First off: I can reassure all my readers that I will not be coming out with an opus on Yahoo’s turmoil in 2012. Nor rounding out a trilogy of books on AOL in 2013, for that matter, full of lessons learned and bridges burned.

But that’s not true for other players in Silicon Valley, including three sure-to-be prominent books coming out in the next three months.

First off, on Jan. 25, will be the work of Fortune magazine writer Adam Lashinsky, who turned his cover story on the inside workings of Apple into a book called … “Inside Apple.”

The subtitle, “How America’s Most Admired — and Secretive — Company Really Works,” promises the “secret systems, tactics and leadership strategies that allowed Steve Jobs and his company to churn out hit after hit and inspire a cult-like following for its products.”

Apparently, we’re all about to find out about concepts like the “DRI” — or assigning a Directly Responsible Individual to every task (which I call DYS, or Do Your Story, here at AllThingsD); and the Top 100, “an annual ritual in which 100 up-and-coming executives are tapped a la Skull & Bones for a secret retreat with company founder Steve Jobs.”

Sadly, not anymore on that retreat, but I am still looking forward to reading more about the management techniques of the late tech visionary.

On Valentines Day, well-known VC, entrepreneur and Start-Up Whisperer Reid Hoffman’s book with co-author Ben Casnocha also comes out, touting lessons from Silicon Valley.

Titled “The Start-up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career,” it is described as a “blueprint for thriving in your job and career in today’s challenging world of work by applying the lessons of Silicon Valley’s most innovative entrepreneurs.”

Let’s hope it’s not the dudes from Color handing out the advice!

According to the authors, “the key is to manage your career as if it were a start-up business: a living, breathing, growing start-up of you.”

If I were a start-up, I would sell virtual doughnuts. Hey Reid, gimme a badillion dollars!

Finally, on March 12, the grumpy investor Peter Thiel teams with entrepreneur Max Levchin and chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov for “The Blueprint: Reviving Innovation, Rediscovering Risk, and Rescuing the Free Market.”

It’s funny that they, and also Hoffman, are using the hopelessly analog term “blueprint,” but I like the retro feel.

No surprise, Thiel’s posse is unhappy with the pace of innovation, presumably underwhelmed by “Plants vs. Zombies” compared to the internal combustion engine.

“Challenging the notion that we are living in an age of technological progress, three of the world’s most original thinkers demonstrate that we have become a risk-averse society, hobbled by tort laws and government regulations, short-term financial thinking, and mind-numbing complacency,” the book’s description reads. “Eager to end ‘paper entrepreneurialism’ and avoid another financial meltdown, they propose that we expand research and development in breakthrough ‘disruptive technologies,’ create millions of jobs through science-based engineering and genuine innovation, shore up our crumbling infrastructure, stop squandering money on misspent ‘horizontal education,’ and restore financial discipline.”

Phew! And here I was very pleased that I can Instagram filtered pictures of my dinner last night around the world.

In any case, before the zombies arrive to steal them, get your brains ready to think big thoughts.

Remember when Fortune magazine wrote in September that Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg had reportedly bagged a bison as part of a “personal challenge” to eat only what he had killed?

Well, proof of that is hard to miss, now that the ginormous mounted head of said dead bison has been hung on the wall of a Facebook conference room used by the social networking site’s COO Sheryl Sandberg.

Zuckerberg placed it there recently as a prank, to surprise his top exec with the installation of the very hairy bison when she was away from Facebook’s Silicon Valley HQ.

And surprised she was when she got back and was faced with the creature, which pretty much takes up the whole room, as you can see above and below.

(And, let me just say on a personal level, like a digital version of the “Murder She Wrote” lady, solving the mystery of this geek-on-bison killing is a whole lot more satisfying than getting a pile of internal Yahoo memos.)

The bison has now been nicknamed Billy and also sports a Facebook-branded baseball cap and occasional hoodie — natch! (My suggestion if you want to use a dead beast metaphor most effectively here would be to clad it all in Google swag.)

While he never confirmed it, Zuckerberg had teased the crowd about the possibility of his hunting prowess at the f8 developers conference this fall in his keynote speech, displaying his Facebook page that had a picture of what he had tagged “Bison Burgers.”

In fact, it’s been quite a lot of bison for the famous entrepreneur since he felled the majestic beast. According to Wikipedia, bison usually weigh 700 to 2,200 pounds, but can be as much as 3,800 pounds. That’s a lot of burgers!

To get them, Zuckerberg learned the most humane approach and then shot the beast in California, after obtaining a hunting license and, presumably, a very big gun.

Clearly, he was serious when he told Fortune in May that “the only meat I’m eating is from animals I’ve killed myself.” Among the early victims, which grew in size, were a lobster, a chicken, a pig and a goat.

At this time, the Winklevii are still roaming the plains — and it would be illegal and just plain mean on Zuckerberg’s part to frag them any more than he already has.

So, he went for the bison, the next biggest beast in his cross-hairs.

Its head will be moved to Facebook’s new headquarters today along with the rest of the company, who will now work in spacious new digs.

Which, I am told, could easily fit a herd of elephants — but let’s not go there.

Folks are getting worked up about a Fortune magazine piece that speculates on what a Bill Gates comeback might look like and suggests the billionaire is pondering such a move.

But there’s no truth to that, according to Larry Cohen, Gates’s chief of staff, who I just chatted with by phone.

In fact, Gates does part-time work for Microsoft and has ever since stepping away from his day job there. But his full-time gig is as a philanthropist overseeing the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

In March of 2010 , the New York Times used the ju-jitsu theme to depict the fight between Google and Apple over smartphones. As you can see below, the late Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs faces off with an iPad and iPhone against then-CEO (and now Executive Chairman) Eric Schmidt, who is armed with an Android device.

Jobs gets to do the cool, in-the-air kick.

Now, this week, on the cover of Fortune magazine, it is Facebook’s CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg doing the floating hi-yaaa against Google CEO and co-founder Larry Page.

Leaving aside the fact that neither ever wears suits to do anything, let alone karate, it’s almost exactly the same, as you can see below.

Personally, I would have used Nerf guns at dawn.

Following Zuckerberg in the No. 2 spot is Google CEO Larry Page, who’s been broken out from his usual pairing with co-founder Sergey Brin. Brin’s down at No. 11 this year, followed by fellow Googler Marissa Mayer at No. 20.

Entirely absent from the 2011 list are Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone, who shared the No. 3 spot in 2010. They’ve since left the company and are back undercover working on new start-up projects together at Obvious.

Other featured techies this year include Jack Dorsey of Square and Twitter (8), Spotify’s Daniel Ek (18), Groupon’s Andrew Mason (27), Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley (28), Dropbox’s Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowski (29), Facebook’s Carolyn Everson (35), Opower’s Dan Yates and Alex Laskey (36), and Instagram’s Kevin Systrom (39).

The 40 under 40 issue hits newsstands on Oct. 24.

That poor little bird.

The famous Twitter bird, I mean, which is getting yet another drubbing on another magazine cover.

When last we checked in with the tweetie icon, he (his name is, apparently, Larry) was on a crutch and all bandaged up on the front of Fortune under the inevitable title: “Trouble@Twitter.”

Inside, there was also an illustration of the bird with a rocket strapped to his back going the wrong way.

Is this bird Wile E. Coyote or what?

Now, New York magazine has the bird as an obese beached whale with the cover line: “twitter #toobigtosucceed?”

I wonder when, if and when the start-up starts to score big results, there will be a Twitter bird with really big muscles.

Or more likely, because Larry is getting unfairly abused, if all does not go well for the San Francisco company, a Twitter bird with X’s for eyes.

I am calling fowl.

Today, Fortune magazine released its annual “50 Most Powerful Women in Business” and, as usual, it had its share of tech execs on the list.

And off it, too — first and foremost being ousted Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, who was jacked completely from her 2010 No. 10 rank. She was No. 8 in 2009.

In her place: Newly designated Hewlett-Packard CEO and former eBay CEO Meg Whitman grabbed the No. 9 spot.

Also on the list: fast-rising IBM sales, marketing and strategy exec Ginni Rometty at No. 7; Xerox CEO Ursula Burns at No. 8; Oracle President and CFO Safra Catz at No. 11; Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg at No. 12; Google execs Susan Wojcicki and Marissa Mayer at No. 28 and No. 38, respectively; IBM North America GM Bridget Van Kralingen at No. 39; and Best Buy Americas President Shari Ballard.

Catz was the highest paid of the group, with $42.1 million in total 2010 compensation.

And also taken off this year: 2010 No. 14, HP’s Ann Livermore, who left her top job there, but still is on the tech giant’s board; 2010 No. 28 Cathie Lesjak, CFO of HP; 2010 No. 44 Lorrie Norrington, a former president at eBay; and Apple’s communications head Katie Cotton (she was robbed!), who was No. 50 in 2010.

The new list will be in the magazine on Monday, which is when a related conference will take place in Southern California. (I will also be in attendance there, along with other less powerful ladies.)

Whitman is scheduled to speak at the conference in the afternoon on Tuesday, October 4.

Adam Lashinsky, Fortune magazine’s high-profile Silicon Valley reporter, will be penning a book titled “Inside Apple: How America’s Most Admired — and Secretive — Company Really Works.”

An expansion of a well-read article that Lashinsky wrote for the publication earlier this year, the book will be available on Jan. 18, 2012 from Business Plus, an imprint of Hachette Book Group.

Lashinsky’s will be the second Apple tome to be coming out that will shed more light inside the workings of Silicon Valley’s most iconic company.

In November, former Time Inc. writer and editor Walter Isaacson’s much anticipated biography about Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs will be released by Simon & Schuster.

“Steve Jobs” has been written with cooperation from Jobs, who has not done so in the past.

Lashinsky said in an interview today he did not garner Jobs’s help on the book, but did manage to get a deep inside look at the company.

“Doing an unauthorized book is harder,” said Lashinsky. “But what you get is well-reported information, which is outside the message Apple wants to deliver, and there is so much good stuff, this company is worth far more than an article.”

Lashinsky has been a longtime reporter in tech, including covering Apple, a company that is notoriously secretive and difficult to report about.

Still, Lashinsky has written a lot about the maker of the groundbreaking Mac, iPod, iPhone and iPad devices, including a piece in 2008 about recently installed CEO Tim Cook, titled “The Genius Behind Steve: Could the Operations Whiz Run The Company Someday?”

Inside Apple will be more about the entire company, which has vaulted from near death only 15 years ago to become one of the most highly valued companies in tech and, in fact, globally.

The publisher promises a lot of insidery facts, including, “how Apple creates killer products, forges intense bonds with consumers, and gets what it wants from suppliers … the lessons about leadership, product design and marketing are universal, and they should appeal to anyone hoping to bring some of that Apple magic to their own company, career or creative endeavor.”

Lashinsky said these are important lessons for others to explore.

“So much of what Apple does stands decades of business teaching on its head, because they just don’t do things the way other companies do,” he said. “The rest of the business world might want to pay attention.”

Indeed, they should.

Don’t worry about it, Forbes chairman Steve Forbes tells his staff, via an internal memo which you can read below.

Before we go further: I worked at Forbes for 10 years; I still know lots of folks who work there. Now: The Fortune piece is useful because it details, via internal documents from banker J.P. Morgan, just how badly the bet that Elevation Partners placed on the magazine in 2006 has worked out.

The fact that Elevation (better known as either Roger McNamee’s private equity fund, or Bono’s private equity fund) bought a minority stake in the publisher at close to the market peak has been well known.

But the Fortune piece spells out just how badly timed it was: Elevation’s projections had Forbes generating close to $90 million in EBITDA in 2009; instead, the company had operating losses of $19.7 million. Last year the company went into default on a $90 million credit line.

Fortune also argues that the deal has been a disaster for the Forbes family, but I’m not sure that this is the case. After all, it allowed them to take more than $100 million out of the company while holding on to a majority stake. If they hadn’t done that five years ago, they certainly couldn’t do so today.

Regardless, Fortune does a good job of showing just how precarious life has been at Forbes for the past couple years — as it has been at every business magazine (just ask Portfolio and BusinessWeek) — and the publisher’s uncertain future. Elevation and Forbes have interlocking put and call options that kick in next month, and it will be interesting to see how long Elevation remains a minority owner.

—

Fortune Story on Forbes
Steve Forbes [XXX@forbes.com]
Sent: Thursday, July 28, 2011 9:43 AM
Today Fortune magazine published a story on Forbes with the clear intention of disrupting the business of its most formidable competitor.

Fortune was aware that this was highly confidential, private information and of no value to release to the public. Though the intention is to harm our business, it will not adversely impact Forbes because it highlights a very difficult time in the past when all the media industry was going through unprecedented upheaval.

Forbes has the finest team – you – in the media world today. Forbes is profitable and is successfully navigating these extraordinarily turbulent seas. The company continues to grow and thrive with powerful new strategies and talent.

We are attaching (below) a statement that will be sent later today to the media responding to this article.

Media Statement
Contact: Monie Begley Feurey
SVP Corporate Communications, Forbes Media
XXX@forbes.com

Forbes Media is profitable and in full compliance with all bank loan covenants.

In 2010, as part of a newly formulated strategy, Forbes sold Investopedia for cash realizing a profit on the sale of this investment. The decision to sell this non-core investment was taken
by the board of Forbes Media upon the recommendation of management.

In 2008, Steve Forbes and Tim Forbes, CEO and COO repectively, initiated a reorganization of the company, including the integration of its independent operating units, Forbes magazine and Forbes.com.

They also decided to expand the company management team, which led to the successful recruitment first of Lewis D’Vorkin as Chief Product Officer and then Mike Perlis as CEO of the integrated business.

The last decade has seen unprecedented upheaval across the media industry.Within that decade Forbes magazine, uniquely among its largest competitors, Fortune and Business Week, grew its total readership to record levels – 5.4 million in 2010 – and grew its share of advertising from 33% to 40%. The company also launched 16 local language editions, giving it the largest worldwide brand footprint among business publishers. At the same time, Forbes.com grew to one of the largest and most profitable business websites in the world, with, on average, 20 million monthly unique visitors.

Since 2010, the company has pursued its strategy of putting journalism at the center of social media. This strategy is at the cutting edge of media today, which is why it is garnering support from audiences and advertisers alike.

Elevation Partners are enthusiastic supporters of the direction of the company and have been full participants as these strategies have been developed.

Steve Forbes remains Editor in Chief and Chairman of Forbes Media. Tim Forbes is Chairman of Forbes Digital. The Forbes family remains the controlling shareholder of Forbes Media.

In a move reminiscent of one done by Facebook in 2009, Twitter is close to completing an $800 million funding deal that will include a second part in which around $400 million of the total will be used to cash out current investors and also employees.

According to several sources close to the situation, the complex transaction could be completed within two weeks.

Along with basic funding needs, this is largely being done this way to give those with stakes in the San Francisco microblogging company an ability to monetize their privately held common stock and also to do this selling in a more organized — and legal — manner.

That is especially important since the company is not likely to go public for at least a year or more. And, while it could also be sold to a bigger company such as Google, that is also not in Twitter’s immediate future.

Before this secondary follow-on, the first part of the deal will be a $400 million investment for preferred shares by new and also existing shareholders, as was reported by the New York Times last week.

That round will indeed value Twitter at $8 billion, as the Times reported, which is a higher number than in other earlier reports.

This is more than double what Twitter was valued at when it got $200 million in venture funding from Kleiner Perkins in December at a $3.7 billion valuation.

Once the latest investments are complete, Twitter’s total cash haul since it was founded five years ago will be $760 million.

Key new moneybags are expected to be Russian investing heavyweight DST Global, which has invested in Facebook, Zynga and Groupon; as well as the digital growth fund of J.P. Morgan and perhaps others.

Current investors include Benchmark Capital, Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital and several other venture firms, as well as a spate of prominent angel investors.

The latest funding is an important one for Twitter and will up the pressure for its management, including CEO Dick Costolo, to really get its business growing in terms of revenue and profits.

Twitter is still struggling with coming up with a truly lucrative business model, and its execs have presented a number of them, such as promoted tweets, largely based on advertising.

It reportedly has $200 million in annual revenue from its efforts, which is still small in comparison to other Web 2.0 start-ups.

Interestingly, that was a similar situation to where Facebook found itself two years ago, when it allowed its employees to sell 20 percent of their shares.

That financing was part of a $100 million add-on to a $200 million investment in the social networking company by DST. At the time, the tender offer valued the company at $6.5 billion for the common stock, or $14.77 a share.

Of course, Facebook is worth upward of more than 10 times that now, so any Twitter sellers might want to consider their options carefully.

It is not clear exactly who can sell their Twitter shares, and in what amount, in the new deal. When Facebook did a similar move, for example, its top leadership could not sell any of their stakes.

A Twitter spokeswoman would not comment about any fund raising.

But, interestingly, in an onstage interview at a Fortune magazine tech conference this week, Costolo criticized stock trading of the shares of popular start-ups on secondary exchanges as a “distraction.” Like other companies, he said, Twitter had instituted stricter policies to limit the ability of its employees and investors to trade on those markets.

It has only just announced its IPO plans, but Groupon is already getting a bitter taste of the brutality of being more public in an increasing series of negative reports aimed at its business prospects and execs.

That has included a spate of posts after it filed to go public last week about the unusual accounting treatment in an S-1 regulatory filing for the offering, which also showed a large outflow of its venture funding to the pockets of the Chicago-based social buying site’s founders.

Since then, though, the gloves seem to be off for Groupon, just as it starts to market itself to Wall Street investors.

Perhaps the toughest so far has been one written by Fortune’s Kevin Kelleher, painting a very sketchy investing portrait of the company’s Chairman and co-founder Eric Lefkofsky.

Wrote Kelleher in a piece titled “The Checkered Past of Groupon’s Chairman”:

But Groupon’s IPO has brought an uncomfortable spotlight onto Lefkofsky. While some attention focuses on his ambitions as an investor in tech start-ups, others see a “spotty history” and draw parallels between the past and the present. Lefkofsky’s track record, reflecting failures and successes, bears certain hallmarks: Rapid revenue growth accompanied by big losses, a penchant to sell stock early on, and lawsuits filed by investors, lenders or customers who feel they have been wronged.

Ouch.

While one of the lawsuits mentioned in the piece was dismissed with prejudice, it did not help that the piece included an early email used in the case, written by Lefkofsky in the Web 1.0 era, that read in part:

“Lets start having fun…lets get funky…let’s announce everything…let’s be WILDLY positive in our forecasts…lets take this thing to the extreme…if we get wacked [sic] on the ride down-who gives a shit…THE TIME TO GET RADICAL IS NOW…WE HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE…”

Double ouch, even if it is probably a bit unfair to use such rookie remarks from a young entrepreneur back then to reflect on him today.

Still, Lefkofsky — whom I met with recently at Groupon’s HQ and found as whip-smart and savvy as any Silicon Valley sharpie — does seem to need to be more circumspect in his utterances today.

Most specifically, the day after its IPO filing, he told Bloomberg in an interview that Groupon will be “wildly profitable,” referencing worries about losses unveiled in its financial statements and his past record of start-ups.

Said Lefkofsky on June 3:

“I’m going to be in technology for a long time. I’m going to start a lot of companies. These are not sham companies. These are great businesses. InnerWorkings is profitable. Echo is profitable. Groupon is going to be wildly profitable.”

While sources said it is unlikely that Groupon will be forced by the Securities and Exchange Commission to make a new filing due to the remarks, it’s just the kind of mistake the typically voluble company needs to avoid going forward.

In other words, no more words from Groupon.

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.”

——-

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.

An updated version of that magazine’s iPad app lets users subscribe to the weekly magazine for $5.99 a month, or the equivalent of a $1.50 an issue. That’s a steep discount from the app’s old model, which only sold individual issues for $4.99 a pop.

Conde Nast is selling an annual subscription to the iPad app for $59.99; a yearly subscription to the print version of the magazine costs $69.95. Very important: Conde says print subscribers will get iPad access for free.

At least, I think that’s the case. I’m basing all of this off the New Yorker app’s description in iTunes, but I haven’t been able to get the updated app to work yet on my iPad. The information syncs up, though, with what both AdAge and the New York Post reported last week. (UPDATE: After some futzing about, I’ve got it to work, as advertised. The app still allows you to buy an individual copy for $4.99.)

Assuming Hearst goes through with its plans, Time Warner’s Time Inc. will be the most conspicuous magazine holdout. Time Inc. and Apple just agreed to a deal that allows print subscribers to get app versions of Sports Illustrated, Fortune and Time for free, but they still haven’t agreed to subscription terms–which they’ve been stuck on since last summer.

Other big print publishers who have agreed to Apple’s terms include the New York Times, which has said it will start using iTunes to sell subscriptions in June. In February, Conde also announced it would sell digital editions of its magazines for Google’s Android platform, but has yet to do so.

Publishers–and other media companies–have previously balked at both Apple’s proposed cut–it will take 30 percent of each sale–and its control of subscriber data, including credit card information.

But it’s possible that Apple has backed off some of its original terms. Last week Hearst suggested it had gotten Apple to modify at least some of its conditions. And if that’s the case then Apple may be offering revised terms to all subscription partners. I’ve asked Apple and Conde Nast for comment.

The notion of iPad apps enthralled magazine executives a year ago, but sales have been underwhelming for many titles. One common complaint: Publishers have sold the digital titles at the same price as paper-and-ink versions, while most customers have expected to buy them at a steep discount, and to get them free with existing subscriptions.

Now that big publishers are starting to actually do just that, we’ll see if sales improve.

UPDATE: Just got some clarity on the agreement Conde hammered out with Apple. Apple’s fundamental proposition hasn’t changed, but the publisher has gotten a few concessions out of Steve Jobs and Co. Examples via people familiar with the publisher:

• Apple still controls crucial subscriber information, and only allows Conde Nast to ask for name, zip and email. But the publisher now has two chances to ask for user’s email: The first as a standard opt-in screen, and then again on a screen that asks for email and a password in order to get exclusive content.
• Conde has more flexibility on pricing than Apple originally offered. For instance, at one point, Apple didn’t want the publisher to be able to offer a print+digital bundle at a $10 premium to digital-only, but wanted all prices to be the same (which they will be when GQ offers subscriptions later this month: $19.99 a year for digital-only, or digital + print).
• The agreement extends to international markets, etc.

Small stuff, but important to the publisher. Meanwhile, Apple gets what it wants without giving up much it cares about. Steve Jobs wins.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone took time off from his myriad of witty talk show appearances to slap around a just-published Fortune cover story that was titled–get it?–“Trouble@ Twitter.”

Wrote Stone, in part, on his personal blog in a post titled “The Trouble Bubble”:

We founded Twitter, Inc. in March of 2007 and while we have long said it’s about the users, not the service, we have nevertheless enjoyed favorable media coverage. What took so long for somebody to write the article that says we are falling apart? The normal press cycle is to put a company on a pedestal and then knock it down. It’s much more interesting that way. Twitter has had so many ups and downs you’d think we would have had more negative press. To me, it’s like watching the movie Rocky–he’s up, he’s down, he’s out, he wins!

He correctly points out Fortune’s reliable proclivity–see Google, Facebook–to write a wildly positive piece about the latest tech phenom, followed by a smackdown, followed by a they’re-back! tome.

Now, it is the San Francisco microblogging company’s turn.

(In Fortune’s defense, you try selling a magazine these days without a hookish cover line! Hence, the hit-you-over-the-head wounded bird motif here.)

But vegan-y, nice dude that he is, Stone ends on a positive note:

“For a long time, we refused to hire a communications group and now that we have one, I’m having fun teasing them about this Fortune article but the truth is, we’re long overdue to be knocked down by the press.”

While it must be pointed out that Rocky suffered from brain damage in the last installment of the famed movie franchise, BoomTown awards a Stone-cold win for Mr. Biz-boa!

Here’s the full post:

The Trouble Bubble

We founded Twitter, Inc. in March of 2007 and while we have long said it’s about the users, not the service, we have nevertheless enjoyed favorable media coverage. What took so long for somebody to write the article that says we are falling apart? The normal press cycle is to put a company on a pedestal and then knock it down. It’s much more interesting that way. Twitter has had so many ups and downs you’d think we would have had more negative press. To me, it’s like watching the movie Rocky–he’s up, he’s down, he’s out, he wins!

Fortune magazine finally stepped up to knock us down with a cover article, “Trouble@Twitter.” Here are some examples of how this works. After mostly positive coverage of Facebook, Fortune finally published an article in April of 2009 titled, “Is Facebook Losing Its Glow?” However, later that year they published, “What Backlash? Facebook Is Growing Like Mad.” Google received similar treatment. In July 2010 Fortune published, “Google, The Search Party Is Over.” Later that year, they published, “Google Continues To Gain Search Marketshare.”

We’ve had lots of positive press from Fortune in the past. In July of 2010 they published an article titled, “Twitter’s Business Model: A Visionary Experiment.” The article ended with, “Facebook might want to take notes.” It may seem odd, but from my perspective, this means we are being taken very seriously. Twitter is an important company and it’s under scrutiny from journalists–this is exactly how it’s supposed to work. Now it’s our job to prove the reporters wrong so they can write an article later about how we have made dramatic progress.

The Twitter team is an incredibly dedicated group of people who truly believe they are doing the most meaningful work of their lives. It’s also a very small group of people when compared to the other companies Fortune is investigating. We still have under 500 employees–many of them working weekends and nights to fulfill a potential that is palpable. For a long time, we refused to hire a communications group and now that we have one, I’m having fun teasing them about this Fortune article but the truth is, we’re long overdue to be knocked down by the press.

Or you could argue that we’re just seeing the opening act of the tablet market, and that it’s going to be really, really big. Especially for Apple.

That’s the thesis that Credit Suisse is pushing, in an Apple research report titled “The Most Valuable Company in the World?”, where it slaps a price target of $500 on Apple shares.

The report argues that the tablet market will hit $120 billion by 2015, and that Steve Jobs and company could own half of it. Near-term, they figure iPads will be a $34 billion business for Apple next year.

Their summary, via Fortune:

iPad—addressing a $120bn market LT. Our proprietary analysis for tablets (takes into account factors such as regression analysis for long-term computing demand, pricing by tier, and cannibalization of multiple industries) highlights that the tablet market could rise to $120bn by 2015. Within this segment, we believe Apple will dominate, given aggressive pricing, time to market advantage and a software edge, maintaining share as high as 50% long term. This means that iPad should become a $34bn business by FY12. Further, our proprietary BOM analysis implies that GMs for this business will expand to 35% by end-FY11 from around the 27% levels seen in FY10.

HP has agreed to let Time Warner’s publishing unit provide subscriptions for magazines on the device maker’s new tablet, due out this summer, according to a Time Inc. source.

Time Inc. will initially sell four magazines via the HP device: Sports Illustrated, Time, Fortune and People.

HP is about to show off the new device, built using Palm’s webOS platform, at an event today, so we should get a few more details then.

But for now the deal means that HP is the only tablet maker to give a big publisher the subscription terms it wants. Time Inc. and other publishers had expected to sell subscriptions via Apple’s iPad/iTunes ecosystem last summer, but those plans fell apart, and negotiations haven’t gone far since then. The crucial sticking point was control and access to subscribers’ billing information and other data that are crucial to publishers’ business model.

Publishers are also expecting to work with Google and its Android platform, but have yet to announce anything.

It’s worth noting that this arrangement is between HP and Time Inc., and not Next Issue Media, the joint venture that is also supposed to represent publishers in their discussions with tablet makers.

Yahoo’s CEO Carol Bartz has been under pressure of late, due to everything from executive turmoil to flat revenue to lack of vision to, perhaps most importantly, a flaccid stock price.

And, as of yesterday, you can add excessive pay to the pile.

That’s because Bartz just topped the list of 25 overpaid CEOs, which is done annually by proxy adviser Glass, Lewis & Co.

A dubious distinction, to say the least.

The San Francisco-based firm pointed to the $39 million Bartz garnered last year from Yahoo (YHOO), which–to be fair–includes both salary and options she has not yet sold.

Still, the huge sum also recently put her atop Fortune magazine’s list of highest-paid women.

Glass Lewis, of course, was using Yahoo’s top exec to make a point:

“Bartz represents a problem we find at many other firms with poor pay-for-performance grades: excessive compensation awarded to executives to encourage them to join or remain with a company.”

Indeed, this big number–however loaded with options based on some level of performance–is one that is sure to draw shareholder ire, due to the fact that the well-paid Bartz is simply not delivering what had been hoped for when she was brought on to shake up Yahoo.

It will be interesting to see if the board of Yahoo–hands down the weakest and most mistake-prone in Silicon Valley–will act in the same way the Microsoft (MSFT) board did with CEO Steve Ballmer.

Although a small thing, especially given how wealthy Ballmer is, the company pointed to the ill-fated venture that was the Kin phone and the slow response to the Apple (AAPL) iPad juggernaut, when giving him only half his maximum bonus recently.

This was despite record revenues at Microsoft, yet still a tiny but encouraging sign that the board has the courage to say: Not good enough.

Will Yahoo’s mousy board members manage to squeak out any such message to Bartz in the months ahead?

Having seen them in action for many years of stumbles now, which has been like watching someone throw himself continually down a flight of stairs, here’s my educated guess: No.

The Slate Group, the Washington Post Co.’s (WPO) online unit, is shutting down the site, the company announced today. The Big Money was a smart but modest site with a smart but modest staff of five people, so this isn’t earth-shaking news.

And two of the site’s employees–publisher Brendan Monaghan and editor Jim Ledbetter–will stay with Slate in new roles. So it’s hard to argue that this is reflective of larger issues at Slate or its parent company.

The memo announcing the move, signed by Slate Group Chairman Jacob Weisberg and General Manager John Alderman, is straightforward: The Big Money is getting shuttered because it didn’t make enough money:

The problem, in a nutshell, is that the site is not pointed toward profitability on a fast enough timetable….Part of being a quasi start-up means being unsentimental about sites we like that aren’t working as businesses and quickly evolving our model in response to a fast-moving marketplace. We are experimenters. This was a great experiment, but not every experiment results in a breakthrough.

Fair enough. The Big Money did some good work, and it did have an audience–comScore (SCOR) says it was getting between 300,000 and 400,000 unique visitors a month, which isn’t terrible. But it’s hard to sell advertisers on any individual site with less than a million uniques these days, so you can see why Slate would pull the plug after less than two years.

I do have one question, though. See the chart above (click to enlarge), and you’ll note that Slate’s main site is humming along quite well, with a mix of New Republic-style highbrow commentary and some clicky-clicky click here! now! slideshows. Why didn’t that success boost The Big Money?

My outsider’s perception is that the main site gave its business spin off very little editorial real estate. And that it seldom pointed a traffic firehose toward its little brother. And folks who know about this stuff tell me that people inside the company had the same perception.

I wouldn’t expect Slate to prop up The Big Money with money and links indefinitely. Ultimately, if the thing didn’t work on its own, it didn’t work on its own. But I’m a pretty regular Slate reader, and I frequently found that I learned about something The Big Money was running from someplace other than Slate.

I ran that theory by Weisberg, who says I’m wrong. TBM got as much promotion and help from Slate as its other sub-brands, Foreign Policy and The Root, he says. And he’s says he’s surprised to hear that anyone feels otherwise: “All of the small sites always want all the placement they can get on Slate, and there’s always competition for the finite resource of home page promotion. But I think that in general people think it’s been fair.”

And Weisberg spends a lot more time looking at these sites than I do, so I’ll defer to him here. One other quick question–since Fortune famously thrived after starting in a miserable economy, why couldn’t TBM do the same?

Because we’re not living in 1933, Weisberg says. “Our model is that you can enter into these things more easily. It’s not as big an upfront investment. But it also means you don’t have as long a time frame to prove these things out,” he says. Ultimately, TBM’s business wasn’t growing fast enough because its traffic wasn’t growing fast enough. Time to try something else.

*Hey! Another new iPad app from Time Warner’s (TWX) Time Inc. . No subscriptions, via Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes, though.

While at the press conference at Facebook’s f8 developers confab last week, BoomTown checked in with David Kirkpatrick, author of the soon-to-be-released book, “The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World.”

Pretty good timing for the former Fortune magazine writer, since the social networking site seems to be barreling through on its goal of being at the center of the digital universe, now reaching 500 million users worldwide with a $25 billion private-market valuation.

An IPO is expected sooner rather than later, although the innovative company seems more intent on colonizing the Web with “Like” buttons and its insidious Facebook Connect.

As Kirkpatrick wrote on the book’s Facebook fan page after the conference last week:

“Yesterday’s f8 represents a sea change for Facebook because for the first time the world finally sees its true ambition–to become the world’s Internet identity infrastructure. The implications are manifold, as I explain in my book.”

Well, as an aged member of the tech media who has seen true ambitions come and seen them go, often very quickly–Netscape Communications, AOL (AOL), Yahoo (YHOO)–I will reserve judgment on digital world domination for five years hence.

Nonetheless, it looks like “The Facebook Effect” will be well worth reading, given Kirkpatrick had cooperation from its execs, including CEO and Founder Mark Zuckerberg.

And I know how much the was-that-a-question tech wunderkind of Silicon Valley likes to answer queries, so kudos to Kirkpatrick for getting him to sing. Also, expect a lot of big players in the Web drama from Yahoo to Google (GOOG) to Microsoft (MSFT) to Twitter and more.

Here’s the video of my interview with Kirkpatrick about the book, which comes out in June (I did forget to ask him why Tintin’s silhouette posed for the cover):

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100426/facebook-scribe-david-kirkpatrick-talks-about-zuckerbergs-world-which-we-all-just-live-in/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20100303/time-inc-s-newest-product-a-magazine-printed-on-paper/ http://allthingsd.com/20100303/time-inc-s-newest-product-a-magazine-printed-on-paper/#comments Wed, 03 Mar 2010 16:01:45 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=16918 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.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100303/time-inc-s-newest-product-a-magazine-printed-on-paper/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100203/time-inc-s-magazines-get-less-bad-with-some-help-from-people/ http://allthingsd.com/20100203/time-inc-s-magazines-get-less-bad-with-some-help-from-people/#comments Wed, 03 Feb 2010 18:41:24 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=15921 If you’re waiting for Apple’s (AAPL) iPad to rescue the magazine business, you may have to wait a very long time indeed. But the present-tense magazine industry–the ink-and-paper version everyone has left for dead–may be limping its way to a recovery.

It’s not close yet. But we are seeing signs that things are at least getting less bad. As Nat Ives notes, the slide in newsstand sales seems to have slowed in the second half of last year, and some titles are even reporting an uptick.

Meanwhile, industry heavyweight Time Inc. also had comparatively good news to report today-things are still down, but not as dire as they have been.

The numbers: The Time Warner (TWX) unit says Q4 subscription revenue was down six percent and ad sales were down 12 percent. Not stellar, but better than Q3, when they were down 13 percent and 22 percent, respectively.

The bottom line, in the meantime, helped by two rounds of major layoffs, stayed steady, with an operating margin of 14 percent.

It’s hard to tell how widespread the recovery is, because different titles have different stories to tell. Time Warner did note that its News unit–that includes Time, Fortune, etc.–lagged behind and that its Style group–overseen directly by CEO Ann Moore–did well.

“Well,” that is, by magazine standards: Revenue was flat in Q4, aided in large part by People magazine. (Now you can see why the Time Warner executive I talked to last year said it was hard to see the company dumping that title in particular.)

The company said that while ad dollars were down nine percent in the U.S., ad rates only shrank by “low single digits,” which is a bit encouraging. And Time Warner said numbers for the current quarter are improving over Q4.

Requisite caveat here: These numbers, and the ones you’re going to see for the next couple quarters, are being compared with really terrible numbers from previous quarters. So the fact that Time Inc. can’t show actual growth tells you that this is still an industry with really big problems. But maybe they’ll be more manageable than we thought–even without the help of a “magical and revolutionary device.”

Here’s the Q4 breakdown (click tables to enlarge):

And, for comparison’s sake, here are the Q3 numbers:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100203/time-inc-s-magazines-get-less-bad-with-some-help-from-people/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100121/fortune-takes-another-run-at-its-website-with-a-high-profile-hire/ http://allthingsd.com/20100121/fortune-takes-another-run-at-its-website-with-a-high-profile-hire/#comments Thu, 21 Jan 2010 12:12:06 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=15288

Here’s what qualifies as a man-bites-dog story these days: A big mainstream business publication hiring an experienced business journalist.

Weird, right? But true: Fortune magazine has hired veteran writer Dan Roth to run and revitalize the title’s Web site. He starts as managing editor next week.

This qualifies as news because:

• Big magazines–and business titles like Fortune in particular–have been shedding jobs, not creating them. Roth, for instance,was a victim of layoffs at Condé Nast’s Wired magazine last fall–just after he published this excellent and sobering analysis of Demand Media, in which he describes what its ascent says about the future of “content creation.”
• Fortune hasn’t done much with its site for some time. So rehiring Roth, a well-regarded writer and editor at the magazine from 1998 to 2006, signals that it has ambitions to do…something with it.

For the past several years, Time Warner’s (TWX) Time Inc. has allowed Fortune to more or less languish on the Web, while letting its CNNMoney.com site do the digital heavy lifting for all things business, which it does pretty well, attracting more than 13 million unique monthly visitors, per comScore (SCOR).

Fortune.com, meanwhile is minimally staffed and serves primarily as a repository for the magazine’s print stories, the occasional special package and a steady stream of updates on Apple (AAPL) from the prolific Philip Elmer-DeWitt. Put it this way: Roth won’t be displacing anyone by taking the top editorial job at the site, because the site hasn’t had a full-time edit person running it for a couple of years.

But now, though Roth won’t say so out loud, it appears that the Time Inc. braintrust has decided to reinvest in Fortune.com and will give him the ability to make more hires. Here’s his more modest description of his job description:

I think Fortune has the chance to take what it does best–covering the most important companies and business people–and reinterpret that for the Web. The goal is to take the intelligence found in the magazine’s long-form features and make that voice and worldview work in a shorter form and at a faster pace.

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.

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