John Battelle’s “Musings on ‘Streams’ and the Future of Magazines”

John Battelle muses on the shift from page-based content (magazines, blogs, and similarly grouped content) to streams of aggregated content.

What’s lost is that experience of consuming one publisher’s meal – instead, we stream a mishmash of snacks.

That “page-based content” experience has value – editing and designing a publication is an art – but getting paid for that is more complex than ever. As Battelle enumerates, digital publishing has brought new complexities: Producing content for different screen sizes and content platforms while creating ads that can piggyback on each format and succeed for advertisers.It’s a daunting challenge, but Battelle is hopeful:

So far, we’ve written off magazines as dying, because we can’t figure out how to replicate their core value proposition in the digital world. But I’ve got a strong sense this is changing. Crazy publishing entrepreneurs, and even the big players in media, will sooner rather than later drive solutions that resolve our current dilemma. We’ll develop ads that travel with content, content management systems that allow us to automatically and natively drive our creations into the big platforms, and sensible business rules with the Big Guys that allow independent, groundbreaking publications to flourish again.


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