First of all, for a report that costs £99, and that frames itself as taking the magazine industry forward, there’s an awful lot of low-res photography, sub-editing errors and terrible writing. “Mm! Smell that? You’re getting a whiff of the citrus-scented pages of Lemon magazine”. No, I’m not. Other cringeworthy moments include 2 pages on Entertainment Weekly putting a video screen in its pages, which in an iPad world quite thunderously misses the point; and the section on what makes a good cover, which your average journo undergrad would balk at being over-simplistic. It also overplays the potential for the likes of Issuu – while it’s great for cheaply archiving content (and we use it for exactly that), it’s not going to be “leading the way” in the future. There’s still a residual sense of believing you can shove the qualities of print into the online and tablet space.

This report is being aimed squarely at the lumbering giants of the publishing industry, who haven’t got up to speed with apps, augmented reality and the rest. To be fair to FIPP, it’s collated a lot of significant recent developments in one place, and it’s a sad fact of publishing that those at the very top are usually the least nimble and need this education. Witness Jonathan Newhouse, Conde Nast’s international CEO, using his conference speech last year to deliver a sentimental hymn to print.

But there are points that this report fails to hammer home. It underplays the importance of social networking – this is an opportunity to get a vast group of people effectively advertising your magazine for free, while getting an unprecedented level of emotional attachment to your brand through online discussion. It’s more powerful than the idea of putting ads on the cover, or any little gimmick. There also needs to be a continuing breakdown of the idea that a magazine is words and pictures, something that Monocle, with its 360-degree lifestyle, does very well, even if its products have the occasional whiff of emperor’s new clothes about them.

And the thing that’s really missed out is the very thing that FIPP themselves are doing so well – selling intelligently collated, sought-after information for a high premium. The internet is a challenge to mediocrity in print, because of its democracy – anyone can dredge up some Jennifer Aniston red-carpet pics. Similarly, the internet is very good at providing free information you didn’t really need but enjoy anyway, but its infinity means that getting exactly what you want is a lot harder. Magazines, in whatever form, need to address the need for specificity and excellence, and as the internet becomes more and more fractured and time-consuming, people will increasingly pay a premium to get what they really need quickly and easily. Data sets, quality journalism and writing, and trustworthy information – these are what make money, and because of the internet, you can charge more for them now than ever before. Creating niche brands, that allow you to buy into a small, self-contained lifestyle and set yourself apart from the cultural homogeneity created by the internet, will also reap huge dividends.

The old guard are clearly, by the tone of this report, still queasy and uninformed about the decline in mass print. But the creative opportunities for the rest of the magazine industry are huge – we get to be event organisers, fashion designers, statisticians, product designers, and club owners, and all the while creating even more luxurious and beautiful print products. And for all the technological toys we get to deploy in all of these areas, the most important thing to remember isn’t an innovation at all, but the oldest adage in the book: content is king.

In my mind when I first heard about this I saw a full-page, flexible screen with flashes pointlessly shimmering down it a la any Philip K Dick story adapted by Hollywood. The reality is a tiny wee screen housed in some cardboard pages that’s sure to annoyingly interrupt your enjoyment of all the beautiful people.

Lamer yet is when you find out that this is costing CBS thousands and thousands of dollars, and is only getting put in mags for subscribers in LA and NYC. Not sure how the numbers got crunched here, and the channel is keeping quiet on budgets, but I think it was conceived in their “cool stuff that makes it look like we’re really innovative, no matter how unsustainable the cost” department. Admittedly the traction is getting increased by people like us talking about it, but the reality is that this campaign just isn’t going to reach enough people to justify its cost. With ad margins getting smaller mid-recession, this kind of showboating seems like a dangerous course to take.

If you do expensive, limited experiments, do them like Fallon recently did with their Make Me A Supermodel campaign. By creating an interactive shop window, they wrung every bit of engagement from and exposure to its audience, which was constantly refreshing itself on the pavement in front. By contrast, CBS’s video screens have much less reach, and will look very average once the battery runs out. They also have to be inserted by hand, which makes the whole thing take on a distinctly pre-Cambrian tone.  

But perhaps the most annoying aspect of this whole thing is the stuff its actually advertising, the toxically unfunny “comedies” How I Met Your Mother, The Big Bang Theory, Two And A Half Men, and new show Accidentally On Purpose, whose title alone makes it sound like it’s straight out of a two-minute brainstorm in 1986. These are shows which can only be enjoyed when off work with swine flu, when ER seems like Len Loach and when you need a show with an extra-loud laugh track to flag the jokes up for your tired, monged-out brain. If this is the future, then its sitcoms still suck.

The most meow-worthy section reads thus: “It is clear that journalists do not want to be in the contemporary labor market, much less the highly competitive information market. They prefer to justify the value they create in the moral philosophy terms of instrumental value. Most believe that what they do is so intrinsically good and that they should be compensated to do it even if it doesn’t produce revenue.”

But while a generation of print producers splutter “but it is intrinsically good!”, Picard is right to be so contemptuous. As Rob Grimshaw, managing director of FT.com told us recently: “You don’t need 100 versions of one newswire story… We’re just going to need less outlets, there has to be some sort of big consolidation for that part of the market to start working properly.” Generic news, especially when there’s the BBC doing it so well and for what feels like free, can’t be the core moneyspinner of a newspaper any more, or even perhaps the core content. 

“The Boston Globe, for example, could become the national leader in education and health reporting because of the multitude of higher education and medical institutions in its coverage area”, Picard notes, also suggesting that American newspapers must also do local news more deeply and well than their television rivals. UK titles are already doing niches well – the Guardian with media, the Times with education, the Independent with reactionary stories about science that make you wonder what on earth they believe in – but they’re going to need to make more of this unique content that people are willing to pay for.

What Picard gets wrong is that, merely, “scarcity raised the economic value of content”. True, information has become less scarce when the prime publication and distribution channel is a free content-management system rather than a printing press, but it’s a real jump to suggest that economically valuable content, i.e. quality content, is no longer scarce. I would argue that there is really a very small amount, if any, quality unpaid journalism out there. While the nobility attached to journalism by its old print masters is embarrassing, people will undoubtedly pay for good writing, which non-professionals simply don’t offer. I mean, have you read most British blogs recently?

Something that print has going for it is its tactility. The very act of holding a magazine or newspaper means you’re physically interacting with it, and that’s surprisingly powerful – it can build a relationship that’s lasting and easily monetised. As Jeff Jarvis and Jason Pontin have noted recently, titles need to give their readers what they want, to serve them, and the readers will pay for that. If you build the relationship with the reader, and give them what they want, then asking them to pay for it online won’t be much of a stretch. Allied to this, I think there could be a small but worthwhile market for more luxurious editions for the real devotees, even after the normal mag has gone online and onto readers.

It’s the same with quality blogs like TechCrunch or Gawker – these have really engaged communities, who wouldn’t mind paying for access. Micropayments for blogs would obviously be lunacy, but subscriptions would work. It doesn’t matter that Gawker is, the majority of the time, an aggregator of other content; people will pay for the snark, the hyper-literate community, the relationship. Tone alone can make content unique, and therefore valuable – this is the advantage that blogs have.

At the moment, with an ad-funded model, publishers want to please as many people as possible, because they need a lot of numbers to turn a profit. They have to offer a wide range of coverage that may well be done better by a number of content creators each devoted to one particular niche, and are therefore in a weak position. It’s true to say that objective news coverage has no value – it succeeds as plainly written, pure information. But once writing provides information that can’t be reported by amateurs – and it certainly exists, from recipes to the halls of power – then it can be monetised. Of course everyone’s been enjoying not paying for things, but that doesn’t mean they don’t appreciate its value enough to start paying for it.