Friday, August 21, 2009
World of Warcraft Jumps Into Print
You might think that starting a brand-new, high-quality, full-glossy magazine in one of the worst publishing environments in years would be a suicidal business idea.
You might think that starting a brand-new, high-quality, full-glossy magazine in one of the worst publishing environments in years would be a suicidal business idea.
Considering the magazine-heavy resume of The Daily Beast founder Tina Brown, it stands to reason the Web publisher would take her cues from that world.
Time Warner’s hiring of Tim Armstrong to run AOL is, to misquote another Armstrong, a small step for AOL but a giant leap for Time Warner.
Whether or not the former Google executive can turn around the AOL business, his hiring clearly sets up AOL to be spun off. That is a step Time Warner must take, having wasted years trying to fix or find a buyer for AOL.
Like Napoleon marching into an abandoned Moscow, Larry Page and Sergey Brin have led Google’s advance into traditional advertising only to find nothing to loot. Now begins Google’s long imperial retreat, starting with 40 layoffs. But the real cut here is to Google’s ambitions.
Wired didn’t even bother with a Beta release. It bustled onto the publishing scene 15 years ago this month, chirping like a broken modem and shrink-wrapped as a point release: Issue 1.1. Peeling back those matte pages now, one can’t help falling victim to a bit of nostalgia for this town crier of the proto-digital era. There was no logical reason that this magazine should even have existed in 1993. Clinton/Gore had just been sworn in, and no one was talking about the “Information Superhighway” yet. Words like baud and Usenet and ISDN hadn’t even been surrendered to the dustbin of digital history.
Companies are increasingly being asked to calculate their carbon footprint, and if they’re public, publish it. Good idea? Perhaps. But it’s harder than you might think, and the results can sometimes be counterintuitive. Take my own industry, magazine publishing. Surely dead-tree media is bad for the climate, and Web media is good, right? Well, not necessarily.
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