From MIN: 

Editor & Publisher’s Web site EditorandPublisher.com announced to readers on Friday that it would no longer restrict access to its content to paid subscribers. The venerable media-on-media trade brand was sold by Nielsen in January to Duncan McIntosh Company, which inherited the online subscription model. In a statement at the site, publisher Duncan McIntosh said, “Nielsen had been using [paid access] for a number of years, but nothing during the past year has changed our opinion about them.” McIntosh says that he and the staff had never been “big believers in pay walls." "We have removed it to build more traffic and make more of our original content available to our visitors," he says.

The brand, which started in 1901, continues to publish on a monthly basis. Print subscriptions are $65 a year.

 

Interesting article from MediaPost. I think they are right in their prediction of US News' future. Full story with interesting comments here

Killing Your Print Business Starves Your Brand

by Ari Rosenberg, Thursday, November 11, 2010, 12:00 PM

"News you can use" is no more.  In case you haven't heard, U.S. News & World Report, the former weekly magazine that rode this tagline into media departments with flair and confidence after Mort Zuckerman purchased it in 1984, has suspended its magazine business except for a few planned one-offs throughout the year.  The company will rely solely on its Web site to drive revenue moving forward. 

Its press release read like a suicide note. 

Even when pages were not included in a buy, the U.S. News print platform gave the brand a unique and credible point of differentiation when up against Web-only properties.  Now they are going head to head with sites that do online better than they do.  It would be like a diner, located next door to a Five Guys, changing its menu to burgers only.   

The number of U.S. News readers who follow this brand online once they stop getting the magazine, will be vastly smaller than the number the brand will abandon -- so overall audience will take a huge hit.  But the hardest hit will be the brand's perceived value.  It will become less relevant to consumers and less significant in an online ad market great at drowning brand value in exchange for cheaper prices.

Someone once shared with me an interesting and provocative perspective on the print advertising business.  He is the former president of The Onion.  At The Onion, he knew his advertising profits came from his brand's Web site.   He also knew he was losing money publishing a free paper distributed in multiple markets.   So why did he stay in the print business?  Easy. Publishing his brand in print became a marketing expense to help increase the brand's awareness, credibility, and value.  

The print platform of a content brand not only drives incremental traffic and subsequent page views to the brand's Web site (and related digital assets), it helps support higher CPMs online.  Removing this platform, and decreasing the overall number of advertising sales calls made on behalf of the brand, is an irrevocable mistake by U.S. News -- signaling an end, not a new beginning.

There is a restaurant in my neighborhood that I used to order business lunches from three to four times a week.    Once or twice a week, I would also order myself dinner.  Needless to say, I was a very good customer.  Two months ago, the restaurant stopped opening for lunch.

I have not ordered dinner from them since.

Consumer appetites are fickle. Once you stop serving your brand the way they are used to consuming it, they pick something else off the menu. 

U.S. News strategists will find this out as they starve this once-proud brand into obscurity.

Shoot This Magazine! F&S Builds an Anti-iPad Print App

They call themselves “The Gun Nuts,” but two of the most popular bloggers at Field & Stream magazine’s Web site are not crazy when they tell readers to go out and shoot the July issue. In a novel attempt to publicize an upcoming TV series as well as the uniqueness of the print media, the July “Gun Nuts” issues of F&S comes with a printed target and an invitation for readers to send in snapshots of themselves shooting the page. The winning entry will win a gun, naturally. “Magazines are supposed to be dying out, killed by the Internet as delivered on home computers, laptops, phones and iPads,” bloggers Phil Bourjaily and David E Patzal write at the “Gun Nuts” blog. “Maybe someday, but for now we are proud to say we have created an app for a magazine that can’t be replicated on a screen.”

The contest is also promoting an upcoming TV show on the Outdoor Channel starring the two F&S gun editors. The duo will give gun reviews and practical hunting advice. The show premieres on June 30.

 

We are routing for Editor and Publisher. 

From MIN Online:

Editor & Publisher editor Greg Mitchell said on HuffingtonPost.com yesterday that the 125-year-old E&P was about to ship its last issue. “For the record, it is the January 2010 issue, so we made it into our 126th year, at least,” he wrote. Recounting how his staff was informed of the closure earlier this month, Mitchell called the notice from owner Nielsen Co. “inexplicable.”

He said that thousands have written to him and Nielsen protesting the decision to fold the legendary trade pub for journalists and newspapers. The staff decided to stay on through this week to finish the issue and to keep the Web site running, in the hopes of attracting a buyer, investor or some kind of help in keeping the brand alive. Mitchell says “there has been a lot of interest but no firm news to report.” The office is scheduled to close for good on Thursday.

Along with E&P, another Nielsen publication with a long pedigree, Kirkus Reviews, is not going gently into the night. That magazine’s staff has been posting suggestive items on Twitter that hint at a possible rescue of the book review brand. The editors posted a final note on the site entitled “Goodbye for Now.” Kirkus Reviews began in 1933 as a book review service from Virginia Kirkus, who had been the head of the children’s book department at Harper & Bros. It, too, published its last issue recently.

E&P and Kirkus were not part of Nielsen's multi-title sale to e5 Global Media earlier this month. Billboard, Hollywood Reporter and the Adweek/Brandweek/Mediaweek books were among the titles packaged in that deal. Ironically, Nielsen could not find buyers for two of its longest-lived and most-respected trade brands.

Gannett's Wisconsin papers will begin offer free ads for an increase in an advertiser's buy. 

This story from Editor and Publisher: 

"Effective today through mid-October, if a current advertiser increases the media buy by 25%, the paper will double the entire run for free. A similar program exists for new advertisers."

E&P describes this as giving away advertising. My guess is that advertisers would describe it as 50% off.