, things that I never knew
existed, and pushing them to me.

Yes, that's the "push" model, and that's the traditional idea behind a
"magazine." That's what it's meant since the 19th century. _American
Machinist_, for example -- one of the oldest continuously-published
magaines in North America -- was founded in 1877. It was a "magazine"
of things you didn't know you wanted to know. g

Until it hollowed out ...

Though I must admit that was struggling with the proper handling of the
Editors of the Horde -- should they be described as sweaty,
smoke-stained, ink-stained, or all of the above?

My image is a 1930s big-city newsroom. Quart of whisky in the bottom
drawer, just in case. What brand did the editors of _American
Machinist_ prefer?

g Smoke-stained, but not sweaty.

Saved by HVAC, and the Surgeon General's report was still young.

But, what about the ink - digital was in the future.

We didn't handle ink. Ink was handled by a company that printed AM and
Business Week, and a half-dozen other McGraw-Hill magazines, in New
Hampshire.



They didn't do a lot of drinking,
except at our parties, where yours truly often got smashed on whatever
was at hand. It was a pretty straight-laced bunch. I was the
youngster, and tolerated for such transgressions. But there were no
booze bottles in desks.

However, my bosses and cohorts in the circulation department, before I
became an editor, frequently did the two-Martini lunch. I got them
both at once, served straight up but in a brandy snifter. That would
be 1973 - 1974. Then I closed the door to my office and told my
secretary to take my calls.

Could people hear the snores over the bustle and typewriter clatter,
despite the soundproofing?

I didn't snore in those days. But it was awkward. Unlike my boss, I
didn't have a couch in my office. I think I fell over in my office
chair once.



It was the tail-end of the "Madmen" era. It was a suit, tie, and white
shirt (no button-downs) all day, every day. Editors could get away
with sports jackets and a pastel shirt when we were feeling sporty --
tweeds with leather elbow patches were the editorial uniform for days
when we didn't have visitors. I never owned one of those.

The editorial environment at AM was pretty faced-paced for a monthly,
but that's nothing like a weekly, and not even remotely like a daily.
I've been in plenty of newsrooms when I worked in NYC. Their
environment seems most related to their publishing cycle.

Yes. Organizations are always molded by how they are paid.

g In this case, it's a matter of how many hours they have before
their assignments are due. On a daily, you can really sweat it.



With a paper magazine, it's random-access and thus easy to skim and
find the stuff I care about without having to plow slowly through
everything.

With an online magazine, it's slow and clumsy to achieve reasonable
random-access. It's also harder to read if your eyes are not perfect,
and the reader (a desktop in my case) is clumsy.

Yes, and that's why I was skeptical of online magazines since the
beginning.

But I was a circulation manager before I was a writer and editor, and
I've compared what I know about readership of print magazines with the
statistics I've been catching up on with online magazines. The "time
spent reading" is longer for print magazines. But the raw readership
-- the number who open it up, and the number who respond to ads -- is
slightly higher with direct e-mailed online magazines.

Hmm. Based on personal experience, I'd doubt that emailed magazines
get slightly higher ad responses than print, if only because I rarely
get through most of the email magazines.

As I said, FSMD has unusually high open- and click-through
percentages. I don't know why, specificially.


One possible confounding issue is that when I'm searching for
something, I will usually find a bunch of online articles or ads, and
I'll click through some of them. So these could have never been
emailed, and still I'd find them, once I knew I was interested. Which
brings us back to the need for a usable digital push model.

Or something like we're just beginning with FSMD. Our e-mailed
editions are emulations of print magazines -- straight push. Our
website is a hybrid. It allows category searches and archive
selections. We need much more versatile and specific searches for the
"pull" readers who come to the website looking for something specific.

You can also collect differentiated statistics on the the number of
click-throughs from pushed content versus click-throughs that come in
from random directions, as from search engines.


IMO, the best online trade magazine, in terms of functionality, is
_Modern Machine Shop_. They were pioneers online, and the publishers,
with their own staff, have developed a highly functional website. It
has searchability from several directions.

It's a little different because they also have a print version. But
they use the website to expand what they do in print. It's a fine job.

I'll have to sniff around http://www.mmsonline.com/ for the
experience. And to drool over the toys.

Wave to my buddy Mark Albert. We started in this business at about the
same time and we're roughly the same age. I call him Dorian Gray,
because he stopped aging about 20 years ago.

--
Ed Huntress


Joe Gwinn