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Link Roundup: Rethinking Publishing’s Business Model
1. A lot of magazines are thinking about raising their rates, Stephanie Clifford writes in the New York Times, in an effort to offset the decline in advertising. Some publications have cut prices to pump up circulation (Parents, Elle’s, Fortune, and Fitness dropped between 34-51% each), while some have had great luck taking precisely the opposite tack. The Economist is up to $7/issue and $100/year, while its circulation has increased by 60% since 2004. (Its reputation has likewise climbed in the same period—it’s an unexpectedly hip publication.) Also more expensive while experiencing increases in circulation: People, The New Yorker, Real Simple, Cosmopolitan, and Vanity Fair. I guess VQR was just ahead of the curve when we raised our rates a year and a half ago.
2. Fans of the Oakes twins’ art will enjoy Make magazine’s video of them employing their concave easel. If you have no idea of what I’m talking about, read Lawrence Weschler’s profile of them in our current issue, recover from having your mind blown, and then watch the video.
3. VQR contributor Ashley Gilbertson has a photoessay in Time about the high rate of suicide among military recruiters. The high-pressure job and the prevalence of PTSD among combat veterans serving as recruiters make one of the safest jobs in the military surprisingly deadly. If you haven’t already, be sure to read Ashley’s “Last Photographs” and “The Life and Lonely Death of Noah Pierce,” each of which have won many accolades. Also, I recorded an interview with Ash in December, in which we discussed suicide among recent combat veterans.
5. Blogger Keith Montesano interviews Jennifer Chang about History of Anonymity, which we published as a part of the VQR Poetry Series.
6. poetry.LA videotapes poets giving readings in Southern California, and then shares them on the internet. You can start with Poet Laureate Kay Ryan reading in San Clemente last year.
7. Several media executives have teamed up to establish a single-sign-in industry-wide micropayment system for media outlets. This is fundamentally an a) antitrust and b) technological task. That former Solicitor General Theodore Olson is on the company’s board is a good sign regarding the former, but the finesse required for the latter may be underestimated by this crew.