Q&A: Rex Hammock, Founder & CEO of Hammock Inc.
There's a lot of talk about the future of magazines, and print media in general, because there's a lot to talk about. When it comes to discussing what the future holds, Rex Hammock is one of the guys you want to speak to.
He's a veteran "magazine guy" who co-founded the Custom Publishing Council, served as a director of the American Business Media trade association and is today the CEO of custom media firm Hammock Inc. His recent guest column in Publishing Executive entitled "9 Things I've Learned About Magazines by Blogging" piqued my interest so I decided to ask Rex about the state of the magazine industry, what the internet means to print publishers today, the pay walls that are coming up and what blogging might look like a decade from now.
The five biggest paid content myths
There's a lot of talk about paid content these days for obvious reasons and there's only going to be more of it now that Rupert Murdoch has announced plans for News Corp. to go all in.
One of the reasons there's so much debate over paid content is that there are a lot of misconceptions and myths about paid content. As someone who has run paid content websites for years, I thought I'd share the five biggest paid content myths I frequently hear mentioned in discussions about paid content.
Daily Mail's new comment moderation will increase engagement
The Daily Mail has decided to stop pre-moderation of comments on its website, a move which should see an explosion in the number of comments left on the site.
Concerns have been raised, such as the possibility that advertisers may object to their ads may appear next to questionable content, but I think it''s a smart move, which should increase engagement on the site and raise the number of page views.
Murdoch CAN charge for content online, but can anyone else?
Commentators have queued up to tell Rupert Murdoch that his plan to charge for online content is wrong. But I think it's obvious that he can charge.
Murdoch's got the will to charge, access to value-add content, and has a lot of experience selling subscription products in the UK. The question is not whether he can charge - it's whether his competitors can match his content and experience.
App review: Independent for iPhone
Hot on the heels of its new mobile website, The Independent has released an iPhone news app this week.
The Independent iPhone app is a departure from some other newspaper apps, as it is designed to allows readers to download all the articles while they have a decent 3G or wi-fi connection, and saves them for reading while offline.
Finding the right subscription model at the NYT
By all appearances, the question isn't whether the New York Times will revisit paid subscriptions. The question is what those subscriptions will look like.
Last week, Gawker published documents purporting to detail two possible online subscription packages the newspaper company is mulling over, New York Times Silver and Gold.
Q&A: JD Lasica, Founder of Socialmedia.biz
JD Lasica is the founder of Socialmedia.biz, a social marketing consultancy, and Socialbrite.org, a learning hub for nonprofits. JD was an editor at a California newspaper before he became involved with digital media in the late 90s. He now speaks regularly about social media and user-generated media.
JD recently participated in the Traveling Geeks roundtables hosted by Econsultancy and I spoke with him about social media, the impact it's having and the fate of mainstream media.
Google tells newspapers how to disappear completely
Newspaper publishers want the best of both worlds. They want the traffic that Google can deliver, but also think that the search engine owes them something. Specifically: “A fair share of the revenues being generated through the commercial exploitation of our content”.
Well, newsflash: Google owes the newspapers nothing. And now it has openly told the newspapers how to block web pages from the search engines by using the robots.txt no-inclusion protocol. If they want to, that is. There’s a barrier for those who want it. Now put up, or shut up.
Of course this isn’t new to anybody, but Google’s stance, as paidContent puts it, “effectively raises a middle finger to the 169 signatories to the Hamburg Declaration on Intellectual Property Rights, including Dow Jones managing editor Robert Thomson and News Corp Europe CEO James Murdoch”.
It’s going to be interesting to see if even one of those 169 signatories, or any other major newspaper, is actually brave, dumb and ballsy enough to take Google up on its offer. What’s the betting? I’ll wager that not one of them will go ahead with this.
Mobile app review: FT on iPhone
It already has an excellent mobile version of its website, but FT.com is looking to improve on this offering with an iPhone app, released today.
The FT Mobile app is free to download and supported by advertising, though it does carry the same restrictions as the main site, allowing users to read 10 articles per month before having to cough up for a subscription.
Aggregation in the UK: Can it work?
Americans and the British are quite similar, but also quite different. Jokes that make Americans laugh may not make a British person laugh; food that a Brit might love could repulse an American; and so on. It seems the way the two nations consume news online is different, too.
Social media: the best and worst of 2009
Email marketing: six steps to improving customer engagement in 2010
Web 2.0
Graham Charlton
Strategy & Planning
