WWD has broken this story, with few details and even fewer mixed metaphors than me, over here.

UPDATE: WWD now reports that FB is leaving “to focus all [his] energy” on Baron and Baron, his client-work studio. Coming only two weeks after a change in publisher, all is presumably not well at the big I.

The same piece claims that M/M Paris have been tapped up to replace FB at the top – a reversal of what happened at French Vogue in 2003, when FB replaced M/M as creative consultant. Now I’m a big fan of M/M, particularly their work with Bjork and their fashion alphabet, but they do strike me as a rather obvious choice. Expect more monochrome and elaborate typography.

Jeremy feels the same way.

“I guess I started a magazine because I knew almost nothing about print.”

It may not sound like the best time to buy an entire magazine, but that’s just what Lothar Eckstein has done. Twice.

The founder and editor-in-chief of sleek magazine, in November he bought two of his favourite independent magazines, Qvest and Luna, from German company Mediakom, to create a stable of three fashion magazines under the umbrella of B20 Publishing.

He talked exclusively to the Blogsplosion, sharing tales of independence, economies of scale and the future of magazine advertising.

Your background is in advertising – what made you first want to get involved in magazines?

I started in advertising 20 years ago. But in advertising, you are always working on someone else’s baby. In the end, the client builds something, not you. Fifteen years ago, I moved into working in television and then the internet.

I guess I started a magazine because I knew almost nothing about print. I knew all the risks in television and the internet, and didn’t dare [create my own venture]. In print, it was the opposite.

When did you think you could make independent magazines your main business?

When I was working for big German publisher, Axel Springer.

Describe your magazines.

Luna is the only high-end children’s fashion magazine in Germany.

Qvest shows forward-looking fashion in a visually distinctive way, and will include some exciting new features with the launch of issue 37. With a circulation of 80,000, Qvest is by far the biggest serious magazine in its segment, in the German market.

Sleek is unique in exclusively combining art and fashion. Each issue has its own theme.

Why did you decide to acquire Qvest and Luna?

I always felt that it would be worth trying to strengthen independent titles by giving them a chance to profit from economies of scale. Like: Buy paper together. Print together. Distribute together and sell ads in Italy or France together. But remain editorially fiercely independent.

How much did you pay for the titles?

We paid too much, of course! What else can I say as a buyer?

Is B20 owned by you alone? Why the name B20?

I have two partners, Matthias Düwel and Marcus Meyer. The name? We wanted something modest. The brand is just a vehicle for business to business affairs. B20 stands for the 20s in Berlin, a time and place that the three of us are impressed by.

Did you change the editorial teams after taking over?

Yes. Annika von Taube moved up from Managing Editor to Editor in Chief for sleek – she replaces me. Adriano Sack will be in charge of Qvest as of Edition 37 together with Clark Parkin. They will take over from Tamara Rothstein and Ashely Heath, who I want to thank for what they achieved for Qvest over the last two years, very impressive work.

Have you made any changes to the magazines themselves?

There will be some changes linked with the new teams. But it is too early to tell what they will be.

Have you started to gain the economies of scale you had hoped for?

There are amazing savings, more than we expected.

Are you planning to create any new magazines? What kind of magazine would you like to add to these three?

Yes, we are. Or rather: Yes, we were. But given the financial crises, who knows what will happen…

What is the future of magazine advertising?

It helps to have a good online model to go with the print model. Being visually driven and using “haptics” to the max also helps. The most important thing is being small, though. The market will shrink, but it will continue to be big enough for small players to continue for a long time to come, especially in high-end, quality niches.

Shortcovers to bring individual article purchase to the iPhone
Buried in this description of on-screen bookselling. I said that the whole ‘by article’ thing wouldn’t go away, though the iPhone screen isn’t the killer device that will make it a comfortable read

Vogue does torture-porn fashion shoot
Zzzzzzzzz

Polaroid’s old factory bought by Dutch fanboys
New film to be developed; seeks help from photographers, and will probably get it

Big names in British men’s magazines make their own arch fanzine
It’s fun. Some bits of it make me laugh, though others make me feel like I’m missing the in-joke. Which I almost certainly am

Top Gear presenter was fired for doing something funny with dropcaps
I completely missed this before. Full Flickr scans here

Italian doctorate on magazines includes interviews in English
Interviews with mag makers at the end. There’s plenty of pretty to illustrate the Italian text too

Variety likes The September Issue
Though montages grate a little, it seems, as does relentless self-publicity by all concerned

super/collider to screen high-definition moon footage
One of my favourite digital magazines, small as it is, presents its first live event in London

Crisis roundup

Google quits the print ads game
Was never really their forte, even in happier times

Home design magazines feeling the pinch
No surprises in this fairly typical doom-and-gloom story

Why magazines themselves aren’t doomed
Smart answer. Perhaps, perhaps the model is broken, but not the medium

“Bottom line is, we didn’t handle it right. We took bad advice, and followed it.”

A quick summary: in July last year, a website called Mygazines launched. It allowed registered users to upload scans of any magazine, and then share them for free. Faster than you could say “copyright infringement”, the site had more than 130,000 registered users, and everything from The Economist to Time was being scanned and shared on the site.

Opinions about Mygazines ranged from “theft, pure and simple” to “an idea whose time has come”. Various publishers contacted their lawyers to have it shut down, with the backing of the Magazine Publishers of America. Meanwhile, attempts to find who was behind the site met with digital obfuscation – the url was registered to the somewhat dubious name of John Smith in the Caribbean island of Anguilla. As one hosting service shut it down, it moved to another, travelling the virtual server globe, with lawyers in hot pursuit.

At least that’s how the story was told at the time. As speculation gathered, John Smith emailed various media outlets, including this one, defending the site, and denying it was a new Napster by promoting copyright theft through sharing.

Smith’s argument seemed to be based around two basic ideas. First, they weren’t doing anything wrong in allowing sharing:

“If you were to take all of the offices in the world that purchase magazines for the sole purpose of providing entertainment for their clients, is the same as sharing. Furthermore, these offices see different people everyday, so the sharing is constant and consistent and usually includes many back dated issues as well as new. By virtue of the fact that these groups change everyday makes it like a free magazine store.”

Secondly, there was more to Mygazines than met the eye.

“The true future of the industry lies in the final stages of our site concept. We can easily transition to the final revenue model quickly with the co-operation of the publishers. We cannot however reveal the full concept at this time as we are saving that discussion for the publishing industry directly.”
…
“The competitors have missed the boat. Even the sites that think they have come up with the future online version for magazines, they have not! Publisher friendly or not! There is a final stage missing that can’t be seen unless one has the freedom to think outside of the limitations of the industry as is.”

The lawyers soon had their day in court, and a swift settlement was reached in the US, and then upheld in Toronto. Soon after, the Mygazines website closed, citing lack of funds.

And then, earlier this month, it came back. No John Smith, no Caribbean islands, new funding (from “silent investors”) and a team working full time on making Mygazines 2.0 a commercially viable company, working with the magazine industry to produce digital editions of print magazines.

The site is now registered in the name of Yoav Schwartz, a former Microsoft manager originally from Israel, and Mygazines’ head of programming. John Smith, whose real name is Darren Andrew Budd of Ontario, Canada, remains as CEO of the company, and they’ve now hired Pierre Bisaillon – who set up digital magazine company ZMags Inc in North America as a franchise of Danish-based Danish-based Zmags ApS – to be Mygazines’ “VP, Corporate and Business Development”. The company is based in Ontario, quite a distance from their erstwhile Caribbean hideaway.

In a Magtastic Blogsclusive, I spoke to Darren and Yoav on the telephone about file sharing, being the industry’s pariah and those mysterious revenue models.

Who came up with the original idea of Mygazines?

Darren Budd (DB): I came up with the idea about two and a half years ago. I was standing in a magazines store and thought, gee, I want one article from that magazine, two articles from that, and I only have a limited budget – and even if I have an extended budget, I’m going to have too many magazines to carry, I’m not going to get around to them all.

So now you’re buying your biggest payoff. You’re not buying, say, Architectural Digest or a bunch of other things that might have one or two articles in [that you'd like] and are 12 dollars. You’re buying the biggest payoff for the smallest amount of dollar. What you do is buy the same week after week and not expand your reading.

The idea was that you need to have a place that you can choose, page by page, article by article… in Mygazines, that was one of the first things we created.

I was pretty specific with some of the technical things, not that I understand the deep-down technical aspects on how to get it done. All of that was formed with Yoav to bring it to reality.

I feel he’s as much responsible for the progress, and the company being able to be robust and alive now is because of the fact that he saw the vision, and was able to help with that vision. And Hamid [Hamid Abbas from Dubai] was very keen in programming that vision, technically speaking. [Abbas is now a shareholder of Mygazines].

Yoav Schwartz (YS): My role has been in bringing Darren’s vision, and quite a vision it was, to fruition. At face value it looks like another digital newsstand, but what separates our system is that the very basic core of what we were trying to achieve was to base everything not as a whole magazine but as its parts, which are pages. It’s like saying that a CD is just a CD whereas really it’s comprised of a bunch of songs.

DB: There’s a key thing that then changes. If you click on the table of contents in a digital magazine, you can jump straight to that page. So you can charge by article, or you can offer a subscription, some content will be free, some won’t. And then the key is the community around that.

So let’s say you’ve got a community, and you’re going on there because you want to reference a recipe, type up a topic, I want to put 5 pages together and send it to my 5 groups of friends who are working in the same office. It’s not just how do you read, it’s how do you make it better for people.

I’m gong to spend the same budget [on magazines] anyway, so maybe I’ll be a member of three different sites with that budget, but what I am now is part of that community, I’m getting information, I can reference it I can purchase it, use it as a daily tool.

That also gives you advertising possibilities. Is the first page the most expensive? The middle, the end? You can offer advertisers to be where they want to be, on the most popular article or whatever.

You can also offer dynamically generated ads, which can be embedded into the publication. And these ads will bring you closer, because they’re database-driven for each member. You’ll get similar ad rates as you will in a regular magazine, as opposed to the current sidebar ads, whose revenues are not commensurate with print.

Why will digital ad rates change to be more like print?

DB: One thing must change before the other thing changes. So the page manipulation will come together first, to let the ads be specifically focused. On our site we have notifications, and we were the first guys to do that. “If an article is published on health or finance, let us know every five days”. So now you have push advertising. If these are dynamically generated ads, then you’re getting specifically targetted spaces, which is what the whole advertising industry is based upon.

How much of what happened with Mygazines 1.0 did you foresee?

DB: I think that we would say this: we were more technically oriented and creative people. We were a little bit out of our range in dealing with the legal aspect. What we really wanted to do was to reach the industry. We didn’t know what would come in the open upload.

We had some uploads from publishers who wanted their information up, and some turned out not to be [the original publishers]. And instead of going with our instinct, which was to get back to the publishers and say “if this isn’t you, how can we work with you?”, we listened to what was PR-based advice – probably not the best advice – to continue and show the publishers the way.

I think that was arrogant and probably misguided. Well, it was misguided. I take full responsibility for how we approached the industry, because I think they might have been more than amenable to speaking about our new way of looking at it. But once we tried to get through to them [after launch], we were dealing with their lawyers, so it wasn’t even possible to speak to them directly.

Even before we settled, if any individual publisher was saying “please take these off” we were scripting against it, but what they wanted – and rightly so – was “we don’t want to come to you individually when someone uploads something and say ‘take it off’, you should make sure in general it doesn’t happen.”

Bottom line is, we didn’t handle it right. We had a great technical idea, we had a very good site that could be good for the industry, but we didn’t handle it properly, and the way we’re approaching it now, we’ve brought on people who are experts in their field, who know the industry a lot better than we do. And we can stick to what we’re good at, which is vision and technical, and not try to be PR people.

At the end of the day, you can blame anybody you want. We took bad advice and followed it, and I will take responsibility for it.

YS: We are now as legitimate as we can be. We’ve proven ourselves in terms of the technical ability of our software, and very shortly we plan to prove ourselves in terms of reaching those publishers and moving forward with our entire vision.

We’ve basically taken a lot of what we had in terms of technology, which was geared more towards the consumer, and now we’ve put just as much focus on publishers, to provide them with the tools and the metrics, and the control that we now understand they require. So what you might see on Mygazines.com is a full 180 degree turnaround from what we had, now geared towards publishers and providing them with tools, but there’s more than meets the eye, and the two will be merged quite soon.

DB: We’re not blaming the industry. We handled it improperly and that’s the bottom line. We now understand how the industry works, and you can’t paint every magazine with a broad stroke. Every publisher has a different way of making money, so you have to build the site around their ability to do what they need to grow.

Why did you hide behind the name John Smith?

DB: It all came pretty quickly. You’re trying to raise money, you’re trying to design a site, you’re trying… really we were just a bunch of technical guys. With the open upload – honestly I thought people would make their own magazines and upload those.

You have to understand, when this was going on, all the lawyers and lobbyists and anyone involved in the business who might have helped us all opted out because they’re all part of the industry. So the viewpoint that we kept ignoring these things is not looking into the situation, which was us calling everybody, and not having the ability to get advice from any of these people because none of them were willing to work with us.

So it was both inexperience, and inability to get that experience, that led to… just not handling it properly. It’s our fault regardless, because we should have foreseen people uploading, and we should have had a way of getting hold of the industry.

YS: That’s our past. Everybody makes mistakes. We’re trying to do everything we can to move forward and maintain the vision and bring it in a way that publishers will really appreciate and come on board.

DB: And that’s why we all settled fairly quickly – there was no quiet secret, it was between us and them, here’s what you need to do to make us secure, and we were amenable to that. We made a mistake and we needed to deal with it.

Mygazines 1.0 was based around the idea of a single newsstand of titles and articles, and you seem to be suggesting this will return. Why would a magazine want to be on an open newsstand, alongside their rivals, rather than creating their own branded digital space?

YS: Among our main products are our Express, Pro and Enterprise options. The Enterprise is a self-branded newsstand for an individual publisher or group of publishers. Mygazines will still have a global newsstand for publishers who want to be a part of it, but we’ll also offer publishers their own spaces that have nothing whatsoever to do with our newsstand.

DB: If they want to have a separate e-commerce solution via their own newsstand, that’s available. Paying by subscription, by article – it’s all up to them.

YS: That’s part of our new upgraded software. It looks like the reader is the same as it was before, but it’s not – the resolution is much higher, full screen, you can print at high resolution if the publisher allows it, download for offline reading if the publisher allows it, embed rich media, streaming videos, Flash files… there are also other key features, such as clipping, which is perfect for coupon flyers – you could select all your favourite coupons and then print them out as a batch.

So we’ve really taken the other side, saying ‘ok, we know what consumers want and we have that. Now let’s make sure we have everything publishers want.’

DB: We are in discussions with people constantly. It’s not just pie in the sky things. In some cases, some of the things we’ve come up with are specific customisations for clients that we find will be useful for the publishing industry as a whole.

Will I still be able to share articles with people who haven’t paid for them?

YS: That’s a technical decision that we’ll come to when publishers decide how they want to share. Given our system, we’re able to do almost anything. So it really comes down to implementation, not the system.

DB: Let’s talk about the free model – let’s say that dynamically generated ads have now kicked in and the publishers are getting as much or nearly as much for an online ad as in their printed magazine. The answer would be that you can do everything, it doesn’t matter, the concern is to get readers. You only must join the community to read the articles – we have to know who you are so we can make money off the community.

If the model is not free, there are many different ways to do it – and that’s why we’ve tried to provide the infrastructure. A publisher could have two tiered levels – say, $5 for all archived material, and one new subscription of a digital magazine, and I can share with everybody on that tiered price level. There may be another package which is $9.99, and allows me access to all the magazines on a newsstand, and I can share with anybody in that pricing level.

YS: Every newsstand will have its own community, and the marketplace will choose. If most people want a paid-for newsstand, that’s what will happen. If dynamic ads bring enough dollars, maybe you’re charging a dollar a month, and it’s going to be an unlimited reading of everything. The market will end up telling you which of those models it prefers, and it might be different for different magazines or publishers.

———

Mygazines claims to have many clients already signed up, including non-magazine clients. My own doubts are around the sheer complication of so many communities, pricing models and sharing ability. If iTunes has taught us anything, it’s that simplicity and ubiquity will win. I’m also not sure if ad rates for online magazines will match their print equivalents – there are several reasons why that may never happen.

As for the deeper question, ‘Are magazines nothing more than collections of articles?’… I’ll leave that for another day. It’s not going to go away.

The New York Times magazine – on a good week, one of my favourite newspaper supplements – today published a deliberate echo of Rolling Stone‘s American bicentennial issue The Family from 1976, that featured 76 ‘Portraits of Power’ shot by Richard Avedon. (Not entirely coincidentally, Avedon’s photos are currently on display in a gallery in Washington DC.)

Where Avedon mixed politicians with models and counter-cultural icons, The NYT has gone just for members of the new Washington arrivals, under the heading of ‘Obama’s People’. And the images are reproduced in carefully corrected colour rather than black and white exactitude.

They’ve stuck to the formula in most other ways though – 52 simple portraits, short captions stating name and job title only, and they’ve also echoed Elizabeth Paul’s elegant, thin black typography as well.

Kandar is an interesting choice, both a big name and a photographer with his own style: bright fashion lighting, few smiles, often making his subjects seem alone and uncomfortable. They don’t so often engage with the camera as with something off to one side, an affectation that makes both the subject and the viewer feel uncomfortable. When they do look straight at you, it sometimes feels like a reluctant compromise.

He also has the portraitist’s eye for careful detail. So the press secretary is clutching briefing notes, the personal aide all manner of devices, the international lawyer is dressed up and ready to go…

As with the Rolling Stone original, the photos have been chosen as pairs, rather than in order of rank. Sometimes it’s a colour in common, other times it’s a visual contrast. Great photo editing from The NYT‘s Kathy Ryan.

Occasionally, inevitably, adverts intrude – which makes those single photos without a soulmate seem awfully lonely, however much they smile.

My favourite portrait is of this pencil. Sorry Denis McDonough, Senior Foreign Policy Aide, but its missile-like quality and colour, echoing your laser-like gaze, is the star of the photo.

At the back are slightly extended biogs.

Lovely piece of work. The NYT site has its own slideshows if you want to see the images one by one. And as usual, that douche A Photo Editor has the real inside story.

On Thursday evening, The September Issue (whose tagline is the not-inaccurate “Fashion is a religion. This is its Bible.“) premiered in Salt Lake City as part of the Sundance Film Festival. It’s a documentary telling the story of the creation of the September 2007 issue of Vogue – a mammoth 840 page edition (of which 727 were ads).

I’ve only found one review so far, and it seems the film is about the battle between Anna Wintour and creative director Grace Coddington, a battle for humanity’s soul and the right to accessorise properly. All of which suggests bitchy, stress-filled office fun, especially for those either nosy or nostalgic for the days when magazines carried advertising – though it’ll probably be more of a busman’s holiday for many of us. Arthouse distribution seems almost guaranteed, especially if the vultures end up making Wintour angry enough to walk out.

Two minutes of short clips and the rather hairy director talking here:

Esquire puts a hole in Obama’s face
For $250,000, who wouldn’t? There could be some neat creative solutions made using this alongside the cover image in the future, like a Mad magazine-style trapdoor; though knowing Esquire US, there won’t be. A pull tab for BMW is to follow. “I think you can smell a gimmick a mile away,” says the VP of Discovery channel. I’m sniffing one from here

Papercamp highlights the future of tech and paper
Less gimmicky, more geeky. Originated by Dopplr’s Matt Jones; some of the ideas can be seen here. There’s a New York-flavoured edition coming up next month

Ads in PDFs scrapped by Adobe
Between them, Techcrunch and Nxtbook have it about right. However, I’m not convinced by the phrase “A true digital magazine is designed to be an elegant reading experience. While some are better than others, most all are more engaging than the PDF format” – PDF Mags begs to differ

Taschen’s London store gears up for a warehouse sale
Takes place on 23-25th January. Plenty of pulp mag books with slightly scuffed covers on offer on day one, fewer bargains by the weekend I’ll bet

Adbusting protests against Photoshop use
Fabulous in-joke fun

And the obligatory crisis roundup:

Jeans brand scraps magazine advertising
“Magazines will always be relevant. We are just trying something new this season.” And cheaper. Goes instead for marketing on its own website and instore

Arthur goes into hibernation
The community funding only postponed the end. The blog has been busy since, though. If you prefer a fictional version of this story…

…Bad Idea creates miniseries about print and the money pit
Occasionally amusing. “How about Kabuki theatre for the disabled?”

Funniest line of the magazine crisis so far
Though I’m not sure it’s true. But who cares?

A quick summary for those who haven’t been keeping up:

• JPG is/was a photography magazine created by 8020 Publishing, originally based around community submissions to their Flickr group.

• It was founded as a print-on-demand hobby magazine, and then turned professional in ways its husband-and-wife founders, Derek Powazek and Heather Champ didn’t like. The founders were given the boot; Powazek went on to help launch Magcloud and Fray.

• JPG‘s sister magazine, a short-lived travel magazine also created from online submissions called Everywhere, was suspended in August 2008. (Disclosure: I wrote for it once, by invitation – which seemed somewhat to go against the whole ‘community created’ thing to me.)

• On 1st January this year, 8020 announced that JPG was closing. The Faith issue was the last one. No irony intended, I’m sure.

• Despite its failure, some saw JPG‘s model as the only realistic future for the magazine industry; others felt it was not aspirational enough and the cover price was too high; or maybe it just didn’t get the right distribution, appeal to advertisers or do something that Flickr didn’t; in the end it just proved too expensive for its publisher, particularly in a troubled ad market

• Right now, it seems likely that the JPG brand will continue, with either photosharing website SmugMug grabbing it, somehow being resurrected by its community, or a buyer stepping in.

There seem to be three realistic paths for the magazine’s survival, if indeed that’s to happen:

1) As a bonus for paying members of a photosharing site, monetizing the existing community and getting new users away from industry leader Flickr. Hence SmugMug‘s interest. Or maybe Flickr will pre-emptively take it over to stop that happening.

2) As a supplement inside an existing photo magazine, such as Amateur Photographer. Great way to create a new readership, give members a special “3 issues free trial”, and so on.

3) Ironically, printed on demand via Powazek’s MagCloud (or similar). In this scenario, the community decides to go it alone, and a few keen young designers decide to take it on to boost their portfolio. You know, for kicks.

If either 1) or 2) come to pass, then 3) will probably happen as a spinoff anyway, as there will always be users who don’t want to pay to play.

(And just to throw a crazy 4) into the mix: how about combining 125‘s mag/agency combo with Getty’s Scoopt to create a gallery of available images for fun and profit? Ok, maybe not…)

Distribution certainly played a part in the magazine’s downfall; the high cover price probably did too, as did the advertising downturn. However, I don’t think they were the fundamental reasons for its failure.

As a way to create a magazine, it was indeed fairly revolutionary: take online content, pay little for it, and encourage a growing community to keep submitting. It tried to place amateur payment alongside professional standards and advertising, not an easy sell (and part of the reason for Powazek’s walkout) but probably the only way to make money from UGC in this kind of a magazine format – ignore the whingers, and skim off the willing cream. The whole thing took advantage of available online community features, and did a decent job of community management too. All fine and good, but the stumbling block was the magazine itself.

For something built around community, what it didn’t do was carry that group-hug, interactive feeling into the magazine. Reading the magazine didn’t feel like being a part of any community. The attitude of the magazine didn’t make you smile, the photo mix was fine but rarely jaw-dropping, the amateur snappers’ advice was all fine and good, but not illustrated in an effective manner. Overall, it felt… average. On a good day.

I really wanted to like it, given its courageous and interesting publishing model. I did enjoy some of its themes – Noir, above, for instance remains my favourite feature of those I’ve seen – but when I saw the result, I didn’t really understand why anyone would buy it when it was available online for free (though the giveaways stopped after issue 15); I also didn’t think the paper version ever really looked coffee table enough to justify the high price, or indeed any price at all, and it didn’t have any compelling reason to own it, unless my own pictures were inside – in which case I’d get a free copy anyway. Having a community of 197,000 users is one thing, but that doesn’t mean they’ll overlook the quality of a bland end product when faced with a newsstand (not to mention an internet) filled with other options.

The SaveJPG.com community may be crying out for a saviour, but 8020 almost certainly couldn’t have raised the necessary cash from that same community in the way that, say, Bitch did. Because the community would just say, why don’t we just keep the money and do it ourselves? (They might yet do that, and go back to making their own niche print-on-demand hobby mag – which is how the whole thing started.)

Overall, 8020′s model was a brave stab at monetising and creating a print magazine using some of the features of this brave new world of UGC. Everyone wanted a piece of that just a few years ago. The magazine even sourced some decent photos among its content, and seemed to attract a few big name advertisers.

But if 8020 was going to handbuild a brand new publishing model, then they needed to create a truly remarkable magazine to show it off, alongside some clever marketing and clear advertising appeal. ‘Not bad’ was never going to be good enough to change an industry.

And so it wasn’t. I remain doubtful that most forms of UGC will ever be monetised far beyond subscription fees; it certainly won’t until/unless the advertising millions find a way of making money off communities, something MySpace, Google and Facebook are still headscratching over. One thing’s for sure: it’ll take a better magazine than JPG to prove me wrong.

I’ve been Blogsploding on here since April, and it’s about time I asked you, the humble lurker, why it is that you keep returning to this humble page/subscribe to my little RSS feed.

Would you like more reviews? Or fewer reviews? More news? Do you enjoy the interviews? The general articles? Are you pining for guest bloggers, competitions, talk of classic magazine titles alongside trendy upstarts? Do you ache for the day I’ll get a proper camera and a decent lighting set up, so my pictures of magazines aren’t so blurry?

Am I writing pieces that are too long? Not writing often enough? Do I focus too much on the mainstream, on the UK, on myself? Which have been your favourite or least favourite entries so far? Do you want fewer disturbing pictures of scalpless dolls from art exhibitions in Barcelona? (I hope so, I don’t have any more)

Is there, in other words, any other form of blogging entertainment that I can perform for your magazine-loving pleasure?

Please help me make this blog even better. It’s over to you, so click Comments now and speak your brains. The best suggestion/s will win something pretty from my magazine collection.

Thank you kindly.

Unselfish Heller reveals vintage magazine source
Contains all the big hitters: Life, Flair, Harpers, New Yorker, Fortune… just be prepared to bid against Steven

Men’s Vogue to be reverse-bound with Vogue
A smart short-term solution to keep jobs; long-term future still suspect, though

What’s wrong with Vogue?
“Vogue has become stale and predictable” according to the NYT blog; plenty of quotes to back it up, too. Miesel aside, it certainly pales in daring compared to Vogue Italia and Vogue France. But could an American audience handle such bravado?

Roundup of how Google Magazines is doing
“We talked about digitizing it for years, but could never justify the expense” – a phrase which applies to far too many magazines. Still, not everyone can formulate a successful digital strategy, and not everyone is interested in trying, which is where the big G comes in

Cute new PDF fanzine about Tokyo/China
A bit short on content and focus, but very nice looking and a decent start from two Italians living in Tokyo. Worth the download, if not worth keeping; I’d love to see a Japanese expat PDF zine made in the west, as a contrast (via Jean Snow)

Mag roundup of 2008
Decent roundup of mags they’ll miss and covers they loved (which I almost universally didn’t. I do agree with many other people’s favourite though)

Ink-saving typeface
Not yet there, but a decent-enough talking point / piece of PR