Now that Time Inc. CEO Laura Lang has repaired a rift with Apple and agreed to allow monthly and yearly subscriptions to be sold via the Apple Newsstand, some are wondering if a digital price chop will follow.
Time Inc. said yesterday that all 20 of its magazines — including People, Sports Illustrated, Real Simple and InStyle — will now sell subscriptions via the Apple Newsstand on the iPad. Up until now, only single copies could be purchased via the Apple Newsstand app.
The strategy at Time Inc. — and indeed at most of the big publishing houses that already use the Apple Newsstand for subscriptions — has been to sell products at a price point close to that of the print edition.
A single copy of Time magazine, for instance, was $4.99 on Apple Newsstand, the same price as print.
Time yesterday gave no sign that the digital price was going to drop.
Some observers think that will be the next battleground to be waged inside the nation’s biggest publisher.
Already, Lang has taken a big step to overcome lots of internal bickering and divisions. At its core, the fight pitted her boss, Time Warner CEO Jeffrey Bewkes, against Apple.
Issues generally centered on who would control the data that consumers supplied to Apple. Publishers wanted it to flow through to them.
When Apple refused, insiders said that Maurice Edelson, the executive vice president and general counsel who had been part of the troika that ran Time Inc. following the ouster of Jack Griffin in early 2011, was a big opponent of selling subscriptions via Newsstand.
And since Edelson was also in charge of corporate development, he had a powerful say in blocking the subscription plan early on.
Publishers were fearful of repeating the mistakes they had made in the early days of the Web, when they gave away content for free. In the tablet world, they wanted to make sure that customers paid.
“They did not want to repeat that mistake, but they made a whole new round of mistakes,” said an industry source.
Consumer databases have long been a hidden asset for publishers to help them market advertisers’ products. The fear was that Apple would end up with all the data, eroding what publishers thought of as one of their core assets.
But other publishers on Newsstand found that consumers who went digital, when asked directly, were often willing to “opt in” and give e-mail access and additional information to the publisher.
That helped to soften Bewkes’ resistance.
“We watched Newsstand evolve over the past year and became satisfied they understand our customers and can meet our needs,” said Time Warner spokesman Gary Ginsberg.
Said one Time Inc. insider, “I’m sure that Laura had to manage up” to convince Bewkes that it was now safe to sell subscriptions via Apple Newsstand.
Said one source of the Apple deal, “It means Bewkes blinked.”
Supporters think a price cut for tablet-delivered subs will spur demand and that a larger base of readers will attract more ads.
Power couple
It is going to be a busy fall for former BusinessWeek Editor-In-Chief Stephen Shepard, now the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, and his wife, Lynn Povich, former editor-in-chief of Working Woman.
Both have books that will hit within days of each other in early September. Shepard and Povich met and married when both were senior editors at Newsweek in the ’70s.
Shepard’s book “Deadlines and Disruption: My Turbulent Path from Print to Digital” is being published by McGraw-Hill Professional. “It’s a book about journalism, written as a memoir,” he said.
Shepard oversaw BusinessWeek for 22 of its glory years, when it was routinely one of the top ad page-grossing magazines in the US.
He retired in 2005 to tackle the job of launching the first journalism graduate school at a public institution. Since there was no entrenched hierarchy, Shepard said he was able to shape it for the digital era from the very start. Most graduates are landing jobs within six months of leaving.
Povich, sister of talk-show host Maury Povich, penned “The Good Girls Revolt” for publisher Public Affairs.
It chronicles how a group of women at Newsweek in 1970 filed a class action lawsuit charging their employer with “systematic discrimination” in hiring and promoting women and follows up on how things turned out
Povich, who started with the mag in 1965 as a secretary in the Paris bureau, was one of 46 women to join the class action. It was filed the same day Newsweek ran a cover story, “Women in Revolt.”
By 1975, Povich had become the first woman in Newsweek history to rise to senior editor. She left in 1991 to join Working Woman.
Later Povich was a pioneer of cable 24-hour news and helped get MSNBC.com off the ground.