Another dead magazine. They’ll blame the advertising environment, the economy, the bubble. But let’s get real: what brought Portfolio down was Portfolio. Here’s why:

1.   Saturation:  The first chart they show you in a b-school is a 2×2 of size v. saturation. Big unsaturated markets are where opportunity lives. Small unsaturated markets are where nichemakers rise. But big and small saturated markets are a waste of time—without marketing or disruptive innovation. Portfolio had neither. In magazines, “editorial” IS brand marketing, but when the editorial lacks positioning, it’s the same thing as torching money. And as for disruptive innovation—what’s the opposite of disruptive innovation? Conformism, imitation, similarity, an editorial idea unrelated to digital life, to a working business model, or to meaningful differentiation. Why bother? Readers didn’t. Advertisers didn’t.

2. Fragmentation: Trying to cap a fragmented media market with generalist coverage is either very bold or very foolish. You pick.

3. Print. D’oh. I still think it can be done, but not without a compelling digital strategy that would rethink the role of narrative journalism.  There was zero effort to do that here.

4. Money. What’s the ROI on a 600-day-launch prep, $4/word stories, $150,000+ contracts, $200,000+ editors, and no digital strategy? Can $100 millon launches really break even in this economy? Unlikely.

5. Mission: Conde would have you believe Portfolio invented the genre of business mag with style. Vogue Business? Not quite. So was there a market here? Consider: Only 10% of the WSJ’s readers are women. That’s why Lipman’s hiring made good sense: she launched the WSJ’s Weekend Journal. But the proof is in the pudding, and Lipman showed she didn’t get it, in just the same way Weekend Journal didn’t really change the pickup with women or younger readers until Murdoch. Even Tina Gaudoin hasn’t figured it out yet, and she knows style in her sleep.

6. Editorial: Long-form business journalism? Hello? See above. Despite 600 days of prep, Portfolio never had a well-thought through editorial positioning to differentiate in saturated markets. Yvette Kantrow writes in The Deal that Portfolio wanted to be the business magazine for people who don’t like business, but that doesn’t seem right to me: I think Lipman just had a shallow idea of business journalism that was distinguished solely by the idea that longer pieces could explain the complexities of business better than business magazines with known business writers. But it turns out that Lipman hired the same people, writing more or less the same kinds  of pieces with the same kinds of spin. Sure she won a few awards for this, but even a stopped clock is right twice a day. You could have put almost any competent business editor in Lipman’s job and won a few awards if that person had CN’s resources  (see number 4 above). I defy anyone to tell me what Portfolio stood for except a committment to spending money on long-form journalism.

7.    Credibility: From day 1, Lipman gave readers all the wrong signals. She put all her marbles on long form journalism when everyone was talking about digital journalism, then chose many of the same old prize-winners from Michael Lewis to Tom Wolfe. Her covers showed a complete lack of comprehension about her audience and the economy. Remember the golden skycrapers, the gears, the hairy apes, the spy—one cliché after another—followed by Dov Charney, Sarah Palin, and the fallen bull? What’s that you say?  She shouldn’t have been expected to cover the Zombieconomy when she was hired to celebrate it? Rubbish. She could have covered everything from recession economics and its style to derivative disasters  to Obama and his style—right from the start.  (That fallen bull was apparently stuck on the cover after Lipman feared she’d be seen as a Barry cheerleader, a copycat, or both.) She could have signalled outrage. Instead she signaled that she was personally offended by the fallout and incapable of explaining it. And flying to Davos first class didn’t help. (Gawker really excelled on its coverage of this point.)
8.    Digital strategy: Did I say strategy? (Disclosure: I interviewed with both the business and edit side before Portfolio was launched; it’s one of the few times I was happy not to get the job.) Yes, Ari Brandt and Chris Jones attracted talented bloggers—Jeff Bercovici and Felix Salmon were doing great work. But to what end? Despite a well-designed site, there was never any thought to how Portfolio would deal with its competitive set in the digital space, whether the competition was NYT DealBook, WSJ, TechCrunch, Seeking Alpha, Dealbreaker, Bloomberg, or even Slate’s The Big Money, which has no resources but is constantly working to distinguish its tone and positioning.

Portfolio had all the resources money could buy but no competitive strategy, no editorial strategy, no content strategy, no technology strategy. In any sector —fashion to rocknroll, tech to celebrity—there is a wealth of web-based data to be aggregated, scraped, curated, ranked, and regurgitated, but nowhere more so than in business media where data streams run the gamut from rich to richer. To have failed even to consider what that opportunity—the opportunity to deliver real reader value—means—and to have spent an estimated $100 million over two years on this ignominous failure—is just shameful.

Even as I write this, I’m reading media critics who are saying that Portfolio’s failure is merely an example of the failure of advertising or the failure to reinvent advertising. It’s the economy’s fault: “From an advertising standpoint, the goal was advertisers new to the company and new to the category,” David Carey told AdAge. “Strategically, check the boxes on all this stuff: a different voice, a different style, a different type of advertiser. All of that was on its way to being accomplished, and then of course, a significant hit to advertising from the recession.”

But none of that is true. Portfolio is simply the story of yet another media venture convinced that having a few digital trends and tactics—a blog here, a feed there, water as often as you can—is the same thing as having a real digital strategy. Well, here’s some news, friends: That’s merely another brand advertising outsert stuck on the web, and it doesn’t work. Even if you pour money into it.

Bye-bye Portfolio. You won’t be missed.

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If you do yoga, you probably already know the word means union. Breath and body. Twist and turn. Stretch and release. All at the same time. Sounds impossible but that’s the whole idea: moving, stretching the whole body together to reach beyond.

How about yoga with media? To stretch beyond—for real innovation to take place—you need new business models. But not just. You also need an innovation culture that creates living, breathing media experiments across business and editorial and technology. All of them together. All-One, as Dr. Bronner likes to say. In an agile, networked world where attention is scarce and most news is just randomly filtered data, change in any one of these three chakras by itself won’t cut it. Good content disconnected from context—people or data—is just data. If you want to be seen, you need to do the yoga that twists business requirements together with editorial and technology. And you better get down with the data baby because if you don’t know your XML from your HTML, your metatags from your master narratives, you ain’t going nowhere.

Unfortunately most media companies today are stuck when it comes to innovation. Newspapers still assign writers a single story a day instead of putting themon a beat over the course of a day with constant mini-updates. Business folks are still struggling to balance selling brands and search; seo still seems like a naughty word. Selective inkjet printing and supposed mass-customization are stand-ins for developing products that really embrace context. Designers are still more interested in pretty designs than persona-based user architectures. And although it’s changing,  lots of companies (media or otherwise) are still stuck with five year old content management systems that don’t give them the power of end- to-end XML, seo, metatagging, and multiple outputs to web, mobile, whatever.

So yoga: union. If you want to swim the blue oceans, innovate beyond your competition, the only way forward is to twist together. At the end of the day, editorial unsupported by business strategy and tech is just random data. You’ll be lucky to be spidered.

As I’ve written before, part of what holds back innovation is the rudimentary silos of static church/state (business/edit) relationshp of most media companies. But it’s not just at the operational level. Even the pundits don’t do yoga. Even now, even when there is more momentum to innovate across the wall than ever before, few if any, of our friends are connecting business model to content model: yoga.

Jeff Jarvis has been putting the pedal to the medal with his New Business Models for News project at CUNY. It’s a brillaint study, interrogating the financial dynamics of news companies, asking the fundamental questions of customer acquisition costs, pricing, bundling, net ROI of Googlejuice vs other measurable audience and advertiser metrics (churn, linking, etc.) Jarvis wants to collect the data, model it, and see what implications it has for news companies. Bravo. But it’s still business modeling. Jarvis isn’t reintenting the wheel—nor should he; his objective is to bust out the numbers in order to figure out how news organizations make money.

“The question is not whether content should be free or whether readers should pay; “should” is an irrelevant verb. The question, very simply, is how more money can be made. What will the market support?

The other question, then, is how much journalism the market will pay for? What kind of journalism will it support? This doesn’t necessarily start with the current spending on current newsrooms. Part of the equation, especially in the other models, will be new efficiencies (e.g., do what you do best, link to the rest) and new opportunities to work in collaboration and in networks.

The question Jarvis is raising is what those new efficiencies will consist in: what’s the value of user participation and increased collaboration, inside and outside the newsroom. What’s the value of innovation? His book, What Would Google Do?, provides many examples of media innovation but without the economics; his study will presumably provide financial ballast for new business models. But Jeff’s post begs the question of how you’re supposed to model stuff you haven’t built before. Again, what’s the value of innovation? If you’ve been reading this blog or Jarvis’s post on what he calls The Great Restructuring—or Umair Haque, the guy that inspired both of those posts—you’ll know another answer here is to put monetization (or at least overt monetization) beneath innovation, beneath community. But that’s not yoga either.

So what is media yoga? Wednesday’s FT had a piece about Freakonomics economist Steven Levitt’s new teaching gig at the Univ. of Chicago’s Booth called “Using Experiments in Firms.” I’m a little afraid that Levitt and  his co-teacher John List, both economists, will scientize this, but I suppose it’s a start, and it’s interesting that it’s taking place in a B-School. (Where’s similar focus on innovation in J-School?) There’s a giant world of innovation methods—from the Bass Diffusion curve to Christensen’s Disruptive innovation theory to Kaizen and TRIZ and beyond (way beyond)—some of which emphasize incremental increases in value and others (Christensen and Blue Oceans) that go for more profound leaps in value and technological transformation. We’ll see what comes out of Levitt’s new class, but I’m a little skeptical—economists and business modelers tend to get caught up in scenario setting, and what we need now more than ever is yoga. Left brain, right brain. Business and editorial and tech together. (Which is why, I think, supple management practices such as Agile and Scrum—and disciplines that look across the entire breadth of the media value chain such as IA/UX and content strategy—are beginning to get a bigger toehold today.)

So do media yoga. Fail often. Fall occasionally. And make sure you warm up all your muscles before you get on the mat. Otherwise, it’s savasana for you, bud.

Om.

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Remember the future of mass customization? Happy consumers, beaming with pride that the great masters of manufacturing allowed them the privilege of mixing their own batch of stuff from the rich storehouse of a brand? This happy, shiny future has been repeatedly trotted out for various industries over the past few decades, usually to be set aside because of the real costs to transforming manufacturing lines, and servicing millions of unique products. When it works, for example, in design objects, it can have interesting results; in technology, it’s usually a dodge from innovation. And now it’s being trotted out again, this time for media, by Time Inc., which—in mid crisis—has had the epiphany there might be potential consumer interest in letting consumers mix n match  content from a bunch of its current titles.

The title of Time’s “experiment” in free, customized content: Mine,  Here’s how it works. You go to the Mine website, pick five of eight offered magazines (Time, Sports Illustrated, Real Simple, Money, Travel&Leisure, InStyle, Golf, Food+Wine), and about six weeks later, get a magazine composed of articles poached by  Time Inc. from those five titles, om print or digital format, customized to your zipcode. (Free info: mine were Time, T&L, Instyle, F+W, Money.)

Wow, you’re saying. That’s a lot of free content. Great value to the advertiser (Lexus sponsors the whole shebang). Geo-targeted. Wow, cool stuff.

Except, um, no. You can only get either digital or print edition. (You can also put an rss widget on your iGoogle page.) And the content, apparently,  runs from 2005 to 2009—let’s repeat that too, shall we: from 2005 to 2009—and is organized less like a single magazine than a bunch of magazines each separated in its own tidy branded cordon sanitaire with ad pages marking it off from the other brands. I haven’t seen the digital edition, so I won’t comment on its execution, but I think I have something to say about its general concept. After all, I was part of the team that first suggested this idea back in 1995…

15 years ago

Turns out this is an idea that’s been kicking around at least since the days of what was known first as Time Inc New Media and then, after ATT and MCI failed to convince us proprietary X25 networks were tomorrow’s big thing, the Time Inc Internet Project and finally Pathfinder. Locked in a bake-off for the top job, Jim Kinsella and I set out our competing visions of Time Inc’s internet future for our boss, Walter Isaacson.

My vision was Calliope. Unfortunately that domain was already taken—already in 1994! (If the domain was available, who knows what would have happened!) Calliope was to be a unitary effort from all of Time’s (then) 35 brands. One article from here, another from over there, sometimes even on the same subject, with community comments and email underlying the whole shebang.

Kinsella’s idea was Pathfinder: a home page designed to send you to each of those brand’s websites, and minimal editorial resources under that. Just what the name says. As I said to Jim (who ever let me forget it), Calliope was centrifugal, Pathfinder, centripetal. Kinsella, who has had an amazing career and is now chairman of Interoute, one of the largest European network providers, was right though: by pledging to keep Pathfinder limited in its intent and range, he could cobble enough resources to build the ostensibly decentralized brand into a strong centralized organization. (A brilliant corporate insight, I came to recognize much later.) My way would have meant the brands wouldn’t have had a base to build from without spending their own money (which they didn’t have or didn’t want to spend online) and would have created a new editorial hierarchy, presumably with Isaacson as king. (To his credit, he didn’t go for that, and 15 years later, he’s still just as savvy, kicking off the recent debate about  micropayments with a TIME cover.) One publisher flatly told me to go F myself. Isaacson didn’t support me. And as for getting the brands to collaborate? On his way out the door, Curt Viebranz, who came to TINM from HBO (and was later president of Tacoda and a top exec at AOL until Falco etc. pushed him out), famously said that working at Pathfinder was like trying to herd a group of cats. (A lot of this ancient history is in John Motavalli’s rather misguided Bamboozled at the Revolution.)

One more person should be mentioned in all of this: Bruce Judson, a talented exec who came to Pathfinder with dual JD/MBA degrees and the rep of a Time Inc superstar thanks to his championing selective inkjet printing—the same (or very very similar) technology they’re using to print Mine.

Dumb and dumber

So why is a dumb idea from 1995 any better regurgitated fifteen years later?

It’s not. It’s even dumber.

Here’s why: in the Google era, mass customization, giving consumers the choice to design their own product from the limited set of a firm’s products, is not customer service for the masses. If anything it is the opposite—it is innovation with a limited set of consumers—and healthy margins—in mind. If you love Time Inc magazines more than all other content and think it deserves a privileged place in your home, then perhaps this is media for you. Of course if you really thought this way, you’d subscribe to all the magzines independently. As Scott Anthony says, this is innovation through the wrong lens: the lens of the guy who works at Time Inc and grabs copies of all the magazines that used to be given away free to employees in the lobby; he reads a few articles and chucks the rest in the john and the garbage. This is innovation to help himself, not the customer. As Anthony writes:

The general point here is to make sure you evaluate innovations through the proper lens. The trap companies often run into is they think their view of quality is the same as the markets’. That’s not always true. If the innovation isn’t perceived to be better by the consumer, customer, partner, or supplier to whom it is targeted, then adoption could slow and frustration could grow.

If Time Inc’s poobahs—the url says timecmg.com, so this is likely some consumer marketing group Ann Moore has lashed together including her publishers, Time Inc Custom Solutions, and somebody in online (i.e., the rump of Pathfinder)—were truly interested in innovating customer service in the media context—and if their CMS was up to it—they’d be looking for taxonomical matches between articles and metatagged subjects and user metatags. They’d be taking a page from the New York Times, specifically Times Extra, which lets you see the Times’s own headlines and stories right on the same page with external links to competing versions of the same stories. They’d be hackging the hello out of the Daylife API, creating filtered news programs running across the range of all Time Inc. content and affiliates. Or maybe they’d just do Time’s Mahalo, allowing search under the banner of high touch contextual curation. Yeah, I know it’s an experiment, but it’s not a good one. What’s the next experiment? Subscriptions for your customized magazine and micropayments for the online version?

This is how a dumb idea from 1995 is being made even dumber in 2009, relying on the hubris of publishers who think customers want customized magazine content over and above context created from across the entire web of news resources. What was innovative—but wrong in 1995—is no more innovative in 2009.

Some people never learn.

CODA, 4/19: The AP reports—and Time Inc is now apologizing—for botching the personalization of Mine’s first issue. Apparently few readers got the five titles they actually picked; most of the articles were evergreen, dating back to summer 2008, and at least one person, Joshua Benton, director of Harvard University’s Nieman Journalism Lab, found the personalized ads—all featuring Lexus— “’slightly creepy’ because they referred to where he lives, included his name and described him driving one on Route 6 to Cape Cod.” Argh.

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Sometime around 2001, after burning through several editor-in-chief jobs during bubble 1.0, I decided it might not be a bad idea to have an MBA. My editorial friends thought I had gone off the deep-end, and not for the first time. The first time was when I moved from print to online; second was when I began to use my biz head to shift from “editorial” (Time Warner, Disney, Ziff) to “consumer” brands (Bertelsmann, Samsung, Citibank); and now business school? Please. Until the MBA I’d been firmly planted on the editorial side of the Luceian wall keeping church from state, business from edit. But an MBA meant moving right over the wall, into enemy camp. And to do what? Everyone knows the business of the media business is advertising. No ads, no revenues, no profits, no jobs. No disrespect, but publishers are by and large glorified salespeople, not strategists. You don’t need no stinkin’ MBA for that.

I had a different idea. I’d been up close and personal on the biggest disasters of Web 1.0. The Titanic (the implosion of Time Warner’s Pathfinder.com). The Hindenberg (Disney On Line). Pearl Harbor (Thomas Middelhoff’s brilliant, insane campaign to buy or beat Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com with BOL.COM). And let’s not forget little skirmishes such as Ziff’s eShopper, a webshopping glossy piggybacking on the already sinking Yahoo! Internet Life franchise, just as bubble 1.0 was bursting. After eight years of this, I came to realize, as Bill Goldman once said of the movie business, that “No one knows anything.” (And that definitely included me.) I watched young MBAs and V/alley entrepreneurs (not usually MBAs but typically accompanied by one or two) make a cult of what they called Dot Com—how I hated that expression. I saw random people I knew mint millions. I saw good guys founder in desperate search of a “business model”—some meaningful, logical path to profits—while bad guys gulped more more and more marketing dollars for projects that everyone knew sucked and never worried about business models.

B school gets a C

B school was my attempt to grapple with media’s failure to reckon with digital innovation. The key, I believed—and still believe—is to bridge the church/state divide, the ignominous wall separating edit from business. And because it was futile to ask bizheads to innovate with editorial and digital media—but I could easily imagine innovating editorial with digital business models—an MBA seemed like a good place to get my feet wet. Boy was I wrong.

My cohorts—at least half my class—couldn’t give a rat’s ass about business innovation or for that matter business models. Newsflash: You go to b-school to make money. In fact, you can’t learn to build a business model at Stern; it simply wasn’t, probably still isn’t, taught. I had to take courses in the part-time Langone program to learn how to actually put together a marketing budget and do DCFs (discounted cash flows) on media companies. As one profesor put it to me, our [business schools'] job is to create dumptrucks full of bullshit and serve up thumblefuls of the tastiest morsels to you idiots. (He actually used that word.) Such is and was the defecatory triage of the MBA environment.

Despite appearances, this isn’t a rant about b-schools and MBAs (although that might be fun to do in another post). What’s interesting is growing discussion about the death of print and the growing disconnect (in just a few places) with innovation at the level of product creation. You can’t fix the business model if you don’t have a clue what kind of a product to create. The problem is the raw limits on innovation within media, the constraints of history and prejudices of touch and feel—and class and age—print conveys. Innovation, either in business models or product management, is stuck, can’t even get into first gear. (And if you’re pissed off about it, you’re a  whiner.) First hand experience tells me that b- schools have nothing to teach in this regard, that the focus on finance, slicing and dicing and arbing, reinforces selfish impulses; second-hand experience—for example, this wide ranging debate at HBR.com—confirms that most of the conversation is misguided, that innovation doesn’t even have a seat at the table! J-school seems like it’s in even worse shape; a similar debate is brewing there, but at a much lower temperature, perhaps because j-school is more or less a victim while b-school comes closer to being a cause.

Umair Haque says that business model innovation—digging into costs, revenue streams, efficiencies—is “exactly the wrong thing to focus on right now…Business model innovation amplifie[s] value destruction.” Of course, business model innovation—Securitization, the structured aggregation, bundling, and slicing of mortgages or any other underlying security—was supposed to be the big breakthrough for finance. Instead it’s brought us to our knees. For Haque the dirty word is Monetization: “It blinds us to value creation, at the expense of value capture. When we seek to monetize, we end up chasing the same old lame competitive advantage. I win, you (and you, and you) lose. Put another way: ‘monetizing’ toxic junk — from CDOs, to Hummers, to McMansions, to Big Macs—is how we got into this mess.”

In media terms, this is Zell territory, Zell Hell. But not just. When you’re trying to save your ass, all the innovation you can afford is tied up in value protection and efficiency: whether it’s the NY Times’s leaseback of its new building, saber rattling with unions, or what I think is the ruinous, lemming-like decision to shutter editorial brands because equityholders don’t have the patience to figure out a new business model.

Can’t anyone here play this game?

Of course, it’s not business models that are at fault. Even Haque, here again, from the same article, makes the distinction that some business models—those based on innovation—are more equal than other. “When we can make valuable stuff, there are a plethora of business models to choose from, some old, some new, some untested, some tried and true. When we can’t, no amount of business model innovation can save us from implosion.”

So the question l want to ask here—and will be asking over the next few posts—is: Can’t anyone here play this game? Why does it seem nearly every editorial brand is packing its bags and going home—just when there is more opportunity than ever to slice, dice, curate and aggregate the content surrounding these brands? Granted, some media brands may be playing in “red oceans” of rivals that are just too infested with competition to be worth pursuing. Blender, for example. One can make the argument—one of my b-school professors did —that there’s just no sense fishing in markets that small, that saturated. Marketing just won’t do any good here, he said. It’s missionary work. To which I raised my hand and said, No that’s the missionary position—right where most of media is right now, getting fucked (excuse my French) without any real love for winning new customers or satisfying as yet undefined customer needs (what I later learned—after b-school—are so-called “blue oceans.”) Instead it’s all blow cards and blow jobs (okay, PR.) What about the mass of niches under each of those supposedly saturated markets? Were they untouchable? Was there no way to reach them either? Mr. Marketer’s reply was that there might be, but you’d have to prove your point to management that they were worth reaching. In other words, you’d have to show a path to net return-on-investment after spending all those marketing dollars.

Blender cover

Of course I have no way of knowing what kinds of shenanigans were behind Blender’s shuttering. (And what a tangled web of intrigue it seems to be with ex-Rolling Stone publisher Kent Brownridge convincing Steve Rattner and his p.e. firm Quandrangle to pony up $250 million—$190 of which were borrowed—to buy the titles in the first place.) But leverage ain’t everything. You have to wonder, like the good, grim reaper of the magazine death pool does nearly every day now—why titles that were once print innovators or at very least well-established brands couldn’t (can’t) be bothered to think through their digital strategies until it’s too late. Why is it easier to shut down and forfeit a brand than find a new play online, than to find the nexus of journalistic narrative and the broad path of tagged knowledge, inside and outside the boundary of a title’s digital assets? Perhaps “missionary position” is right: when you’re up against everyone from MOG to Hypem, not to mention rollingstone.com or even spin.com, staring at half-naked chicks on your cover is a lot more fun than thinking through the issues of value creation and customer service—yes, customer service, even for media brands! What a thought!

These are questions of innovation that, to my knowledge, just aren’t being considered even now. What would customer service via digital innovation, first at the level of editorial technology and then at the level of business model, look like for Blender, or for that matter, Hallmark or Domino or BestLife, or half a dozen other print titles that you know are in trouble?  When these magazines fail are their publishers saying that the value of circ plus shrinking CPMs (not to mention the scant revs from their retardataire web strategies [sic]) just ain’t worth it, that it’s just not enough net IRR (internal rate or return) to sustain the investment? Or are they saying the brand is worthless, that even a sale of the assets (brand, lists, archive, talent, website) amounts to a pile of beans in a firesale, and so ought to be walked away from—like a foreclosed house in some oversold condoglut Las Vegas zombieland? My guess, sadly, is that the private equity guys believe it’s the latter. They just don’t know how to fix it, said one of my buddies, although it turns out Blender is going to be kept alive as a website.

Editors don’t get it either

And they may have a point: because, sad to say, outside the Times (which is doing an admirable job of throwing up one innovative idea after another to see what sticks), the editorial teams don’t know how to fix it either. They don’t understand that the toolkit isn’t just a better mix of articles, or more “service” —in journalistic terms, that’s usually listicles—but rather a broad and everchanging mix of social media/community, content strategy (taxonomical and SEO-driven information architecture), curation and aggregation, user generated content, ecommerce, etc—all combined with and told through great storytelling, big hairy audacious narratives. And that’s what’s finally doing a job on media innovation. The editors are fumbling with lawn chairs on the Titanic, cutting staff, making efficiencies, and playing with Twitter and blogs—i.e., more content creation—while the business side is out selling. Meanwhile, no one’s watching the store.

There’s no attempt to rethink the enterprise or the brand, in competitive terms and through the customer base of actual customer needs, of user personas, of learning to add value to people’s lives. No attempt to rethink the idea of service by (at very least) getting a grip on what users actually want in digital terms and how that distinguishes a brand from its rivals journalistically. No attempt to think through web-based innovation instead of  business model games. No attempt to play in what Jarvis calls “the mass of niches”; it’s still all about the generalized reader, the mass and print’s equivalent of gross rating points, distilled via CPM and CPC. It is it any wonder what we get from this are flashy, flimsy brands with a few blogs (which of course are disconnected from published work) and (if we’re lucky) some author-side metatags—if we’re lucky: most media companies still don’t publish in end-to-end XML and XHTML so that’s not a whole lot of good. (Wordpress is still far more sophisticated than most magazine’s CMS today.) It’s still brand by editor-in-chief, not brand by customers-in-charge.

And so the number of magazines and newspapers continues to dwindle. The other day, it was announced that there are now fewer magazines than ever before: just 17,000 mags to go before they turn off the lights. Now I’m not saying every every media brand (notice I do not say magazine title) is worth saving: we didn’t really need Trader or  Genre or King or Financial Week, and there are lots more out there that are going to fail simply because they think that web-based media is inferior to legacy edtiorial. On the other hand, the value of these brands is real and quantifiable (upon sale), and can represent real audiences that have real forward value. The question is: Are you ready to save them? Are you ready to tap into the community that already exists for your brand, to bring it to life using these tools? Are you ready to listen? Call this social media if you like: servicing your community through the tools that already exist out there, Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, even Plaxo. I call it customer service. (Forget Nordstrom and Disney, think Google.) Haque calls it the “I win, you win” question—as opposed to the revenue driven  “I win, you lose.” And of course there’s Jarvis: What Would Google Do [with your brand]?

These are the innovation questions beyond the missionary position. Over the next few posts—and probably over the course of whatever I write here—my theme will be media innovation: how and why it works, has failed, can transform media brands through design and technology into lovebrands consumers truly take to heart and companies truly profit from: a kama sutra of media innovation.

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• Enough Business Models Already! (insomniactive.com)
• Don’t Blame the Business Schools (blogs.harvardbusiness.org)
• Audio: Scrap the MBA (blogs.harvardbusiness.org)
• What exactly is a Content Strategy? (copydiva.com)
• The Discipline of Content Strategy (alistapart.com)
• Content-tious Strategy (alistapart.com)