Self-Publish Your Own Magazine With MagCloud - ReadWriteWeb. Have you every wanted to run your own magazine, but never had enough money or a large enough audience to make it worthwhile? Well, if there's one thing that the self-publishing industry can cater to, it's the long tail. Now, thanks to a startup called MagCloud, even the smallest of ventures can produce their own, professional, full-color magazine and without the costs normally associated with hiring traditional publishing companies. About MagCloud MagCloud is another project to emerge from HP Labs. Earlier this year, HP Labs launched BookPrep, a print-on-demand service for out-of-print books.
Now, they're delivering MagCloud, a project devoted to providing small independent publishers the ability to publish digitized magazines as well as economically print on demand. Using HP's Indigo technology, the magazines are printed when ordered in full color on 80 lb paper with saddle-stitched covers. How To Use MagCloud Browsing the MagCloud Selections Previewing a MagCloud Magazine. Google I/O 2010 Keynote Day 1, pt. 6. Reinventing BusinessWeek. A few years ago, BusinessWeek’s Steve Baker and I sat over coffee concocting a scheme to create a crowd-sourced, wiki-based, curated effort to get the magazine’s readers to fix General Motors.
Oh, if only we’d done it, BW’s crowd might have saved us taxpayers billions. Well, now, BusinessWeek is for sale and whoever gets it – it is a valuable franchise with a very valuable and wise crowd – will need to reinvent it. I was going to suggest that the magazine do for itself what we were thinking of doing for GM. But Steve beat me to it. Steve also contemplates what he calls the “last 5%” of a magazine’s process that picks every nit and sands and polishes. It’s the magazine way, especially among weeklies in America, and though I saw improvements from it, it also drove me nuts when I worked in it. The assumption behind that last 5% is that there's perfection to be reached: a right way to tell this story. But my problem with the 5% process has to do with insularity. Magazine production and interactivity - what the students did. I’ve just been casting my eye over the Magazine Production work of two groups of second year students on the journalism degree I teach on.
In addition to design and subbing, they were assessed on ‘web strategy’ – in other words, how they approached distribution online. To give this a little context: early in the module ideas for magazines had to be pitched to the student union for financial backing in a Dragons’ Den-style competition (where among other things they had to address web strategy and business model). One idea per class ‘won’, which the whole class then had to work together to produce. The winning ideas were: Nu Life – a magazine aimed at international students; and Skint - a money-saving guide with a particular focus on food. This is what they did… The social network as web hub Both groups created a Ning social network as the hub of their activity. Skint pulled just one RSS feed – from BBC Entertainment – but also had an on-site blog, images, video, forums and groups. Time Inc.’s Ann Moore Makes the Case for Magazines - And is Glad She’s Not in Newspapers | Peter Kafka | MediaMemo | AllThingsD.
Ann Moore, who runs Time Warner’s (TWX) Time Inc. spent last fall overseeing a lengthy series of reorgs and layoffs. But she’s starting off this year on a better note: Yesterday she received a lifetime achievement award from the magazine industry’s trade group. Here’s an excerpt from the acceptance speech she delivered at the Magazine Publishers of America luncheon. I’m reprinting it here (with her staff’s help) because I think it’s a nice summation of why many of us are dismayed to see what’s happening to traditional media. But I also think Moore’s argument–that quality magazines/newspapers/journalism will survive because society needs them to–doesn’t hold up. The more I chew on this stuff, the more I fear that we’re headed for a bifurcated world: People with a lot of resources will get access to high-quality information. Everyone else will get free stuff that has little value.
First, I’m grateful in these crazy times that our readers have not abandoned us. Wiki being used by journalism students.