HIGHLIGHTS FROM DAY THREE: TUESDAY, OCTOBER 30

General Sessions

Keynote

David Verklin, CEO of Carat Americas

David Verklin kicked off the last day of the American Magazine Conference Tuesday morning by giving magazine publishers three pieces of advice in this extremely challenging and exciting time in the industry:

1. Embrace the “click.”

2. Take a deep breath. It’s going to be all right. In fact, it’s going to be great.

3. Study the world around you, the world beyond magazines, and how consumers are getting their information.

Verklin went on to share a vision of the near future when consumers would obtain information and act upon it using many different forms of media. He predicted that his vision could arrive in 18 to 24 months.

While many are already in the game, publishers need to go even further in their digital efforts, said Verklin. He told the story of social-network Facebook’s three-year rise to power. “The people here have been in the social networking business for more than 50 years,” he said, saying Facebook had basically taken a page of the magazine-publishing handbook: create an engaged community. Verklin urged publishers to use Facebook rather than view it as a foe. He suggested editors having Facebook pages or magazines creating Facebook widgets, somehow tapping into the millions of global visitors to Facebook each day.

Verklin also sees opportunities in virtual worlds, such as Second Life, where Carat helped Reebok establish a presence and sell more than 30,000 pairs of shoes. “Are you selling subscriptions to Second Life residents?” Verklin asked. “Has your editor ever spoken at a Second Life event? Second Life isn’t a foe. It’s an ally.”

Another example Verklin cited are Webkinz, which are stuffed animals that kids can care for online as virtual pets. “You’re giving an inanimate object life,” Verklin said. “Can the online world bring a magazine’s content to life? Could a publisher create a similar world to their subscriber’s children?”

Verklin went on to say that mobile is a very necessary part of the technology picture as well. He said that by 2010, there are expected to be more than four billion mobile devices worldwide. Marketers are finding effective ways to engage on mobile.

Where Is Magazine Measurement Headed?

Moderator: Brenda White, VP and Publishing Activation Officer, Starcom USA (left)

Panelists:
Dr. Julian Baim, EVP and Chief Research Officer, Mediamark Research & Intelligence (2nd from right)
Tom Robinson, Managing Directo, Afinity LLC (2nd from left)
Ken Wollenberg, Chief Operating Officer, Simmons Market Research (right)

Magazine measurement is changing rapidly and will continue to do so, according to the “Magazine Measurement” panel at AMC.

Accountability is the key, said moderator Brenda White from Starcom USA, and advertisers are trying to gain a greater sense of that from magazine publishers. “We have a lot of forward momentum now,” she said. “We need to not look for that silver bullet and try different things.”

Julian Baim of Mediamark Research & Intelligence said that his organization is trying to answer the call for more timely information. “There’s a demand for how each issue is doing,” he said. Also, advertisers want measurement to be expanded to include the magazine’s entire brand, whether it be online, in print, or on broadcast.

Simmons’ Kenneth Wollenberg added that ease of use is something that marketers strongly desire.

Tom Robinson said that Affinity has spent time dispelling some long-held myths in the magazine advertising world, such as that the front of the book is better than the back of the book.

Baim noted that MRI obviously found certain celebrities sold better than others, but also that consumers liked the cover subject to match the content of the magazine. “Virginia Tech did horribly for People, but great for TIME and Newsweek,” he added.

Wollenberg commented on how the engagement scale works for different publications, such as ESPN, where the magazine has the most engagement, followed by its website and then its original broadcast entity is third. “Same thing with Oprah,“ he noted. New forms of engagement measurements are constantly being experimented with.

RFID is something that is still in formation, said Baim. “Putting chips in every magazine is somewhat challenging financially,” he said, so his organization may focus that effort on waiting-room copies and test from there.

“It’s important to not just use technology just to use technology,” Wollenberg cautioned.

The Web, User-Generated Content and the Future of Journalism

Moderator: Michael Skoler, Executive Director, Center for Innovation in Journalism at American Public Media (right)

Panelists:
Evan Hansen, Editor-in-Chief, Wired News (left)
Ann Shoket, Editor-in-Chief, Seventeen (center)

User-generated content has been a buzz phrase recently. The American Magazine Conference gathered three people who are leading the charge into this area to help explain how magazine publishers can make this concept a reality.

Michael Skoler from the Center for Innovation in Journalism at American Public Media was one of the earliest proponents of user-generated content, and he chronicled his use of the form—from inviting people to attempt to balance government budgets online to gathering information about proposed stories.

First the organization invited people through radio to go to the website, where there was a healthy stock of different “games” to play, from measuring one's environmental footprint to figuring out health-insurance issues. Game usage and demographic information is gathered and sometimes stories come out of the information generated from the game’s themselves. With a growing database of people, Skoler could send out information about different potential stories to targeted groups for feedback and also has a built-in group of sources when there is breaking news. Each person is tracked with demographic information and a tracking of every point of contact the person has ever had with the site all in one document.

Seventeen’s Ann Shoket has 13 million potential partners to work with in her readership. One way she’s leveraging that is by picking 15 of them and giving them video cameras to blog and video blog their way through their first year of college on MySpace. “We’ve made a partner out of someone who could be a competitor,” she said of MySpace. “We’ve gone where our users are and we’ve put our brand right into where they already are. It’s a very intimate connection.” She also noted what she finds to work best in user-created content is to set up the scenario and then get out of the way and let the content flow.

Evan Hansen of Wired News shared that his organization is using user-generated content in many ways and has used it to break stories, since the Wired audience is very dedicated and knowledgeable. Two of the title’s best covers this year involved “How Tos,” so Hansen’s team created How To wikis and let the users create from there. Blogs on the site also offer lots of room for comments and have many return visitors who have created their own communities.



Editors' Interstitials:
What Worked for Me, What Didn't, What's Next

Gayle Butler, Editor-in-Chief, Better Homes & Gardens (center)
Steve Madden, VP and Editor-in-Chief, Rodale Bicycling Group (left)
Sid Evans, Editor-in-Chief, Garden & Gun (right)

The recurring theme in each editor's interstitial presentation is the focus on the consumer.

For Gayle Butler, who launched a redesigned Better Homes & Gardens in February 2007, it was a matter of determining who her readers were, and in this case, they were women passionate about the home and garden, so the title was re-crafted to speak to those women in language centered around their interests. Besides updating the magazines look, Birnbaum revealed, “We organized our content into distinct chapters that will align with her specific passion points.”

The redesign also involved putting more emphasis surrounding the reader with “refreshing ideas,” and providing those ideas when, where and however a reader may want them. Those tools include online and mobile recipe search, an extensive online photo archive, and various outlets that emphasize green living—from the magazine to a community-driven “Living Green” website, and even to a showcase home equipped with appliances and engineering that could help facilitate green living.

Steve Madden described Bicycling’s BikeTown project, which came out of a need to spread the word about the benefits—from health to environmental impact—of bicycling.  Madden’s team initially asked readers in Portland, Maine to write essays to about what they’d do with a free bike. Residents responded well, earning the use of free bikes courtesy of the Bicycling, and one of the magazine’s reporters was assigned to monitor the use of those bikes during a summer. The program was an overwhelming success—leading to weight loss, renewed health, reunited families, and much more.

More BikeTowns have since been spawned. Participants have a website where they can talk to each other. Bicycling gave them GPS devices to map their favorite trails, as well as a video camera so they can upload movies onto the website.  Benefits that followed were advertisers; Bicycling’s received a boost in press coverage; bicycle manufacturers wanted to sponsor bikes for the program; and new potential readers were exposed to the magazine.

Sid Evans was most recently Editor-in-Chief of Field & Stream, where he helped turned the magazine from “the voice of God”—telling people exactly what to do, to “the voice of our readers,” as the previous stance didn’t seem to work well on its own anymore in the current age.  “We turned it from a monologue to a dialogue so that we’re constantly having a conversation with them.”

The magazine has since branched beyond reader letters, which was the only place where the reader used to be present in the magazine, to a variety of platforms that elevated their status as vital contributors to the conversation. Reader stories now appear as magazine features. “People love to see themselves in the magazine, more so than online,” said Evans. 

Field & Stream also started utilizing their readers as product testers, a mutually beneficial relationship where the magazine would get reviews and the readers would get free goods.  Online, readers could contribute to blogs and upload to photo galleries. Additionally, readers also got a chance to be on TV via Field & Stream’s competitive reality show called “The Total Outdoorsman Challenge” that aired on the Versus network. “It’s basically ‘American’ Idol for hunters and fishermen,” Evans quipped, adding, "Idolize your readers and they are going to idolize you."

Keynote: The Future of Social Networking

Reid Hoffman (right), Chairman and President, Products, LinkedIn, interviewed by Josh Quittner (left), Executive Editor, Fortune

Select quotes from the interview:

Josh Quittner: You’re an investor in everything.

Reid Hoffman: Well…everything good.

RH: Social networks are platforms. You can make a variety of applications and build it on top of the platforms.

RH: Advertising is successful when it is like content…But banners are not interesting.

RH: Web 1.0 USG (user-generated content) was message boards. There was a lot of flaming. Now, it’s much more responsible.

JQ: Privacy and anonymity are old man’s concerns.

RH: I am a strong believer that there will be multiple social networks.

RH: If you look for a zero-risk way of doing business, you will probably fail.

RH: All innovators have moments of “oops!” But don’t be afraid to take risks.

Keynote: Insights from Google

Eileen Naughton, Director, Media Platforms, Google

“Don’t be scared of Google!” is the advice Eileen Naughton gave her former magazine colleagues.  “Their ‘Don’t Be Evil’ company motto is real.”

As a senior Time Inc. executive, Naughton had chaired AMC when it was last in Boca Raton, in 2004.  From her current perch at Google, she’s been able to discern how different the digital landscape has become since her magazine days, and how her company can help magazines succeed.

Social networking is now the norm, media is on demand all the time, and 1.2 billion people around the world are connected to the Internet.  The web is the fastest growing medium, proving “disruptive to established media,” noted Naughton,

Search taps into a core human behavior.  85% of Americans use it, and it is a proxy for brand vitality.  By the end of 2005 more people were searching for blogs than magazines.  Naughton conveyed that one might think of smaller magazines on the “long tail” and bigger magazines at the head of the tail—but the fact is, all magazines are on the tail, and Google, Yahoo, etc. are at the head.

Social networking now represents half of all traffic on the web.  Successful media sites, such as The Knot and Epicurious, have capitalized on creating communities around their content.

Other advice:

• Let search engines find your content! Don’t put it behind fire walls—allow it to be found it “natural” search results.  Also, buy search terms that make sense for your content.
  
• Another model is to “atomize and distribute”, meaning get your content out there by partnering in lots of ways.  It’s the “let 1,000 flowers bloom” model.
  
• Brands live on YouTube.  The next generation of professionally produced video is now here.  If you have video assets get them there.
  
• Consider hyper-syndication of content—like the Feedburner Network.
  
• Use gadgets (weather tools, etc.) for engagement and syndication

 In short, all brand assets should be discoverable.  Publishers should get them on the “Internet Cloud.”

Green Goes Mainstream

Moderator: Alan Weisman, Author, The World Without Us (2nd from left)

Panelists:
Deborah Jones Barrow, Founder, TheDailyGreen.com (far left)
Claudia Malley, VP and U.S. Publisher, National Geographic (far right)
Urvashi Rangan, Senior Scientist and Policy Analyst, Consumers Union (3rd from right)
Mark Spellun, Foudner and Editor-in-Chief, Plenty (3rd from left)
Bryan Welch, Publisher and Editorial Director, Ogden Publications, Inc. (2nd from right)

“We wouldn’t have been up on this stage a year ago,” said Deborah Jones Barrow of The Daily Green.com.  “There’s been a cultural tipping point.”

Given the overwhelming complexities of our environmental footprint on this planet, it’s to be expected that this panel discussion shifted between grand pronouncements on the fate of the human race and, by comparison, the somewhat mundane details of creating magazines for a growing body of concerned readers.

Moderator Alan Weisman set the tone when he opened with what he called his bombshell: “Every four days, there are one million more of us on this planet.  How much can it take, and in the face of population explosion, what can any of us really do?”

Magazines can play a valuable role in the answer—by providing content and guidance to the people who’d like to be forces of change.

Daily Green: We’re a website on purpose, though the web is of course not without energy use.  But printed magazines can also move toward more sustainable papers and inks.

National Geographic: These are big issues, complex and multilayered, and we want to give consumers in-depth information. 

Consumers Union: We’re keeping a watch on the market.  Not all claims of green can be trusted.  Our no-advertising policy allows us the freedom to get at the truth behind the claims.

Plenty: We’re providing a voice for the Green Movement that believes that we can have plenty…if we rely on sustainable, renewable resources like wind and solar power.

Ogden: We have a major puzzle to solve as a species gifted with the ability to see into and affect our own future.  We need to find a way to sustain economic prosperity without the traditional growth that comes with growing populations, which is at the heart of the problem. 

Ultimately, all the panelists were united in the belief that without a sense of optimism and faith that they could make a difference, people who would otherwise care deeply would become disengaged.  At their collective magazines and properties, they each work to bolster, inform, and inspire the growing population.

Unlocking the Secrets of Circulation Success

Moderator: Christie Hefner, Chairman and CEO, Playboy Enterprises Inc. (left)

Panelists:
Michela O'Connor Abrams, President and Publisher, Dwell (2nd from right)
Peggy Northrup, Editor-in-Chief, More (2nd from left)
Paul Rossi, Publisher, North America, The Economist (right)

Brief highlights:

Dwell: We put our reader at the center of everything we do and that has been our key success driver.  Editors are to be trusted and respected but the business side should have final say on the cover.  However, honor your core brand assets.  For example, though we have many celebrity readers, we would never use them on the cover, despite the increased sales that might bring for that issue.  It would not be true to who we are.  Product extensions, such as our pre-fab homes, have driven new readers to our site that would never have found us otherwise.

 More: Events have allowed us to tap into the connection with our readers and greatly drive circulation. We’ve also used email newsletters to great advantage.

The Economist: The Church-and-State silos are completely intact at The Economist.  Our strong voice is what readers have come to expect and seek out.  We’ve used research to our advantage at retail, to get beyond what might seem obvious.  For instance, research told us that our readers shopped at Costco.  They fought us when we wanted to get into their stores and we were armed.  We now sell exceedingly well there.  We just raised our cover price at newsstand because I feel we should value our words more than our advertising.

ASME's Best Cover Competition

With the help of supermodel and activist Petra Nemcova, the American Society of Magazine Editors revealed the winner of its second annual Best Cover Contest, honoring the top covers of the year.

And the winners are...

2007 Cover of the Year	2007 Celebrity Cover of the Year	2007 Concept Cover of the Year
The New Yorker September 11, 2006	Wired August 2006	TIME October 16, 2006
2007 Fashion Cover of the Year	2007 News Cover of the Year	2007 Service Cover of the Year
Harper’s Bazaar February 2007	The New Yorker April 9, 2007	O at Home Winter 2006
2007 Best Coverline
Texas Monthly January 2007	Adi Ignatius, TIME; Petra Nemcova; Jay Lauf, Wired; and Marlene Kahan, ASME
Nemcova with Jack Kliger, Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S. Nemcova with Francoise Mouly, The New Yorker Nemcova with Adi Ignatius, TIME Nemcova with Jay Lauf, Wired

Visit www.magazine.org/bestcover to view the finalists as well as all the entrants by category.