The Periodicalist Glenn Fleishman

Tom Standage is the digital editor of the Economist, responsible for its appearance in many electronic forms: web, native apps, digital audio, and more. Tom also regularly writes fascinating non-fiction titles that teach us about the present through the lens of the past, such as The Victorian Internet about the business and culture of telegraphy and Writing on the Wall, about the first 2,000 years of social networking.

Host Glenn Fleishman spoke with Tom about finishability, completism, and the raging endless river of content. We also discuss the reasoning behind the Economist's new bite-sized daily Espresso app, pulling back from blogs, and the importance of audio — both podcasts and the professionally read-aloud versions of every article.

The Periodicalist is an irregularly produced series looking for a sponsor to help underwrite regular production of episodes. We would love to find a partner that wants to feature the podcast as part of their larger efforts at looking at the future of publishing: listen@periodicalist.com

Jason Snell just left his editorial career of 20 years, most of it spent at IDG, and most of that at Macworld magazine. He's happily retooling his professional life to meet his interests: expanding The Incomparable network of pop-culture podcasts; launching Six Colors, his editorial site featuring reviews and reporting about technology, centered around Apple; and co-hosting the Clockwise and Upgrade podcasts on Relay.fm. He tells us about rebooting and starting new things.

Glenn Fleishman, your loyal host of The Periodicalist, is shutting down The Magazine after 18 months of ownership and trying to make it thrive. He's learned a lot that he shares in this episode. He's also recently put The New Disruptors podcast on hiatus after nearly two years of weekly episodes, when sponsorship flagged. Glenn talks about the joy of ending things when the time comes, and some of his thoughts about the future.

Jason and Glenn spend the first half of this episode reviewing why periodicals, including the IDG empire, couldn't escape the innovator's dilemma, and see the freight train of the Internet bearing down on them; and the second half, looking into the limitations of the current methods of reaching readers and listeners. Their conclusion: email newsletters and podcasts still have a lot to offer.

The Periodicalist is an irregularly produced series looking for a sponsor to help underwrite regular production of episodes. We would love to find a partner that wants to feature the podcast as part of their larger efforts at looking forward at the future of publishing. Get in touch if you're interested at glenn@glennf.com.

Show notes

Pat McGovern was the beloved founder of IDG, genuinely well liked and respected. He died in early 2014.

Glenn's long-time editor at the Economist, Tom Standage, wrote Writing on the Wall: Social Media — the First 2,000 Years (2013), which explains the remarkable predecessors of what we think of as modern social networks.

This marvelous obituary of Carl Schlesinger, a New York Times typesetter, tells of his role in capturing the last night of hot-lead typesetting at the Times. He later became an amateur tap dancer.

Subscribe to Lisa Schmeiser's newsletter, "So What, Who Cares?"

Ben Thompson has built a nice business, Stratechery, on writing smart things and offering an affordable subscription to his analysis.

The death of the Web/rise of apps news cycle featured the Wall Street Journal's Chris Mims' provocative "The Web Is Dying; Apps Are Killing It"; a rejoinder at Quartz by Zach Steward, "The web is alive and well"; and John Gruber's dissection of Mims' story at Daring Fireball, "Native Apps Are Part of the Web."

Marco Arment created the Overcast app for podcast discovery, subscriptions, and listening. I highly recommend it.

Monument Valley is a lovely game that recently added an expansion set of levels.

The Magazine adopted TypeEngine as its app in the summer; TypeEngine is an periodical publishing platform that pushes to custom apps.

Windows 93 is an excellent parody of what Windows 95 would have looked like in 1993, constructed entirely in JavaScript.

Cartooning (and more broadly illustration) has a long history on the Internet: people seem to have figured out how to send images in part to send comic strips and other cartoons to each other before LOLcat photos became dominant.

Glenn Fleishman is joined this episode by Matt Bors, a long-time political cartoonist and illustrator, a Pultizer finalist, the recipient of the presitigious Herblock Award for political cartooning. Matt is part of the team at Medium that is redefining online publishing, and is where he runs the section called The Nib.

5: Curb Your Enthusiasm (The Periodicalist)

Glenn Fleishman is joined by Jason Snell, the editorial director of IDG's consumer division and impresario of The Incomparable Radio Network, to talk about how publications can appeal to people who aren't the most obsessed about a topic. Cultivating a community of slightly interested people, who represent the largest potential audience segment, is hard to do.

Sponsor: This podcast is made possible through the generous support of MailChimp, which is underwriting our first six episodes. MailChimp lets you manage email lists of any size. They also make hats for cats and dogs.

Let us know what you think and your ideas for future shows: send email to listen@periodicalist.com.

Show notes

Jason has a rich background in experimenting with web sites and early content-management tools.

Jason started the short-fiction online magazine Intertext in 1991.
He was also one of the folks behind Teevee.org.
Jason created a version of TeeVee run by NetCloak.
TidBITS was fed from a FileMaker database.
Glenn once helped try to put the Yale course catalog online (in 1990), and Prodigy was a reasonable suggestion as a place to host it.

Film.com was incubated by Glenn's first Internet company, and later purchased by Real Networks. (The domain was sold at some point to MTV.)

Back in the day, subscription revenue had high margins for a few reasons:

Captive market for advertising (no other places to advertise).
Second-class periodical mail was cheap.
Newsstand prices weren't unreasonable for single issues.
The publication cycle used to be frenzied as one approached the date (weekly, monthly, etc.).

Jason describes changing from a punctuated cycle to a continuous one.

Originally there was separate print and web staff.
The Seattle Times and Post-Intelligencer had this odd joint venture run by the Times that handled the web side for both.
Wired Digital was run and owned separately from Wired magazine for eight years.
Glenn: "A blog is a ravening maw that demands to be fed." Jason: "The process monster will eat a month's worth of food in a day."

Glenn helped produce the 1991 Time magazine man-of-the-year cover.

Jason and Glenn both came from backgrounds involving enthusiasm, whether professional, consumer, or personal.

The gadget sites might have set the tone for how news sites developed.

Gizmodo posted constantly.
Posting all your stories at once, one time doesn't work.
You have to spread out posts across a day.
But that creates a medium in which "enthusiasm for a subject is required on some level."
Dozens of stories every day.
The old value proposition for publications was based on yield. You paid a small amount of money and got a thick bunch of stuff, only some of which was interesting to you.

New York Times Innovation report was leaked, maybe strategically.

The current approach drowns out those with mild interest.

Yahoo Tech's launch caused tech writers to roll their eyes, but it's aimed at a general audience.

Jason walked away from comic books, but returned in recent years. But no site is focused around the casual visitor who wants to know what happened in the lst month: "we roll stories onto the site, and roll them right off."

Where is the revenue pipe for making a site that is casual? Compared to a magzine that was general in focus but appealed to narrower and broader audiences at once.

Publishers love:

People who come all the time.
Those who have a specific need and come and find a single page.
Glenn has three examples of publications that may fit a more casual, but interested audience:

TidBITS has a long-running weekly mailing list that grew into a web site, but its mailing list continues to remain very important. Take Control Books as a division of the publication is outside the churn…

Modern publications — print, born digital, and hybrids — survive typically with a small amount of staff and small to large armies of wordsmiths for hire. In this episode, co-hosts Glenn Fleishman of The Magazine and Jane Friedman and Manjula Martin of Scratch magazine talk the freelance life with guest Jen A. Miller, a successful technology, medical, and running reporter. Can people make a living as a freelancer? And what’s the different between a freelance writer and a freelance reporter? Have rates really not gone up at some publications for 30 or more years? And much more.

Sponsor: This podcast is made possible through the generous support of MailChimp, which is underwriting our first six episodes. MailChimp lets you manage email lists of any size. They also make hats for cats and dogs.

Let us know what you think and your ideas for future shows: send email to listen@periodicalist.com.

Show notes

How has freelancing changed recently?

Growing realization that most high-quality reporting is done in-house
Newspapers had 25% or more profit margins, which allowed for:

A huge staff
Ability to fund investigative journalism
Relied on stringers who were spread across the country/world
Freelancing is on-demand and is often paid a better hourly wage than in-house staff

Big publications have stringers do some news reporting nowadays

Taken to court

Tasini v. New York Times
National Geographic lawsuit against photographers
Contracts now insist on perpetual electronic rights

First North American Serial Rights

Worthwhile to buy non-exclusivity

When you aren’t an employee, the employer is not obligated to take care of you

Pay rates for online work is now much less

Jen’s Notes from a Hired Pen
Check the per hour rate
Jen’s best paying client is 50 cents a word
Newbies tend to work for lower rates
See yourself as a premium brand
Be sure to define your terms!

Newbies are getting social media/content marketing jobs

Is freelancing now more marketing than writing?

Ethics

New York Times Ethics Guide
Use common sense and take questions to your editor
Protocol with accepting freebies and gifts
ACA/Obamacare’s effect on freelancers

Now guaranteed coverage, if you can pay
As a freelancer, you are starting a company of one
Today’s high student loan debt is a major issue
Are many publications open with their pay rates?

Rise of digital publications

Yahoo News
The Atlantic’s Quartz
Vox
The Intercept
Grantland
Bleacher Report
“Don’t save the newspaper, save the news”

The CIO.com gig taught Jen that:

Her major selling point was being proficient at concise and clear copy
Passion projects can be funded by other types of writing
How to specialize?

Start by finding your niche
Community driven by the internet age
Start with something you already know, but with an edge
Art of Nonconformity

Kathleen Tinkel co-produced a fax newsletter for years, MacPrePress, that was extremely valuable and lucrative

The Information by Jessica Lessin

Your blog can be your calling card and an important platform

How to keep up with “the next thing”?

Integrate the global with the specific

Should we get a degree in journalism/writing?

Final thoughts: Make your own path and don’t go into debt

How do freelancers get paid?

Who Pays Writers
Katie Lane episode of the New Disruptors
Deposit your checks
Consider taking a deposit at the beginning of the project
Vet publications and their paying history
ASJA

Publishing your own work has never been easier, but easy is a relative term as co-hosts Glenn Fleishman and Matthew Amster-Burton discuss. Glenn recently produced a hardcover book with ebook and print-on-demand editions. Matthew has a series of ebooks underway. The two have both worked with conventional publishers in the past. The devil is in the many thousands of details: one wrong move and countless hours can be wasted.

Sponsor: This podcast is made possible through the generous support of MailChimp, which is underwriting our first six episodes. MailChimp lets you manage email lists of any size. They also make hats for cats and dogs.

Let us know what you think and your ideas for future shows: send email to listen@periodicalist.com.

Show notes

The Magazine: The Book ultimately appeared in three editions:

Hardcover
Ebook
Createspace (print on demand)

The fork is your enemy.

Matthew's story

Started with Hungry Monkey
Turned rejection into self-publishing
Fan base from Spilled Milk Podcast
Freelance food writer

Things publishers consider:

No guarantee of sales
Niche market is tricky and risky
Profit and loss

The Magazine: The Book:

Subscribers help as patrons
Kickstarter lessons learned: long post-mortem published on Medium
Dance troupe analogy

Know your audience:

Don't overestimate the size of your audience
Don't underestimate the size of your audience

Non-perishable books.

Why crowdfund and not self-fund?

Copyediting expenses
Cover design expenses
Vanity project
Is there another way?
To gauge interest
Pre-sales are awesome
Looks are pretty damn important

Pages from Apple is pretty decent.

The quality of bookiness

Codex
Type
Interface to words and thoughts

Project Gutenberg

Budget needs to cover

Copyediting
Developmental editing
Cover design
Interior design
Software

Glenn's tip: Choose the correct trim size!

Forks galore!

Matthew and Glenn's Saga of Unintended Budget Consequences

Print budget additionally needs to cover:

Printing (for offset)
Shipping (for offset). Note: International shipping will cost a million dollars.
Startup costs (for some print-on-demand providers)
Additional cover and interior design
ISBNs (may also need for ebook)
ISBNs image (EPS, typically)

Kickstarter price discrimination

Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools
Tidbits Publishing
Rewards

Glenn's thoughts on The Magazine: The Book, Year 2.

Amazon's inertia, power and domination

Createspace
Fulfillment by Amazon
Kindle Store

Thoughts on distribution

Print on demand option
Ingram Spark

Glenn's New Disruptors podcast episode with Ada's Bookstore owner

Matthew's new ebook: Child Octopus

Book thoughts: Matthew vs. Glenn

For immortality, choose wisely.