• The story of an eye witness: Jack London, a San Francisco writer, wrote about the 1906 earthquake that almost destroyed the city by the bay. This is amazing writing from an amazing writer whose words make that tragedy come alive, a century later.
• Rajat Gupta’s lust for zeros: He had the world on a string and then he made bad choices. His worst was picking to fraternize with the wrong kind of guy and he is now paying the price for it. He was indicted in the largest insider trading case in U.S. history. What a fall for a guy who once ran McKinsey & Company.
• 1977: my own year of living dangerously: My friend Martin Varsavsky goes back in time, to a city he loved and grew up in — Buenos Aires — and tells his story. I have never known Martin like this. Amazing story.
• Gentrification in Buffalo: Cities and communities are people. And that is why we can reinvent, remix and thrive in them.
• Can you redesign the razor? Some gentlemen want to know and are talking about it.
• Counter-terrorisim and the legacy of Philip K. Dick. The New Yorker writer reflects on his piece, Too Much Information, from 2002. It is pretty amazing and far-sighted piece considering it was written over a decade ago.
• How Facebook and Brooklyn killed America’s obsession with cars. The headline says it all.

To submit documents, users must download the Tor Project software. They can then access Strongbox and submit information under a randomly generated code name. The New Yorker explains, “If a writer or editor at The New Yorker wants to contact you about the information you have submitted, he or she will leave a message for you in Strongbox. These messages are the only way we will be able to reach you, and this message can only be accessed using your code name.”

In a New Yorker blog post, Poulsen writes that he and Swartz began developing Strongbox, which was nicknamed DeadDrop, in 2011. He says:

“By December, 2012, Aaron’s code was stable, and a squishy launch date had been set. Then, on January 11th, he killed himself. In the immediate aftermath, it was hard to think of anything but the loss and pain of his death. A launch, like so many things, was secondary. His suicide also raised new questions: Who owned the code now? (Answer: he willed all his intellectual property to Sean Palmer, who gives the project his blessing.) Would his closest friends and his family approve of the launch proceeding? (His friend and executor, Alec Resnick, reports that they do.) The New Yorker, which has a long history of strong investigative work, emerged as the right first home for the system. The New Yorker’sversion is called Strongbox; it went online this morning.”

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Documents from the Mailers’ Technical Advisory Committee (MTAC) in May show that the industry perception is that magazines arriving in mailboxes is one of the few exciting “mail moments” left for postal service customers. So encouraging magazine subscriptions could boost enthusiasm for the struggling postal service, which mainly relies on so-called “junk mail” to stay afloat, materials that aren’t quite as exciting for customers on the receiving end.

The news was first reported by the blog Dead Tree Edition, which raised some important questions about the proposal, including:

• Would include both print and digital subscriptions?
• Would it be an unfair use of the postal service’s resources to compete against companies like Amazon or subscription sellers?
• How would publishers get their magazines into the program?

Neither the USPS or MTAC responded to requests for comment. It’s still just a proposal, but CJR reports some subscription offerings could appear in stores as early as January as part of a preliminary test, and publishers have shown interest in participating:

“The plan is for the Postal Service to install posters with QR codes in post offices around the country. Customers could then scan the code with their phones and subscribe to different magazines. Alternatively, they could just subscribe to magazines online, through USPS.com.

“What periodicals lack in volume, though, they make up for in influence. People want to receive periodicals, so they check their mail and read the spam. If magazines die, then people may not even bother to check their mailboxes. Internally, the Postal Service refers to periodicals as “the anchor in the mailbox.” Clearly, the Postal Service has an interest in making sure that periodicals stay in business and continue to sell print subscriptions.”

There’s no doubt that the promise of the arrival of a print copy of the New Yorker might entice me to the mailbox more often, but that doesn’t mean the USPS is necessarily the best company to sell me that subscription, or that QR codes on in-store posters would be an effective way to do it.

QR codes have tricky adoption issues, and plenty of customers find them confusing or unhelpful. And with 87 percent of magazine and newspaper publishers putting out iPad apps and focusing on the digital future, doing deals with the postal service seems like an odd move. But hey, if the program works, new customers are new customers — and both the postal and magazine industries could use them at the moment.

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But here comes BuzzFeed. The viral media site, which has already disrupted news and political reporting, thinks it can apply its super-sharable formula to 10,000-word essays.

For the unfamiliar, BuzzFeed made its name with internet fluff (a “cat that look like Rembrandt“) but has lately been powering up with high-profile hires like Politico’s Ben Smith and Rolling Stone’s senior editor, Doree Shafrir. The latter, as BuzzFeed’s executive editor, is now hiring a long-form editor.

“There’s opportunities to do really compelling jorunalism that originates in online form,” said Shafrir in a recent phone interview. “Right now a lot of the best long-form stuff originates in print and we’d like to change that.”

And there’s the rub. While other forms of journalism were ripe to be disrupted by BuzzFeed’s technology-driven platforms, the company will have a harder time taking on the likes of the New Yorker. Consider that there are two good reasons why the most celebrated long form journalism still starts in print: simplicity and status.

The first relates to readers. Long-form reading is a relaxing, immersive experience best enjoyed on the couch. The simple elegance of a print magazine continues to be the superior way to deliver that experience. As for status, a print appearance still remains the pinnacle of prestige for writers – to many would-be Nabokovs, a BuzzFeed appearance just doesn’t carry the same cachet as seeing their name on the cover of The Atlantic.

Shafrir, needless to say, is not fazed by these obstacles to BuzzFeed’s long-form ambitions. She points to the viral success of her own recent 7,000-word opus “Can you die from a nightmare?” as evidence that BuzzFeed is a good vehicle for long-form content. She adds that future long pieces on the site will focus on both universal themes (like sleep and night terrors) that everyone likes to share and also on pieces that will generate intense interest among specific communities — say surfers or parents of autistic children.

As for the natural appeal of magazines to both readers and writers, larger forces are tilting in BuzzFeed’s favor. One is the ever-improving quality of e-readers and tablets which are becoming almost as light and elegant as a New Yorker page. This will appeal to the couch crowd as will BuzzFeed’s decision to insert a “read it later” button right into the stories. You can see how this works here (the reader simply chooses her favorite service from a drop-down menu and the story is zapped to a reading list where it can be read anywhere later on):

And finally, a younger generation of writers are less likely than their forebears to have print prejudices. As this astute Poynter piece points out, newer literary sites like The Awl are finding success by rejecting the convention that online writing should be kept to 800 words or less.

The point is that, the evolution may be slower, but long form’s move to digital sites is as inexorable as that of other journalistic genres.

(Image by  cosma via Shutterstock)

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Earlier this week, Tablet magazine’s Michael Moynihan reported that Lehrer had fabricated Bob Dylan quotes in the bestselling Imagine. It had previously been discovered that Lehrer was reusing his own material in New Yorker blog posts. Lehrer resigned from his position as a staff writer at the New Yorker. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has stopped shipping physical copies of Imagine and the ebook is no longer for sale.

To the right is the ad that appeared this morning in Shelf Awareness, an email newsletter aimed at booksellers. (Note: The image may not appear in this post if your ad blocker is on.) Publishers Marketplace reporter Sarah Weinman pointed out the ad on Twitter.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt had no comment on whether it is running the ads elsewhere.

Updated 8/6/12: HMH is also offering refunds to readers who purchased a print copy of the book, but notes ”consumers must submit requests to the retailer from which the e-book was originally purchased.” Here’s how to do that:

Amazon Kindle: Contact customer service if you are outside the normal 7-day window for ebook returns.

Barnes & Noble Nook: Call 1-800-The-BOOK or visit in-store customer service.

Kobo: Contact Kobo customer service.

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The decision by the New Yorker and Wired to unplug their stories from Flipboard, a tool that lets readers “flip” pages magazine-style on their tablets, suggests that while Flipboard has proven itself very capable of delivering readers, its ability to deliver revenue is much murkier.

In a telephone interview, CEO Mike McCue played down the significance of the magazines’ pull-out, calling them “outliers” and suggesting they miscalculated. ”I find it ironic that Wired is taking a step backward while the New York Times is taking steps forward.”

The Flipboard quitters: examples or outliers?

The announcement by the New Yorker and Wired, reported by Ad Age this week, caused a mini-stir in publishing circles. A Wired exec also complained about a dearth of advertising for the platform. The two Conde Nast publications indicated they will now keep their content on their own websites and apps and use Flipboard only to display headlines.

The move comes at a time when some publishers are questioning the value of Flipboard, even as the social reader is claiming  more than 8 million users. Unnamed executives told Mashable that the advertising proposition wasn’t adding up and that they feared Flipboard was cannibalizing their readers on other platforms.

Flipboard, which compiles stories based on social media recommendations, lets publishers add full screen ads that resemble those found in a magazine. The aggregator, which says it has thousands of partner publishers and a waiting list of another thousand, takes a cut of the revenue from those ad sales. It has been running four to eight ad campaigns a month, some of which appeared in the Flipboard editions of Wired and the New Yorker.

Build it and advertisers (might) come

Flipboard is steadfast that its platform — stacks of curated content corralled by social media — is the future of news and, based on its popularity, many readers seem to agree.

But despite offering a magazine-like showcase for brands, Flipboard has yet to create a meaningful advertising ecosystem. The company suggests this is because the ad industry is not yet configured for a platform that, in its view, straddles both digital and off-line formats. In an earlier interview, a Flipboard spokesperson said many brands have a “little trial budget” for tablet ads and that they will increase such budgets as they come to understand the platform’s potential.

In an effort to bring advertisers up to speed, Flipboard has invested in a six-person New York team led by Christine Cook, the former Chief Revenue Officer of News Corp’s tablet newspaper, The Daily. Cook’s team is tasked with helping salespeople with lead generation and spreading the word about tablets’ potential.

“They’re working with top agencies and advertisers to educate them about what’s out there,” said McCue.

A spokesperson added, “We support their sales teams with our team in New York. We can help them sell into current advertisers, but many times we bring new advertisers since we often get calls directly from brands interested in Flipboard.”

As for publishers, McCue suggests they are “addicted to ad revenue from banner ads” but that those ads are in a permanent downward price spiral. He says they are better off with Flipboard-style ad campaigns that offer 10 to 15 times the payout of banner ads,  which is “closer to print economics.”

Who gets to keep the money?

So here’s the mystery. If Flipboard is so lucrative (McCue says it is generating millions in ad revenue), why are Wired and the New Yorker taking their ball and going home? Wired’s Howard Mittman told AdAge that advertiser interest isn’t sufficient and that the magazine prefers to engage readers without an intermediary.

Not all publishers are so downbeat. Christine Osekoski of Fast Company says her publication has its first advertiser partner in place for September and that Flipboard will be a very lucrative new revenue stream for Fast Company. She adds that any risk of cannibalization is offset by the chance to introduce Fast Company to new readers.

These mixed messages, in addition to the curious timing of the pullout by Wired and New Yorker, suggests that the issue here may not be Flipboard’s overall viability but instead the company’s formula for dividing revenue.

McCue would not disclose a percentage of the revenue share — he would only say the publishers get more than half and that the formula is the same for everyone. And, for Conde Nast, that may be the problem.

Wired and the New Yorker have been prime ambassadors for Flipboard as a result of their prestigious brands and top-shelf advertisers. But now the two magazines may have grown tired of carrying water for Flipboard and may have decided to make a point by pulling out on the day of the latter’s big New York Times announcement. The decision may also give Conde Nast leverage to negotiate better revenue deals for its other publications that are continuing their Flipboard partnerships. The company, unlike some publishers, is in a position to tell Flipboard it needs Conde Nast more than the other way around.

Flipboard’s Future

In the bigger picture, publishers will be hard-pressed to put the Flipboard genie back in the bottle. As my colleague Mathew Ingram explained in his analysis of the New York Times partnership, a growing number of readers prefer to get their news through aggregators and social media rather through a publisher’s website or app. If publishers walk away from Flipboard, they run the risk that readers won’t follow them back to their old platforms.

What all this means is that Flipboard’s future is not immediately in question — in short, the company’s issues appear to be rooted more in marketing rather than a bad business strategy. The issue appears to be the terms of Flipboard’s partnerships with publishers. It’s a pretty safe bet that by this time next year its one-size-fits-all policy will be replaced with something more granular.

And finally, there is the question of whether Flipboard will seek other revenue streams if publishers insist on taking a greater share of ad dollars . Flipboard said the company is already generating a small amount of non-advertising revenue. Given that McCue said last year that a premium ad-free version of Flipboard is off the table, this revenue may come from readers who sign up for paywall publications they discover on Flipboard.

(Image by Lightspring via Shutterstock)

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Lehrer shouldn’t be excused for cribbing from himself. But it’s not that surprising that it happened.

“Big ideas” aren’t unlimited

Jonah Lehrer, in the model of fellow New Yorker staff writer Malcolm Gladwell, is a “big ideas” writer. He writes books that center around a counterintuitive or provocative theme, and explains why things are not as they seem. Books like these are often really popular.

So far, the criticism toward Lehrer has centered around the fact that he copied his own sentences, but copying ideas and themes is also problematic. There is not unlimited material for this kind of pop science writing. It varies in quality, a lot. Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point” was better than his later books like “Outliers,” partly because the idea behind “The Tipping Point” was better and the examples were fresher. (Similarly, when Malcolm Gladwell tried to apply the counterintuitive thing to protests in Egypt and Tunisia, people got mad.)

It is tough to come up with new, fresh material that advances a counterintuitive thesis. It’s even tougher to repeatedly come up with those new “wow, I never looked at it that way” ideas. And when you do come up with those ideas, it’s probably more tempting to recycle them.

Writing isn’t public speaking

Authors like Lehrer and Gladwell do a lot of public speaking along with writing gigs. (Here are some of Lehrer’s public appearances.) In public speaking, borrowing from yourself isn’t such a bad thing. Many public speakers recycle material from one presentation to the next. Presumably, they tailor that material depending on whom they’re speaking to, and don’t give the same presentation to the same group twice. (Slate’s Josh Levin points to Malcolm Gladwell’s disclosure about how he handles his obligations to the New Yorker versus his obligations as a public speaker.)

Lehrer’s self-borrowing is easy to discover because he has written for a lot of high-profile publications — Wired, the New Yorker, the New York Times — that attract similar audiences. The examples discovered so far are vivid and memorable — the logic puzzles, the “love making.” That could mean that there is a lot more similar content waiting to be discovered, but it’s clear that Lehrer tends to repeat similar memorable themes. That’s not so bad in his role as a public speaker, but it’s problematic for a journalist.

Lehrer recently did a video interview with GigaOM’s Chris Albrecht. It’s below.

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The number of newspapers and other media entities that are erecting paywalls or launching subscription-based apps for the iPhone and iPad continues to grow, and even some smaller regional newspapers are throwing up walls to try to protect their print subscriptions. Other publishers, however, have found alternative methods of monetizing their content — such as packaging their older content in different formats to appeal to readers in different ways, including e-books and special feature offerings like those The New Yorker has started selling. While these may not fill the yawning gap that continues to grow between print revenue and online revenue, they are arguably a more creative response than a pay wall.

As Reuters’ blogger Felix Salmon notes in a recent post about The New Yorker’s approach, the venerable magazine has a treasure trove of past content that it has been able to bundle into easily digestible chunks and offer as one-off iPad packages — most of which are sponsored by an advertiser or a group of advertisers and are either available to existing subscribers through the magazine’s iPad app, or can be bought for as little as $2.99 through iTunes. The first of these, Salmon says, was a collection of articles the magazine had published about the digital revolution, from a profile of Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to a 1958 “Talk of the Town” story about a chess-playing computer.

Repackaging existing content for the “long tail” reader

Other packages have included historical collections about baseball, including pieces dating back to 1929, some written by famous authors such as John Updike, as well as golf and the topic of “sustainability.” As Salmon notes, the number of potential feature packages that could be created is almost limitless, and the cost of doing so is relatively minor — unlike the printed anthologies that entities like The New Yorker come out with from time to time. All it takes is a search of the archives, a short foreword written by an editor to describe the collection, and an upload to the iTunes store.

How many readers are likely to be interested in these packages? That’s hard to say, but the revenue generated by sales — or sponsorships — of these collections is likely to quickly eclipse whatever cost was associated with producing them.

Until the web and mobile reading devices like the iPad came along, there was no easy way to monetize this kind of “long tail” content. Many newspapers created elaborate electronic libraries that could be accessed only by librarians at huge cost to the end user, or packaged their content on CD-ROMs, but the costs involved were so prohibitive that they were only of use to corporate customers or professional researchers. These kinds of collections also often took so long to produce that any interest readers might have had in the topic was likely to wane before these collections even appeared on the market.

With iPad apps and e-books that can be published quickly on Amazon’s Kindle platform, however, publishers can pull together a collection around a news event — such as the arrest of Boston mob kingpin Whitey Bulger, or the death of Steve Jobs — and sell it quickly (Jeff Sonderman at the Poynter Institute had a look at some of the newspapers that are doing this recently, including the Boston Globe  and the Washington Post). So publishers can benefit in two ways: They can take advantage of the short-term interest in content they have already produced, and they can also easily put together packages like The New Yorker has done, that appeal to a broader and less time-sensitive reader.

Some readers will even pay for what is available free of charge

There are other examples of publications taking this approach too, including the technology blog Ars Technica (owned by Conde Nast), which recently published an e-book version of the massive review that writer John Siracusa produced about Apple’s new operating system, OS-X Lion. The review — which ran to 27,000 words — certainly benefited from the e-book treatment, and many readers said they preferred to read it on an iPad rather than on a screen. And despite the fact that Ars Technica charged $5 for a review that anyone could have read on the website for free, it sold more than 3,000 copies of the e-book in less than 24 hours.

The non-profit political publication ProPublica has also made use of e-books as a way of extending the reach of its content, publishing feature packages on the terrorist attacks on Mumbai and Wall Street corruption. In some cases, these collections have been offered free of charge — which means they effectively function as marketing for the publication — while others have cost as little as 99 cents. Wired magazine has also used e-books as an alternative method of distribution for some of its existing content, including a new book about Steve Jobs based on articles the magazine has carried in the past.

Obviously, selling a few e-books for 99 cents or $2.99 isn’t going to produce gigantic sums of revenue for newspapers or magazines. But at least this approach takes something those companies have in abundance — the content they’ve already produced for other purposes — and finds new ways to monetize it, instead of trying to charge readers for something they can get anywhere, such as breaking news or political commentary on the topics of the moment. E-books and one-off apps may not replace pay walls for some newspapers, but they’re an idea worth exploring.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Giuseppe Bognanni and Rego Korosi

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