Nat Ives gives a great recap of the presentation at AdAge.com.

In the simulations, current magazine subscribers bought interactive magazines and bundles of print and digital editions, signed up for iTunes-like accounts that bill credit cards on an ongoing basis, and accepted that interactive editions are “more valuable” than print editions, Mr. Kon said. People who don’t currently buy magazines also showed much more interest in buying interactive editions in the future marketplace “as we think it could look,” he said.

And it wasn’t just magazines oriented to men or technology that found takers. “There is very strong demand across the categories in the magazine sector,” Mr. Kon said.

For his entire article, entitled, “People Will Buy Tablet Editions, Print Consortium Tests Find” click here.

Next Issue Media Names Morgan Guenther CEO

Former President of TiVo will Lead eReading Joint Venture

Concluding an extensive search, Next Issue Media, the eReading joint venture of Condé Nast, Hearst, Meredith, News Corporation and Time Inc., has named Morgan Guenther as Chief Executive Officer, the company announced today.  In leading Next Issue Media, Mr. Guenther, based in San Francisco, will draw on his deep entrepreneurial experience heading and advising innovative companies rooted in Silicon Valley.

Mr. Guenther assumes management responsibility immediately for Next Issue Media, six months after the joint venture first announced plans to develop open standards for a new digital storefront and related technology that will allow consumers to enjoy their favorite media content on portable digital devices.  He will lead the venture from its new San Francisco office.

“Next Issue Media is well positioned to create and deliver incremental business opportunities to the magazine and newspaper publishing world,” said Mr. Guenther.  “The potential for value creation across the entire industry ecosystem – including consumers, advertisers, publishers and distributors – is massive.  Our task now is to execute on that potential, and I’m excited to be leading the charge here.”

Most recently, Mr. Guenther served as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of AirPlay, a wireless entertainment services company.  Prior to this position, he was with TiVo Inc., as President from 2001 through 2003 and before that as Senior Vice President of Business Development and Revenue Operations.  Mr. Guenther sits on several other technology company boards and is also a former partner at Paul Hastings Janofsky & Walker LLP.

“At TiVo, Morgan helped change the way people watch television. With Next Issue Media, he will help us stimulate digital innovations that redefine, personalize and enhance the experience of reading magazines, newspapers and other types of content,” said Robert A. Sauerberg Jr., Group President, Condé Nast Consumer Marketing and Chairman of the Board of Next Issue Media. “Morgan will continue to build upon the strong groundwork, strategic thinking and product development that John Squires initiated. All five Next Issue Media partners strongly believe in the potential of the forming eReading marketplace and are fully committed to this venture. We wish John well in his pursuit of new opportunities after helping Morgan through the transition.”

“I have been delighted to help launch this joint venture involving five of the largest magazine and newspaper publishers in the world,” said John Squires.  “We’ve set the groundwork for an exciting business and I’ve enjoyed helping many of my colleagues and friends embrace this terrific new publishing opportunity.”

eMediaVitals covered my keynote presentation, and Rob O’Regan gave this brief overview of my speech:

NIM’s goal, (Squires) explained, is to enable and streamline the process for publishing digital magazines on e-reader devices.
There are four key elements to the process:
• Common output feed standards. “You have to build to the machine,” said Squires. “The primary struggle is delivering something very readable to a 7-inch screen.”
• Consistent application environment. The goal is to provide a “harmonized” digital reading experience. “Readers don’t need five ways to navigate a TOC,” Squires said.
• Ad formats/ delivery protocol. “You don’t want to be directing a consumer off of your app and onto an advertiser’s website,” Squires said. “If they leave your app, they won’t come back. It will break the experience.” For this reason, NIM is working on methods that will enable advertising content to be ported into the publisher’s content management system.
• Print to digital workflow tools. A robust publishing platform is needed to deliver immersive content via multiple devices – with minimal rework by editors or producers and minimal incremental costs. “The biggest issue is simply how we publish,” said Squires. “How do you take content and get it optimized for the appropriate screen, so your readers love it and you don’t have to work too hard.”

You can read the rest of O’Regan’s recap here.

As we’ve reported, the Next Issue Media team consists of small group of product development, business and marketing professionals. That team, in tandem with our management consulting colleagues at Oliver Wyman, is intently focused on the development of our common reading application, consumer storefront, publishing platform, and offering for advertisers. Progress has been made in all sectors of the business and we are on target with our first-stage developments in the following areas: execution of broad-based consumer research; construction of a multi-year business model; development of a universal content e-wallet; outreach to publishers, software and hardware manufacturers; building the digital edit experience and accompanying publishing platform; and designing a web-based storefront and related branding activities.

I also had the chance to begin sharing some high-level insights culled from the consumer simulation research noted above, as well as customer feedback from editorial research conducted by our founding partners. In mid-March, I spoke at the MPA Magazines 24/7: The eReading Revolution event in New York. You can find more on my MPA talk in my March 19 blog post, but suffice it to say, all evidence to date points to consumers being hungry for a magazine eReading experience that integrates the best of both the print and digital worlds. We’re working hard to make that happen!

And quite soon, we will be announcing our brand name! We’ve gone through literally hundreds of options trying to choose the right name and logo to capture the essence and vigor of our venture – one that will truly excite both consumers and potential business partners alike. We expect to share our new name this spring – stay tuned!

I described some of the insights we’ve gained from focus group research conducted by our founding partners. For example, people generally have low expectations for digital magazine reading, but after seeing a demo of the immersive experience, they become highly enthusiastic, especially enjoying the following:
• Superior photography
• Video highlights
• Timely updated information
• Additional editorial content
• Deeper advertising content
• Sharing capabilities
• Bundled offers of print/digital content

NIM recently fielded its own national consumer survey, and I briefly described some of the findings yesterday. As we analyze more of the results, we’ll continue sharing them publicly.

Consistent with the partner focus groups, our findings show that once consumers become aware of the magazine eReading experience via a demo, their ‘take-rate’ almost doubles, from an initial 22 percent to 39 percent. We also found that at subscription renewal time, more than half of subscribers (53 percent) say they would like to renew with a digital product. Among non-subscribers, almost 40 percent say they would subscribe to a digital product bundled with print. These results indicate that people really want to have both print and digital experiences and that successful businesses will be provide ways for that to happen.

NIM was founded to help publishers expand into the digital realm as seamlessly as possible, while maintaining direct relationships with their existing customers. As I emphasized to the audience yesterday, digital publishing is hard! NIM is looking at ways to enable and streamline the process, by creating:
• Common output feed standards
• A consistent application environment
• Ad formats / delivery protocol
• Print-to-digital workflow tools

In the next six to eight weeks, we plan to have a lot more to tell you about our research and our business – so stay tuned!

I’m looking forward to sharing some of the important insights Next Issue Media has gained over the past few weeks as we’ve enthusiastically pursued our four key goals: to create a highly featured common reading application capable of rendering the distinctive look and feel of each publication; a robust publishing platform optimized for multiple devices, operating systems and screen sizes; a consumer storefront offering an extensive selection of reading options; and a rich array of innovative advertising opportunities.

I plan to highlight some of the insights from our just-completed national survey on consumer awareness, interest and desires regarding the magazine eReading experience.

I’m looking forward to seeing many of you on Thursday and continuing our dialogue about the powerful new opportunities for magazines across the emerging eReading landscape.

Even for a short month, it went by very quickly in a flurry of meetings with hardware and software manufacturers, domestic and international magazine, newspaper and book publishers, creative agencies and developers – and everyone in between.

This month I made the rounds in Silicon Valley and have been wowed by some of the great digital editorial development work being done for publishers by companies like The Wonder Factory, ScrollMotion and Zinio. Check out the Sports Illustrated, GQ and Esquire demos on the landing page of our web site and remember that this is just the beginning of the next wave for magazines. Some of the newspaper prototypes I am seeing are also nothing short of amazing. We’ll share them on the site as soon as they become available.

With our strategic goals firmly in sight, we’ve been working with our internal team and our management consultants at Oliver Wyman to give shape to the venture’s business plan. Our activities are focused on visiting our various constituencies, modeling the underlying business assumptions, and conducting consumer research on digital content preferences and consumption, while scoping out the technical building blocks necessary for our venture to succeed.

We’ve been working hard and have narrowed down potential names for the consumer-facing side of our company. We anticipate being ready to make a public announcement on that in the Spring. Our Web site will debut in early March, and as I wrote last month, it will host information about Next Issue Media for our main audiences: publishers, advertisers, the hardware and software industry and retailers alike. Plus we’ll try to showcase samples of great stuff we love from the eReader and digital content marketplace.

On Friday, February 19th, I appeared on a panel exploring The Age of the Big Media JV at paidContent’s 2010 conference themed “Discussing the Economics of Paid Content” in New York City. I was in great company with the heads of some of the media industry’s most interesting joint ventures, like Vevo and Canoe, and I spoke about the benefits (in our case) of a strong board of directors and the importance of having clear business direction from the outset. Canoe Venture’s CEO, David Verklin, said it best in summing up the prevailing JV ethos, “If you want to go fast, go it alone. If you want to go far, go with a group.” We are living through this ethos now, as we slowly but steadily put the pieces of our business together.

Our small but mighty start-up team will grow next month, as we mentioned here earlier. On Monday, we welcomed Robyn Peterson, who will head up our product development efforts. Robyn is working to build the foundation for the consumer experience, which will include a fully-featured and intelligent store, as well as a universal digital reader. The goal, of course, is to make the consumer experience as simple and easy as possible in the store, and ensure that the beauty of magazines and newspapers are brought to life in a digital format in the reader.

Starting on Monday, Robyn Peterson will be joining us as Product Director. He’ll focus on developing the consumer experience, including a storefront filled with a vast array of magazines, newspapers and books. Robyn’s extensive product development and technology background will be a huge boost to the NIM team as we create effective tools that allow publishers to easily create content for these exciting new reading devices.

Robyn comes to us from NBC Universal, where as VP of Product & Technology he handled strategy and technology for NBC Local Media, which runs nbcnewyork.com, nbcchicago.com and a number of other local websites. Prior to NBC, he spent several years at Ziff Davis Media where he oversaw both product development and technology.

We are thrilled to have him with us at NIM during this exciting time and look forward to introducing him soon to you.

Welcome, Robyn!