New Print Alliance Getting Ready For War -- A Decade Too Late

According to the New York Observer, Conde Nast, Time Inc., and other magazine publishing powerhouses are discussing coming together, a la  the Super Friends, to monetize their digital content, but even a rock-solid virtual wall won’t help them get money like 1999. In fact, it may further alienate customers –- who may have even more reason to turn to the free resources already available.

The rumoured group, to be launched by Time Inc. Executive Vice President John Squires, will be finding ways to charge what has already been free for more than a decade. Squires gave a solid “no comment” to the newspaper, but in an Observer interview earlier this year he said, “Unlike books and music, I think [for magazines] it involves designing a new product in order for it to be something that consumers really love…. I like our chances to be able to design a product that consumers will want to pay for.”

The problem is that consumers aren’t used to paying for words anymore. As noted by critics, including David Weir in his recent BNET post, even online print advocates don’t expect more than one out of every ten readers to pay –- and it’s unclear how much that paying group will actually shell out.

Note the dilemma here is different from that of Hulu or iTunes. Print is not like an original television or movie program, which must be experienced in its intended form, or audible content, which must be heard and, ideally, taken where we go. As proven time and time again, when it comes to service and informational pieces, nearly anything printed in a magazine can be boiled down to a Yahoo! top ten or cliffnoted in a Wikipedia entry. At this point it takes extraordinary narrative journalism, a la Conde Nast’s The New Yorker, to have the average customer consider paying for content –- and even The Atlantic Monthly and other comparable magazines hedge their bets by making the bigger content free only to print subscribers.

Speaking of, there is a succinct Atlantic Monthly post on the very subject. Seeing how print media covers its own evolution will be as interesting as the evolution itself. It’s still unclear if the old guard will be in the same stranglehold position as the major music companies when some outside entity, like Apple, dictates what will and won’t work in its digital future.

Image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/tracyhunter/ / CC BY 2.0