OOPs...The Economist (finally) realizes it was giving free digital subscriptions

The Economist magazine has been serving some people a digital subscription to its magazine for free, sometimes for as long as five years. According to a story in paidContent, the magazine will revoke those premium digital subs next week and insist that people pay for them. “There was an error in our database which resulted in a number of people being assigned full subscription rights by mistake,”

Some U.S. publishers leap on Apple's new iOS newsstand feature

"It's kind of like having the paper delivered to your front door. Only better."-- from the Apple website, referring to a feature in its new iOS --  a virtual newsstand which lets readers access magazines and newspapers quickly on iPods and iPads and alerts them automatically when a new issue is available.According to a story on Folio:,  When viewing the Newsstand in iTunes, some featured titles

American digital magazines ranked in terms of trust, interest and believability

Research from Affinity LLC indicates the leaders among American digital magazine brands in terms of various attributes among 170 titles considered by readers. This, according to a story in Folio:
Most Trusted: WebMD the Magazine
Most Entertaining: Maxim
Most Useful: Cooking Light
Most Innovative: Dwell
Most Believable: Guideposts
Most Topical: The Atlantic
Most Authoritative: The Economist

Transcontinental Media signs up to rep About.com and other sites

Transcontinental Media is to be the exclusive Canadian sales arm for About.com and various sister sites including CalorieCount.com and Netplaces.com, all owned by The New York Times Company. The sites will be added to the digital ad inventory that Transcon is able to offer, adding about 5.8 million unique Canadian visitors monthly (based on May 2011 Comscore data). "We are proud to have become

British Vogue study says glossy readers mix print and digital in "heightened engagement"

Research recently released by Condé Nast in Britain says that readers of glossy magazines aimed at women are increasingly mixing their consumption of printed and digital titles, but using each for different purposes. Media Week reports that the study, commissioned by flagship Vogue, found that glossy readers are using both print and online titles distinctly.The study said the number of women

Cardholders will access full digital magazines at their local branch library

If you think the digital tsunami is sweeping over magazine publishers, consider the way the wave is affecting public libraries. A story on Folio: reports on a new partnership between Zinio (which works with Magazines Canada already on delivering digital issues of members magazines) and Recorded Books (a leading publisher of audiobooks) that will grant library visitors access to digital magazines

iPad magazine adoption is a little bit of history repeating itself: CJR

The adoption of iPad magazines is following a similar trajectory to that of other major publishing formats going back generations, says a story from the Columbia Journalism Review, cautioning that looking at falling sales figures over a short span doesn't really reflect the longer-term impacts.iPad magazines are not stumbling for the exact same reasons that the first books, print magazines, or “

Learning how to work together in the digital newsroom at Forbes

It may be of great interest to people who are trying to organize the management and generation of digital and print content to take a look at the new Forbes newsroom. Columnist and blogger Lewis Dvorkin outlines in a post the four different "teams": audience development; web producers; channel product managers (who often also create content for the print magazine); and advertising.The data forms

Transcon Media to represent Ziff Davis sites (e.g. PCMag.com) in Canada

Transcontinental Media, has entered  into an exclusive new partnership with Ziff Davis, Inc. to represent the Canadian ad inventory for Ziff Davis' flagship property, PCMag.com, as well as ExtremeTech.com and Geek.com. Transcon will be selling sponsorship and custom ad units targeted by category, brand and audience.
"We are truly pleased to have become partners with Ziff Davis and to have the

Is Kobo e-reader a missed opportunity for magazines?

More than a year after it launched, the Kobo e-reader newsstand still does not carry a single Canadian magazine. While it offers a range of Canadian newspapers, ranging from the Globe and Mail ($15.95 a month or $0.65 an issue) and the Edmonton Journal ($13.99 a month or $0.55 an issue) the only magazines it offers has not changed or grown and all are U.S.-based. For instance, Harvard Business

Preview of Next Issue Media digital newsstand for U.S. titles now online

A consortium of five major U.S. magazine publishers who formed Next Issue Media in 2009 have finally unveiled their "digital newsstand". According to a story in MediaDailyNews, a preview is available exclusively on Samsung's Galaxy Tab 7.0, but will be introduced as a standalone app later this year.Next Issue Media was formed by Conde Nast, Hearst Corp., Meredith, News Corp., and Time Inc. with

Long form comes to digital; Atavist offers pay per view articles up to 30,000 words

A new company called The Atavist is offering long journalistic stories on the Kindle and Nook and in an iPad app. The company doesn't yet offer a subscription model, but has hopes to do so soon, including allowing readers to buy a bundle of articles. According to a story in Folio: the stories are being sold for US$1.99 each on e-readers like the Kindle and $2.99 in the app, which offers

Inflights flying high with iPad versions of seat pocket magazines

That venerable category, the in-flight magazine, is still going strong but many publishers are putting them up on tablets such as the iPad. A story in the blog Jaunted lists some of the airlines that are putting their custom magazines on iTunes-available iPads:United Continental -- Hemispheres
 Lufthansa -- Magazin 
Malaysia Airlines -- Going Places
TAP Portugal  -- Up 
Sky Mall 
 [h/t to Arjun

New ABC circ rules allow magazines to count digital sales even if ads are different

Changes to the rules of the Audit Bureau of Circulations mean that magazines can carry different ads in their digital editions than in print, a development that pleases publishers but annoys media buyers. Publishers will be able to take credit for success in developing new platforms such as iPad editions and ABC will break out print and digital edition circulation data even if different

Diving into digital; Magazines Canada one-day conference in Toronto and Vancouver

It's a timely topic, to be sure: Magazines Canada is offering two helpings of The Business of Digital, a full-day event to address the challenges and provide insights about the world of digital publishing and digital strategies for traditional publishers. It is being held on Tuesday, April 14 in Toronto at the St. Andrew's Club and Conference Centre, 150 King Street West, 27th Floor and Tuesday,

Quote, unquote: Every Conde Nast magazine will have a digital edition by year's end, says Levine

"We like this technology so much that by the end of the year every magazine will have a digital edition....We frankly don't want Apple to have a stranglehold on this business."-- Rick Levine, Condé Nast's director of editorial operations, told the South by Southwest Conference where the company's 20-plus magazines are going. It was reported by The Wrap. To read more about why Levine thinks this

Wall Street Journal tops 200,000 tablet subscriptions for the paper, worth $41.5 million

As but one indicator of the growth of digital uptake by the public, it has been reported by MediaDailyNews that The Wall Street Journal has sold 200,000 digital subscriptions for tablet devices. The subs, 75% of which were sold in the last year, seem to have benefited from the launch of Apple's iPad.WSJ's audience is quite specialized and is in particularly high demand. It is one of the few

iPad magazine apps growing, just not quite so fast

The addition of magazine apps onto the iPad have gone up 10-fold since last April. The pace of growth, however, has slowed between January and February, something that the Association of Magazine Media (MPA), which released the study, attributes to post-holidays lassitude. The data is gathered by iMonitor, a tracking system developed for MPA by McPheters & Company to track the addition of apps

Another senior digital departure at Rogers Media

More changes in the digital wing at Rogers Media: Leslie Sole, the chief content officer who joined the leadership team in December 2010, moving over from Rogers' television division, has left the company. Sole was responsible for the creation and execution of the Rogers Media content strategy, which included the integration of magazine content on other platforms and in other media. The departure

Quote, unquote: Building a subscriber-friendly device-agnostic front end

We're hedging our bets--Apple right now has the largest market share in tablet usage. Six months from now, Android and the whole Google platform may grow or it may not, or Apple and Google may split the market up. What we want to do--and it's been hard, especially with Apple since they haven't been too transparent--is make this a front-end experience for the subscriber that's device-agnostic