AllThingsD » Andy Serwer

Why Fortune's Apple Story is AWOL from the Web–And Why You Can Buy It on Amazon

Peter Kafka — Mon, 09 May 2011 10:30:52 +0000

Last week, Fortune published a deep dive into Apple, then made sure that many people who would care about it couldn’t read it: The story was available in the magazine’s print and iPad editions, but not on the Web.

Instead, tech bloggers quickly devoured the piece and spat it back up, in chunks, on their own sites. And even if they were inclined to, they couldn’t point their readers to the source material.

What were Fortune’s managers thinking about? Quite a bit.

“This is an entirely new experiment,” says Dan Roth, managing editor of Fortune Digital. “We’re trying to figure out the best way of releasing journalism online.”

The short version: Fortune will eventually make the story available, for free, on the Web. But first it’s going to see if it can use Adam Lashinsky’s piece to generate more than just eyeballs. Perhaps even cash.

In the past, Fortune would have published the Apple story online last Thursday, at the same time the magazine was showing up on newsstands and in mailboxes.

Instead, the magazine teased the piece with a post from Fortune.com Apple blogger Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Saturday, telling print subscribers they could read the full story on Fortune’s iPad app for free. And that everyone else could either sign up for a $20 subscription–which would give them access to the app–or buy an individual iPad edition for $4.99.

Fortune hasn’t been able to pull this off until this week. It’s the first time the magazine has been able to offer its iPad app to print subscribers for free, via a pact that parent company Time Inc. just struck with Apple.

Roth says the main idea behind gating the story on the iPad app is to give print subscribers a bonus for their patronage. Or to make them feel like they weren’t dummies.

“There was this feeling that we’re sort of pissing off our subscribers,” by publishing the magazine’s best stories on the Web, often before paying customers got their hands on them, he says. “The problem was there wasn’t anything we could have offered them before.”

And if Fortune can sell some subscriptions or app downloads, even better. Over the weekend, Fortune tracked 1,400 referral visits to its subscription page from Elmer-DeWitt’s post, and another 1,000 visits to the app’s iTunes preview page. Roth says he hasn’t seen iTunes sales numbers yet.

Starting this morning, a small slice of the Apple piece will show up on Fortune.com, but that will be another teaser promoting the iPad app. If you really want to read the story and don’t want to wait–or shell out for an issue or a subscription–you’ll have another option, too: It’s now available as a $0.99 Kindle “single” on Amazon, too.

But won’t anyone who wants to read the story be able to read it for free via the tech blogs?

Well, yes. Maybe. That’s sort of the test.

Magazine employees have reached out to handful of bloggers who they think have lifted too much of Lashinsky’s story. They’re particularly sensitive about reproductions of a painstakingly created Apple org chart. (Sorry! Fixed!)

But Roth, along with Fortune managing editor Andy Serwer, assumed that parts of the story would get prominent Web play. Their bet is that most of Fortune’s audience will be interested in reading a really good Apple story, but not enough to seek out a summarized version on someone else’s site.

“I think that our readers, for the most part, aren’t necessarily going to Techmeme and reading the tech blogs”, Roth says.”A lot of them are. But not most of them. And this is the kind of thing that people will really want to read all of, and pass it along to friends.”

But then again, they’re not really sure. Hence the experiment. “None of us have any idea what works and what doesn’t work anymore.”

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Disclosure: I worked with Dan for a few months way back in the late 1990s, and he interviewed me when he wrote about my last employer a couple years ago. It’s a good read.

Time Inc.'s Newest Product: A Magazine, Printed on Paper

Peter Kafka — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 16:01:45 +0000

Time Inc.’s newest product took nine months of meticulous work, carefully calibrated focus groups and a bunch of money. And it has absolutely nothing to do with the Internet, the Kindle or the iPad.

Time Warner’s (TWX) magazine unit is showing off a redesign of Fortune magazine, which should be in subscribers’ hands shortly and on newsstands next week.

Like every other business magazine, Fortune took a pretty good beating from the one-two punch of the recession and traditional media collapse. And I don’t think overhauling the way its pages look and feel will do much to change that.

But it’s still interesting to hear editor Andy Serwer explain why he thinks it’s important, and he was kind enough to chat with me about that the other day.

Note how emphatic Serwer is about the standalone status of Fortune as a print product. The periodical is starting to overhaul its neglected Web site as well, and Serwer pays obligatory lip service to the notion of Fortune on Apple’s (AAPL) iPad, Amazon’s (AMZN) Kindle and other digital platforms of the future.

But he’s clear that the magazine’s success or failure will depend on how readers and advertisers respond to the pen-and-ink product it is selling in the present tense.

Not revelatory, but a good reminder.

[ See post to watch video ]

iMeme Fa So La Ti Do

Kara Swisher — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 11:12:36 +0000

I stopped into the iMeme: The Thinkers of Tech conference, put on by Fortune magazine yesterday and today in San Francisco, and ran into a passel of the Internet regulars, talking about–you guessed it–the Internet.

You got your John Chambers of Cisco, you got your Sheryl Sandberg of Google, you got your Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com, you got your Jeff Weiner of Yahoo–and you’ve got yourself a digital partay.

A lot of people were blabbing about the latest bubble rumor that Microsoft was considering offering $6 billion to purchase Facebook. Yes, the No. 2 (by far) social-networking company that could, making the definitive leader MySpace worth, like, a kabillion.

Here is my little video of the event, as I chat with conference organizer David Kirkpatrick and Fortune magazine editor Andy Serwer (with whom I went to the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where we both did precisely nothing).

I also play a little word association–$6 billion, being the key one–with Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi and the obviously-weary-of-me Facebook PR maven Brandee Barker.

[ See post to watch video ]