Pay Attention to Fortune: They Might Just Save Print

Last week, Fortune published a story that dove deeper into the Apple Corporation than any piece before it. This story was available in two places. The iPad edition, and the print edition. Customers who wanted more than the mere snippets posted in tech blogs would have to pay for the privilege. Fortune considers it an experiment, to see if a market exists for this kind of subscriber-exclusive content.

The whole Apple article will eventually be available for free online- Fortune recently posted the first chunk of it on their site. And they'll put the rest up- at their own pace- after they've had a chance to squeeze as many paying customers out of it as they can.

Fortune's early numbers show a moderate increase in traffic to their subscription page as a result of the ploy. But sales numbers from iTunes are not in yet and we are a while off from knowing if this strategy will really work. If the money rolls in though, we could be on the cusp of a new paradigm in journalism.

 

Fortune has wisely recognized that they cannot stop people from posting chunks of the article in blogs and the like. They've limited themselves to reaching out to sites that lift too much, accepting the remainder of the leakage as an inevitability.

Print media has had a number of false messiahs in the last few years. The Daily, the Wired app, and the iPad itself were all expected to bring print into the digital age. Fortune's gambit is the latest in a growing list of schemes to bring the money back to Big Content. The idea is certainly sound enough. The question is- will people pay?

Updates

Fortune’s Schlocky Tim Cook Cover

Source: Daring Fireball

This week’s Fortune Magazine cover story penned by Apple watcher Adam Lashinsky is called “How Tim Cook is Changing Apple”, and it goes pretty deep into some of the high-level changes at the top of Apple since its late CEO Steve J ...
Full article at: Daring Fireball  More like this  2 hours ago

Apple CEO Cook's doing a good job, but Jobs 'would have lost his mind over Siri'

Source: Macworld UK

Steve Jobs would have “lost his mind over Siri,” according to an ex Apple employee. The ex-employee told Fortune that people at Apple are “embarrassed by Siri”. Siri is Apple’s voice-recognition ‘PA’ feature on iPhones that has come under fire recently i ...
Full article at: Macworld UK  More like this  10 hours ago

Fortune on how Tim Cook is changing Apple

Source: ZDNet

Summary: A FORTUNE cover story on Apple CEO Tim Cook tackles his leadership style (and how it differs from Steve Jobs), Facebook, product development and Apple’s top-secret Top 100 meetings. The issue of FORTUNE magazine features an in- ...
Full article at: ZDNet  More like this  1 day ago, 3:11pm CDT

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