Time Warner in Talks With Meredith, The Latest Magazine Circ Figures, An End to Saturday Mail Delivery, Hearst’s New TV Venture, The NY Times’ Paywall Success Story, 5 Steps to a Streamlined Workflow, TFP DPS Tip: Using a Sidecar File for Metadata Import
Welcome to TFP’s weekly roundup of interesting and noteworthy stories from the publishing world. This week, we’re discussing the latest newsstand and digital magazine sales figures, how the end of USPS Saturday mail delivery will affect magazines, advice on establishing a lean workflow, and more.
- Fortune has reported that Time Warner is in negotiations to sell most of its Time Inc. magazine titles to Meredith Corp. Meredith—publisher of Family Circle and Ladies’ Home Journal, among others—would gain titles such as People, InStyle, and Real Simple, with Time Warner retaining Time, Sports Illustrated, and Fortune.
- Numbers released last week by the Alliance for Audited Media for the second half of 2012 point to stable magazine circulation, with declines in newsstand sales balanced by growth in digital and print subscriptions. Although digital replica editions still account for just 2.4% of total circulation, some titles, such as Cosmo and Maxim, saw bigger gains.
- The U.S. Postal Service’s plan to drop Saturday delivery in August was not welcome news to many magazine publishers, particularly weeklies that count on getting their issues to subscribers for weekend reading. The news came sooner than expected for some, who will now need to adjust production schedules and shift some content to online.
- Hearst Magazines President David Carey acknowledges that although younger women have remained strong magazine consumers, attracting younger males has been a challenge. But maybe Hearst’s new Esquire Network—a cable channel aimed at “modern men”—along with a new responsive design strategy will help give its magazines a boost.
- The New York Times paywall success continues, with the paper reporting a 64% increase in digital subscribers over the past year. Meanwhile, the Times fixed a hole in its paywall this week that had allowed non-subscribers to bypass a 10-story limit online.
- TFP’s Founder and CEO, Margot Knorr Mancini, outlines common ruts that workgroups can fall into and suggests five basic steps that are critical to maintaining a lean, mean, content-positive workflow. Give them a try and let us know your results!
- On TFP’s DPS Tips blog, learn how to streamline metadata input by using of a single XML file called a sidecar to add and manage properties in all the articles in a folio.
This Week in Publishing appears every Friday on the TFP blog. Every week we compile interesting and noteworthy stories from the publishing world and put together a wrap-up to help our readers stay up-to-date. Think we missed something great? Leave a comment below and let us know.
Posted by: Gina Barrett