Posts tagged Publishing

Spongebob Learns a Lesson in Journalism Ethics Well this might be the best episode of Spongebob Squarepants ever. You can watch the whole thing here. If you don’t, here’s the spoiler version: Mr. Krabs starts his own newspaper, The Krabby Kronicle, and makes Spongebob a reporter. But Mr. Krabs wants some embellishment in the stories. He says: SpongeBob, what’s the meaning of this? ‘LOCAL RESIDENT WATCHES POLE’? No one’s going to pay to read this malarky. When you write these stories, you’ve got to use a little imagination, boy. Maybe instead of “Man Watches Pole,” you could say something like, “Man Marries Pole.” Then you could alter the photo a little to fit the headline… After which Spongebob’s readers get angry at his yellow journalism and he ends up teaching his publisher a lesson. Image: Screenshot from the episode. H/T: Romenesko for the find.

Spongebob Learns a Lesson in Journalism Ethics

Well this might be the best episode of Spongebob Squarepants ever. You can watch the whole thing here.

If you don’t, here’s the spoiler version:

Mr. Krabs starts his own newspaper, The Krabby Kronicle, and makes Spongebob a reporter. But Mr. Krabs wants some embellishment in the stories. He says:

SpongeBob, what’s the meaning of this? ‘LOCAL RESIDENT WATCHES POLE’? No one’s going to pay to read this malarky. When you write these stories, you’ve got to use a little imagination, boy. Maybe instead of “Man Watches Pole,” you could say something like, “Man Marries Pole.” Then you could alter the photo a little to fit the headline…

After which Spongebob’s readers get angry at his yellow journalism and he ends up teaching his publisher a lesson.

Image: Screenshot from the episode.

H/T: Romenesko for the find.

Ebooks accounted for 22.55 percent, or nearly a quarter, of U.S. book publishers’ sales in 2012, according to a full-year report released by the Association of American Publishers Thursday. That’s up from 17 percent of sales in 2011 and 3 percent in 2009. Ebook growth continued to plateau, however, suggesting that the industry is maturing.
Ebooks made up 23 percent of US publisher sales in 2012, says the AAP — paidContent (via infoneer-pulse)

Pinterest Design Ethos Echoes With Publishers

joshsternberg:

The visual Web continues to push forward, one publisher site at a time.

Publishers across the digital media landscape are redesigning their sites to mimic the photo-friendly grid layout of social sites like Pinterest. Media companies from The New York Times to CNN to Mashable are falling in love with the less-is-more design approach, both as a way to create a better user experience and a route to integrate ads less awkwardly.

“The holy grail is how advertising feels more integrated to the pieces,” said Dan Gardner, co-founder of design shop Code and Theory. “As a page becomes more visual, it allows advertising to feel more integrated. It’s not to confuse what’s advertising and what’s editorial, but advertising can now be more part of the experience.”

That experience is transforming websites. Instead of putting up blocks of text, publishers are understanding that big, bold, beautiful images attract more attention from visitors. The old-fashioned way of presenting information was to offer an inherent hierarchy: news story headlines get bigger treatment, other articles get smaller text. Visual approaches change that.

Click through to read what designers have to say about the Pinterestification of publisher sites.

Are we witnessing the rise of the artisanal magazine?

thepenguinpress:

Jason Diamond writes in Flavorwire: 

Observe The Travel Almanac selling out, and Kindling Quarterly, described as an “exploration of fatherhood through essays, interviews, editorials, art, and photography,” getting written up by The New York Times as examples of this crop of sleek new magazines aimed at niche readerships. David Michael Perez, one of Kindling Quarterly’s founders, told the Times that he believes his magazine (which retails at $14 an issue) is a good business model that he and his business partner, August Heffner, jumpstarted using personal funds. There’s the Canadian menswear magazine Inventory, which retails for $20 in the States, and Babes Quarterly is billed as “a modernized version of the classic 1950’s and 60’s pocket men’s magazine” that is “designed to a creative, babe loving guy in all of us.” These magazines are also thinking of new ways to promote their product, and also new ways of doing business overall. The Portland magazine Kinfolk explicitly states on its website that it is a “collectable print magazine” aimed at growing a “readership of young artists and food enthusiasts by focusing on simple ways to spend time together.” The Chicagoan, a Jazz Age Windy City magazine that was relaunched in 2012 by Stop Smiling publisher J.C. Gabel, says it has “embraced the vintage newsstand as a metaphor to bolster our message of substance and style” by setting up pop-up newsstands throughout the Chicagoland area meant to function “much like food trucks.” The Toronto fashion journal Worn comes out biannually, with a stated mission “[t]o show a wide range of beauty, one that includes diversity of culture, subculture, gender identification, sexuality, size, race, ability, and age,” as well as “To answer, always and above all, to our readers and not our advertisers.”

FJP: The pop-up newsstand food truck idea is brilliant. Could serve sandwiches and coffee too.

Scientology Everywhere kateoplis: Dear Atlantic, What? Yours, Kate FJP: With the upcoming publication of Pulitzer Prize winner Lawrence Wright’s, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief the church — long known for aggressive pushback against reporters — is starting a PR offensive. The advertorial in the Atlantic about church leader David Miscavige overall awesomeness comes just a few days after the Hollywood Reporter published excerpts from Wright’s book. The first explores how John Travolta became a Scientologist, the church’s strategies to make sure he didn’t stray, and how his original handler Spanky Taylor had her child taken away and ended up in the organization’s disciplinary program, The Rehabilitation Project Force. The second, How David Miscavige and Scientology Seduced Tom Cruise, profiles both Miscavige and Cruise and digs deeper into the upper hierarchies of Scientology. The church’s immediate response to the Hollywood Reporter came from Karin Pouw: “Of the 200 people [Wright] spoke with, only 9 were Scientologists. … Most of the remaining 200 were apostates, many who have shopped similar false claims to the gossip media for years.”

Scientology Everywhere

kateoplis:

Dear Atlantic,

What?

Yours,

Kate

FJP: With the upcoming publication of Pulitzer Prize winner Lawrence Wright’s, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief the church — long known for aggressive pushback against reporters — is starting a PR offensive.

The advertorial in the Atlantic about church leader David Miscavige overall awesomeness comes just a few days after the Hollywood Reporter published excerpts from Wright’s book.

The first explores how John Travolta became a Scientologist, the church’s strategies to make sure he didn’t stray, and how his original handler Spanky Taylor had her child taken away and ended up in the organization’s disciplinary program, The Rehabilitation Project Force.

The second, How David Miscavige and Scientology Seduced Tom Cruise, profiles both Miscavige and Cruise and digs deeper into the upper hierarchies of Scientology.

The church’s immediate response to the Hollywood Reporter came from Karin Pouw: “Of the 200 people [Wright] spoke with, only 9 were Scientologists. … Most of the remaining 200 were apostates, many who have shopped similar false claims to the gossip media for years.”

The Times’ Sports Page is Blank and Filled with Irony In case you haven’t heard, there will be no inductees to the baseball hall of fame this year (the organization wants to distance itself from the steroid era players.) To reflect this, the New York Times’ sports department published a largely empty cover today. But it wasn’t completely empty. From a few feet away, a passerby might notice a single line at the bottom. Sports Art Director Wayne Kamidoi told Poynter what it says: Ultimately, some of the marquee names of The Steroids Era were rendered in agate-size type, a mere footnote in baseball history, at the bottom of the package. FJP: Powerful.

The Times’ Sports Page is Blank and Filled with Irony

In case you haven’t heard, there will be no inductees to the baseball hall of fame this year (the organization wants to distance itself from the steroid era players.) To reflect this, the New York Times’ sports department published a largely empty cover today.

But it wasn’t completely empty. From a few feet away, a passerby might notice a single line at the bottom.

Sports Art Director Wayne Kamidoi told Poynter what it says:

Ultimately, some of the marquee names of The Steroids Era were rendered in agate-size type, a mere footnote in baseball history, at the bottom of the package.

FJP: Powerful.

AP to Publish News on Restaurant Receipts Interesting, no? From now on, whenever you dine at the Old Ebbitt Grill in Washington, D.C., your receipt will contain the news you’ve missed over the course of the meal. From their press release: The printed updates have several advantages in this venue over the smartphone, providing access to the news without people becoming absorbed in their devices at the same time contributing to table conversation and interaction. Image: Press Release.

AP to Publish News on Restaurant Receipts

Interesting, no? From now on, whenever you dine at the Old Ebbitt Grill in Washington, D.C., your receipt will contain the news you’ve missed over the course of the meal.

From their press release:

The printed updates have several advantages in this venue over the smartphone, providing access to the news without people becoming absorbed in their devices at the same time contributing to table conversation and interaction.

Image: Press Release.

Textbooks, 812% More Expensive Than 1978 With a new semester almost upon us, it’s time to figure out why college textbooks are so absurdly expensive.

Textbooks, 812% More Expensive Than 1978

With a new semester almost upon us, it’s time to figure out why college textbooks are so absurdly expensive.

RIP Peter Parker In Amazing Spider-Man #700, Peter Parker dies and his role as Spider-Man is taken over by Doctor Octopus / Otto Octavius. Number 700 will be the last in the “Amazing” series. 2013 will kick off with Otto as the web slinger in “The Superior Spider-Man #1.” Image: Variant Edition, Amazing Spider-Man #700.

RIP Peter Parker

In Amazing Spider-Man #700, Peter Parker dies and his role as Spider-Man is taken over by Doctor Octopus / Otto Octavius.

Number 700 will be the last in the “Amazing” series. 2013 will kick off with Otto as the web slinger in “The Superior Spider-Man #1.”

Image: Variant Edition, Amazing Spider-Man #700.

How to Think Like a Digital Disruptor

New on theFJP.org:

James McQuivey, VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, defines a digital disruptor as someone who knows how to use digital tools to do things better, faster or cheaper than before. Digital, he explains, reduces the barriers to entry in the publishing world, which allows anyone to be an author or publisher, be it a start-up or an adjacent business that never considered publishing before.

Some digital disruptors, however, are more likely to be successful than others.

A blogger with a large following, for example, has a successful digital customer relationship that he remains engaged with, which puts him far ahead of a traditional publisher struggling to build a relationship with its customers. An app developer remains engaged with his product by continuously updating it to ensure his customers remember it’s there. In this video, James walks us through how successful disruptors think: opportunistically.

See also James’ article for the FJP, What Will Rise from Journalism’s Ashes.

For more FJP interviews with media industry experts, visit theFJP.org.

Being in media is terrifying right now. Whereas in the old days, you wrote something and then a fleet of people printed it and handed it to X hundred thousand people so they would read it, now, the fleet is gone. You are alone out there in the ocean and there’s not much that anyone can do for any given story to make sure that people read it. […] We do not control the distribution of our work. Period.

Alexis Madrigal (via theatlantic)

FJP: Others think that change is awesome.

The Atlantic

Two years ago, we set out to create a revolutionary product that people would love. The Daily delivered great original reporting, excellent design, and custom interactivity to users every day. Although we have over 100,000 passionate paying subscribers, unfortunately we have not been able to build a big enough audience fast enough to make our business model work.

Memo to staff from The Daily’s editor in chief Jesse Angelo and publisher Greg Clayman.

The News: The two-year-old iPad only newspaper will shut down after releasing its December 15 issue.

The Issue(s): Basically, being locked into the iPad. Yes, the Daily had a hundred thousand subscribers, and yes, it built out a robust social media presence but going iPad only for the meat of its content was too much too soon. There were just too many people locked out (and locked in) for it to thrive.

Another way to put it is this thought from Trevor Butterworth, a former weekly columnist for The Daily:

So, The Daily meets its doom on December 15. The editorial section, et moi, bit the dust over the summer, so not much of a shock. The single biggest failing? You can’t create an entirely new brand and take it behind a paywall after 4 weeks, while limiting its footprint on the Internet, and then expect people to buy it. Where was the marketing?

Second, it simply added more average-reader content to a market saturated with free average-reader content. It didn’t have the courage to be cool, quirky, nerdy, obsessive or snarky. Its demise is a wake-up call for those who confuse cool technology with being cool - and those who think more of the sameness is going to produce a paying customer base for a mainstream media product.

Branding is not about growing inequality but growing equality. In the old world there were a few big-name hotshot star journalists, and a lot of regular hacks pushing anonymous news. In future more and more journalists will be stars — some big stars shining all over, some smaller but maybe brighter stars twinkling to some important niche audience. And if a journalist has no twinkle whatsoever — then it’s time to find something else to do.

Saska Saarikoski, Brands, Stars and Regular Hacks — a changing relationship between news institutions and journalists (PDF).

Saarikoski, a former culture editor at Finland’s Helsingin Sanomat, conducted surveys and interviews with editors, publishers and reporters about the issues raised by the branding of journalists. The result is this recent report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

In which Neil deGrasse Tyson helps Superman find his way home.