Maghound, already hilariously misnamed the “Netflix for magazines” from Time, Inc., wants to give you an easy way to subscribe to magazines, in one central location, with the ability to swap out subscriptions from one magazine to another on a whim. The service will enable subscribers to explore magazines at the subscription price, rather than paying news stand prices.

But, from early reports of what the service will offer, I think they’re already heading into murky territory.

The price point stinks. According to USA Today, “users will pay about $5 a month for three magazines, $8 for five, $10 for seven and $1 for each additional. About 10% of titles, including some weeklies, will cost more.” That’s 3 magazines for $60 per year. What? Quick grab some subscription cards from your favorite magazines. Most cost less than $20 per year, right?

Let’s look at some numbers:

The best selling fashion and style magazines on Amazon are as follows:

1. GQ - $12/year
2. Vanity Fair - $15/year
3. Glamour - $12/year
4. Marie Claire - $8/year
5. Lucky - $12/year

The price for these subscriptions totals $59. That’s two extra magazines for a dollar less than what Maghound will offer. In other words, with Maghound, you’d pay a 35% premium for the top three magazines, with the option of picking up one of the other two magazines in place of one of three you’ve already subscribed to.

At the $8 price point, or $96 per year, you’re in worse shape with those five magazines, paying a 38% premium on the subscription price. If I just went ahead and subscribed to the top five, that’s $37 I could spend on impulse magazine buys on the news stand.

To be fair, if you move further down the tail into more boutique subscriptions like Metro.Pop ($23 from their Web site), Gay Parent ($32 from Amazon) and Foreign Affairs ($44 from Amazon), you can save some serious cash. But you can save some serious cash by reading magazines that post their content online already (Atlantic, Wired and more magazines already do this. And many magazines have some of the most interesting bloggers on the net, so why bother with with the print product at all?)

Is the tail of any value without the head to drive large subscriber numbers? Time will tell.

There are more points I’d elaborate on, but Stephen J. Dubner has them all covered at the Freakonomics blog.

Ted Gup writes for The Chronicle of Higher Education:

I teach a seminar called “Secrecy: Forbidden Knowledge.” I recently asked my class of 16 freshmen and sophomores, many of whom had graduated in the top 10 percent of their high-school classes and had dazzling SAT scores, how many had heard the word “rendition.”

Not one hand went up.

…

As a journalist, professor, and citizen, I find it profoundly discouraging to encounter such ignorance of critical issues. But it would be both unfair and inaccurate to hold those young people accountable for the moral and legal morass we now find ourselves in as a nation. They are earnest, readily educable, and, when informed, impassioned.

…

Then, too, there is the explosion of citizen journalism. An army of average Joes, equipped with cellphones, laptops, and video cameras, has commandeered our news media. The mantra of “We want to hear from you!” is all the rage, from CNN to NPR; but, although invigorating and democratizing, it has failed to supplant the provision of essential facts, generating more heat than light. Many of my students can report on the latest travails of celebrities or the sexual follies of politicos, and can be forgiven for thinking that such matters dominate the news — they do. Even those students whose home pages open onto news sites have tailored them to parochial interests — sports, entertainment, weather — that are a pale substitute for the scope and sweep of a good front page…

Obviously, I’m not so critical of technology, because it is only a tool and can go either way. But I question a few of the premises in the piece.

How can we add good context to news pieces? Do a Google News search for “Iraq.” Where do you even begin to understand the complexity of the past five years? It’s like trying to watch LOST in the middle of this season. Without that background information most of this information is useless. Click on most any story at Google News and you can’t continue to dig for more information about the subject, nearly every page is a dead end; You just get one article about one small piece of the larger picture. It’s incredibly disappointing. On the Web, we should always strive to leave a trail of bread crumbs with relevant links.

Compare news sites to Wikipedia where I can click for hours.

How can we make important information relevant to people that may not normally seek this kind of information out? Too often I feel like this industry throws dry but important information out there without linking it to real human concerns. People aren’t usually one trick ponies. They care about many different topics, some run parallel and some topics cross paths. We should find angles where multiple topics meet, wedge information about one important topic into the conversation about another. And make it relevant!

Citizen journalism and the “We want to hear from you!” aspect of it is kind of silly as an idea. But to assume that because people with cell phone cameras and such can’t commit acts of journalism is folly. This gets back to the broader picture. Gathering information people in our community collect, placed in a thoughtful, relevant context, only adds to the value of our own reporting. Obviously there is a lot of noise out there, but we should strive to act as the filter, to get to the signal that matters.

Just look through some of these photos from the N.D. Democratic convention to get an idea of what acts of journalism people in our communities are doing.

All of this feeds off itself. Broader context through citizen journalism adds more bread crumbs and helps humanize news. Continuity of the overall picture helps target news items to the right group(s) of people. Well informed people can provide more (and better) acts of journalism.

I hate to sit here constantly defending Howard Owens but here we are again. Howard recently posted a great little MBO plan to turn Luddite reporters into web savvy journalists. The plan includes super easy things anyone can do in about two weeks if they tried. But I guess the plan was too straight forward, as the comments attracted quite a few nasty trolls (with no sense of irony, either, since they’re reading and participating in blogs).

Anyway. My two cents.

What many of the complainers and trolls there forget (or maybe haven’t taken the time to know): Having a good web site begets a good paper. Publish to the database. From there you can cull the best content for print editions, mobile versions and even broadcast packages. And those are just the obvious ways to reuse your online product. You have real, quantifiable metrics with which to base editorial decisions. You have opportunities to provide breadth of coverage as well as target content to maintain and gain readership. You can optimize your content for your readers. You have opportunities to diversify content. You have opportunity to interact with the public directly (through comments, blogs, twitter, etc.) and indirectly (through site metrics).

Doing nothing different (and that includes reporters, editors, publishers–any level of news management) at a struggling news organization will only lead to the loss of your job and eventually, your paper.

And you know what? I’m sure that your former readers won’t mourn your loss because plenty other sources out there currently take the necessary steps to move in the same direction the readers and advertisers wish to move. Your information is your brand. If your audience doesn’t want the information you’re giving them, then they don’t want your brand.

NONE OF THE THINGS ON HOWARD’S LIST ARE EVEN HARD TO DO. The objectives require hardly any skill beyond tenacity. Your readers are going online and so should you. If you don’t understand what makes the Web different from print, god help you and the audience you’re trying to serve when you think of the Web as simply digital print.

I mean…really? You can’t take the time to learn how to push a single button on a point and shoot camera? You can’t spend the whopping 10 seconds to sign up for twitter and facebook to see what they’re about? You can’t start a free blog (which has no production schedule)? You can’t ask someone how to drag and drop some video clips around on a time line? That’s lazy. Journalism never had room for that kind of laziness or lack of curiosity to begin with and don’t pretend otherwise.

I’m willing to bet that I can think of a use for every single one of the items Howard lists for any beat. Any beat! Here’s your chance. I’ll do the real hard work–thinking–for you. Just tell me what you’re working on either by emailing me with the form on my homepage or in the comments below. Seriously.

Bill Keller:

In other words, something is happening out there, and if we don’t understand it, it’s not just the newspaper business that is in peril.

And at this time of desperate need for reliable news reporting, the supply is dwindling.

That may sound like a strange thing to say in the age of ‘too much Information’. You turn on your computer and there is a media tsunami: blogs, Google News, RSS feeds, social sites like MySpace and file-sharing programs like YouTube. You can harvest it from around the world. You can customize it. You can have it delivered to your cell phone. You know where many thousands of younger readers go these days to follow breaking news stories? They go - or at least they are sent by search engines - to Wikipedia, an online, communal encyclopaedia written and edited by well, essentially written and edited by any passerby who wants to log on and contribute.

The Onion:

In what is being called a seminal moment in Internet history, a rare weekend post by 25-year-old blogger Ben Tiedemann on his website bentiedemanntellsall.blogspot.com rocked the 50 million-member blogosphere this Saturday. The landmark post, which updated nearly every member of the global online community on the shelf Tiedemann was building, was linked to by several thousand sites, including Daily Kos, Digg, and The New York Times. “Wow, what a special treat this was for all of us,” said Talking Points Memo head blogger Joshua Micah Marshal, who, along with all other bloggers, checks Tiedemann’s site every day just in case something monumental occurs.

Matt Taibbi:

If you have no real knowledge or skill set and you’re lazy and full of shit but you want to make a decent wage, then journalism’s not a bad career option. The great thing about it is that you don’t need to know anything. I mean this whole notion of journalism school—I can’t believe people actually go to journalism school. You can learn the entire thing in like three days. My advice is instead of going to journalism school, go to school for something concrete like medicine or some kind of science or something and then use the knowledge you get in that field as a wedge to get yourself into journalism.

What journalism really needs is more people who are reporting who actually know something. Instead of having a bunch of liberal arts grads who’ve read Siddhartha 50 times writing about health care, it would be really nice if some of the people who are writing about health care were doctors.

People say the darnedest things, don’t they?

Listen, this is journalism 101. Bill Keller is an idiot (somebody put that in a textbook). The Onion hit the nail on the head here. The blogosphere isn’t some unified voice as the-media-would-have-us-believe. It’s a bazillion voices talking about a bazillion things. Which is why there are tools like social networks, RSS and search to help cut the signal from the noise. Why is this journalism 101?

Because, the whole idea of the Fourth Estate (the other three being the Executive, Judicial and Legislative branches of American government) is that journalism acts as the check on the government. It acts as the voice of the people who give democratic government its power. That the barriers to create and consume media have lowered, taking power from the media, means that voice has been passed to the rightful owners of the Fourth Estate: the people.

On an entirely philosophical level

I’d argue that, especially lately, and especially the New York Times, that the mainstream media hasn’t acted as a voice of the people. It hasn’t acted as a check on government. It’s been by and large the voice of the government instead. That Tiabbi interview I link to above makes some brilliant points about why the media is disconnected from the public. Read it.

Which, honestly, so be it. Let the mainstream media be the mouthpiece for government. The media as it once was is not as relevant as before. They are simply an increasingly small part of the head to the long tail of conversations happening in the world. More people are talking about more things through blogs, social networks emails and, hell, face to face conversations than the media can cover based on its rigid standards of “excellence.”

The truly excellent writing is happening on the network, all you have to do is filter the noise. And know what you care about. Someone else cares about it too. They’re probably an expert. Or, at the very least, not boring.

On an entirely business level

Mainstream media moron Bill Keller (I’m sure he’s a smart guy, but this smart guy missed the damn point) opines in his speech about how the media is mishandling coverage in Iraq. There are only 50 western reporters in Iraq. When Saddam was captured, there were 1,000. Do you know why this is? The media has a really, really hard time making news relevant to their readers. I guarantee you they were all pretty much writing the same stories over and over, hardly one of them relevant to their market.

So dump the overseas reporter and use wire copy. It’s expensive to send a reporter to the Mideast. And it’s more expensive when said reporter joins the chorus (or boys club or whatever you want to call it) and writes the same thing everybody else is writing instead of writing something interesting, poignant, beautiful and relevant. God, when put that way, the news media sound like “A-list” tech bloggers. Fuck.

Taibbi is right. Where are the news people who really know what they’re talking about? I’m sure those 50-some reporters in Iraq know what’s going on around them, but by the time it’s vetted by editors and wire monkeys who most likely don’t know what the hell is going on, we the readers are left with mindless, boring drivel, watered down and written for 12-year-olds. And even if a single great story somehow survives this process, there’s hardly ever context to what we’re reading. There’s no sense of history, of the characters and events leading up to the news item. And if there is it is trivial. “Today the stock market fell because a cow looked at a businessman in India.”

No, bring the reporters home and spend an eternity talking about Paris Hilton’s latest idiotic endeavor. It’s relevant to your readers, right? No, but at least it’s halfway interesting when faced with matter of fact city council reporting. It’s also cheap (literally and metaphorically)!

This is the cancer of the media. This is the bane of my existence. Why the hell did I ever think it would be any different? We should all just quit and go into advertising and marketing. At least there we’d be honest about being lazy scumbags.

If you think it’s all about long-form enterprise stories, you’re mistaken, too. Unless you can show your readers by the time they read the headline and look at the photo why this story is important to them, they’re off to the funnies page. Or calling to cancel their subscription. You’re wasting space.

Relevance matters. It matters more than any other news attribute.

You have two options that I can think of: Cast a wider net or throw spears. Use your space to write about more things with the hope that a few or more articles will matter to people or go out, pick valuable segments of your population and cater to their proclivities.

As much as I hate to say it, it worked for FOX News. It works for professional blog networks. It works for the book publishing industry. It works for magazines. That isn’t to say the people are turned off to the idea of balance and fairness. It’s just that we’ve turned those ideals in the newsroom into bland and boring. We try to be everything to everybody. It’s stupid.

On an entirely personal level

It can be better.

We can drop the pompous, holier-than-thou act. We could start thinking in terms of neighbors instead of readers and eyeballs. We could remove the laziness from newsrooms across the country. We could stop hiding behind upside-down pyramids and passive voice. We could stop worrying about beating the competition; Nobody is comparing notes (scoops are illusory ego boosters). We could start serving segments of readers better. We could demand that J-schools get their heads out of their asses and pass only the students that didn’t just get into this business because they hate math. Then we could make our content interesting, poignant, beautiful and relevant.

To do that, we should diversify our media offerings. We should enable our audience to join the conversations. We should solicit the best voices of our communities. We should stop looking at blogs as a unified object out to destroy us. We should create and design tighter, better papers and Web sites. We should create tighter news packages. Dump the decisions by committee. Think outside your products and go where your readers are.

We should do more and talk less.

UPDATE: Scoble has decided to go on strike until Monday because of this idiocy. NOW I’M REALLY ANGRY.

Kathy Sierra wont be at ETech conference today because mindless idiots have been threatening her…on the Internet.

In her post (linked above), she accuses top bloggers Chris Locke (One guy who helped write The Cluetrain Manifesto, but now mostly posts Internet quiz results on his blog like 15 year olds on LiveJournal), Listics’ Frank Paynter (who does his best to “be respectful, not mean spirited…” and “express love” as per his disclaimer), Jeneane Sessum (writer of godawful Internet poetry), Raving Lunacy Allen Herrel and others of posting threats like:

fuck off you boring slut… i hope someone slits your throat and cums down your gob

And:

They posted a photo of a noose next to my head, and one of their members (posting as “Joey”) commented “the only thing Kathy has to offer me is that noose in her neck size.”

and posting this photo:

Well, Sierra has gone to the police with all this, and it seems they’re taking the threats very seriously.

If these accusations turn out to be true, I expect to see sites like BlogHer to make formal apologies for the actions of their bloggers (Sessum is a regular contributor).

I also wouldn’t mind seeing their apology videos on blip.tv.