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,”

Answer, educate, inspire: how readers searches work

With magazine engagement with their audiences increasingly dependent on canny use of the web, it may pay off to give some attention to research about how readers search for what they want. A proprietary study conducted by About.com (part of the New York Times) in collaboration with Latitude, looked at how users exhibit three distinct search behaviours.Though the research is pitched to

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

Is the wired generation actually a re-wired generation?

A study commissioned by Time Inc.and previewed Monday at a New York conference appears to show that millenials, the people who grew up after the explosion of digital media, have become wired differently because of this changed environment. According to a story in MediaDailyNews, young people had biometric sensors attached that tracked their heart rates, breathing, sweating and even how and what

A true watershed moment -- only 20 years ago Saturday, the first web site was launched

Sir Tim Berners-Lee
Since the web and magazine publishing have become inextricably intertwined (and will be more so in future) it seems appropriate to note that this coming Saturday, August 6, marks the 20th anniversary of the launch of the very first website.It was created by (now Sir) Tim Berners-Lee, who was the inventor of the World Wide Web, a browser-editor so dubbed  in March 1990. He

Rogers Media to launch 100,000 circ biweekly Sportsnet magazine in the fall

Rogers Media will be launching a national, b-weekly sports magazine called Sportsnet, keying off its prominent radio and televison broadcasting brand.The bi-weekly is expected to start publishing in the fall."Sportsnet magazine will be Canada's leading source for in-depth perspective and inside reports on hockey, baseball, football, soccer and MMA to name just a few," said Ken Whyte, Executive

Cross-country authors' tours may be replaced by online or virtual tours

The new, constrained, realities of book publishing means that the traditional author's tour is an endangered species; proof is provided by the launch of a new program by the Canada Council for the Arts to fund "travel" grants to authors so they can do their publicity tours completely online. According to a story by Quill & Quire magazine, authors must supply tour plans listing sites and blogs

R. R. Donnelly buys JournalismOnline and its Press+ metered paid content model

U.S. printing giant R. R. Donnelly has made a strategic move by buying JournalismOnline's content project and, with it, the Press+ technology that allows publishers to create flexible pay models for digital content, according to a story in minonline. Stephen Brill, who had founded American Lawyer and Court TV and later Brill's Content before founding JournalismOnline, has been a champion of

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

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

New online design, travel and food magazine Dabble launching

On Monday, a new online magazine called Dabble,focussing on interior design, travel and food, is to launch. Editor-in-chief is Kimberley Seldon who is also the design editor for Chatelaine magazine. According to a story in the Calgary Herald, the nature of online publishing means the magazine has plenty of room to cover everything lavishly. Dabble can run 10 full-sized home, interior, food or

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

Rogers magazines to provide content for Canadian women's portal partnership with NBC's iVillage

Rogers Media has entered into a partnership with New York-based iVillage.com  to launch a Canadian version of the popular website for women. iVillage is published by iVillage Inc., a division of the NBC Universal Women and Lifestyle Entertainment Networks Group) According to a story from Canadian Press, iVillage.ca will be launched this spring and offer content from the U.S. site iVillage.com,

Halilfax-based OptiMYz magazine strikes deal for digital edition

OptiMYz magazine of Halifax, the official magazine of GoodLife Fitness Clubs, has signed a 3-year agreement with Planet-Tek Systems to produce digital edition of the magazine called OptiMYz Interactive. According to a release, the digital version will feature embedded videos, interactive polls and Google Maps store locators. "OptiMYz Interactive will offer a personal and intimate experience that

The web is dead and tablets are the future in the "app Internet", says Forrester Research CEO

Aw, and I was just getting used to it.A story carried by Folio: magazine from a conference in New York reports George F. Colony, the CEO of Forrester Research saying that the web is already eclipsed by the world of "the app Internet". While Colony's response raised a few eyebrows, considering his audience was largely print-based media company executives and their financial sponsors, and

Postmedia gets Jay Rosen and Jeff Jarvis to advise them on "digital first" strategy

Postmedia has recruited online gurus  Jay Rosen and  Jeff Jarvis to their new digital advisory board, according to a post on J-source. Also appointed were Janet Bannister and Judy Simms. The board is headed by Postmedia's executive VP, digital, Malcolm Kirk. Rosen is the author of journalism site PressThink and is a professor at New York University's school of journalism. Bannister is the

Top 50 U.S. magazines most followed on Twitter

Folio: magazine has published a list of the top 50 (U.S.) magazines most followed on Twitter.The following list of most followed magazines was culled at the end of January (follower counts were taken on Jan. 31). For about 50 titles, the follower counts were compared to a similar count conducted in October, to see how their counts grew over the last three months.

iPad magazine success? Make it as little like a magazine as possible

Apparently the way for magazines to be successful in a world ruled by the iPad is to be as little like a magazine as possible, at least according to Eric Schonfeld at TechCrunch.If I were creating an iPad mag it wouldn’t look like a magazine at all. It would look more like a media app, and there wouldn’t be any subscription or even distinct issues. New content would appear every time you opened

Sending readers away from the magazine page; is it the right strategy?

Media blogger BoSacks raises an interesting question concerning the geo-tagging/augmented reality in the latest Esquire magazine which lets readers interract with its cover model Brooklyn Decker at Barnes and Noble stores by using a downloadable program on their GPS-enabled smartphones. And to search for the reworked Esquire logo at locations across the U.S. His question is whether a traditional

When isn't it plagiarism? When it's "promotion" for Men's Health, apparently

Dave Zinczenko, the editor of Men's Health, was accused of plagiarizing his own writers by the blog Gawker for cutting and pasting old Men's Health content, removing the bylines and putting the material in his Yahoo column "Eat This, Not That".  Zincezenko told Gawker We use this material to grow traffic and awareness for the Men's Health and Women's Health brands and a variety of Rodale