One of the first shakeouts in this new, lean world of magazine publishing has emerged and ironically it is one that was supposed to herald the dawn of a new approach to magazine publishing.
According to the Wall Street Journal, 8020 Media, the publisher of a pair of titles using an integrative approach, has gone belly-up. The San Francisco based company published JPG, a photography magazine and Everywhere, a travel magazine, that both relied on the input of its readers to determine the content of the magazines. Voters helped determine which stories and photographs made the cut by registering their choices on the magazines' website.
It was smart. It was new. It was popular and engaging and it was cheap. Contributors even received a small fee for their work. So why did it fail?
Advertising, or rather lack thereof. Mitchell Fox, chief executive of 8020 Media, said that the company's experiments proved his mission, that "mass collaboration and participation" can indeed be the foundation of a new type of media but that advertising revenues for all types of media were down.
It is a shame especially since I am all about rooting for any type of new media that breaks the mold and stretches the boundaries of publishing. Let's hope that someone else picks up the ball and runs with it.
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