“Nobody mistakes Jann Wenner — whose Wenner Media publishes Rolling Stone, Us Weekly and Men’s Journal — for a digital fanboy. He was lukewarm enough on the internet to let another company license and run RollingStone.com from 2003 through 2010. Last year he orchestrated a magazine industry ad campaign promoting the ‘power of print,'” Nat Ives reports for Ad Age.
“But his tentative take on even the iPad may dismay the big publishing powers, which hope tablets will deliver a better kind of digital platform for magazines, one that means significant business in a matter of years,” Ives reports. “He thinks it will be decades. ‘You’re talking about a generation at least, maybe two generations, before the shift is decisive,’ he said.”
Look at the music industry as an example. I think it’s split about 50-50 between CDs and digital delivery. There is a place where there are extraordinary advantages in the distribution delivery system. Otherwise the products are indistinguishable; there’s no difference in the physical products as there is here.
And yet it’s still a generational shift going on. And we [publishers] are far away from that. We have a much different and more unique product than just the CD… The lesson for magazine publishing business is not to rush like the music business should have done, because it’s a different product. Music is really easily reducible to digital. There’s a different beat to it.
Be attuned. Get ready to make the moves. Be adept at moving quickly to the changes. But to rush to throw away your magazine business and move it on the iPad is just sheer insanity and insecurity and fear. – Jann Wenner
Much more in the full article here.