Printcasting: Turning Blogs into Magazines

Even I, stalwart defender of the printed periodical, was given pause by a recent article in The New York Times about Printcasting, a web site that lets people create print magazines from their blogs.

Supported by the Knight Foundation, the site is a free service for using a blog as a content feed for the online magazine creation system. You can also include blog items from other Printcaster users, and advertising is shared across the network. You can alert subscribers when a new issue is available and they can download it and print it out themselves. (A better description of the services is available here.)

It's an interesting concept. Yes, most people with blogs don't want a print edition. But let's face it: Lots of people create blogs because they can't afford to do a print publication; this service lets them have both options, so I think there will definitely be a customer base for Printcasting, even if the customers are just printing out copies and leaving them at coffee shops.

Though the designs of the publications are limited, it's still another interesting idea for merging the worlds of online and print. As I've noted here before about the print-on-demand magazine publisher MagCloud, by taking the distribution challenge out of the equation (and costs) of the prospective small publisher, the digital revolution could actually spawn a renaissance in magazines, and not be its death. MagCloud is different in that it is a printer service, where the publishers upload (at no cost) their magazine files to MagCloud, which uses its network of high-quality HP printers to produce the magazines on demand and mail them to the buyers.

Printcasting goes one step backward in terms of design quality but one step forward toward my prediction of direct-to-buyer printing, by which I mean the publisher creates the magazine, sends it in digital form to the customer, who prints it out on his/her increasingly professional home or office printer.

This revolution is starting to become fun!

Can This Marriage Be Saved? Crack User Burns Husband's Playboys

A woman who claims she needed more money from her husband set his collection of Playboy magazines on fire, then called 911 to report the blaze. At first she denied setting the fire, according to reports, but fire officials immediately ruled it arson, and a lot of evidence pointed to her. Her crack cocaine paraphernalia in the bedroom didn't help her case, surprisingly.

This probably puts an end to all the claims by drug users that it helps them be more creative and think more clearly. Consider this: If she needed more money, why didn't she haul his magazines to a used bookstore and sell 'em?

Rex Hammock Gives the Good News

Blogger Rex Hammock gives a preview of his column in Publishing Executive magazine, in which he explains the strengths of print. He offers a good nine-point list of reasons magazine people and online people do not need to be at each other's throats.

Worth reading.

Is Maggwire the Google News for Magazines?

No, to answer the question in the title of this post. But Maggwire's similar, a web site offering links to online free articles from magazine web sites. They are also categorized by a wide range of subject matter sections (Food & Wine, Tech, Sports, etc.).

I naturally checked the Comics and Sci Fi category, which was completely comprised of articles from the British SF magazine Sci Fi Now. To be more accurate, they mostly looked like links to the short daily updates and tweets put out by the magazine's staff, not to complete articles from the print edition (though this was admittedly my first time visiting the site, so one day's exposure shouldn't be taken to be representative). Though Sci Fi Now made up all of the links, there was a list of links to publishers off to the right on the page, and that included a whopping three: Sci Fi Now, SFX (another British SF magazine), and Wizard Universe. So far, at least, no Starlog, Fangoria, The Comics Journal, Cinefantastique, etc.

Though the site lacks comprehensiveness right now, it probably bears watching. For an interview with the site's founders, see Mr. Magazine.

Terry Pratchett and Assisted Suicide

In the we-don't-want-to-think-about-this-but-adults-have-to department, Terry Pratchett has added his voice to the debate in the United Kingdom over assisted suicide.

In a lengthy article in the UK's Daily Mail tabloid, Sir Pratchett ("Sir Terry"? I'm not British, so I'm not up on proper silly titling protocol) praised those who have made the trip to Switzerland to be assisted in their suicides, and he said when his time comes -- he was diagnosed in 2007 with Alzheimer's Disease -- he hopes it will be in the garden with a glass of brandy.

Now, the British press isn't something to crow about on the best of days, but did he really need to choose the Daily Mail to make this statement?

Anyway, it's a brave and sensible statement from a fantastic writer.

Obama's Birth Certificate, Even if the Lunatics Ignore It

Courtesy of the LA Times, here's a link to President Obama's birth certificate. Just figured as many bloggers as possible should post this, so the wingnuts have fewer and fewer excuses to say they've never seen proof.

The so-called "birthers" movement is so crazed and ridiculous, what does this say about GOP congressional members who can't bring themselves to denounce the movement? They're all such products of the power-by-any-means school of Republican tricks that none of them have the guts to simply challenge the wingnuts in their town hall meetings and tell them that they're lunatics, they're flat our wrong, and they should return to reality and stop wasting our time. In those words -- not nicely, not respecting their "intelligence"; be brave and let 'em have it.

After all, any GOP congressperson who doesn't realize that every time a "birther" erupts on the public stage the Democrats cement thousands more votes -- well, that GOPer is too ignorant to survive long.

More Ridley, More Alien

Starlog.com passes along word that Ridley Scott, the director of the staggeringly good science fiction/horror movie Alien, is going to direct a prequel to that movie.

With all due respect to James Cameron, who really established the series' popularity with his Aliens sequel, the Scott original remains one of the few movies to successfully get across real alien-ness. So I've got high expectations for his prequel.

Larry Flynt on Obama

Hustler publisher Larry Flynt writes a short item on today's Daily Beast urging Obama to toughen up and, er, "bitch-slap" the Republicans to "put them in their place."

When I interned one summer in the vice president's office back in 1990 (oh, leave me alone), one of my more-interesting regular tasks was to compile a collection of articles from newspapers and magazines for the vice president to read. In one of those compilations, I included an article Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote for the New York Review of Books, in which he called for the end of the national security state in the wake of the Cold War's demise.

You can assume, even without reading the two pieces, that Moynihan's was the better written piece of prose.

The VP didn't take Moynihan's advice then, and I doubt, even if some intern puts Flynt's article in Obama's daily news briefer, that the president will take Flynt's advice today.

Magazines on Screen

Let's see, just as an exercise: What television programs have been set in or around magazines?

Suddenly Susan (San Francisco-based magazine The Gate)

Ugly Betty (New York-based magazine Mode)

Just Shoot Me (Blush)

That's not a very long list. I must be missing a bunch of them. What are they?

Playing Taps for Music Magazines

Slate.com blogs about the difficulties that music magazines are having surviving (or not), and the author -- a veteran of defunct music rag Blender -- offers his three reasons for their demise:

• Too few superstars, and all the magazines cover the same ones.
• Music magazines have lost their access to the top stars and previews of music, so there's less reason for fans to read them.
• Social networking has stolen the audiences.

I personally think his first and third reasons are minor and uninteresting. After all, music magazines that want to be mass market best sellers have to prostitute themselves to the flavor of the month to make sure they eet their rate base; but what makes a music magazine -- or any other genre-specific magazine, such as science fiction films or politics -- a must-buy for readers is when it helps find the up-and-coming or overlooked artist/film/book/thinker and puts that person on the cover. So stop whining.

But the second reason probably indicates more of what's wrong with the music magazines and how they've stopped knowing how to serve their audiences. They are not the only publishers who have lost their niche exclusivity; back in the 1970s and early 1980s, science fiction films and television programs were almost completely the purview of SF magazines, which could get all kinds of access to filmmakers and authors that fans could not find elsewhere. But as SF became more of a mainstream success and as traditional media chased pop culture to lure audiences, even mainstream publications were putting out special Star Trek issues and featuring Battlestar Galactica on their covers. That's great news for the fan; but it obviously created a big challenge to the niche publications that were selling their access and now had to start selling their unique outlook and any value-added content related to the media.

The same, I think, is true of music magazines. Rolling Stone has always mixed politics in heavy doses, as did Spin from its early years. But politics and artist interviews and concert photos and all the rest aren't enough to keep feeding big audiences.

Music magazines, in my humble opinion, are niche magazines and should be operated like such. The MBAs running them don't want to hear that their natural market probably limits them to 100,000 or 200,000 circulation ceilings, but, as I keep saying on this blog, that's a great opportunity for smaller, entrepreneurial publishers and investors to come in and play where the big guys no longer can.