Tag Archives: digital publishing

E-mag gives golfers personalised issue after every round

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A golf magazine in the US has started producing personalised digital magazines for subscribers based on their most recent round of golf.

Golf Digest partnered with the popular Golf Logix app, which helps users navigate courses, and tracks and analyses their game performance, to create Golf Digest Live, a personalised e-magazine tailored to the player’s most recent strengths and weaknesses on the course.

Golf Digest senior editor Matt Ginella, said Golf Logix was the perfect partner given it is the most-downloaded golf app and boasts 1.75 million users. “Golf Logix was always hoping to be with the golfer off the course, and we were trying to figure out a way to be with the golfer on the course,” Ginella said.

Users of the app are being asked if they want to invest in the Golf Digital Live offer, which, after a 30-day free trial, costs $19.99 annually, giving subscribers access to a personalised issue after each round they play. “We’re essentially playing to a packed stadium—we’re not starting at zero like most apps have to,” Ginella added.

And the according to AdWeek, Ginella sees the magazine becoming even more personalised as golf tracking improves. “Right now, the only speed bump to crazy success that I see is data entry—we need users to give us their results,” he said. “I’m excited about integrating technology that lets you track a ball or track when you use a club. … If we can use all of those ancillary products, that’s where the app gets really slick.”

The personalised magazine can be read while the subscriber is on the green or after the game’s completion. It offers tips, tricks and articles from the Golf Digest archive, based on the player’s performance, turning what was a mass, monthly publication into a personalised, constantly updating resource.

Golf Logix is a free app that works in a similar manner to Nike+ tacking players using the phone’s GPS and the course details of more than 30,000 courses in the US.

Twitter founders introduce new ‘networked publishing’ tool, Medium

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‘Obvious’, the company headed by Twitter co-founders Biz Stone and Ev Williams, have introduced a new collaborative publishing tool called Medium.

The release follows the pair’s continued success in providing the world with major publishing platforms, beginning with the Blogger service and, more notably, Twitter. Medium aims to offer a collaborative resource among media networks and maintain the standard of content production.

Co-founder Williams writes, “Lots of services have successfully lowered the bar for sharing information, but there’s been less progress toward raising the quality of what’s produced. While it’s great that you can be a one-person media company, it’d be even better if there were more ways you could work with others.”

Medium features different types of posts including text and pictures, which are then grouped into collections. From there, multiple parties can add materials to these groups, as part of a ‘networked publishing’ operation.

The category groupings are organised with highest-rating posts at the top and the rest appearing below. As of today, people can access Medium and offer commentary such as ‘This is good,’ ‘This is helpful’ and ‘Nice work!’, all of  which contribute to the site’s scoring system. Currently, only a limited number of users are able to publish new content on the site.

Stone emphasises that while Medium’s primary objective is to facilitate a global networked publishing system, the site is still in production.

“Much of our vision for Medium is just that – vision,” Stone writes. “Our ideas are much farther along than our product. Medium is only a sliver of what it could be.

If Obvious’ product history is anything to go by, Medium is set to create a significant impact in the social network and online publishing industries.

 

Story originally published on Marketing‘s sister site Macworld.

 

Thriving in the age of digital publishing

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This week myself and our social media specialist, Zoe Wyatt, had the pleasure of being a guest speaker at an event called Thriving in the Age of Digital Publishing, a ‘tech clinic’ on innovation in Queensland publishing. The event was run by the Business Innovation Services unit of the Department of Science, Information Technology, Innovation and the Arts in partnership with the Australian Institute of Commercialisation and was targeted at a wide range of publishers from across the state including those with single titles, multiple titles, newspapers and magazines.

The event was much needed. In short, out of all the industries on LinkedIn, newspapers and traditional media forms are experiencing the biggest decline. In stark contrast, digital publishing is experiencing the biggest increase.

Having come from a media background (my first journalism gig was on the sports desk of the main daily newspaper of my home town of Wellington at the tender age of 16, I started my own secondary school sports newspaper at 17 and worked in media roles in newspapers, magazines and online in New Zealand and the UK through my 20s) I certainly knew where the 30 to 40 publishers in the room were ‘coming from’; and with my experience in the online world (and innate opinion) I was happy to give them my two cents worth.

It was an onerous task to take the stage immediately after Spiros Kotsialos, digital delivery general manager for News Corp, but I spoke from the heart, as I always do, and my slot was on digital strategies and potential business models.

So what did I tell them?

The fact is there have been numerous casualties within this industry over a period of time, but at an increasing rate more recently. To name but a few in Queensland alone, in March this year we lost The Weekender and all Journals on the Sunshine Coast, in April the Queensland Business Review, Queensland 400 and Book of Lists and the Gold Coast Mail and Robina Mail have also all gone by the way side.

As I am telling lots of businesses at the moment, certainly not just publishing, it’s high time to get your head out of the sand and continue to be busy being busy. If you do, you risk not having a business to be busy in any longer.

The question in this case, as it is with many businesses across all industries, is actually not ‘How do we become more digital?’ it is in fact ‘How do we completely review and potentially revise our business model to become more profitable and sustainable?’

Four possible business models

As far as I can see there are four potential business models when it comes to publishing:

1. Replicate the publication experience online

Many regional publications have gone this way in a token gesture to get with the digital age using technologies such as Issue, Yudu and similar which basically take their printed product, and turn it into a PDF online, with the ability to flip pages and zoom in on articles. Not particularly time consuming, which is good. Not particularly expensive, which is good. In my mind, not particularly effective, which is bad.

2. Go purely online

There are several examples of publications who were once offline such as Anthill magazine who are now entirely online. Others are starting off life as a purely online product with the thought of potentially getting enough interest and advertising dollars to produce hard copies (eg. AusMumpreneur), while others have no intention at all of taking on expensive print runs and distribution runs – the bane of most publishers lives (eg. Adore Home).

3. Put up a pay wall

In your online travels you may have stumbled onto one of these – either a taste test of an article, and then an instruction to buy, or an entirely ‘buy it or leave it’ approach. The likes of the Wall Street Journal and the LA Times have all gone this way. I think it’s important to note that these are ‘uber-publications’ with seriously established brands and followings.

Whilst it’s a lovely idea that you could be making a buck for every download of every article, miraculously turning you into a money magnate, my gut feeling is the reality will be a lot harsher. While the argument exists that people will pay for information they really want, I’d counter-argue that it would have to be very well researched and exclusive content to incite a desire so strong to pay for it, to overpower the alternative of seeking the information elsewhere online, and for free.

4. Freemium

Of all the models listed above, if I had to pick one to put my money on, I’d probably go with this one. This is where some information is made available for free, with a stepped approach to pay for more exclusive content, an approach News Ltd has currently gone with. There are many examples of other industries, particularly in the software space using this business model with a good level of success. Just think of all the cloud-based solutions which offer the ability to try it for free for 30 days, pay a limited amount for a limited service, and then grow into higher plans as you better understand the offering and are coaxed into paying larger amounts for it.

Only time will tell which business model is indeed the winner, but in the mean time, the great thing about being a part of the event is that I witnessed more than a few ‘light bulb’ moments at the event, and can’t wait to see some of the dramatic, though positive, changes some of those present in the room will make.

It was heartening to see a wide range of great service providers in the room including Oomph (a smart digital publishing/tablet platform), webqem (who specialise in the Adobe offerings), pixelnatives (who have great app solutions) and City Desktop training who train people in the use of a wide range of software.

If you’re in the publishing game, I encourage you to go check them out, or suggest those you like in comments.

 

Future bright for Aussie newspaper apps

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One in five app users, or 4% of the Australian population, have downloaded a newspaper or magazine app to their mobile device according to data released by Roy Morgan Research.

The findings from the research agency’s ‘Single Source Data’ show that out of recently used apps (accessed within the past four weeks), Fairfax mastheads the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age have the largest audience, with 121,000 total and 89,000 frequent users respectively.

The next most popular is The Australian, which just edged out the New York Times for third place, with an audience of 54,000. The Economist ranked as the fifth most used in the past four weeks with 40,000 users.

Australian titles that round out the top three are currently free to access, while the New York Times requires a subscription and The Economist operates on a ‘freemium’ model (free access to all but premium content).

The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age apps were released in April last year with the promise of being free until December (after that they will cost $8.99 a month) and The Australian was also released on a sponsored basis to allow readers to trial the apps for a period before the pay wall goes up.  Fairfax’s apps are available on both mobile phone and iPad, while The Australian is only on iPad.

Head of innovation at personal media specialists Tigerspike, Oliver Palmer, says news organisations are recognising the need to develop apps in order to deliver their content where the audience is.

“When you start to talk about apps, you’re opening up a much broader range of competitors for Australian publications,” Palmer says.

“The New York Times and The Economist have been successful in enticing Australians to pay for their apps due to the strength of their reputation and the quality of the journalism.”

Palmer says the Herald’s and The Age’s apps have been successful because they’re complementary to the newspaper and offer a much richer experience, as well as the fact they’ve been advertised extensively in traditional media.

He is optimistic of the future for paid news or magazine apps: “Apps are a logical way to pay for content through mobile or tablet applications which makes it an easy way for people to understand monetising it.”

Industry director of media research at Roy Morgan Research, George Pesutto, also thinks the future for news apps is bright with access to news via mobile device already a popular function and the number of apps set to increase.

“As smartphone and tablet penetration in Australia continues to increase, we would expect to see a corresponding growth in the number of users of newspaper and magazine apps,” Pesutto says.

“Since most newspaper apps are still free it would be too early to determine how successful newspaper apps will be once they all allocate a charge for their download.

“However, given the modest take up already of some paid for newspaper and magazine apps we would expect some interest in Australian based newspaper apps at a cost.”

Users of the top apps, the research found, are more likely to also be heavy hardcopy newspaper and magazine readers and heavy internet users.

The Australian’s app was sponsored by Telstra and launched free for three months, but pay walls are yet to go up.