Digital Media Publisher Consortium Officially Underway

Conde Nast, Time Inc., Meredith, Hearst and News Corp. to create common format, storefront.

By Bill Mickey
Monday, January 4, 2010

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Five publishers in December announced a joint venture to develop a common digital publishing platform and Web storefront to sell electronic versions of magazines and newspapers for portable digital devices. The much-reported, and now official, partnership between Conde Nast, Time Inc., Meredith, Hearst and News Corp. will reach a combined audience of 145 million readers.

According to the announcement, which doesn’t provide a launch date for the products and doesn’t name the company or the team who will run it—although Time Inc. executive vice president John Squires has been tapped as an interim managing director—the joint venture will focus on four goals:

• The creation of a common content format for all publications
• A publishing platform that can run on multiple devices and operating systems
• A storefront where consumers can purchase the content
• An array of ‘innovative’ advertising formats

“For the consumer, this digital initiative will provide access to an extraordinary selection of engaging content products, all customized for easy download on the device of their choice, including smartphones, e-readers and laptops,” said Squires in the announcement.

The equity partners are backing up the venture with their own products, claiming a reach of about 145 million unduplicated readers, per MRI figures, and are inviting other publishers to contribute products as well.

Revenue, said the announcement, will come from content and advertising sales and print subscriptions—implying that opportunities to subscribe to print products will be offered alongside the digital content.
The field of mobile and e-reader content, as well as a common storefront to sell it, has become a crowded one. The joint venture’s announcement comes just days after a Hearst-incubated company called Skiff announced its own, very similar effort. Skiff will produce a common content format, a storefront to sell it, and advertising opportunities as well.

Publishers can partner with the service to create and design the digital versions of the magazines, Skiff president Gilbert Fuchsberg told AD. “We need a good, clean XML feed and a set of design rules and we will work with them to create the right design for them. That’s one of our distinctions. The ebook is commoditized and not what [magazine and newspaper] publishers are looking for. We have a set of tools for publishers to make it easy for them to create a great looking publication.”

Time Inc. and Conde Nast are both already producing digital editions of their magazines for a tablet format. Squires told PaidContent’s Staci Kramer that these products are “very much the products we want to enable for the industry.”

He also said that while he’s “respectful” of other efforts, such as Skiff, he expects the joint venture to “provide the format and standards.”

What About Digital Publishing Vendors?
All of this, however, begs the question of what role, if any, existing digital magazine formats will play in this multi-publisher partnership.

Digital magazines produced by such companies as Nxtbook Media have already been available for smartphones for some time. “On one hand, this is good news for Nxtbook Media, as it validates the multi-format delivery we’ve been advocating for the past few years,” said Marcus Grimm, Nxtbook Media’s marketing director. “On the other hand, we certainly wonder why publishers are intent on reinventing a wheel that’s already on the market. We’ve already released new formats for Blackberry and the iPhone that work for readers and advertisers, and are quickly developing solutions for the rising tide of devices.”

Zinio sees the developments as a boon for the platform in general. “We are excited to see the American magazine industry focusing on creating a forum for dynamic designs, optimized for the medium, and supporting the growth of digital magazine consumer adoption,” the company’s president and CEO Rich Maggiotto said in an email. “This will further enable our efforts with Zinio’s 350 global publishers producing over 1,700 consumer titles, which include publications from the international divisions of Time Inc. (IPC) and Conde Nast, as well as Hearst worldwide.”