"Broken" and "malfunctioning" business models were in the news last week, with both terms being applied to different parts of the publishing industry.
Rupert Murdoch's comments on the value of content, and the potential end to the era of free access to his newspapers' websites, chimed perfectly with much of the debate at the FIPP World Magazine Conference. In fact, during the FIPP event Cathie Black president of Hearst Magazines made an impassioned plea to the audience, saying "we cannot allow the [negative] message about the future of newspapers to bleed onto the future of magazines", and urged magazine professionals to collectively talk to their advertisers about the magic of magazines.
Guardian Media Group chief Carolyn McCall said traffic was not a fair swap for revenue, describing it as "crazy" that others, the most obvious example being Google, benefit from publishers' "extremely expensive" investment in journalism and content creation while the media owners gain no revenue. She confirmed that Autotrader and Guardian Jobs are both making money online. The main Guardian website - widely viewed as the best and most successful national newspaper website - is not yet profitable. Though McCall did put this down to the way the group accounts for its online revenues.
Forbes Media president and CEO James Spanfeller gave an honest assessment, saying that it was hard to see how any semi-general editorial product would be able to charge for content on the web, and provided the following priceless quote: "I don't know if we're going to get that pony back in the barn".
While e-readers were discussed as a potential threat to magazines, they are of course also a potential revenue stream and these devices, as well as mobile content, are areas of considerable interest for publishers as the mechanisms exist to monetise their content via such means.
"Monetise" being one of the most oft-quoted words of the conference, together with "media agnostic". The message from numerous publishers was that if the best "surface" for a magazine to be published on turns out to be Amazon's Kindle, then so be it.
Emerging markets are of course of great interest to many publishers, and representatives from India, China and Brazil all emphasised their determination not to make the same mistakes as their colleagues in the developed economies.
In China, for example, there are more than twice as many mobile phone users (some 700m and counting) as internet users, and a mobile phone newspaper service that only launched last year already has revenues of $2bn, according to Hugo Shong, a founder of IDGVC Partners.
Roberto Civita, chairman and editor-in-chief at Brazilian publishing giant Abril pointed to competition regulations in Europe and the US that made it impossible for publishers to co-operate in formulating an industry-wide charging model. He quipped: "We don't have this legislation yet in Brazil and we're thinking of getting together. We have to act before the regulators do."
He was joking, but for publishers the challenge lies in persuading an entire generation of readers who have grown up with the internet free-for-all that high value content has to be paid for somehow.
