From MIN: 

Editor & Publisher’s Web site EditorandPublisher.com announced to readers on Friday that it would no longer restrict access to its content to paid subscribers. The venerable media-on-media trade brand was sold by Nielsen in January to Duncan McIntosh Company, which inherited the online subscription model. In a statement at the site, publisher Duncan McIntosh said, “Nielsen had been using [paid access] for a number of years, but nothing during the past year has changed our opinion about them.” McIntosh says that he and the staff had never been “big believers in pay walls." "We have removed it to build more traffic and make more of our original content available to our visitors," he says.

The brand, which started in 1901, continues to publish on a monthly basis. Print subscriptions are $65 a year.

From MIN Online. Full story here

Conde Nast continues its promised roll-out of print titles for the iPad. Vanity Fair was released late last week for both the iPhone and iPad at $4.99 an issue. The mobile iterations follow closely the model used in GQ. The full contents of the magazine can be thumbed in facsimile format when the iPad is in landscape mode. Facing pages appear on the screen and the usual multi-touch controls manage zooming. In portrait mode the current article’s text is rendered in a long scroll beneath the splash image, which can be zoomed to full screen or swiped to show any more images in the set. Text fonts in portrait mode can be enlarged.

Editorially, the mobile issues also add some extra content: video of the Hawaii shoot for the cast of Lost; an extended piece on the last season of the show, an extended profile of Emma Watson and an app-exclusive spotlight on illustrator Ed Sorel. On the advertising side several of the sponsors have video spots attached to the renderings of their print ads.

Vanity Fair for iPad follows a less radical approach to redesigning the magazine reading experience than Bonnier’s efforts with Popular Science’s iPad app. At the same time it accommodates the hardware more adroitly than Rodale’s Men’s Health, which adds more multimedia enhancement without altering the print format. Apparently recognizing recent complaints by iPad users that the single issue pricing of these apps is multiples higher than a subscription rate, Vanity Fair is giving a price break to customers. Once one buys the first iPad edition for $4.99, subsequent months will cost only $3.99.

A former staff writer, Dennis Romero, gives a first-person account of what is wrong with Entrepreneur Magazine, focusing primarily on the editorial and personnel issues dogging the business magazine. The author's account seems pretty believable to me but it is fair to point out that there are oftentimes two sides to stories like this. At a minimum, Romero's blog offers some insight into some of the things I always wonder about with magazines like Entrepreneur, such as: how much do they cater the editorial in an effort to attract specific advertisers. (Romero's answer: quite a bit)

Full blog here.

Here is a taste:

"So, essentially, Entrepreneur is hostile to journalism because it costs money and requires tolerance of diverse, smart, and educated people. At the same time, there’s a sleight of hand: Entrepreneur’s owners crave those advertisers that crave educated, savvy and demanding readers. How they connect the dots between dumbed-down “take-away” stories for people who haven’t the slightest notion of business, and a moneyed advertising base keen on the educated and affluent, is pure salesmanship."

AP Chairman Dean Singleton says he is mad about the unauthorized use of news content, primarily on non-member sites. This is great news. Now lets hope that anger can be channeled into an actual business plan. Publications were annoyed but not quite angry that Craig's List and eBay stole their classified business, they were irked that Monster.com got their help wanted business, they were chagrined that Realtor.com eroded their real estate advertising business.  But they were not quite angry enough to to do anything about those blows to their businesses. It is good to see someone in the industry actually get angry. Now let's hope that translates into action. 

This is from www.paidcontent.org:

AP Annual Meeting: Singleton On Protecting AP’s Online Content: ‘We’re Mad As Hell’

By David Kaplan - Mon 06 Apr 2009 11:37 AM PST

MediaNews Group CEO and AP Chairman Dean Singleton began his keynote highlighting the wire service’s decision to concentrate on working with portals that protect its news content. On the use of online sites appropriating AP content and not providing any revenue back to the organization, Singleton channeled Howard Beale from the movie Network: “We’re as mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore.”