Intelligent Content, Algorithm as Editor, and Poetry in Decline

After college, I was intent on becoming a full-time poet.  In that pursuit, I read for small cash poems at the American Legion, the VFW, Future Farmers of America, and Daughters of the American Revolution.  I usually selected anti-war poetry and for that reason I rarely got a return curtain.  I had a brief run of success with religious poetry during Holy Week until an Episcopal Church in Bethlehem, PA, objected to my “On the Medical Aspects of the Crucifixion,” which I considered balanced and in good taste.  Soon after I joined Rodale, I read a poem about male executives cheating on their wives while on business trips.  After a time, I found it easier selling advertising.

Poetry is like a skin rash that returns when the seasons change.  After months of chewing on big data and tracking delicious publishing workflows , I decided to take a course, from a psychological perspective, on Czech/German poet Rainier Maria Rilke, author of Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, works that still have something to say about soul one hundred years after publication.

I read a few years ago that Steve Jobs was an inveterate reader of William Blake, the visionary 18^th century English poet.  Many of Blake’s contemporaries considered him mad and that’s probably why he is still interesting and T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound barely survive as academic footnotes.  Blake spoke of “Jesus the Imagination” and the importance of seeing the world through a Third Eye.  Maybe this is where the iPhone was hatched.

Colleagues I haven’t spoken to in decades sent me without apparent glee a recent WSJ piece by Joseph Epstein announcing yet again the end of poetry.  I can barely read my own tea leaves, though I suspect Epstein is right that academics had a lot to do with this decline.  T.S. Eliot trumpeted an aesthetic he referred to as the “objective correlative,” suggesting that every image in a poem has a recognizable referent in the physical world.  And the soul went out the window.  A school delightfully called New Criticism, centered in Sewanee, TN,, grew up in the 1920s around this notion and generations of tight, tidy, analyzable academic-friendly poems were written by poets, for poets and the New York Times Book Review.  I rode the train for many years before getting off at a station called Rilke.

It’s not particularly surprising that university English departments would adopt analytic tools consistent with the time as a way to show prospective students that this discipline had as much science as the psychology and sociology departments.  To aid in this effort, lots of academic journals sprang up in the post-WWII years and fed this hunger and provided university administrators with leverage.  You would either publish or perished.  I published a lot—and left.

I studied linguistic and generative grammar in college and understood early on that “language” was “chunky” and in a way self-generating.  I taught this in a Hollidaysburg, PA, English class and was reprimanded by my supervising teacher for coloring outside the lines.  But this is a long way from machine language reading me and updating content based on my quirks and browsing habits.  This is the premise of Roger Wood and Evelyn Robbrecht, of the Art+Data Institute, in a recent fascinating piece about Intelligent Content at PaidContent.   They write that “books and magazines of the future will act as sort of human computers translating your reading desires into pure machine language that tells the publisher how to present the material for faster and more pleasurable absorption.”

The authors observe that we are seeing the beginning of this development with Flipboard, where consumers can now create, curate and share their personalized magazines with perhaps a revenue-share component down-the-road.  They point out that Wordpress and Tumblr appear to be the closest thing to offering an always-on and continually updated reader experience through analytics.  This brave, not-so-new world “will be filled with mashups, video, audio, real-time updates, new navigation interfaces and even content that interacts with the reader’s environment,” such as Augmented Reality.

Freud declared one hundred years ago that we had to depend on a strong Superego—our civilization and culture--to hold back the dark forces of the unconscious.  Freud was buttoned-up, but did have a bit of the novelist in him and liked to draw large and startling figures.  With much less at stake, I have been listening for at least fifteen years to publishers, including yours truly, who trumpeted with a certain logic that the editor was the last defense against the wild forces of the web and social media that spits out unruly content from a stream-of-consciousness spigot invented by an increasingly mad James Joyce.

Hyperbole aside, this is a defensible position and a vital business posture where “branded content” is a powerful and necessary selling proposition, especially for magazines.  But what if our authors, our seers, are right in their view that the algorithm will replace the editor and curator: “Quick and automatic branding and positioning of the book or magazine on a glowing electric slab will become more important than the most  sage human editor.”

Content farms such as Demand Media, lambasted by publishers and downgraded by Google, might be only the first iteration of using data to develop article ideas.  Wood and Robbrecht go further and suggest big data from reading and search behavior will help predict what articles will likely rate high in terms of reader engagement.  Publishers also will be able to choose subject matter with an eye to ROI.  If true, this would be profoundly disruptive and interesting: software as the secret sauce.  And as the authors indicate, we have only to look at Quartz, Gravity, Contextly, and Sailthru to find evidence of companies that are developing tools to customize, personalize and update content on a device level.

A few years ago, I invited Demand Media into MPA to speak to editors and publishers about their use of search data to decide and shape articles for their various web sites.  The NY editors at this forum were understandably neither happy nor impressed with what they saw.  Demand Media was and is still, to some degree, a race to the bottom from any editorial perspective.  But that was yesterday.  What we are seeing today are analytics that can shape content to a user’s need and subtle inclinations.  This is neither far-fetched nor bottom-fishing.  On the contrary, it is consistent with everything publishers say about the importance of user engagement in terms of the lifetime value of the customer and the immediate P/L.  Intelligent Content can have a positive impact on the bottom line.

These days, we hear a lot about Responsive Design that enables web content to be distributed via templates to the various devices.  This is an important development, but has raised key business and advertising issues that need to be resolved.

It will likely be some time before we see the Algorithm atop the editorial masthead and Intelligent Content the rage.  But the authors present ideas for a content future that already exists in germ.  Writers and editors are becoming more sensitive to content use by marking up content with metadata at birth so it—and they-- will have more value downstream.  They will also have to become more sensitive to analytics and the role of algorithms in reading, serving, shaping and updating content based on what consumers want in real time.  This is why we call it rich media, the new augmented editorial reality.

Health and Fitness Magazines and the Coming Digital Disruption

The news that Maxim magazine and associated web site are for sale is not particularly surprising.  On paper, the magazine looks rather formidable.   Alliance for Audited Media puts its total paid circulation for 2012 at 2, 543, 563, which earns the title the #18 position on the list of the top 25 print magazines in paid circulation.   Riding a favorable demographic tide, AARP’s Magazine is on the top of the chart with its Bulletin right behind.

Lists and round numbers can be very deceiving because they don’t tell us much about the actual health of the magazine.  Reader’s Digest, which has undergone a series of restructurings in recent years and just declared bankruptcy, is on the list.  So is the American Legion magazine.  I still get the title even though I cancelled my subscription soon after my military adventures.  I guess veterans never really die.

Maxim, expected to be slightly profitable in 2013, resides in a publishing cul-de-sac shared by many of its brethren: offering discount circulation to drive print advertising sales.  I understand that some fifty years ago magazine publishers began to push circulation levels to questionable levels to compete with the growing threat from the nascent television franchise.  And they have regretted that decision ever since.  Nonetheless, many still play in that sandbox.  Maxim sells twenty print issues for $24.00 ($1.20 an issue) and ten issues for $14.97 ($1.50 an issue).  For a high-touch, glossy issue that’s a steal and likely does not cover the full cost of paper, production, and postage, areas that take the biggest piece out of a publisher’s revenue pie.  I will add that Maxim appears from its website to have a very muscular digital strategy, available on iOS and Android platforms as well as on Zinio.  The company is selling subscriptions for $14.99 and some back issues for $5.99 an issue.  This is very aggressive digital pricing for Maxim or any company but likely not enough to offset declining print advertising.  Magazine publishers continue to trade analog dollars for digital dimes.  

I understand Maxim sells very well at military establishments.  Having been at sea for as long as six or nine months without touching land (or anything else), I can understand this hockey-stick graphic on the magazine’s circulation chart.   Maxim “is your source for hot girls” and it will continue to stand up and salute this anthem.  Nothing is left to the imagination and no event unworthy of being appropriated.  The website informs us that there is a “strip bracket” for those aficionados of March Madness.  For the more reserved set, there is a discrete search for “hometown hotties.”

Maxim was launched in the UK twenty years ago by Felix Dennis, already very wealthy from his computer and related titles.  I was in the UK at that time as part of the team launching Rodale’s Men’s Health, which was just beginning to find its legs in the US.  The first issue of Men’s Health did very well, selling more than 100,000 copies on the newsstand.  But I kept looking over my shoulder at Maxim.  Felix Dennis was not your typical publisher.  He was brash, outspoken, unpredictable, and a genuine truth-teller in the business.  On a regular basis, Dennis excoriated American publishers for being fat, slow, with overpaid staff and puffed-up editors.  Felix wasn’t invited to many publishing events because of his sharp tongue, but proved his point with a very successful Maxim in the states and more recently The Week.  Blender and Stuff were subsequently shuttered.   He sold Maxim for $250 million, apparently knowing when to get out.  Perhaps in response to all the pulp he used up, Dennis has already planted 600,000 trees in his native England.

Time always moves on, but with social media it has simply moved a little faster.  Though Maxim’s cheekiness is unique, much of its content can be found on the Internet and social media platforms in some form.   My background is editorial and I always suspected that Men’s Health, in the brash Cosmopolitan way, would eventually win out and it did, with a current total paid circulation of 1.5 million and 40 international editions.  It sits astride of the men’s magazine mountaintop.

I started my publishing career as an associate editor for Prevention magazine.  The formula was very simple.  Rodale subscribed to all available medical journals, including The Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine and many others.  We simply translated the medical findings into everyday language.  No one had done this better than Rodale.  However, now everyone does it.   Medical doctors regularly report medical journal findings to their television audiences, as casually as if it’s a traffic report.  It’s no accident that pharmaceutical advertising is usually one of the top categories for media.

The conventional wisdom is that special-interest areas (and the high-design, high-touch versions) will be the last to be disrupted by technology and social media.  I’ve long suspected that health and fitness editorial would have this protection.  After all, WebMD didn’t seem to have much effect on magazines like Men’s Health and Men’s Fitness or Prevention.   And the aging demographics and the needs of this sector for lots of health information should work to the advantage of print.

I recall asking Mike Lafavore, the founding editor of Men’s Health, how he accounted for the success of that title.  He said, in effect, that the secret source was in the tone of the magazine.  Since men are usually uncomfortable talking about health under any circumstances, he had to entice them in with guy humor, understatement, bravado and yes, lots of sex.  And it has worked amazingly well.

One reason  Men’s Fitness, published by Weider (a subsidiary of AMI), has lagged far behind Men’s Health in terms of advertising, circulation, and market position is that the title, in my opinion, has not fully understood the psychology of the male nor found the right tone or editorial sensibility.  In some respects, the language and graphics of the magazine is too muscular and perhaps too full of itself.

AMI Chairman David Pecker recently announced that he hired David Zinczenko, longtime Rodale wonder-boy for Rodale’s Men’s Health and some blockbuster books, as a consultant to work his magic on Men’s Fitness, Shape, and Natural Health.  If anyone, Zinczenko is the man to do it.  I worked for Pecker at Hachette and have learned not to underestimate him.  Though I worked at Rodale early on, I have no inside knowledge about whether the recent shedding of so many key staff might leave the company vulnerable.  But I do know that it is hard to dislodge a brand, especially one with the wind at its back.

But perhaps I’m looking for disruption in all the wrong places.   For the last year, I’ve been nosing around the digital health space, keeping an eye on digital startups, and whether the considerable noise I’m hearing is a blip or a sign of genuine disruption.  While with Qualcomm, I learned what the company was doing with Qualcomm Life, part of Qualcomm Ventures, which is devoted to the next wave of wireless health innovations, including body worn or implantable biosensor for chronic disease care, medication compliance, and fitness and wellness need; low cost ECGs that work with smartphone; and mobile technology that permits access to live patient data.  Qualcomm is a huge footprint in this space because of its business and strategic relationship with both device manufacturers and carriers.   And they seem to have gobbled up some very promising companies.  But they have company.

We know media has been disrupted.  Given the work of Khan Academy and the institutionalizing of online, accredited courses at many tier one universities, we can assume education is not far behind.  Now the multi-billion dollar health and fitness industry seems ripe for disruption.  If you have any doubts about that please read the February 2013  blockbuster article in Time magazine—the most read in its history, “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us.”

A very good source of information about startups, health incubators, Venture Capital funds, and the like is Rock Health.  The organization is a first-seed accelerator exclusively for startups.  It provides capital, office space, mentoring, and operational support from entrepreneurs.  Rock Health is looking for product-centric ideas to solve real problems in health whether through mobile or web apps, hardware or sensor components.  I’m hoping to induce some health magazines to join this scene, using their rich audience data and other interfaces with customers to develop more personalized editorial coverage.

The range of offerings coming through Rock Health and elsewhere is quite staggering, having been informed by mobile technology, crowd-sourcing, reward systems, and the full weight of mobile analytics.  Achievement Mint is an intelligent incentive network that rewards consumers who make good health choices.   BitGym’s technology uses an iPad to turn any cardio machine into an interactive gaming experience.  Cardiio provides software that turns ordinary cameras into biosensors.  CellScope used optical attachments to turn smartphones into a diagnostic-quality imaging system.  ChickRX is a woman’s personalized health platform.  HealthRally is a crowd-funding platform for personal health motivation.  (Many thanks to Rock Health for this information that I have summarized).

In 2012, 134 digital healthcare companies each raised two million dollars.  Most funding went to companies developing personal health tracking tolls and consumer health engagement.  I don’t know any aspect of healthcare that is not getting some attention, from diabetes, to acne, to the efficacy of supplements.  Most of these efforts are tied to the smartphone.  Moreover, this is not just about content per se but how dense medical information can be turned into a beautiful digital product.  Medical apps have become commonplace in the various stores.  Most popular seem to be those that diagnose ear infections, take a pulse, measure BP, perform cardiograms, and complete blood, urine, and sweat tests.   So whether we like it or not, healthcare is moving out of the clinics into our homes.

To be sure government regulations and privacy issues could stall innovation in the digital healthcare section but there is probably too much money and potential savings at stake for them to be terminal.  For one thing, the ubiquity of the smartphone suggests consumers are becoming much more at ease with using their phones as tools.  Paul Jacobs, Qualcomm CEO, refers to the “born mobile” generation that is growing by the day.  I’m not sure of the source, but I read that a physician claimed to be prescribing a lot more apps than medicine.  This story might be apocryphal, but there’s plenty of evidence showing that the new breed of physicians are very mobile-savvy.

Within a few years, I expect that most information available in health and fitness magazines and attendant web sites will be available in one form or other in the app stores or in web apps.  By definition, the information will be more personalized and interactive.  It will be updated.  Without question, graphics will dominate.  Some offerings will provide response in real time through a video chat.  Maybe you will be able to decide who among the beautiful people will take your blood pressure.

Some consumers will still want a branded, filtered experience that comes in one package.  But maybe I will want my own personal health and fitness magazine, based on my interests, Twitter feeds, health profile and concerns, and family needs.  These could be in the form of apps or curated, personalized content that is delivered right to my smartphone and tablet or on my device “at birth.”   This kind of market segmentation has already begun.  And maybe Verizon or ATT will get involved and make this content part of my data feed and deliver it at off-peak times to save me money.   Perhaps I will choose to take advertising along with my medicine, this defraying the cost.  I might accept native or sponsored content if it useful and actionable.  I probably won’t spend much time on deciding what content represents Church and what represents State.  That seems so nineteenth century.   My fantasy is to become the editor of my life.  After all, I will have as much information at my hands as the editors in New York or Emmaus, Pennsylvania.  I will get it faster, in a personalized, curated form at the time of my choosing.

What I am describing might well be a video game.  My interest is much more modest: I am sketching a business plan.  

Rolling Stone Magazine on the Gun Industry’s Deadly Addiction

I’m studying the psychology of the gun from an archetypal perspective.  That is, I’m looking for the idea or ideas behind the American fascination with guns.  Does the fascination come from a perverted frontier myth or an absolutist view of the Second Amendment?  Does it represent an offshoot of the post-Cold War American military expansion, a muscular expression of the “Stand My Ground” laws, or is it a reason for the growing number of so-called Patriot groups?  What about the post-9/11 militarization of US police forces, with their SWAT teams and tanks?  No one should be particularly surprised that we are currently discussing whether the US government can legally use drone strikes against American citizens on American soil.  We might just as well be talking about video games.

The above list of developments or aberrations—depending on your view of guns—can also be seen as narratives or psychologically-rich story lines that might explain our fascination with guns.  What we are seeing now between and among the National Rifle Association, political leaders of every stripe and a range of third-party stake-holders are really public narratives fighting for supremacy.  If the US didn’t have so much psychological gun baggage, the story-line after the murders of 26 children and teachers in Newtown, as well as in other recent tragedies, would be short and sweet:  federal legislation to enforce universal background checks and limit automatic weapons and the size of magazines would become law.  That’s exactly what happened in the UK in 1996 when sixteen children and one adult were murdered in a Dunblane, Scotland, elementary school.   Under strong public pressure, the UK government quickly passed a comprehensive gun control law.  We saw similar actions in Australia.  In the US, after a two-week post-Newtown quiet period, we get inflammatory rhetoric from the gun lobby preaching Armageddon, with federal agents disguised as storm troopers populating this phony dead-end fiction.  I know of no country in the world where this widely reported, intemperate bombast would not be universally shunned.  Instead, it occupies an honored place in the news cycle. 

So the gun has a hold on us psychologically, as well as culturally and historically.  And the gun lobby has been very successful in appropriating variations of the American frontier myth with images of the lone rifleman as the last defense against the marauders who will invade our homes, especially after natural disasters.  

“The Gun Industry’s Deadly Addiction,” published in the March 14, 2013, issue of Rolling Stone magazine described just how far the business has moved away from our lone frontier rifleman.  According to writer Tim Dickinson, “The once-dependable market for traditional hunting guns has fallen off a cliff.”  Dickinson notes that “As recently as 2008, shotguns, rifles and other traditional hunting weapons made up half of all new civilian gun sales in America,” a billion dollar business.  “Today, hunting guns account for less than a quarter of the market, and the hunting industry is forecasting a 24% drop in revenue by 2025.”

According to Dickinson, one reason for this is that “Gunmakers are on the wrong side of the same demographic curves that haunt the modern Republican Party.  Its customer base is too old, too white, too male and too Southern.  According to Gallop, 61% of white males in the South own guns today. Nationwide, just 18% of Latinos do.” 

Dickinson reports that the gunmakers’ response to declining sales and a dying demographic is to militarize the marketplace by flooding it with battle-ready guns.  And the strategy seems to be working.  “Handgun sales have jumped 70 percent since 2008, racking up an estimated $1.5 billion in sales in 2012.   Revenue from assault rifles has doubled to $489 million.  

According to the author, gun proponents joked that in 2009 Obama’s election was a stimulus plan for the gun industry.  Fear of a black president drove sales.  Fear of a clampdown after the Newtown massacre drove sales.  But overall gun ownership in America is declining.  Fewer than 20% of Americans born after 1980 have a gun in the home.  The gun industry faces the same issues as big tobacco: find replacements.   

Dickinson writes that the firearms industry is planning to break into unconventional demographics and hook the kids, seduce the ladies, turn shooting ranges into live-action video games, arm those preparing for a civil war, and supply cartels and criminals.  He describes the archetypal gun ad for women: “The police are nowhere to be found; it’s up to a woman alone to ward of the sexually threatening ‘predators’ of the city.”

The Rolling Stone piece is a sober account of how the gun industry plans to further militarize America.  It is clear that the myth of the lone rifleman, virtuous and restrained, has given way to a deadly cartoon, dressed in bullet-proof garb and packing an AK-47, wandering the byways of America.  The gun lobby doesn’t have to understand psychology to realize that their marketing plans exploit the shadow side of America.  Thus the fear of a black president, sexual predators, looters, absent police, and a breakdown in civil order.   YouTube is full of this madness with dead-enders engaged in battle-readiness training, anxious for Armageddon that is just around the corner.

The late James Hillman, an archetypal psychologist, in his A Terrible Love of War, has staked out the psychological ground of our gun worship.  “The fond belief (verging on paranoia) that is solely responsible for one’s own salvation and that preservation is the first law of nature (Protestant Darwinism) in a mobile, anomic, class-ridden society may provide grounds for American volatility and insecurity, but not enough ground to account for the American idealization of the gun.  There must be a myth at work.  It is as if the gods have combined to manufacturer the gun, are in the guns, as if the guns have become gods themselves.”

The ground of our discussions about guns in America, largely based on fictions and invented history, might be helped by having an archetypal psychologist and a Rolling Stone journalist at the table.  Hillman writes about what some historians considered the “invented history” of Lexington Green in 1775, spark for the gun lobby and July 4^th, during which only seven Minutemen fired their muskets and only one Red Coat was hit.  For the first two hundred years of our history, the gun was rarely fired.  It was not the Revolutionary War that put the gun in the hands of the people, but the Civil War and millions of armed combatants.

But this observation might not please the National Rifle Association, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and all those who make money on Fourth of July parades.  What if our heralded and highly profitable gun culture was really born on the bloody fields of our Civil War?

That is why gun control is so hard.

Time Inc. and the Disruption of Archetypal Brands

I’ve almost finished a novel about the media industry and the rise and fall of an aging publishing executive who sees the Internet in particular and digital in general as a many-headed hydra that has to be struck down on every occasion.   My White Knight carries a real sword, taken from a German officer in World War II in hand-to-hand combat by his late father, and for a while was a hit on the media circuit because his keynote usually consisted of taking a whack at a rather impressive hydra built for the occasion.  My hero, always true to his own mythology, fills his head with pyrric victories and other wooly notions.   We will forgive him if he thinks that a mobile strategy means moving around a lot and margin is what resides on the edge of a page.  I’m holding out hope that this righteous but incompetent executive might still decide to fall on his luscious sword.

The real sword he takes up is in defense of the brand, because he knows, like many of his fictional friends, that once the brand is diluted, drifting in and out of social media like a lost child, appearing on undifferentiated publishing platforms, its imprimatur, authority and commercial value is reduced.   So our Mr. White might go down in a blaze of glory, a leap from the Eiffel Tower, or in an act of self-immolation during Fashion Week, his inevitable home.   But our man, a raging Lothario with a deep Mother Complex, will die with print magazines in his hands and a song in his heart.

Perhaps the pressure brands face today from the many-headed digital hydra invites a discussion of whether magazines, in this age of digital disruption, social media and the atomization of content, have the same endurance, staying power, and connection to the individual or psyche as they had a generation ago.  After all, magazines are ideas.  They are brands.  They are archetypes.  Certainly the many titles devoted to self-help, self-improvement and DIY in the broadest sense, are based on a kind of psychological positivism.  George Green, the former President of International at Hearst International, said that the most important American export of his generation was the “can-do” attitude embodied in US magazines.  Green is spot on.  I have launched magazines and digital businesses in twenty countries and found that the optimism, audacity, and sense of empowerment found in US titles are considered real draws.

Do we overstate the value of magazine brands?  A magazine can be looked at as an archetype, that is, a big and recognizable idea that informs our modern narrative and instructs our behavior, but digital, demographic, and psychographic realities will eventually have their say and their way.   After all, movies and video games aside, the Wise Old Man is not what he used to be.  He’s on Medicare, walks with a cane and is pretty much ignored by his children and grandchildren.

Given the somewhat apocalyptic reporting on the likely sale of Time Inc.’s big moneymakers (People, InStyle, Real Simple, etc.) to Meredith, I walked by the Time Warner building at Columbus Circle in Manhattan to make sure the company logo was intact and the sky hadn’t fallen yet.  I’ve been hearing about “disruption” in the magazine business for almost twenty years , but there seems something very different and sobering about this story; something very final.

For Jeff Bercovici at Forbes.com, this potential sale is another item in an already calamitous 2013 calendar: Reader’s Digest has filed for bankruptcy and Rolling Stone barely escaped the same fate.  Earlier, Newsweek ceased print publication.   Playboy went to a private equity firm.  In 2009, Businessweek sold for $6 million and TV Guide for a buck.  For Bercovici, the icons are crumbling.  He has a point.  It is reasonable to conclude that the disruption that comes from technology, social media, and programmatic ad buying can be particularly harmful to magazines that no longer resonate substantially within a culture or psychographic set.  So this is not just about content platforms, devices and delivery.  It is also about whether brands continue to touch the collective psyche during these tumultuous times.  Private equity firms can delay a reckoning, but evidence suggests that the magazine brand lifecycle might be shorter than we think.

The New York Times’ David Carr suggests Time Warner management wanted to cash out on its most profitable magazines while they were still throwing off a lot of money.  He writes: “Disruption in various economic sectors takes place over years as insurgents rise and former titans crumble, but its effects often become clear in a signature moment.  The specter of Time Inc., which lent its name to one of the largest media companies in the world, being pushed out the door like a party guest who overstayed his welcome is a stark reminder of how the game had changed.”

Perhaps the most acerbic and chilling account of this story is by Michael Wolff in the Guardian newspaper (www.guardian.co.uk), who makes clear in the article’s title that “The fall of Time Inc. is more about bad leadership than a dying industry.”  Wolff suggests—and many would agree—that the signature moment for Time Warner was when the chairman Gerard Levine “engineered a deal, possibly the most infamous ever engineered in corporate America, in which AOL bought Time Warner, destroying billions of dollars in value, breaking the spirits of tens of thousands of employees, and ending the growth as well as the dominance of the company.”

Wolff writes that, by 2008, Time Inc. was a lost ship and points a finger at the eight-year reign of CEO Ann Moore.  He observes that during this period vast resources and considerable brain power were devoted to digital adaption.  “I’m not sure there is any company that has spent so much time talking about its digital future to such little effect.  This was farce on quite an amazing scale.”

Exaggeration and animus aside, there are compelling ironies here.  Even if Time Inc. did not have its C-level house in order, I know of no publishing company that has given so much back to the business in terms of developing industry standards, specifications, and best business practices shared broadly with other magazines at home and abroad.  I saw much of this first-hand while at MPA, the magazine association.  For a generation, Time Inc. was the first citizen of magazine publishing and its executives were tireless and unselfish in their contributions to the common good.

Michael Wolff has been called the “bitchiest media big foot” around, and he doesn’t hold back here in an account that sometimes reads like fiction.  But he gets some credit for saying things that have been whispered for too long in the corridors of power.  He might be right that Time Magazine, Sports Illustrated and Fortune,  apparently not included in any prospective deal, will have new life when unencumbered by a large bureaucracy, editorial overhang, and unfocused corporate leadership.  In a new place far from the corner office, these magazines could represent a “fine opportunity.”  These titles represent big ideas, have close ties to our history and culture, and resonate as archetypes.  Perhaps they just need room to breathe.

It is no small irony that Time magazine, during a period that the parent was downsizing staff by 6% and the news about a pending sale was trickling out,  published a 20,000-word cover article entitled “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills are Killing Us” by Steven Brill. It’s an amazing piece and gives lie to the current political discussion about medical care and Medicare.  Everyone should read it.

This represents long-form journalism and a magazine brand at its best. 

Wine Spectator: A Particular Bouquet

I’ll start with a public thank-you to Marvin R. Shanken, Editor and Publisher of Wine Spectator for sending me copies of the January/February and March 2013 issues of this over-sized and luscious magazine.  I knew Mr. Shanken through my work at MPA, the magazine association, but I am nonetheless flattered he would have read my mind and sent me absolutely free-of-charge this gorgeous title, at least until August 31, 2013, because that’s what the mailing label indicates.  But I will play my part and, prompted by an article in the Jan-Feb. issue on the New York Finger Lakes, I promise to drive to the region and fill my SUV with crates of Riesling, Pinot Noir, and Chardonnay, not because I particularly like these wines, but as a reader I feel a certain responsibility to the advertisers who pick up most of the costs of producing such a fine magazine and are likely paying for me to thumb through Wine Spectator between keystrokes.

The mailing label also tells me this welcome and useful gift is courtesy of my business with Wine.com. This is standard magazine circulation practice called “controlled circulation.”  That is, magazines are sent to a “controlled” group of people who have expressed a deep interest in a subject.  For example, I sent scuba diving magazines to registered divers, bicycling magazines to those who cycling more than 5,000 miles a year, and running magazines to those who participate in more than a dozen organized running events annually.  And this is very good business because such readers are often more valuable to a publisher and advertiser than those who purchase a discounted subscription, get it as a gift, or from an online magazine agent.  It is not unusual for publishers to raise a toast to this important readership.  We are money in the bank and when spoken about in business meetings we are saluted when the executives talk about the “lifetime value of the customer.”  That’s us.

In its heft, size and capacity there is something very comforting about Wine Spectator.  Sorry, I am now talking about the business model and not the wine.  I have no specific knowledge of this title’s P/L, but I must make note of its high and consistent pricing strategies across print, digital and back issues.  Other magazine would kill for a metric that says a lot about reader engagement and where she might reside in terms of purchase intent, another phrase beloved by the audience development folk. 

I do recall in those early, heady days of digital disruption that this magazine was not eager to jump feet-first aboard the digital bandwagon and romance every e-reader that came down the pike or lust after a presence on every platform.  Good move.  

Over the years, various media wags have suggested that the print magazine business in time will bifurcate with the high-touch, high-end glossies such as Wine Spectator and Vogue at one end and highly-focused special interest magazines, such as Snail Watching and Attic Vases at the other end.  These categories will survive and prosper.   Those left in the middle, such as a Newsweek will be sold for a buck and go digital only.  The publishing spectrum has become more complicated than that, but Wine Spectator is assured a place at the head-of-the-table.

The magazine is aging well.     

Future-Proofing Content with PRISM Source Vocabulary

By 2005-2006, most publishers knew at least intuitively that they had lost the browser wars.  This lament was nicely framed in 2008 by an NBC television executive during the run-up to the Beijing Olympics, hammering home the obvious.  Publishers were exchanging analog dollars for digital dimes. 

Coincidentally or not, the drum-beat at this time from the magazine executive suites became louder and very public:  they vowed to get more revenue from content on whatever the emerging digital channels might look like.  The introduction of the iPad raised the stakes around this collective vow and publishers responded with alacrity and no little success in adapting to the new tablet and mobile universe.  Magazines scrambled to produce content for the voracious app stores and become players in the emerging and constantly changing “device and content eco-systems.”

Though much credit should go to magazine publishers for their response to this latest digital tsunami, the fact of the matter is that magazine weren’t ready for this onslaught in some very fundamental ways, including organization and workflow.  The tablet gloriously entered a print-centric, serial workflow that simply doesn’t scale.  Using today’s workflows, tools and technologies, producing multiple tablet editions results in escalating staff costs, redundancies, and lost time.  The existing print-based workflow is unsustainable and increasingly unprofitable.  To create highly interactive digital publications for devices, most publishers were forced to compromise on design and user experience using a variety of tablet workflow tools.  These tools tend to produce flat content with active elements stacked on top, with the result more like a print magazine than an interactive media package.  The need for flexible, sustainable, and fungible solutions is not only a good idea; in a publishing environment faced with extraordinary pressures on costs and digital revenues, this need is also a business imperative.  Thank goodness there is a solution.

NextPub, the industry’s technical incubator, was launched in 2010 by IDEAlliance with widespread support.  An immediate goal was to address the above workflow issues to help make multi-channel publishing simple and efficient.  The nextPub Working Group (WG) envisioned ways to monetize content beyond today’s publishing channels by utilizing a “Dynamic Content Architecture” from which additional publishing channels can emerge when new content collections or “chunks” are demanded by consumers, as foreshadowed by Flipboard, Pulse or Zite.  The central idea is to future-proof content no matter what the future brings.

The nextPub Publishing Model is based on digital capture and management of all content and associated rich media.  Source content must be semantically rich enough to enable the publisher to select content and automate layout and delivery to a wide variety of publishing platforms.  To this end, the WG developed the PRISM Source Vocabulary Specification (PSV), designed to support issue-based publications as well as to enable publishers to aggregate content in new digital content channels.  The tagline, The Source is the Solution, gets to the heart of the matter.

According to Dianne Kennedy, VP, Emerging Technologies, IDEAlliance, PSV defines a framework of robust metadata elements that can be used to configure federated source content and rich media repositories.  Simply put, the more structurally rich content is, the more useful it will be and the more adaptive it will become as we continue to re-imagine and re-vision business opportunities presented by a Dynamic Content Architecture.  As Karen McGrane, content evangelist and Managing Director at Bond Art +Science observes, “Publishers don’t get to decide which device their customers use to read their content—readers do.  Getting content out onto all these different new devices and platforms requires a dynamic and flexible content architecture, which PSV provides.”

PSV, based on PRISM, is a way to describe content, via XML, in consistent and predictable ways using a common vocabulary.  This technology facilitates the repurposing and delivery of structured, format-neutral content.  Introduced more than a decade ago, PRISM was instrumental in delivering print-based content to the aggregators.  PSV, offering a more robust metadata set, is designed to deliver rich media to a range of digital platforms, channels and devices.  In short, PSV takes PRISM beyond print.  And here the need is great.

 As noted above, today’s adapted workflows that design for print, then remake for tablets are inefficient, redundant and slow.  An adapted product has limitations.  For example, most tablet versions are two dimensional like print and require huge downloads.  Conversely, a digital first or digital-early workflow first captures text as PSV in a central repository, transforms the content via templates and scripts, links ads and multimedia, and publishes to print, web, ePub3, HTML5, etc.  PSV is really about capturing semantically-rich, platform-agnostic content early and then selecting, transforming, packaging and delivering that content.

A primary attribute of PSV is its flexibility.  NextPub recognizes that each publisher has her own business models and strategies.  PSV is a framework that can be tailored to the needs of individual publishers.  For example, a publisher might need no more than a simple content repository from which content can be assembled into print and into a digital edition on a monthly basis.  Another publisher might want a content repository to assemble print and digital editions.  Also, it might want to assemble year-end, best-of, special editions for print and tablets.  It might also want to track usage history and usage rights for content, plus the relationship to other content.  And so on.  A framework for robust metadata not only allows such flexibility, it will also invite business opportunities.  As Ann Rockley, another content evangelist, notes in this context, “adaptive content lets you automatically provide your content, anytime, anywhere, and on any device.  Adaptive content is limited only by your design decisions, the functionality of the device being used and the intelligence of your content.”

An additional advantage to PSV is that it adds dimension to digital-first content creation by way of its very rich metadata vocabulary.  PSV can provide deep content to enable sophisticated designs and implementations using more descriptive metadata that informs Java Script and CSS.  Design-based publications have to date employed only minimal automation based on the belief that design comes first and you can’t automate design!  PSV rich metadata offer compelling ways to automate layout and design.

Sarah Wachter-Boettcher, a content specialist at Rosenfield Media, reminds us that metadata is not an end in itself.  “It’s about seeing structures through the lens of meaning and storytelling, and building relationships across disciplines so that our databases reflect this richness and complexity.”  Editors have an important role in this narrative of the metadata.

PSV is royalty-free, open source, and facilitates a design-neutral approach to content creation.  PSV can be used as a source for direct transformation to packaging formats, such as ePub 3.0, or to the web, mobile and tablet apps.  And PSV can serve as a core metadata model in a DAM or CMS to manage assets or deliver them to multiple platforms.  And it is important to note that nextPub will serve as an incubator for tools to enhance tomorrow’s productivity and has invited technology companies to participate in the development of such tools.

Bill Kasdorf, Vice President, Apex Content Solutions, captures the spirit and the promise of PSV.  “PRISM Source Vocabulary promises to become the Rosetta Stone of the magazine publishing world.  It will enable all the players in the complex space—publishers, advertisers, editorial and production staff, system developers, and service providers—to speak a common language.  PSV is a fundamental enabling technology for our brave new multichannel, multiplatform world, encompassing print while efficiently extending publishers’ content to the online, tablet, eReader and mobile environments.”

PSV has already been adopted by the Japanese Magazine Publishing Association and supported by a broad community of publishers who seek fuller content monetization.  Full PSV Specifications, a video technical overview, and details about the nextPub Working Group can be found at www.nextpub.org or www.idealliance.org.

The Archetype of the Gun

I don’t want to sound alarmist, but I am surrounded by guns, starting with my URL.  I thought I was clever coming up with www.magtech.org because everyone would know the site referred to magazine technology.  Except for those looking for www.magtech.com or www.magtechammunition.com to make their next assault weapon or ammunition purchase.

A few weeks ago, The Journal News, a local newspaper, posted a map on its web site that showed with digital teardrops the actual locations and addresses of homes of those who had a permit to carry a handgun.  This act was in response to the Newtown, Conn., shooting and, however well-intentioned, had a blowback effect because some permit holders had moved, given up their guns, or died.  And it didn’t include rifles.  So the newspaper squandered an opportunity.  Nonetheless, it had a sobering effect on the community.  Has the guy down the block who might have a gun been acting weird lately?

I’ve lived in the north Bronx and Brooklyn, New York, and assumed that most people had a gun or a knife and acted according.  I’ve had guns pulled on me while on business travel to Mexico and Romania.  But I’ve had good gun instructors from an early age.  As a detective, my father carried a gun and taught his three sons gun safety.   My brother-in-law, a US Army veteran who saw vicious fighting in the Battle of the Bulge and earned a Purple Heart, taught me to shoot skeet along the Ohio River.  I purchased my first gun, a 12-gauge shotgun from Sears, for small game hunting.   While in the Navy, I fired everything I could get my hands on, including deck guns.  My father-in-law taught me how to hunt deer using a 12-gauge shotgun and “pumpkin balls” or lead slugs good within a hundred yards.  I will always remember him for emphasizing the “sport” in sportsman.  In this spirit, I took up hunting with bow and arrow.

I gave up my last gun, used to keep down the groundhog population, when I moved off a farm in Pennsylvania more than a decade ago.  So I’m quite comfortable, digital gun mapping aside, around guns.   But why are we Americans so uncomfortable talking about guns and about placing certain restrictions on assault weapons and size of magazines?  The murders of the children and teachers in Newtown, Conn., have become an all-too-familiar narrative, bookmarked by the media.   Sadness, horror and outrage are followed by political vows that this time things will be different and something will be done.  In the meantime, the NRA vows that nothing will change and waits for the Connecticut effect to “blow over.”  The organization knows that it has time and much of the Congress on its side.     

I was working in England at the time of the Dunblane, Scotland, massacre, in which 16 children and a teacher were murdered by a man carrying four handguns and 743 cartridges.  It was widely reported that the shooter was a pedophile and deeply troubled by being booted out of the Boy Scouts.  The outrage in the UK lasted more than a few news cycles.  The outrage lasted.  Period.  I recall the punk rock band UK Subs, releasing their “Dunblane” single with the lyrics: “After Dunblane, how can you hold a gun and say you’re innocent.”   This guilt-by-association and similar effects worked.  By 1997, the UK had outlawed all handguns, with some exceptions.

Of course, the US is not the UK.  We have a Constitution and the Bill of Rights, including the Second Amendment that gives the people the right to keep and bear arms.  A common sense approach to gun restriction would be to state the obvious.  No right is absolute.  We can’t yell “fire” in a crowded theater.  Why the absolutism when it comes to gun control?  The answer to this question won’t come from the hacks, pundits or the fringe.  The answer must come from psychology and the gods of mythology, all of whom are well-armed.

As a veteran, a media crank, and a student of psychology I keep the book, A Terrible Love of War by psychologist James Hillman close at hand because the author utters the unthinkable and rarely stated thesis: that America and most of the world loves war; that war is constant throughout history and ubiquitous around the globe; and war is considered normal and acceptable.  Hillman reminds us of Martin Luther King Jr.’s words:  “The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today … is my own Nation.”

To make his point, Hillman notes there have been 16,000 wars of consequence during the last 5,000 years, more or less.  The author would ask us to re-read The Iliad and get to know the Greek God of war, Ares, and his more familiar Roman cousin, Mars, and the myths and legends around these gods to better understand that “the spirit of war and the rage of battle are archetypal, forced upon all animal life, all gender and all societies.” War is indeed inhuman, but it is also sublime.  In the film Patton, the general tells a soldier how much he loves war, more than life itself.  The myths tell us that Mars, no matter how much of a bastard he was, was never far from Venus.

Hillman walks among the mythical figures as if they were next-door neighbors.  But his interest is in psychology, not story-telling.  He reminds us, often, that “Myths provide archetypal ways of insighting the human condition; they present psychological truth such as we discover when turning to war with Mars/Ares in the background of our minds.”  Myths “ask the psyche to invent and speculate; to listen and be amused; religion, first of all, calls for belief.”

So what about guns in this psychological tableau?  The author takes us on an excursion to Japan which had gun control from 1543 to 1879.  The Portuguese introduced guns to Japan and that nation, already skilled at metallurgy, quickly became expert gunsmiths, improving the products in fundamental ways.  Then the country turned away from guns until Commodore Perry arrived in 1853.  Hillman suggests a number of reasons for this.  The skill of engagement moved from soldier to manufacturer; the warrior class didn’t want peasants getting the gun; Japan had no external gun enemies.  The gun was an “outside” idea.  For the author, more to the point is that “The cult of the sword was ancestral, symbolic, and religious—and also aesthetic.”  The sword was associated with elegant movement. The gun required award kneeling positions.

Hillman sees aesthetics as one possible solution or way out; the more beauty, the less violence.  He writes that, during the European Age of Enlightenment, there was a dis-taste for bloodshed and a reluctance to kill fellow Europeans.  Serious thinkers, including Thomas Paine, Voltaire, Swift, Samuel Johnson and many more advanced “a kind of guerrilla warfare against the cant and hypocrisy that form the fabric of nationalistic patriotism, sentimental personalism, and light-hearted religiosity so signal to our times.”

He adds that the idea that “culture restrains war is being proven in reverse.  Along with the American state’s promotion of bellicose militarism, it withdraws from the arts.  The impoverishment is furthered by debasing the language, neglecting education beyond occupational training, and narrowing the rich complexity of religious studies to one’s own favorite brand.”

At a recent NRA convention of Wausau, Wisconsin, The Reality News, not specifically tied to the gun lobby, published an article, “What Would Davy Crockett Say?”  The newspaper calls for Secession and a Combo Civil/Re-Revolutionary War and pushed this cant to the extreme.

This kind of rhetoric makes Hillman’s point.  In A Terrible Love of War, he argues that we need new myths and a heightened sense of aesthetics to explain our love of war and guns.  America’s love of guns is certainly tied to the frontier myth and the fantasy we have about taking things into our own hands.  American literature has a long tradition of the male antagonist as outsider, on-the-run, or in combat, anything to avoid “civilization” and the embrace of the feminine.  It is this simple archetype of nostalgia, co-opted by politicians and cause marketers, that asks “What would Davy Crockett Say?,” sounding very much like the Disney version but deadly as gunfire in its primitive, inelegant, and dime novel chant.

Hillman is too complicated and rich for summary.  He’s best read in the original.  He acknowledges that the pen is not mightier than the sword, that the expression is a writer’s delusion.  But he continues, in this book and others, to take us back to the eighteenth century and the Age of Enlightenment “when orthodox faith was giving way to freethinking,” suggesting aesthetic passions restrain war.  He writes that “all the arts and sciences, and the intimacies of talk, letters and diaries, are lived on slowness and its pleasures.”  By this, Hillman means the “slow aesthetics of workshop, studio, husbandry, garden, and laboratory, taming haste but not its passion.  Venus ‘victrix’ still wants to win and conquer the task at hand.  Aesthetic intensity draws Mars onto a parallel path.”

Less than one percent of Americans serve in the military.  A handful in government set military policy and send us to war.  Most of this is done in secret.  Organized religion, especially Christianity, offers no real counter.  Mars is well represented.  We need more of Venus in the dialogue; more of the feminine. Today, the conversation about guns is narrow and metallic, made intentionally circular and hollow by the convening parties.  We need more artists, poets, scientists, philosophers in this circle of fire.  Hillman asks us to imagine a “nation whose first line of defense is each citizen’s aesthetic investment in some cultural form.”  Might war lose some of its magic?  The author suggests that “aesthetic passion provides multiple fields for engagements with the inhuman and sublime certainly less catastrophic than the fields of battle.”

Until we get our heads around the notion that the gun, and the way it is worshiped in America, is an archetype and therefore a god, gun control, however useful, is a legalistic enterprise.  We should be far more interested in what Venus or Aphrodite has to say on this matter than the “king of the wild frontier” musing about the Alamo.