The music industry clung to its age-old business model and has ridden it down for years now. Distributing music is not going to offer the same margins anymore and survivors are going to have to adapt. This applies to all forms of content. Many magazines are going to have to rethink expense levels and do with less high end office space and smaller staffs. Writers are going to have to produce more content.

I think the unwillingness to face this transition is one reason why publishers may sacrifice strong development of their online businesses to protect the declining but still most significant print side of the business. They don’t realize that they can’t stem this tide. Print will always be a major part of the business but the subscribers they are losing are not coming back, and if they don’t convert them to Internet readers they will lose them completely.

Great post!! This is a hot topic for all these days. Many of my clients grapple with this topic. What I think these posts do though, is tell us time after time that there is a gap between what is expected today and what publishers are providing today. We are in a period of real change. There are no solutions provided just constant criticism. Many of them, as we know, are trying to achieve their online presence with the same staff that pumps out the print edition. Not enough workers to do the work.

But, I will say this…. recently I have been working with a very forward thinking company that records and then sells live music from concerts – which they then make availbale by USB bracelette the NEXT MORNING for a very fair price. These bracelets are 2 way – so they can be SHARED with friends for no cost. The point here is that even though the musicians are agreeing to free shared content and are willing to forego a “sale” they know that the viral activity will inevitably make them money in the future. If they are a fan today they will buy more tomorrow. Interesting concept. Free shared content is here, like it or not – so we better figure out a way fast to make it profitable.

Since you were willing to drive somewhere to read the article, you could have driven to your local library, where it would have been sitting on the shelf, waiting for you. You wouldn’t have had to pay anything to read it, although you could have made a photocopy to take with you if you were in a hurry.

Or, you could have called the library, and they probably would have faxed it to you. I don’t know of any library that would have been able to convert it to 8-track, although I won’t rule that out.

Even better, though, you could have used your library card to log into the library’s databases and find the full text of the article within a matter of minutes without ever leaving your computer.

So while Google may know all, but libraries give you access to it all – free, unrestricted, and with no ads. Google may have told you what you want, but your library could have actually provided all of it for you.

Let your library save the day next time, and save yourself the frustration!

An excerpt:

“I can accept Carr’s premise that the Internet discourages deep reading. After all, it’s a strain to read long documents on most types of screens, and time spent on the Net is undeniably time taken away from other pursuits (though I suspect that TV viewing has suffered more in this respect than book reading). But the idea that deep reading is the only way people form rich mental connections is much harder to swallow, and suggests to me that Carr may be too caught up in the romantic image of the poet or professor lost in his book. I think he misses the many other ways in which these connections arise—some of which, believe it or not, are happening right on the Internet.”

“Dear Atlantic.com visitors,

We regret that as of January 22, 2008, when we eliminated the subscriber-registration requirement from the Web site, we became temporarily unable to register new forum users. In the near future we plan to implement an upgraded forum, open to all. In the meantime…Anyone interested in expressing feedback about the magazine, the Web site, or a specific article, can contact us via our Feedback page. Also please note that several of our blogs—those hosted by Matthew Yglesias, Ross Douthat, Megan McArdle, Marc Ambinder, and Clive Crook—are comment-enabled.

We appreciate your interest in Post & Riposte, and we apologize for the glitch.

Sincerely,
The Editors”

As a Web journalist, I’m all too familiar with glitches like this. But a glitch that’s lasted since January 22? It’s all hilariously symptomatic of the syndrome Scott describes, of publishers either “thumbing their noses at Web readers” or not knowing enough to realize that they are doing so.

You make good points about Google, and about how magazines have operated in the past. And taken together, they help to explain the Atlantic’s behavior. But I don’t think that justifies it.

When asked about the future of print versus online media, Jeff Bezos said that print isn’t going to die any sooner than horses went extinct with the introduction of the automobile. Fact is, we just don’t use horses as the most efficient means of transportation anymore.

Magazines may have been afforded the luxury of time in the past, they may have been oriented toward consumption as a whole in the past, and their revenue models may be based upon that. But the fact is, if magazine publishers don’t reorient themselves to new media, they’ll go out of business because magazines are not the most efficient means to transmit information.

Yes they do many things wrong – in particular not repurposing the online version to make use of the power of linking – but in this case I very much doubt the Atlantic is at all bothered by a flap among people who only read online and provide no revenue stream back into the publication.

The strange thing is that publishers and Editors in Chief usually defend their printed magazine by stating that it adds extra value to have it in your hands, you can take it with you, you can fold it, and so on. So they recognize that the Web is something different and in their eyes can never replicate a printed magazine. And that’s so true (for the time being). So why not put the current issue online immediately for all the good reasons mentioned in your post?

My conclusion is that publishers and Editors-in-Chief still haven’t accepted the Web for what it can be to the magazine: an extra channel to not only reach your reader but to reach new readers, non-readers and to interact with all of them in a more direct way than by through the Letters to the Editor.

A lot of work still to do!

One thing I think would help magazine publishers would be to rethink their processes. Specifically, writers ought to be creating their content first online, then for the magazine, and their publisher ought to invest in a content management system that facilitates that ‘reverse-publishing’ model (reverse, hopefully, becoming a quick anachronism industry wide).

Anyone have experience at a magazine doing that?

Google and our access to information probably does make us smarter, but it also makes the environment more complex than those cognitive gains can incorporate. So in relative terms we are individually more stupid than we were. The solution is to be much more cautious about the quality of our own knowledge.

The credit crunch is the most recent empirical manifestation of this phenomenon.

Tim

I had planned to do exactly that — relax and wait a few days, as I stated in the post.

But then people who received the print issue started writing about it ONLINE. And then Google notified me that the content WAS in fact posted online.

So the real issue here is the nature of the web is making it difficult to maintain the traditional system of subscribers get an advance look. As soon as SOMEONE has the content, it’s out there, and word will spread — especially if it’s great content, like The Atlantic’s, and people are going to come looking for it.

Doing so WHILE the magazine is available on newsstands is a matter that each publisher is wrestling with — since online advertising revenues for magazine websites are usually much lower than print-ad revenues, and different magazines have different track-records at converting new website visitors to becoming paid subscribers or newsstand buyers. So publishers are trying to ensure they’re not jeopardizing their primary revenue streams (ad sales and magazine sales, both of which are almost entirely relevant to printed magazines, not websites).

But before the magazine goes on-sale? Oh relax and wait a few days.

Perhaps The Atlantic wanted to ensure that it all worked correctly before they posted the link to all the free content? Of course it’s possible to quickly repurpose printed content for the web, but sometimes there are glitches and maybe the magazine has a proofreader who checks that everything migrated over correctly before they tell the world it’s there for the reading.

Your blog posting, for instance, was hardly error-free*, and the Atlantic just might have higher standards than you do.

* 2 that I noticed in a quick skim-through:
“I immediately when to”
and
“to see if they had the June issue … Sadly, on the rack I found the June issue, just like on the website.”

So, your argument is that either Google can give away the content, or the magazine publisher can give away the content.

But I would argue that a day or two’s delay won’t make a huge difference, whereas if I discovered some online content that intrigued me enough to run out and try and buy the magazine, and then I found out that the “current” issue was actually not yet on-sale, it was actually a “future” issue that I had read online, I’d be shooting my business in the foot. I would hardly be returning to the magazine store to buy that magazine after the publisher had mistreated me (and other paying readers) in that way.

The Atlantic is creating real value for its subscribers, but the problem that it’s also detracting value from other readers who don’t subscribe. If all the subscribers kept quiet about their privileged access, it might work, but that’s not the way things work anymore.

Here’s the other problem — I tried to pay money for the content but couldn’t. Matt Asay tried to give economic value to The Atlantic by linking to the article and driving traffic but couldn’t.

The tough equation is figuring out how many people subscribe in part before of the advance access vs. how many people get frustrated because they can’t access.

But while I like the publication and many of its writers, it doesn’t seem to be set up to engage in discussions like this one or any other.

If anything, I felt Carr’s piece came up short, and not just in the arguments you made. For a think-piece in a think-piece magazine, it was remarkably brief and derivative; it worked up to Carr’s worries about how our brains might be changing because of the Web and left us there, hanging, to flip to the next page and see the big mug of Donald Rumsfeld.

Print publishers really have to get things in perspective, before they completely wither on the vine. They MUST embrace online and offline, and take the opportunity to build a strong online community around a trusted publication – that is the only way they can flourish.

So many media owners seem to be in denial about how people are choosing to consume media – and as Charles Darwin proved some time ago, it’s a very simple choice – you evolve to accommodate change – or you die.

@Deb, Sounds like quite a few of us are reading articles through ‘backdoor’ ways. I must admit, it feels pretty good to find ways to read through in advance, but I still agree that it isn’t the way forward and it doesn’t make sense that we’re forced to take that type of action.

I believe print subscribers got it on Saturday — that’s probably where the CNET post came from, including a scan of the cover.

See my update above — you can give it to subscribers in advance, but those subscribers aren’t necessarily going to wait to start discussing it online.

I was thinking the exact same thing today. Strange…

I usually read magazines online (except for Harper’s and a few others I’m forced read in the library or flip through in airport newsstands).

I thought it was strange that the latest issue hadn’t been posted yet, so thanks for the trick to get to the new issues, though.