I’ve been talking to myself for some time now about how traditional print media really shot themselves in the foot more than a decade ago by bundling web advertising in with traditional print FOR FREE. I could never get my head around it, as photographers often discussed it on various email lists such as EPUK as long as five years ago when publishers asked for rights to use content online while complaining that the website made no money. Well, now the website HAS to make money, see my post earlier this year about that.

Then a few months ago, we hear talk of Apple’s Tablet device as being a bigger iPhone style device and I start thinking, as I’m sure you will have been, about what a REALLY BIG deal this can be. Just look at how the iPhone is just soooo much more than just a phone, thanks to the power of iTunes and the App Store. Now take that sheer power of distribution and imagine this:

1. Imagine being able to download and buy your favourite car magazine onto your tablet, just like you do songs in iTunes
2. Imagine having your traditional car magazine, but with embedded videos alongside the photo shoots – now can you see where these HD DSLR’s by Canon come in?
3. Imagine you’re an advertiser being able to sponsor the videos and being able to not just put your website’s URL out there, but to have a clickable link within the content?
4. Imagine you’re a publisher who suddenly doesn’t have to think about the huge percentage the big news distribution warehouses take, you just need to get it listed on iTunes or indeed offer a download through your existing website with a pay portal
5. Imagine being a traditional newsagent or indeed any part of that distribution chain? I know I’d be worried.

This blog post by Vincent Laforet is a good read and echoes my thoughts on how 2010 will be the year of the tablet and indeed just might be the medicine that puts the publishing and news industry back to health. With a global audience for your publication avaiable as an iTunes download, the advertisers would be crazy not to be involved. Perhaps then, they’ll be charging for online advertising and throwing in the print version for free….

So that brings me to the creators viewpoint and what this means to photographers? It means getting involved in the whole convergence thing and getting to grips with some of the brillient new products that are arriving, not just from people like Canon, but from the mass of independent companies such as Zacuto, GlideTrack, Miller and other small enterprises.
All these products and technologies are changing the way we create content for our clients, both editorial and commercial and events like Convergence One by The Flash Centre are an important step along the way and if you thought that 2009 had been stuffed full of product announcements, I’m sure there are even more things in prototype form right now as more momentum is created. The benefits for photographers / film makers and our customers will be thrilling and I can’t wait to be part of it!

05/01/10 – A quick note to add a link to this post by The Recovering Journalist and his comments on where the Apple Tablet might just be taking us all. Well worth a read.

There’s been a lot of talk about EPaper disposable LCD’s recently and how they might be the saviour of the magazine industry. Some say that being able to enmbed video into a magazine will be revolutionary, others comment that the ‘disposability’ factor and apparent wastefulness in this age is unacceptable.

What both sides have yet to comment upon is the new wave of ebooks about to hit us. Asus are getting ready to hit us with their Eee Book Reader, a genuine, double page with a spine, LCD panelled book in full colour. Now think about this…. If these things take off and there’s a viable distribution method for content such as iTunes for purchasing ebooks, emagazines and other reading & viewing material, suddenly, you don’t need ePaper LCD’s. In fact, you don’t need paper. And the Asus is predicted to have a price of around £100 GB Pounds, cheaper than a laptop or Sony’s book reader.

So if you have a double page, LCD panel with the ability to let you read your favourite car magazine on the toilet (the biggest comment against online reading), plus the ability to view video, listen to music and make Skype calls though it’s WiFi or SIM card, you have to say that buying shared in newsagents would be a Bad Thing.

Personally, I think disposable LCD’s will make great business cards, far better than those CD business cards of a couple of years back. They required too much effort for the recipient and all too often were blocked from launching on corporate PC’s.

And so to the content, the most important bit. As Rosh Sillars at New Media Photographer says, content creators will survive if they move and adapt. In fact, the ability to create striking still photography and motion content will become more important than ever.

As the new video DSLR’s like the Canon 5D and 7D arrive, so the distribution method is arriving too. It’s never been a move exciting time to be involved in photography & film making, I can’t wait for the next five years!

If you’ve read some of my blog posts from earlier this year, you might have come to the conclusion that I’m starting to dance on the grave of the traditional car magazine, but you’d be wrong. While I’m a big believer in blogs and online car mags (I’ve started writing some myself) I still enjoy picking up a magazine and flicking the pages, before settling down for a good read. But I’ve been struggling to put into words just what it is that means that one car magazine should survive, while another will not. Then I found this really good post by Rex Hammock, a long time publishing CEO in the USA. In his article, he writes about how blogs and magazines can co-exist and the differences between the two and how they can work together.

His point number three that hits the note for me is entitled “No one will ever collect National Geographic.com”. To quote his words,

“The magazines we love are not merely things we read and enjoy; they are expressions of who we are. We display them on coffee tables and desks the way people wear designer labels on clothes or purchase one model of car over another. People collect magazines, trade them and display them on decorative racks or in frames hung on the wall. Magazines provide us with mementos of our life’s journey. They allow us to savor our passions and save special moments. The magazines we love are so important to us, they make us feel guilty to consider throwing them away.”

And he’s right. Being the geek I am, I still have iconic titles such as a copy of Autosport on the week that Enzo Ferrari died and a great Cars and Car Conversion issue simply called “Ayton Senna, Rally Driver”. You’ll know the one if you’ve been around cars long enough.

So yes, I’m still a fan of car magazines, indeed nice, thick, well produced magazines in general, not just about cars. I’ll be writing again soon about some of the magazine / website hybrid business models that look like they deserve to survive and hopefully get some comments from their creators about where they see it going.

No doubt you’ll have an opinion on what a good car mag’s website should be all about, chime in below with your comments.

What should I do? Should I automatically follow back everyone who follows me? After all, it seems rude not to return the compliment. But, I use TweekDeck. I find it usedful for checking Tweeks with a quick glance. It makes a cute little noise and a small square appears telling me when a tweet’s happened. It takes seconds to check and move on.
If I followed all those people, my Tweekdeck would be bonging away like a rail crossing and I’d never get anything done. Plus, I could see at a glance that some people probably didn’t really have that much to say that I would be interested in. No offence, just not my cup of Yorkshire Tea.

Queue Yaro Starak. He hit the nail on the head today about building his Twitter following. His list is smaller than many and he wondered if he should auto-follow, but doesn’t for the same reasons I don’t. He uses Twitter like many as a marketing tool and he compared auto-following as building an un-targetted list. If you have 48 hours to spare, you can quite quickly gather a list of followers of several thousand. But will they be paying any attention to what you want to say when the only reason they’re there is to fatten up a list? I want people to follow me because they’re actually interested in what I tweet and vice versa. It’s an exchange of views, the same as any other discussion.

Yaro asks the same question as me and, like me, doesn’t have the definitive answer and it’s probably the choice of the individual. For me, I want to communicate and broadcast my new blogging and online publishing efforts to as many people as possible, but only if they’re interested. So I see some of the huge Twitter followings as just like an ‘un-targeted’ mailing list. I hope people have a ‘reason’ to follow me that’s not just because it adds one more notch to their list.

I regard Yaro’s views highly on this and that’s because as a traditional writer / photographer moving into self publishing to generate an income, his blogs have been a massive help and considerable inspiration

So what’s your thoughts?

Many people in the motoring and lifestyle magazine publishing industry are looking at online versions of their publications with mixed feelings right now, especially with regard to the video content..

Journalists and editors are just thinking, “It’s for the IT department, nothing to do with me, I’ll just get lumbered with extra work…. And as for doing a ‘piece to camera’, you can forget it with my accent and crooked teeth…”


Publishers are thinking, “We know it’s coming, we know we need content, but right now, the advertising revenue from online sources just doesn’t justify investing in creating bespoke content. We’ll just keep embedding those grainy YouTube clips and take the free stuff the readers send in….”


Some photographers are thinking, “Jeez, this looks like a load of work, I’m outside my comfort zone and I guess they won’t pay any more money either, so lets keep quite about it, I can’t afford a Sony Z1 / EX1 / XL1 / JVC this year…And as for editing in Final Cut, that looks horrible. Time to look at weddings…”

However, I’m thinking, “What a great oportunity – there’s never been a better time to get your reader’s attention and hold onto it…. For the first time ever, if you do it right, you have as good a chance as any broadcaster of getting an audience for your content”

But with one or two notable exceptions, everyone’s missing a great oportunity here.
I’ve been looking at some of the video clips on car magazine’s own websites this month and I couldn’t figure out why they didn’t work for me, until suddenly the fog cleared….

So where do I think they’re going wrong?

If I’m looking at any of the car magazine videos online, I DO NOT want to hear the presenter just read back to me pretty much what the printed version says – I can read that in the feature. And another thing…, it’s not fair to expect motoring writers with no experience of presenting to be a Tiff Needel or Jason Plato, or worse, Jeremy Clarkson. Those people are paid a lot more that us to do just one thing – present and entertain. You can’t compete, so stop trying to.

So what do you shoot?

I want to hear the car charging through the gears, see the bodywork curves in the right light, feel the lateral G force in the turns and watch a video that puts me right there, smelling the leather seats and feeling the grip of the wheel. It doen’t need to be long, two minutes max. It doen’t need to have funky Guns N Roses backing music. But it needs to be shot well, with good sound, a sharp driver and an even sharper edit with some really quick camera work.

But that costs money.

So right now, we’re in a transitional period. Ultimately, there will be some casualties. But if you don’t think it’s going to affect your publication, look around you. People use YouTube almost as much as Google, iPhones are everywhere and the sheer number of devices capable of displaying motion content is multiplying by the week. It’s here now and if you’ve only just begun to think it over you’re running late.

The solution? Don’t try that Bourne Identity car chase with the Mini, that will go badly wrong and the litigation will be endless. But look at your favourite car chase movie and think about the angles, the edit cuts. Sure they cost millions. But if you pay a little for the right content, photographed well, people will remember it and come back. But how do we pay for it?

One of the problems that the traditional publishing companies have with the internet is the cost of distribution. It’s free. You can’t charge for it like you do the print version, but at the same time, it needs content to be commissioned for it to work.

“But if we can’t charge for it, the advertisers won’t pay more than the printed magazine version and everyone needs to do extra work and freelance staff need to be paid, so how will it work?”

Consider this. One of the most profitable companies of our times is Google. You use it every day, but you don’t pay for it. This article in Wired is an excellent discussion on how $0.00 is the new price point. It’s a long feature and you may well not agree with it (some parts of it I don’t) , so you may want to look at it later and keep reading here.

http://tinyurl.com/2se78c

However, the key paragraph is this one:

“…..newspaper and magazine publishers don’t charge readers anything close to the actual cost of creating, printing, and distributing their products. They’re not selling papers and magazines to readers, they’re selling readers to advertisers. It’s a three-way market….”
Nothing new there, we all know that, but that’s what we need to remind ourselves of. A good feature car video has every bit as much appeal as a well photographed and written, printed magazine feature, but it remains online and is instantly distributed globally….. An advertisers dream.

Sure it will take time, but eventually, the audience will be checking you out because you make the best videos. They’ll be linking to you in the forums and generating traffic. Don’t believe it will work? The stats graph below show what happened to my own website when the Ice Driver movie went online. There’s the initial surge, but more importantly, the traffic remained high for almost a month afterwards and my site now has a permanent increase in traffic and readers.








Another example – If one more person sends me a link to that Ken Block Subaru video, I guarantee I’ll shoot them….. Everyone from from Subaru owners, to editors, even a few traffic cops I know, have all been talking about it. Get that kind of take up and that kind of viral marketing, then the advertisers will come and want to be part of the party. Of course it costs and that’s the next thing. This watershed of still photography and video imaging convergence couldn’t have come at a worse time, financially.

From my point of view, it’s yet more investment in equipment with a finite and short life and fast depreciation, more software to purchase licences for and learn how to use and of course, more time spent on location and a whole load more time editing – all this needs to be accounted for somewhere, right at a time when no-one feels like spending on “Capital Expenditure”, as my bean counter likes to call the receipts I give him.

Publishers who are savvy know it’s a chicken and egg thing – they need good, well shot content for the website to generate page views and stats to fire at advertisers for income, but they need to pay in advance for it and the good sites are spending and it shows. But what if it doen’t work? It must work. It will. We can’t afford to blink on this one, no looking back, this is where it’s going.

Sorry it this is a long post, it’s just that I really needed to say it…. Your opinions are very welcome, so fire away, be brutal and speak your mind.