Media Moguls Go Cross Platform

Publishers update their image — and just in time, too.

Once facing extinction, the magazine and newspaper industry may have skirted oblivion. Conde Nast, Hearst, Meredith, News Corp., and Time Inc. announced an initiative that some have dubbed “Hulu for magazines.” The five media giants (CondeTime, for brevity) intend to create a single platform that will allow consumers to buy their magazines and read them on various devices, including smartphones, ereaders, and the like.  Other publishers can join in too, the big five hastened to say.

So will it be a saving throw? Probably. Media isn’t going to go away, despite the Chicken Littles.  If it wasn’t these five — and really, what other five would it be? — it would have been a slightly different configuration of publishers. But CondeTime, take heed: It’s not enough to be the first or the biggest. Just ask MySpace, which is owned by News Corp. It has lost significant ground to rival Facebook. There’s likely still plenty of room on the market for lesser known magazines and rival platforms. For example, McSweeney’s has an iPhone app. (But then again, that’s not so surprising, when one considers the McSweeney’s/Apple customer demographic.)

What’s interesting to me is that this announcement comes on the heels of the unraveling of AOL Time Warner and the pending acquisition of NBC by Comcast. In the first instance, the AOL-Time Warner break-up could also be a harbinger of what is in store for an alliance between media giants. Big + Big is not always equal to success.  On the other hand, at least CondeTime are all in the same line of work. While AOL and Time Warner were both big, and one had the platform and the other one had the content, well — remember in Apollo 13 when they had to figure out a way to make the two kinds of CO2 filter attachments work when one was round and the other one was square? Yeah, like that, and that kludge only had to last for a few days. Forget politics — media makes strange bedfellows. Considering recent history, CondeTime actually does have synergy going for it.

So the biggest question is whether this initiative can “git r done,” as they say down here. With luck the companies involved will take advantage of the knowledge of previous tech/media mergers.  Working in their favor is that young people are amenable to reading on tiny screens, just as they have become accustomed to watching movies on the same itty-bitty devices. That’s a huge market out there. If CondeTime can divorce its content from its old-fashioned content delivery system, it could attract a resurgence of subscribers. I think that’s the mostly likely predictor of its success.

I just hope they’ll continue to mail out dead-tree versions, for the old fogies like me.

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Photo by Lewis Hine, taken on November 13, 1910, part of the US. National Archives.  Used under a Creative Commons license.