Today I got another invite from a magazine company suggesting I subscribe to their publication: this time "Ocean Paddler". Alas their sales and marketing department are going to be disappointed.
But it gave me an idea. These sorts of magazines worked best back when information was hard to get and so those interested in niche subjects had a relatively easy to meet requirement. There might only be a couple of articles per edition of interest but the lack of alternatives increased their value.
My problem - and I can't believe I'm alone in this - is that I'm sort of interested in a number of a topics and in each case there is now a free alternative, the web.
But that doesn't mean there aren't articles that would interest me from each publication. So from Classic Yachts it might be a report of the Fowey Classics while from Ocean Paddler an interview with Audrey Sutherland (as per Bonnie's suggestion). Good journalism is always worth reading, and finding it is getting harder not easier.
So maybe there's a new subscription model in which you can (say) read in an iPad app 100 articles from any water sports related magazine per month for $ 10 and after that (say) $0.5 per article. It would be a bit like your mobile phone (cellphone) contract: you get a certain number of minutes in the basic contract and after that it'll cost you.
Of course you'd call it something better than Classic Yacht Kayak World, but it would represent a half way house between single magazine subscriptions and high granularity pay per read micropayments.
If a publishing house like IPC Media with a decent portfolio were to use such a model it would be an awfully more attractive than each one of their publications on their own.
Maybe I should move quickly before the Buff Staysail Publishing Empire grabs the idea!
