The notebook of the New Product Development team at IPC Media. What we’re thinking, what we’re looking at, who we’re talking to…
I imagine that most of us, even if we don’t actually use it day-to-day as much as we should, are at least familiar with Hitwise and the services it provides for competitive websites.
Still, yesterday’s MAP gathering provided an ample refresher in the shape of Robin Goad, the Director Of Research for Hitwise UK who entertained us for an hour in the lecture theatre with a catch-up of all the stuff Hitwise has to offer. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s come to my attention that the Look cover, which Ali Hall nominated and explained as her Best Cover at the recent IPC Editors’ Conference, goes some way to contradicting the confusion I expressed in the COVER VERSIONS blog.
Kenny Pryde, editor of SuperBike, wrote:
“…we recently listened to an experienced editor explaining that her best cover in 2008 owed a lot to luck. She took a chance on an untried masthead colour, they ‘got lucky’ when the cover star went mental after the cover had gone to the printers and they rather fortuitously had story ‘n’ pics. The mag scored a monster sale, but it’s hard to learn any lessons from that experience.” Read the rest of this entry »
Six months after reports started circulating on the web, October 6 saw the publication of Tina Brown’s latest venture, The Daily Beast.
Brown is, of course, the legendary editor who modernised and turned around the fortunes of The Tatler, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker before her highly-regarded but financially unsuccessful self-started glossy monthly Talk Magazine bit the dust. Read the rest of this entry »
Sorry font nerds I’ve been a bit too busy to hunt out any new fonts. However this has just popped into my inbox and it’s free! (well some of the weights). Check it out it’s called Museo and looks pretty modern and groovy…
Jean-Paul Edwards from the agency Manning Gottlieb OMD spoke across a broad range of topics, giving a great overview of where he felt technology was taking the media market. The stand-out point I took from his speech was a metaphor he used about the fragmentation of the ‘media landscape’. He spoke of a ‘media landscape’ or ‘media ecosystem’ which was like an African savanna which has now, because it is digital, become a rain forest. This means that the big beasts of the savanna are the BBC (the big old elephant) and News Corp (the lion)… I don’t want to labour this metaphor… you get the point. Still a digital rain forest is full of lots of little animals multiplying in the trees. Read the rest of this entry »
Just had a discussion with my manager about the anxiety of modern fathers over the fact that the creative skills children are developing these days are to do with the intangible virtual interactions, whereas my youth was about making stuff, physical interactions. There is a lot of anxiety about this gap, especially for the generation who broke things in dad’s shed, or garage. That’s actually everybody except the current batch. It seems very different to sitting on the floor with a Playstation. But I often wonder what being creative now requires, and does working in a purely electronic way, sitting at a desk peering at a monitor, hinder my creativity? Should I be sketching more? Read the rest of this entry »
Voted as such by the mysterious IPC Editors’ Group, Cover Of The Month is no more or less accurate than any other judging process. But the winner is always good, as demonstrated by this outstanding Living etc cover. Here are 7 reasons why it’s so smart:
drawing of cherries
How do you tell when you’ve become set in your creative direction? By this I mean the processes, skills, disciplines and behaviour that you employ to be creative. For example wireframe > look and feel > prototype > delivery. These may be some of the creative processes a web designer may use to see a web development project through from beginning to end. Read the rest of this entry »
There’s a top tussle going on today between Apple and the publishers of the music they offer for sale on iTunes.
Here’s what Eliiot Van Buskirk wrote on Wired about it:
“Apple have threatened to close down the iTunes music store if an obscure three-person board appointed by the Librarian of Congress increase the royalties paid to publishers and songwriters by six cents per song.
“The Copyright Royalty Board is scheduled to hand down its decision on these rates by Thursday. As part of their general muscle-flexing of late, music publishers asked the board to increase the royalties paid to publishers and songwriters for the sale of digital downloads from 9 cents to 15 cents per song. Read the rest of this entry »
The notion of ‘push’ is when you push your content towards an audience who may or may not be aware of its existence. In a ‘pull’ environment the consumer pulls their content towards themselves because they are interested in it. Read the rest of this entry »