Today's initiative has been variously billed as "iTunes for Magazines" (correct philosophically, but wildly overstated) and "Hulu for Magazines" (incorrect, since Hulu is free). Basically you can now go to this digital storefront and buy all your favorite Conde Nast, Meredith, Hearst, Time Inc., and News Corp publications, to read on your "portable digital device" of choice. Your crappy mobile phone, or iPhone, or upcoming Apple tablet, or, hey, Time Inc. is making its very own tablet, & ad infinitum.

And, of course, this is not the only "digital storefront" thing—Hearst, a partner in this venture, is also going forward with its own personal digital storefront called Skiff , and there are similar services already operating, although, hey, there's not dominant iTunes-type player yet, so you never know.

This could be a successful venture. Then again, it could fade into irrelevance in months. Somebody will make the dominant digital storefront for content like this, just like someone will make the dominant digital reader. Magazine publishing companies, one would think, are likely to get smoked by someone like Apple in this particular sector. But they think it's worth the gamble, after watching what happened to the music industry.

But it'll take a few years. How much would you pay to read Sports Illustrated on your E-reader right now? You don't have an E-reader. And you can read Deadspin for free. So, you'd pay nothing. Changing that dynamic is what media companies need to worry about.

And here's Time Inc's announcement to employees, just because we have it:

December 8, 2009
To: Time Inc. Employees
From: Ann Moore
Re: New Digital Venture

Today, five leading publishers including Time Inc., Conde Nast, Meredith, Hearst and News Corporation announced the formation of a new venture to develop a digital storefront and a common reading application that will allow consumers to enjoy their favorite magazine and newspaper content on any platform they choose.

We already know that the next generation of mobile devices will be loaded with color touchscreens, flexible displays, video capabilities and other features that will make them ideal for consuming rich content and an appealing environment for advertisers. These devices will allow us to combine the best of what consumers love about magazines – quality, curated journalism, engaging content and beautiful photography – with the speed, convenience and portability of the latest technology.

While Time Inc. is pursuing a number of initiatives that will help us expand our current digital businesses and develop new products and revenue streams, our participation in this venture is an important part of our efforts. You'll be hearing more about it in the coming weeks and months.

In the meantime, for a look at some of the work Time Inc. is doing around portable devices, check out the demo Sports Illustrated developed, which will give you an idea of how our digital content might be enjoyed in the near future.

www.si.com/tablet

A.M.

The Apple Tablet has been something of a holy grail for gadget fiends. Now print publishers are enlisting in the cause with just as much fervor. Condé Nast's plan, as described by company execs to Peter Kafka of All Things D: Port Wired to Apple's tablet by mid-2010, followed later by all 17 other titles. By using a special digital format now under development by Adobe — which makes the publishing software that Condé and most other magazine publishers use — Condé also hopes to gain compatibility with tablet and other touch-screen devices made by Hewlett Packard and others.

Jobs should be flattered that such a high-profile publisher is chomping at the bit to get onto his new gizmo. Condé joins New York Times editor Bill Keller in talking up Apple's device; News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch is another recent print-media convert to the tablet religion.

Condé, clearly eager, should keep its enthusiasm in check. The company has closed six magazines and slashed budgets 25 percent at its remaining titles this year, setting off a wave of layoffs. It's doubtful that even Steve Jobs can come up with a silver bullet to rescue businesses that have spent many years squandering past digital opportunities. Especially if the company rushes too quickly and turns out a slapdash tablet product that burns its readers on the format forever.

(Photo illustration by Photo Giddy on Flickr)

Quantcast (Reddit is the lower line; news ranking competitor Digg the upper):

ComScore, via TechCrunch (Reddit is the lower, red line):

The departures of Ohanian and Huffman were anticipated. The co-founders are believed to have completed the "earn out" provisions of their acquisition deal with Condé Nast; the end of October marks the three-year anniversary of the acquisition. What's troubling is that Wired, socked by layoffs and ad declines, seems determined to do to promising Wired.com what it did to Reddit: hinder some real potential.

No matter, for Reddit's co-founders: Alexis Ohanian (top pic, left) is off to a fellowship in Armenia, while co-founder Steve Huffman (top pic, right) will "flee back to Virginia to spend time with my lovely new wife." Sounds like a plan. They'll say goodbye at a Reddit Halloween party in San Francisco. Free drinks are involved — per Reddit tradition — so.... see you there!

(Top pics: Irina Slutsky and saikofish on Flickr)

Wired.com managing editor Marty Cortinas and copy chief Tony Long were laid off last week, sources tell us, though it's expected the two will stay on through the end of the year. The loss of two people, even high ranking ones, might not seem too brutal but for the website's recent history: it lost a quarter of its staff last November, along with a closely-aligned development executive at parent company CondéNet; then in April it lost more staff, including managing editor Leander Kahney, two other full-time employees, an unknown number of freelancers and several writers at Wired Digital's Ars Technica website.

On top of that, people close to the company whisper that the two founders of social news website Reddit, and potentially other staff, may soon be out the Wired door. Co-founder Alexis Ohanian is planning a celebration to take place on the third anniversary of the site's acquisition by Wired Digital on Oct. 31. And there's reason to think this will be more jovial than your typical Halloween party: Three years is a typical outer limit used in "earn out" agreements, in which startup founders vest progressively more money from their acquirers as time goes on. This gives them incentive to integrate their creation into the acquiring company rather than bolting for the door. Ohanian, believed to be hitting his final earn-out date along with co-founder Steve Huffman, declined to comment.

Of course, there's nothing unusual about entrepreneurial Silicon Valley programmers moving on to new challenges. Reddit would likely continue operating just fine without Ohanian and Huffman. And Wired.com marches forward under editor Evan Hansen.

But it's not lost on some Wired.com insiders that the further reduction of Wired Digital comes as New York-based parent company Condé Nast clings to a magazine-centric business model that's been a real disaster lately. After hiring McKinsey & Company's consultants, Condé closed four magazines and slashed magazine budgets, by 25 percent at many titles. And while Wired Digital's already-bled websites and blogs may have strong traffic, advertising and critical notice — they were recently nominated alongside the Washington Post, BBC and New York Times for the Online News Association's general excellence award — they've been included in the cuts.

So how is Condé expecting to survive the next big tumble in magazine advertising, if not with its websites? Through the vision of print side editors like Wired's Chris Anderson, who seems, to some Condé Nasties at least,to have spent so much time on books and speaking gigs he's forgotten to help sell ads — or to try and truly integrate his magazine with his website? Anderson's ad-hemorrhaging Wired print, mind you, has thus far escaped unscathed by the McKinsey cutbacks, we're reliably informed. Despite his good fortune, Anderson is even rumored to be advocating that Wired.com get by on more crowdsourced, written-for-Free blogs like GeekDad. Asked about this, Anderson wrote, "Evan Hansen runs Wired.com, not me." Hansen declined to be interviewed.

Or maybe the Apple Tablet, Microsoft Courier and Amazon Kindle, among other e-readers, will miraculously allow Condé Nast's old business model to seamlessly transition to the digital age, with no real internal changes necessary.

That might all sound preposterous. But it's the best rationale we've come up with for why Condé Nast would starve key websites — the best hope for its future, really — of resources. Granted, it's much easier to remain in a state of denial than to confront real and looming problems. But we thought Condé might have already hit rock bottom and changed its thinking. Apparently not.

(Pics: Josh Russell, Mat Honan and Roo Reynolds on Flickr.)

Take GQ. The men's magazine was once content to throw its stories onto a slush pile called men.style.com, placing the articles next to cut-rate online ads. Then GQ's print advertising dried up, and corporate sibling Wired got a fancy new website. Suddenly the magazine is reviving GQ.com and is killing off its old dumping ground, Men.Style.Com.

Details and Vogue are also going to start doing their own Web publishing, meaning that dumping ground sites like Style.com and Epicurious.com, which have already started firing people, are not long for this world. Reports Ad Age:

Editors who were aloof to the web when Conde Nast started pursuing its current digital strategy a decade ago now chafe at not controlling their own web destinies, and cast jealous eyes on the millions spent on the now-shuttered Portfolio.com and the remake of Wired.com.

At long last, Condé Nast, a company that sells its intimate understanding of culture, fashion and lifestyles, has discovered that the internet is a big thing. And all it took was mass layoffs and an advertising depression!

Gladwell begins with a recitation from the May U.S. Senate hearing on the newspaper industry, the one where David Simon spouted nonsense, and the one that has apparently become a sort of media Woodstock, dividing generations in the big ongoing publishing upheaval. Gladwell places himself firmly on the side of the oldies, and draws a tenuous parallel between the hearings and Anderson's book. Both apparently illustrate the stupidity of West Coast reefer hippies like Jeff Bezos and Arianna Huffington, who just hate selling content, or something.

In Gladwell's review, Anderson is constantly making imaginary pronouncements, which make him look like an idiot. He wants to turn the New York Times into Meals on Wheels, run entirely by volunteers! What a jerk. He says a free price is like "magic!" What?? And Anderson said nice things about YouTube, noted spectacular failure:

When you let people upload and download as many videos as they want, lots of them will take you up on the offer... Although the magic of Free technology means that the cost of serving up each video is "close enough to free to round down" [according to Anderson,] ...a recent report by Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube's bandwidth costs in 2009 will be three hundred and sixty million dollars.

Of course, Credit Suisse numbers may well be grossly overstated, and Gladwell doesn't mention that YouTube is expected to take in $241 million in revenue this year, twice one estimate of last year's sales.

Which isn't to say he's necessarily wrong about Anderson's book, or about Google's user-generated content being "crap." But it does show that, if you're looking for a long-term investment, a Free poster child like Google is probably a better place to park your cash than the magazine group where the two money-losingest titles have big fights over who has less of a grip on the future.

Brushes has a companion app called Brushes Viewer that records the creation of a drawing from start to finish, and we've posted the video of Colombo creating his cover art below.

One insider told us three staff were let go Wednesday; another says that the total is seven — mostly writers — when you include permalancers. That's out of maybe 17 staff and permalancers, give or take, the second tipster said.

The staff-permalancer split may explain conflicting reports over what happened at Wired.com. Gawker and Silicon Alley Insider heard the site was gutted, but Condé is now saying only three staff members were let go. Perhaps that number is higher when you throw in people who were technically contractors. (We've put in an inquiry with the company.)

It's sad to see Ars so severely reduced. Not only for Condé, which not one year ago paid as much ($25 million+) for the site as it did for Wired.com, but also for the art of publishing online. Old-school print editors complain about at a certain lack of depth in Web-only publications; Condé Nast's own Graydon Carter said that the medium is weak at "telling long stories."

Ars proved that wasn't the case. One hopes it can keep doing so now that it's been thoroughly chopped up by an older, supposedly wiser firm.

SAI says that Wired.com was "gutted." We've heard the same, although exact numbers are hard to come by (we still hear 20 or so layoffs total). One layoff victim, we hear: Wired.com managing editor Leander Kahney, who was once mistakenly fingered as the writer behind Fake Steve Jobs, by Nick Denton.

There seems to be some feeling that Wired editor Chris Anderson protected his print side at the cost of his online team. Choosing sides is guaranteed to make somebody mad. If you know more, email us.

Bicoastal tech PR maven Brooke Hammerling broke up with her BlackBerry.

Technology Review Twitterer-in-chief Jason Pontin let the facts get in the way of a good story.

Blogger Penelope Trunk abbreviated her relationship.

Former Condé Nast dealmaker Kourosh Karimkhany had an encounter with celebrity San Francisco crazy dude Frank Chu.

Chris Lehmann, better known as Mr. Ana Marie Cox, confused Elizabeth Edwards with Maureen Dowd.

Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets — or send us more Twitter usernames.

Also gone: Kourosh Karimkhany, the VP of corporate development for Wired.com's parent company, CondéNet. (The magazine is run separately by Condé Nast, a sister company to CondéNet.) Karimkhany did the deals to buy Reddit, an online news-discussion site; Ars Technica, a rival tech blog; and Webmonkey, a Web-technology how-to site. With no further deals planned, there wasn't much reason to keep him on, we hear. (Photo by Jackson West)

Portfolio had lots of things against it from the start. The $100 million investment from Conde Nast placed almost superhuman pressure for immediate success on the editor. And that may have been the biggest problem of all: the editor, Joanne Lipman, was not particularly good at her job. Lately she may have even been losing the patient support of Si Newhouse, her overlord and protector. She never really had the support of her staff, and even her deputies may have had waning enthusiasm for her management. Lipman remains in charge for now; but if the magazine survives in the long term, it will probably not be with her at the helm.

The magazine's immediate problems are the same ones that face everyone else in the business media: that at the time of this economic crisis—the biggest possible story—there are also the fewest possible advertisers. (It didn't help that the magazine decided to ignore the crisis altogether on the latest cover). Portfolio made a big show of attracting high-profile talent with big paychecks; that was when Wall Street was doing well. Now, they'll have fewer issues to put those writers' material in, and a vastly simplified website without a need for a lot of daily content. Some people will have to go. Big names will be leaving Portfolio soon, upset that they signed on there in the first place—and left without any prospect of receiving an equally good offer somewhere else.

Here's the takeaway, as the business types like to say: the Portfolio gamble failed. It wasn't meant to be. Not even a bottomless budget could counteract the fundamental forces that are pushing the media online. The magazine had a lot of talent, a lot of resources, and a lot of good content; but it couldn't put together a package that justified the exorbitant investment in print. Certainly, Portfolio doesn't need to fold just yet; if they can ride out this downturn, streamline the staff, and come out stronger on the other side, they might be around for years and years to come. But their future, like everyone's, is not in the old model of no-expense-spared print behemoths. Magazines will be targeted to niches. General interest publishing will move online (which makes it strange that the mag is laying off its online staff—might be a move in the wrong direction). Thanks for giving it one last shot, Conde Nast; you offered enough proof for anyone.

Hansen shows that Wired is reprising all of its mistakes from the last bubble. "Our vision is to not just be a magazine publisher covering technology, but to be a developer of these things," he says. Of a photo-gallery tool for the website, he says: "We’re hoping to have something to show that will blow people’s minds." Has he been eating Wired founder Louis Rossetto's chocolate?

If I sound like a grumpy old fellow who's seen this all before, it's because I have, first-hand. The sports venture isn't the only repetitive pattern I've spotted. In 1996, Wired bought Suck.com, giving the cultural-critique website enough of a budget to hire unskilled 24-year-olds as copy boys. In 2006, Wired bought Reddit, which lets anyone build their own version of Suck.com (except not as good, because none of Reddit's users are as funny as Joey Anuff, Carl Steadman, or Ana Marie Cox).

What's different now? Oh, sure, we can talk about Internet adoption, broadband, open-source software. Whatever. What has really changed is that now, instead of public shareholders funding Wired's wild experiments, advertisers are willing to foot the bill.

And that is perhaps the biggest reason for Hansen's newfound enthusiasm. He's looking forward to putting ads for sugary electrolyte drinks on his new sports blog. Which only makes us think of OK Soda.

When Wired cofounder Louis Rossetto ran the magazine and HotWired in the 1990s — a period, I should disclose, which includes my employment there — he never stopped talking about the company's seemingly limitless future. His pitch, tinged with equal parts Barnum and McLuhan, always boiled down to this: "Get Wired." I chided Hansen for being too low-key about Wired's online successes, and its new ventures, like the TBD HotWired. Rossetto saw no conflict between being a journalist and a marketer. He believed that while Wired reported on the digital revolution, HotWired would live it. He would never have described a product as "TBD." He would have gone with "TBA" instead: to be amazing.

HotWired FAQ

What Is HotWired?
HotWired is new thinking for a new medium. We call it a cyberstation, a suite of vertical content streams about the Digital Revolution and the Second Renaissance with an integrated community space. While HotWired is currently bound by technological limitations that restrict bandwidth, it represents the genetic blueprint that will evolve into the overarching media environment of the next century.

At the core of HotWired's editorial is point of view. We are not in the content business, we are in the context business. People today don't have the time or inclination to make sense of the data flood. HotWired is Wired's answer to the need for professionalism in a new medium that has been filled until now with something that resembles public access television programming.

HotWired is live, twitching, the real-time nervous system of the planet.

What Does HotWired Look Like?
HotWired is a stunning reinterpretation of the World Wide Web. Developed by Creative Director Barbara Kuhr of the award-winning design firm Plunkett + Kuhr, HotWired's look is clean and bright, filled with playful logos by Dutch designer Max Kisman and bursting with world-beat colors.

HotWired can be accessed on the Internet via the World Wide Web and a client application such as Mosaic or NetScape (though be warned, NCSA Mosaic for Windows has a bug which makes it unusable).

How Is HotWired Different?
HotWired doesn't look like any online service out there - it zigs where all the others zag. (HotWired's unofficial design watchword was "war on bevelled edges.") Its content and perspective are as innovative as those of its mothership, Wired magazine, while at the same time being utterly different. Its community space is technologically unrivalled - the first graphical conferencing system for the World Wide Web.

Isn't Advertising Anathema on the Net? The Net community does indeed react negatively to invasive advertising - the kind of spamming conducted recently by the Arizona lawyers Canter and Siegel, which elicited a massive rejection by the Net's immune system. The advertising on HotWired is the opposite of invasive.

Each advertiser is accessible only through a single discreet banner at the head of a content section. Most advertising is 90 percent persuasion and 10 percent information; advertising on HotWired reverses this ratio. And the privacy of members is guaranteed by HotWired's unqualified commitment to never divulge a member's personal information to advertisers.

Why HotWired, Why Now?
Because while Big Media and the telecom behemoths have been busy forming "strategic alliances" to build the "information superhighway" and sending out press releases about the tests they're launching any day now, thousands of companies and millions of people have quietly built a new interactive medium called the Internet.

This medium is not magazines with buttons, any more than television was radio with pictures. It's a new medium with a new aesthetic, a new commercial dynamic.

Many media companies shovel their leftovers into the online world and call it content. HotWired is not one of them.

Where Wired is a clear signpost to the next level, HotWired is operating from that next level. HotWired is a constantly evolving experiment in virtual community. It's Way New Journalism. It's Rational Geographic.

Today is like 1948; a new medium has reached critical mass. We're trying to help define the future of that medium before it ends up like television.

So if you're looking for the soul of our new medium in wild metamorphosis, our advice is simple. Get HotWired.

What Does HotWired Cost?
HotWired is free to members. HotWired's revenue model is similar to broadcast media - content supported by sponsors. HotWired's sponsors are some of the bluest chip advertisers in America, including IBM, AT&T, Volvo, Sprint, MCI, Zima (Coors), Internet Shopping Network (Home Shopping Network), Club Med, etc.

What Hotwired Is Not HotWired is not Wired magazine with another name (Wired works perfectly well in print, thank you). It's not a so-called online magazine (print content reduced to ASCII and shoveled into another medium, narrowband interactive). It's not video-on-demand (a pie-in-the-sky marketing concept created by out-of-touch old-media executives to justify their headlong rush into a new medium they don't understand, broadband interactive). It's not an online service like Prodigy or AOL (now rendered obsolete by the explosion of interest in the Internet and the development of the Web and graphical browsers).

And like Wired before it, HotWired is not a cold, marketing concept, but the heartfelt expression of the passion of its creators.

Not especially. In 1996, Wired's online arm, HotWired, had launched a search engine, HotBot, using technology from Inktomi, now part of Yahoo. In the spring of 1997, I briefly worked as a freelancer copyediting marketing materials in which HotWired pitched advertisers on buying keyword advertising. Had Wired managed to go public in 1996, as it hoped, instead of being sold off in pieces to Condé Nast and Lycos, might it have raised enough money to build HotBot out? Possibly. Google didn't launch until 1998, after all.

But it's an academic point. Few of Google's ideas were wholly original; timing, execution, and clarity of vision played greater parts in its success. Not to mention luck. Wired always had more of that in chronicling the digital revolution than in living it.

(Photos by Nicholas Carlson)

He's Back!
Webmonkey was the original Web-developer's resource. now it's reborn as the go-to destination for programmers of all levels. Flex your skills at Webmonkey.com.