Linda Ruth's Page

Discovery Girls has always been interactive. This magazine, written for “tween” girls age eight to twelve, uses real girls for models; uses real girls’ questions and problems and experiences as part of its editorial content. The interactivity of its website and its apps is a natural extension of that which has always characterized the brand.

Jason Pontin’s recent blog post, “Why Publishers Don’t Like Apps” identified many factors that we have all been tiptoeing around for some…

Who can resist the person brave enough to cry out that the emperor has no clothes? Once again Technology Review’s Jason Pontin has done that for us by announcing that Publishers Don’t Like Apps. Pontin has a history of making stirs by announcing the end of things and there usually seems to be a kernel of truth in what he says—a kernel that might be overlooked in a more moderate…

I guess I touched a nerve.  

Maybe, just maybe, the current failure of our magazine retail sales isn’t only about digital alternatives to print.  Maybe, just maybe, it isn’t only about our current economic woes.

Maybe it has something to do with the sheer freaking difficulty of getting a publication to be seen on a magazine rack.

“You can’t sell what you can’t see,” a publisher wrote. “Where there is nothing visible to generate an…

Hey Retailer! Please Deliver on your Display Promise!

Some of the “print is not dead” material going round is beginning to sound a bit elegiac: a video whose slam-style poetry celebrates the pleasures of print; rumors of indy publishers huddled in basement groups declaring their undying loyalty to ink on paper. It reminds me of the record crowd when digital music started coming in: whether it’s the sound of the needle on vinyl or the smell of ink on paper it’s all got a kind…