The Atlantic Books is the first in a number of planned paid initiatives, the company said, and “details about the next product will be announced in coming weeks.”

The Atlantic Books’ focus on nonfiction e-singles puts it in competition with companies like Byliner and The Atavist, which publish similar works. The Atlantic Books’ first ebook, a memoir called Denial by Jonathan Rauch, is available today for $1.99 exclusively through Amazon’s Kindle Singles store, though The Atlantic says it will “soon” also be sold by Nook, the iBookstore and Kobo.

“The launch of The Atlantic Books reflects our commitment to innovation in publishing in the service of great journalism and storytelling,” The Atlantic president M. Scott Havens said in a statement. The Atlantic senior editor Geoffrey Gagnon is overseeing the initiative.

In other evidence of The Atlantic‘s focus on long-form journalism, the company recently partnered with Longreads to feature Longreads content across its sites.

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Longreads, founded by former Time Inc. editor Mark Armstrong in 2009, features daily links to long-form journalism and fiction around the web. It started out as a Twitter hashtag and has grown into a website that includes paid memberships for $3 a month or $30 a year, giving members access to exclusive content.

Longreads remains an independent company, and Armstrong — who is also the editorial director of consume-it-later service Pocket — will retain control over the content featured on the site. The Atlantic will provide support on the business and operations side and will feature Longreads content across its digital properties — The Atlantic.com, TheAtlanticWire.com and The AtlanticCities.com — as well as on its mobile apps. Armstrong told me that the move is a way for Longreads to build up its membership model and “explore new models for supporting long-form journalism.”

“I’ve watched with interest as Mark Armstrong and the Longreads team have built a socially engaged community that is passionate about great journalism,” Atlantic president M. Scott Havens said in a statement, “and I’m excited to work with them to bring these kinds of stories to our more than 20 million digital readers.”

The Atlantic has some content-sharing partnerships with organizations like the Council on Foreign Relations and China File, but the partnership with Longreads is the first of its kind.

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At an ad industry event in New York on Wednesday, an Atlantic Digital executive explained what the company had learned from a January debacle involving the Church of Scientology. (In case you missed it, the Atlantic pushed the boundaries of so-called “native advertising” by publishing a feel-good “sponsored story” about the religion — or cult, if you prefer — that included only positive reader comments.)

“The biggest mistake in retrospect was that it wasn’t harmonious to our site and it didn’t bring any value to our readers,” said VP and General Manager Kimberly Lau, at the event, which was hosted by native ad shop Sharethrough. “The second mistake was allowing the marketing team to moderate comments in a way that wasn’t transparent.”

Lau’s comments echo the Atlantic’s earlier apologies for the incident which, by all appearances, was a one-off mistake. But her remarks stand out because of where she made them: on a panel with representatives from Gawker, Vice and College Humor — three publications that regularly mix advertising into their editorial process and that expressed sympathy for the Atlantic’s predicament.

“There’s no other way to make money without doing this kind of advertising,” said Vice’s CCO Eddy Moretti, who added that Vice would have run the Scientology story. Meanwhile, Jason Del of Gawker (“a full-service content, event and video shop”) suggested that part of the blowback to the Scientology story came about because the sponsored format was novel to its readers.

So is all this unfair to the Atlantic —  so-called native advertising is a lifeline for publishers, why can’t it cash in like everyone else? The problem, as Lau explained, is:

“It goes back to the difference between entertainment and journalism,” she said. “There’s a higher bar for a brand like the Atlantic.”

This goes to the crux of the matter — sites that cater to comedy, entertainment or celebrity news can inject sponsored fare into their streams with relative safety. Serious news and intellectual publications, however, must take extra care to preserve the integrity of their editorial content.

In the bigger picture, this extra scrutiny of news brands may limit their ability to garner new online income. But the good news, for the Atlantic at least, is that the company has been profitable for several years and, according to Lau, 59 percent of its overall advertising revenue is digital.

Speaking of native advertising, be sure to attend paidContent Live this April where Andrew Sullivan and other leading media figures will discuss their business strategies, including native advertising.

(Image by Phuriphat via Shutterstock)

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Slate’s latest incarnation is as a data-driven social-media beast.  The site thinks it can use viral wizardry to spray smart writing around the internet and, at the same time, finally earn a profit from being perspicuous. The money question has become pressing because Slate, despite its years as a high-brow conversation starter, has yet to show it can survive without the largesse of a corporate mothership.

So will Slate’s third act pan out? Here’s a look at how its brain trust is approaching data, technology and the evolving ethics of advertising.

Top drawer or traffic whore? Stats and story selection

On a cold January afternoon, I met editor-in-chief of the Slate Group, Jacob Weisberg, and Slate editor David Plotz in the former’s airy corner office on Morton Street in New York’s West Village. The office has large windows and shelves of hardcovers, including Weisberg’s exposition “The Bush Tragedy.”

The men were busy. Weisberg was en route to Davos, while Plotz had ducked out from answering questions on the online discussion forum Reddit. But both wanted to make the case that Slate has what it takes to survive in the age of analytics. “We rely on data, not intuition” said Weisberg. “The big cultural change at Slate is that it’s moved from being a site driven by instinct to a site driven by evidence.”

The remark comes as a rebuttal to earlier observations that Slate relied on creaky technology even as its competitors shot by it with state-of-the-art tools. The New York Observer in 2010, for instance, talked to members of Slate’s staff and concluded that the site’s tech was “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.”

Weisberg says those days are done and that technology is at the center of the editorial operation. He points to a new Silicon Valley-style product team and a doubling in the amount of “sideways” readers from social media in the last year as proof that Slate has gotten religion on the analytics front.

Weisberg says Nick Denton of Gawker and Jonah Peretti of BuzzFeed have been inspirations in the push for better analytics. The two viral media evangelists have shaken up publishing by using social media metrics to judge what stories to promote. (Peretti will be speaking at paidContent Live in April.)

But if Slate turns to audience activity to inform its story choice, does this also mean pandering? “We have written traffic-whorey stories here and there,” admits Plotz. But these efforts haven’t been particularly successful, he says. Instead, he credits editorial initiatives like “Bad Astronomy” (a feature for science nerds) with drawing new regular readers to Slate.

In this regard, Slate is like other high-minded publications navigating a tough, even contradictory mission. On one hand, they promise smart and independent ideas; on the other, they’re heeding social media metrics that could tug them to the lowest common denominator. While news sites like BuzzFeed cut their teeth on silly cat photos only to climb up the intellectual and media food chain, it’s unclear whether this process can work in the opposite direction.

So far, Slate appears to be threading the needle by growing its readership, while also publishing thought-provoking pieces (like this one about Palestinian versus Israeli textbooks). Slate says December 2012 unique visitors increased 33% percent from a year ago; meanwhile, comScore stats show Slate is faring well against other ideas publications. Here’s a chart that shows how they compare (note QZ and theAtlanticWire are part of the theAtlantic.com) :

Paywalls and pettifogging

The buoyant numbers are good news, of course, but do they mean Slate is finally in a position to make money? In 2010, Plotz admitted that Slate was not profitable. Like nearly every other digital publication, Slate had discovered the hard way that great writing and a loyal readership are not the same as a business plan.

Since then, many publishers have followed the lead of the New York Times and begun to charge for access to all or portions of their digital content. These so-called paywalls have gained acceptance after being a contentious issue for years — in part because an early effort by Slate to implement one in 1998 didn’t work out.

Slate recently floated the idea of a future “membership” scheme for some readers, but Weisberg is adamant it won’t involve charging for content. The topic is sensitive enough to have produced a bizarre Twitter spectacle in which Weisberg’s Mr. Fox avatar berated a respected Forbes reporter as a “pettifogger” (and worse):

@jeffbercovici Jeff, that story doesn't say that! It calls membership a "model," not a "pay model." Quit pettifogging.—
Jacob Weisberg (@jacobwe) December 14, 2012

So what exactly does the membership involve? Weisberg didn’t elaborate beyond saying it won’t be unveiled until at least the end of the year and that it will be “more akin to a public radio-type membership model — you give a contribution and in return you get benefits.”

As Slate hashes out these details behind the scenes, it’s also trying to cultivate another revenue stream, in the form of an expanded events business. These include loose mixers that let readers mingle with Slate writers; Weisberg says more than 700 people recently bought tickets for one of its “gab-fests” in Washington. Slate is also hosting small, more formal events hosted by advertisers. One example is a UBS-hosted panel at which Weisberg hosted a discussion on exports with political poohbahs.

Other media outlets have run into ethical challenges with custom events like this — most notably the Washington Post, which in 2009 proposed hosting private “salon events” at the publisher’s house for powerbrokers and journalists. It sparked a newsroom revolt, and the paper ditched the idea before it ever became a reality. Weisberg says Slate, which is independent but shares a corporate parent with the Washington Post, won’t run into similar problems because its events are all public and on the record.

All this still doesn’t answer the question of whether Slate is now profitable. Asked directly, Weisberg said he can’t say because of Sarbanes-Oxley disclosure rules that require companies like the Washington Post Co. to disclose material information through broad public channels.

Ads, yes – but not for the Church of Scientology

Digital publications these days need multiple revenue streams to survive, but their core remains advertising. And here Slate, which has recently built up its own sales force outside of the Post, and others face the same dilemma: an increasing amount of web traffic comes in through mobile devices (about 30% now, and 50% by 2014 is probably a safe bet) but ad rates are low and no one is sure what to do about that.

“I don’t think we’ve figured out anything other people haven’t,” says Weisberg. “You have a rapidly expanding audience but CPM’s that are much lower. The key is distinguishing how and when people are using different types of mobile devices.  Between tablet and mobile, those two will diverge rapidly over time. Tablet ads will become more valuable while handsets gravitate to a performance model.”

While publishers wait for the right mobile ad models to emerge, many are seizing on so-called “native advertising” as the secret to juicing ad prices. It’s debatable whether it’s really new but the basic idea is to produce ads that mimic the editorial content around it – ads that resemble nearby stories, tweets, pictures, etc. It may or not be novel, but for now it is clear that native advertising can go horribly wrong such as when the Atlantic printed a “story” about the Church of Scientology replete with gushing “reader” comments about the cult’s virtues.

Weisberg says the Atlantic tripped up by violating three principles: printing ad that confuse readers; tampering with the editorial process; and accepting an ad from someone the publication shouldn’t have done dealt with in the first place. “They are enemies of free speech, they are persecutors of journalists, they’re litigious. They’re a crazy cult who’s made life hell for journalists who’ve tried to do their job. Why do business with them at all?”

In terms of Slate’s own advertising, the publication says revenue in 2012 grew 26 percent from the previous year. Its advertisers include , most recently, Coke, Lexus and Samsung. As for the ad opportunities offered by aggregation tools like Flipboard, Weisberg is skeptical and says they are “too passive” and less useful now that “Twitter has cracked the news personalization process.”

Slate has also built a strong lineup of videos and podcasts that Weisberg says are lucrative for the site. Slate is now producing nine separate podcasts, some of which rate highly on iTunes; one episode of the show Lexicon Valley recently notched up 650,000 downloads. Slate would not disclose how much ads, which are read by show hosts, bring in but said “advertisers pay some of the highest rates in the industry” for the podcasts.

This podcast and other non-print revenue will help determine whether Slate can join an increasingly data-driven media world while still remaining an influential liberal publication. While the verdict is still out, Slate’s confidence remains high.

“We have the brain of the New York Times and the body of BuzzFeed,” said Weisberg as he prepared to dash off to Switzerland – where he would later tweet, “Wish Pussy Riot was in Davos instead of so many Russian oligarchs & kleptocrats.”

(Images by Slate and Kletr via Shutterstock)

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On Monday, a number of sources discovered an article that had been published on Atlantic Media’s website about the Church of Scientology, and unlike much of what gets written about L. Ron Hubbard’s manufactured religion, it was a long and glowing piece about how well the church was doing — complete with positive comments congratulating the church (Gawker has screenshots of the original piece here). It soon became obvious that the story was sponsored content produced by the church, and Twitter and the blogosphere erupted in outrage.

“Seriously, that is ad-whoredom of a particularly egregious variety. The Atlantic is now partly sponsored by the Church of Scientology?” — former Atlantic blogger Andrew Sullivan

Are all sponsored posts bad, or just that one?

After much debate on Twitter and elsewhere over the ethics of this kind of publishing, The Atlantic eventually took the piece down, and replaced it with a statement saying that it planned to review “our policies that govern sponsor content and subsequent comment threads.” In a follow-up statement to a number of outlets, the magazine said: “We screwed up… We now realize that as we explored new forms of digital advertising, we failed to update the policies that must govern the decisions we make along the way. It’s safe to say that we are thinking a lot more about these policies after running this ad than we did beforehand.”

Nothing inherently wrong with @TheAtlantic's scientology post; it's just incredibly stupid and not worth the money they made off of it.

—
Ross Neumann (@rossneumann) January 15, 2013

So what was the Atlantic‘s offence in this case — was it that sponsored content isn’t appropriate at all, or that the magazine didn’t make it obvious enough that it was advertorial? Or is it that Scientology isn’t an appropriate subject for sponsored content, or not appropriate for The Atlantic? Depending on where you look, you can find arguments for all of those positions and more (we’re going to be talking about this topic with Justin Smith of Atlantic Media, Jon Steinberg from BuzzFeed and Lewis D’Vorkin from Forbes at our paidContent media conference in New York on April 17).

For the digital-media industry, however, “native” advertising is one of the few bright spots — or potential bright spots — in a landscape that is riddled with charts of ad revenue that are going in exactly the wrong direction. And it’s not just traditional media outlets like Forbes or The Atlantic that are experimenting: it’s also a critical part of new-media models at places like BuzzFeed, and even at social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Promoted tweets and sponsored stories are very much like “native” advertising, because they are inserted into the stream of regular content a user consumes.

The best thing about the Scientology ad is that it illustrates just show crappy and clumsy most advertorials are.

—
Peter Kafka (@pkafka) January 15, 2013

For native ads to work, they need to blend in

I think the big lesson from The Atlantic brouhaha is that — as Charlie Warzel points out at Ad Week — using sponsored content as one of the core components of your media strategy really ups the ante when it comes to figuring out whether an advertiser fits with your brand. What seemed to horrify many people (although not The New Republic) was the idea that a magazine they respected would provide a platform to what they see as a dangerous cult. In other words, there seemed to be a mismatch between the brand of the magazine and the brand of the thing it was helping to promote.

Similar complaints have been made about some of the content that appears at Forbes, where chief product officer Lewis D’Vorkin has created a sponsored-content style service called Brand Voice: in effect, Forbes provides brands and advertisers with a platform that is fundamentally identical — in both look and feel — to the one the magazine’s own bloggers get. That content lives or dies based on the same criteria as the magazine’s regular bloggers, namely whether it is relevant and useful to readers. But more traditional media players have criticized the magazine for diluting its brand in this way.

@dangillmor Agreed. I'm not against "Sponsored Content" but who you do business with gets reflected. @TheAtlantic Should be picky here too.

—
David Cohn (@Digidave) January 15, 2013

In the end, most online media and content companies will have no choice but to experiment with sponsored content and other forms of “native” advertising, because there just isn’t enough money coming from the traditional kind in our new world of unlimited supply and falling demand. But as The Atlantic‘s experience shows, it is easy to go astray, and the only way to avoid that kind of disaster is to keep your readers in mind: sponsored content has to be as useful as the kind you produce, if not more so, and it has to be aligned with your brand, or it will fail — sometimes spectacularly.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr/Stephen Brace and Shutterstock/Gl0ck

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The finding comes via an annual Marist Poll in which 9 percent percent of adults (and 17 percent of those 18 to 29 ) picked “Twitterverse” to be most annoying. The word “whatever” topped the list for the fourth year in a row at 38 percent while “just sayin’” (10 percent) replaced “seriously” on this year’s list.

Foes of the Twitterverse will be unhappy to learn that the term is making inroads in the traditional media lexicon. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Financial Times have all used it several times in the last year and the word got further headline traction with the arrival of Pope Benedict to Twitter. It’s clear that Twitter’s efforts at growing up have officially catapulted it into mainstream culture, annoying lexicon included.

Ironically, the biggest moment for “Twitterverse” may have come by way of The Atlantic which recently published a splendid list of the worst words of the year (shame, all you butt-chugging brogrammers who curate artisanal hipsters while discussing legitimate rape.)

In February, Atlantic correspondent Jeffrey Goldberg published a headline, “Twitterverse to new NYTimes Jerusalem bureau chief: stop tweeting!” The word got further traction months later after the Goldberg story led the New York Times scold-in-chief public editor to propose monitoring the journalist’s tweets. Yolo.

(Image by D.J.McGee via Shutterstock)

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The New York Times has drawn a lot of interest because of its paywall, something that has made it a kind of flag-bearer for that method of trying to generate revenue, and the Washington Post and The Guardian are on the opposite end of the spectrum, since they remain adamantly opposed to paywalls and are both trying to find other means of dealing with the digital disruption the newspaper industry finds itself in. And on the magazine side, publishers like MIT’s Technology Review have rejected the popular “apps will save us” mantra and decided to pursue a different approach.

Atlantic Media is interesting in part because of the sheer breadth of things it is doing when it comes to digital, and also when it comes to alternative forms of monetizing its content. And it’s not just experimentation for the sake of experimentation: at a time when declining print revenue is flashing a giant red warning signal for print publishers of all kinds, the company also appears to be growing both its traditional revenue and its digital revenue — and by significant amounts. Digital ad revenue grew by almost 50 percent this year. According to owner David Bradley, the company’s revenue has doubled in the last four years to $40 million, and about 65 percent now comes from digital.

Five reasons to pay attention

There are probably more than five things Atlantic Media is doing that are interesting — for example, giving excellent writers like Alexis Madrigal and Ta-Nehisi Coates relatively free reign to write about even obscure (but fascinating) topics is a bold and interesting move in itself. In any case, this is my attempt to summarize a few of the aspects of what the magazine is doing that are worth paying attention to:

• No paywall or pay-fence: This is fairly obvious, but The Atlantic — a magazine that has a well-established print-based business that presumably still generates a substantial amount of revenue via advertising (as most newspapers do), seems to have no interest in putting up a paywall, while newspapers are throwing them up as quickly as they can. In fact, one of the first things Bradley did when he took over the money-losing publication was to remove the paywall, and in three years traffic climbed by 2,500 percent. With Quartz, the company says it deliberately wanted to avoid what former Wall Street Journal editor Kevin Delaney calls “the friction of a paywall.”

• Alternative revenue: One of the things The Atlantic has focused its attention on instead of a paywall is alternative forms of revenue that are related to its content, something that I have argued more newspapers and other traditional media outlets should consider. According to Atlantic Media president Justin Smith, one of the big drivers behind The Atlantic‘s success has been content-related offshoots such as the event business, where it runs the popular Aspen Ideas Festival. This is an area that too few media players have really dug into. And it can also help you get to know your readers.

• New forms of content: In the not-so-distant past, magazines and newspapers were happy to just throw their existing content onto the internet as “shovel-ware,” and some continue to do so. Atlantic Media has focused instead on trying to adapt what it does with content to take advantage of the web — its Atlantic Wire has been a big contributor to its online success, in part because of a smart approach to aggregation and social media, and it has also launched dedicated sites like Atlantic Cities. And Quartz is the latest example of this principle in action, as is its focus on “obsessions” instead of beats.

“It’s become very, very clear to me that digital trumps print, and that pure digital, without any legacy costs, massively trumps print.” — David Bradley

• Forget about apps: Although it has a traditional “digital edition” app for the magazine, Atlantic Media seems to be much more focused on creating web-native offerings like Quartz that work well regardless of platform — something that publishers like Jason Pontin are also focused on, thanks to the lackluster performance of many traditional media apps. In my experience at least, Quartz looks and works fairly well on the web, tablet and phone, and that cross-platform nature is crucial for any publication that is looking towards the mobile future.

• Native advertising: As virtually every media entity has discovered over the past couple of years, traditional ads aren’t working very well — and that problem is compounded when you move to mobile, where even Facebook has been having difficulty. BuzzFeed and some other players have been experimenting with “native advertising,” by trying to create ad-related or branded content that looks and behaves more like the regular content readers or users are accustomed to. It’s not easy, but there are signs that it is paying off for The Atlantic.

Obviously, not all of these lessons are going to translate to every traditional media entity — The Atlantic is a monthly magazine, and therefore there are different dynamics from a daily newspaper, not just when it comes to content but advertising as well. But there is much that is worth imitating, or using for inspiration, not the least of which is the attempt to make content online something different from just repurposed print content, and the desire to experiment.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Denise Chan and Giuseppe Bognanni

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Launched today at Qz.com, the new publication is optimized for reading on mobile devices and aimed at the “global business leaders” who have become something of a white whale for media outlets looking for reliable revenue streams.

The new Atlantic product is pretty, staffed by smart people and designed for readers who share stories from mobile platforms. This all amounts to a sound strategy but there is one wildcard: the price.

Unlike its compatriots in the elite business niche, Quartz is free — no paywalls, no registration, no app walls, nothing. This is a marked departure from sites like the Journal which have made a very good business of charging hundreds of dollars a year for digital subscriptions.

So where does the revenue come from? Like its competitors, Quartz has flagship high-quality advertisers like Boeing and Cadillac that will engage in ”full-page takeover ads on Quartz’s mobile, tablet and website,” according to AdWeek. This “takeover” style of ad — in which the advertisers gets to occupy the whole page for a hot second — has been touted by Flipboard (one of Quartz’s big partners) and others as the optimal format for tablets.

“Like Wired in the 1990s and The Economist in the 1840s, Quartz embodies the era in which it is being created,” saidQuartz Editor in Chief Kevin J. Delaney in a statement.

At the same time, Poynter cites a Ken Doctor report that explains that Quartz will offer a form of sponsored stories known as “deep content ads.” The idea here is to create ads that seem native to the publication — a scheme executed very well by Buzzfeed, another successful media pioneer.

But will ads bring in enough money to pay for all that elite content? Probably not. Few publications, elite or otherwise, can live on advertising alone these days. That’s why the analyst, Doctor, seems on the money with his prediction that the Atlantic will offer a professional subscription product like Politico Pro. In other words, one for another, the Atlantic will eventually target reader revenue.

With Quartz, Atlantic appears to be making smart tactical choices in pursuit of a viable medium term strategy. And, as David Carr reports in the New York Times, its backers have already tasted success with other digital endeavors like Atlantic Wire and the Atlantic Cities.

The Atlantic’s new business gambit is worth watching closely. Equally interesting will be how the other members of  the “elite” fraternity react. Will they lower prices to stave off Quartz’s arrival or double-down on the “high quality for a high price” digital model that has worked so far?

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Everywhere you look, newspapers and magazines are trying to figure out how to evolve in an online world. Some have merged with online outlets, like Newsweek did with The Daily Beast, while others — including the New York Times — are busy putting up paywalls to try to retain readers. But The Atlantic took a more radical approach to surviving in the web era: It set out to deliberately disrupt its own business, rather than letting someone else do it, and while the experiment isn’t over yet, it seems to be paying dividends for the magazine’s parent company.

A feature in the New York Times on Sunday details how the magazine, which has been around for over 150 years, hasn’t turned a profit for more than a decade — but is now looking at recording a healthy profit of almost $2 million for 2010. How did it manage to do this? According to Atlantic Media president Justin Smith, who joined the company at a low point three years ago, the magazine imagined itself as a venture-capital backed startup in Silicon Valley “whose mission was to attack and disrupt The Atlantic.” As he described it to the New York Times:

In essence, we brainstormed the question, “What would we do if the goal was to aggressively cannibalize ourselves?”

The first thing to do was to remove the walls — both literal and figurative — between the web side and the print side of the publication, both in terms of the business operations and the editorial division. Another wall that came down was the website’s paywall (are you listening, New York Times?). Younger writers with web experience were hired, and advertising staff were given the freedom to sell print or online ads, so long as they hit their targets. The magazine also branched out into conferences and other brand-extension experiments, and it hired superstar blogger Andrew Sullivan.

The result? Revenue at The Atlantic has almost doubled since 2005, hitting $32 million this year, of which half is made up of advertising revenue. Digital advertising accounts for almost 40 percent of that number, compared with less than 15 percent at some other traditional print publications, and the amount of digital ad revenue is up by close to 70 percent over 2009. The addition of traffic draws like Sullivan has undoubtedly helped — he accounts for almost 25 percent of the site’s 4.8 million monthly unique visitors, a number that’s up 50 percent over last year.

As the NYT feature notes, not every traditional publication is going to be able to do what The Atlantic has done — or at least, not as easily. It’s a relatively small business compared with giants such as Newsweek and Time magazine, and has a single motivated owner. But The Atlantic had plenty of one thing that was crucial to its success: desperation. According to owner David Bradley, who bought the magazine in 1999, “Atlantic had so serially failed that it was overwhelmingly likely the next thing we would do was fail, and the next thing we would do was fail.”

That sense of desperation provided just the impetus that the magazine needed to remake itself — and not just a little, but from the top down and from the inside out. There are plenty of traditional media outlets who could use a bit more of that desperation, as they tinker and fidget instead of making the hard changes that need to be made.

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Post and thumbnails courtesy of Flickr user David Daniels

The food-vs.-fuel debate was an unforeseen obstacle for biofuels but the hurdles for wind energy seem to be relatively well understood. Transmission shortcomings and inconsistent breezes are the two major challenges wind energy developers face as more and more wind capacity is added to the grid. So how much hot air is there around wind energy investments? Burned once, investors and regulators are already working to ensure the wind energy boom doesn’t go bust.

On the transmission side, investment is starting to pick up. The inimitable T. Boone Pickens plans on investing $2 billion in electrical transmission lines to pipe power from his remote $10 billion wind farm to market. Regulators are also working to smooth the process of connecting new wind capacity to the grid. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission just approved the Midwest Independent Transmission System Operator’s proposal to reform the generator interconnection queue process, making the administrivia of connecting to the grid more a bit less tedious.

The generally predictable fluctuations in wind energy generation can prove to be an opportunity for other cleantech sectors. Solar energy could help produce complementary power, balancing the load. Utility-scale energy storage has been getting more and more innovation and investment, too. Meanwhile, grid management solutions like demand response could also help in the event of suddenly still winds. EnerNOC inked a deal with the Texas Electric Reliability Council earlier this year in the state that leads the country in wind energy.

Though wind energy growth is certainly being helped by mandates and subsidies similar to those that over-inflated the biofuel bubble, the potential bubble poppers are entirely different. Wind is a pure energy play, with no messy food price stability issues likely to come out of the woodwork. While those mandates and subsidies are subject to the whims of constantly re-elected legislatures, investors should know what the variables are when getting into the wind energy business and no single hurdle is likely to lance the investments.

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