57 Unedited Media Predictions For 2007

Arianna Huffington | Huffington Post founder

1. Democracy will reign in Iraq (Just kidding.)
2. Lindsay Lohan will be "exhausted" at one point
3. Shocker - Brooks & Dunn will score at Country Music Awards.
4. A famous person will adopt an African baby (you can take that to the sperm bank!)
Dick Cheney's daughter and daughter-in-law will have either a boy or a girl, and he'll nickname it "Go Fuck Yourself."
5. ... and all of the above are going to be reported in the media! (But the blogs will have it first.)

Andy Borowitz | comedian, author

Rupert Murdoch will write a book about Judith Regan entitled If I Fired Her.

Andy Cohn | publisher, FADER magazine

Magazines will be increasingly challenged by the advertising community to produce extensive branded multiplatform programs. Publishing companies will need to move a lot faster than they currently are in order to accommodate these demands.

Bo Sacks | magazine industry consultant

I predict more of exactly the same only completely different. More technology, more social-site-development, increased information gathering fragmentation, and many more, but smaller circulation analog printed magazines on the newsstands than ever before. Next year another major circulation magazine will capitulate and wither on the vine before our eyes. Next year paper prices will rise and the sun will set at exactly 9:15 PM on June 21st. Next year it will rain on two Sunday’s in July and we will all still be talking about the absurd reporting structure of PIB. Oh, yes and next year the MPA will develop an amazing and effective advertising campaign for the magazine industry, which will be announced ironically on the same day that we discover that George W. Bush actually reads newspapers and was only kidding about being unable to do so.

Bob Eckstein | Time Out New York | “Talking Points”

1. Print media will make a comeback launching new celebrity-driven titles: Popular Maniacs and Broken Homes & Guardians.
2. Google will buy paranormal.com for $8 billion.
3. Mel Gibson and Borat will make a hit movie together.

David Hauslaib | founder, Jossip

1. Ben Widdicombe will join in the fun of trading daily jabs with Page Six.
2. Courtney Cox will play a better Bonnie Fuller than Bonnie Fuller.
3. Katie Couric will get beat by CNN Headline News.
4. Keith Olbermann and Bill O'Reilly will finally get around to making out and grabbing ass.
5. Radar will try, try again -- and it won't let burning through millions of dollars get in the way of keeping the magazine afloat.
6. Blogs will be huge.

David Hirschman | online editor, E&P

Google will buy the Los Angeles Times (beating out Geffen, Broad, Burkle, etc.), and the company will launch an experiment in monetizing online news content while promoting synergy with a revamped print paper as well as its other properties and services. Dean Baquet will spearhead the editorial side of things, the paper will restore many of its defunct international bureaus and create new ones, and top-level journalists from all around the country will move to (ugh) Los Angeles for the chance to participate.

Dorian Benkoil | mediabistro.com editorial director

1. Jared Paul Stern will win a huge lawsuit and use the money to buy, then make himself editor-in-chief of, the New York Post. He will hire Keith Olbermann as managing editor, who will accept the job then promptly quit to launch a vlodcast network on HuffingtonPost.
2. Arianna Huffington will decide she is no longer "progressive" and is once again conservative, and launch a campaign with running-mate Arnold Schwartzenegger to remove the Constitutional ban against foreign-born Americans from becoming president.
3. Al Franken will divorce his wife and marry Arianna Huffington.
4. Air America radio will again move its spot on the dial in New York. No one will notice.
5. Jim Kramer's head will explode. Roger Ailes will explode. Sumner Redstone will have another birthday and declare he feels younger than ever. His wife will nod and smile knowingly.
6. Nicholas Kristof will move to Darfur, adopt a Cambodian baby, run for Congress, and be both lionized and scolded for putting his humanity above his journalistic ethics.
7. The New York Times will launch TimesSelectSelect, an ultra-premium service targeted at Upper West Side Manhattanites that comes complete with the cellphone numbers and personal email addresses of Paul Krugman, Bob Hebert, Maureen Dowd and William Safire. George Will will be the first subscriber.
8. Everyone will buy everyone else in an orgy of private equity-financed M&A musical chairs. Yahoo will buy Disney, bidding against Comcast as it makes a joint play for Yahoo. Google will team with George Steinbrenner, buy everyone and then change its motto from "Don't be Evil" to "Try Really Hard to Do Reasonably Good Stuff Most of the Time."

Drew Kerr | principal, Four Corners Communications

1. More consolidation, companies being taken private or bought by private equity, less publicly traded media companies.
2. A proliferation of abandoned blogs, the dirty web secret nobody talks about but I'm bringing public for the first time. To many people, it seemed like a good idea at first, then it became a burden. Now they are all floating like debris in cyberspace.
3. Portfolio is going to launch with ridiculous Condé Nast-manufactured fanfare and pricey hoopla, David Carey will be issuing daily press releases about all the advertisers in the first issue ... and it's going to be another slick, Vanity Fair-ish business magazine. Talk to me in two years when we find out if there's really an audience past the first issue and it becomes another Cargo or not.
4. Satellite radio flatlines -- people wake up to the fact that they may have escaped commercials, but the repetitive playlists are still there. And reception issue troubles many.

Gregg LaGambina | former editor-in-chief, Filter magazine

There will be explosions, possibly nuclear, that will deafen the ones that hear them, blind the ones that see them, confuse the rest of us that were asleep with our eyes closed and had headphones on listening to the best album of the year: Midlake's "The Trials of Van Occupanther." Hence, media in general will become irrelevant. Yet, there will be a vast scuffed-up, sooty bunch of us roaming the streets, looking for each other, those of us who like Midlake. We will then forage for supplies (mostly canned goods) and when we build fires, we will sing the songs of Midlake as if they were ancient folk numbers dating from an eternity ago. One of us, around the fire, will raise a hand and mention that he remembers a few choruses from My Chemical Romance's "The Black Parade." We will throw hot coals at him and consider cannibalism for the first time during our new plight. And enjoy our food cold, for one evening, at least. Oh, and Anderson Cooper will be there. He'll do most of the cooking. Four weeks later, as his hair becomes an astonishing inky black, we'll realize he was dyeing it gray for "old world" credibility. We will laugh. And we will teach him how to sing "Roscoe" by Midlake.

Ian Spiegelman | ex-gossip columnist, author

1. Graydon Carter will have to leave his own Oscar party early— right in the middle of explaining irony to Mila Kunis -- when he tries to nonchalantly pass a "Silent-But-Deadly" fart that turns out to be far more aggressive than anything he had initially anticipated.
2. Howard Rubenstein will have a near-death experience. Having survived it, he will recant his entire life's work as evil, label his offspring "privileged crawling slime," and embark on a tour of Firefly/COS player conventions under the name of "Mr. Trick."
3. The press tour surrounding Jerry Seinfeld's Bee Movie will remind everyone in the media of why they have always hated Chris Rock.
4. Anna Wintour will quietly sneak out of a Betsy Johnson show after Paris Hilton whispers in her ear, "Wanna fuck?" Both women will be hospitalized with toxic shock syndrome four hours later.
5. Jonathan Safran Foer and Dave Eggers will suck.

Jared Paul Stern | recovering gossip columnist

Everyone will be talking about my book, which Simon & Schuster is publishing in the fall. It's everything you ever wanted to know about Page Six but were afraid to ask.... and despite what those bitches at the Times say, it's going to sell like hotcakes. Not everyone will enjoy it, of course; Ron, Rupert and Mort probably shouldn't add it to their Channukah lists (though it also makes a fine paper weight) … Meanwhile, I'm already meeting with producers and directors about the movie version. We're thinking John Goodman for the Burkle role, with Dakota Fanning as his girlfriend.

James Hewes | U.K.

1. Further consolidation in the global magazines industry. The trend of smaller players being bought up by the big boys will continue (e.g. News International purchase of FPC in Australia). Launches are risky in almost any market now so the ability to buy established brands, especially those with an established New Media community, will be increasingly attractive.
2. U.S. magazines to begin looking at how to grow their newsstand business. The US market remains almost unique in its reliance on subscriptions, the need to derive significant profitability from all sales routes will force publishers to begin looking at their newsstand businesses in a new light.
3. First wave of closures of magazines that haven't embraced the internet. Particularly in the specialist interest space, it's going to be increasingly difficult to persuade advertisers of your commitment to a particular interest group without a presence on the internet. 2007 might be the first year where the intensity of this pressure starts to send titles to the wall -- no-one will be immune.

Jeff Bercovici | senior writer, Radar

There will be a moderately successful blog started expressly to chronicle the doings of photo assistants at Rodale. The writer will quickly land a book deal and become a regular commentator on The Situation Room.

Julia Dennis | former mediabistro.com intern

Not to be bested by his former #2, Bill Clinton will come out with his own conscientious info-mentary promoting the return of stateside nude beaches. His film, A Widely Inappropriate Truth will garner the first ever 3-thumbs-up. Eternally supportive Hillary will make a campaign stop in now topless Daytona, FL, winning her the 2007 Congressional Playmate of the Year Award, but threatening her democratic bid. In less free news, the price of the daily paper will rise to $25 per issue, leaving those without bulging bank accounts to rely on MySpace for current events. Consequently, Tila Tequila will be covering the Iraq war with nothing but a hat on, sponsored by Halliburton, Bud Light and the band Creed.

Kate Coe | editor, Fishbowl LA

1. Mel Gibson will buy the LA Times, subscribers will receive free plastic rosary and a packet of fake blood.
2. Nicole Ritchie replaces gekko as spokesperson for Geico.

Melissa Walker | freelance writer, teen novelist, Seventeen prom editor

Teenage audiences will continue to vex media types, as MTV, prime time television, teen magazines, social networking sites and celebrity blogs draw fractional bits of their affection. We will write about where they are, how they're behaving, who they're listening to and what they're reading. Incessantly. We will hope for some of their valued attention, but their motives will elude us. Ah, the sweet mystery of youth.

I'm not an important muckity-muck or publishing mogul, but here's some news from the future. Magazines that don't have a high traffic, frequently updated presence online (blogs/video/community) will need to completely re-build their business around online activities that work with their print properties, nothing new here really -- but we'll see more movers in the arena. Expect to see some magazines & print publications experiment (successfully) with:

1. Magazines/print pubs will add their articles and content to iTunes which supports "subscribing" to PDFs, just like podcasts.
2. DRM'ed locked versions of digital edition magazines (Zinio, etc) will find that there is more demand for DRM free PDFs and shareable versions, and this only -helps- sales.
3. Digg-like voting systems for stories (online and print) - making the readers more like editors for what's popular. Condé bought Reddit for this reason, it seems - I would have.
4. Editors of the magazine(s) publishing their OPML files and reading lists.
5. More "rough cut" material online. Posting all "b-roll" photos on Flickr for example, wouldn't it be great to see all the photos that didn't make it in to TIME or National Geographic?
6. E-Ink readers are a ways off, the Sony Reader is going to sadly stumble, but Amazon's looks promising for the target they're going after.
7. Online works best for fast news, print being better suited for long articles, stunning photos, wonderful stories and how-tos / step-by-steps - this might be the shift for many magazines.
8. Design and content "stamina" will matter more. If readers are not collecting your magazine for future generations - what's the point?

Pranay Gupte | journalist and author

1. Lionel Barber, editor of the Financial Times, will be knighted by the Queen of England.
2. Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al-Maktoum, ruler of Dubai, will buy out the International Herald Tribune from the New York Times Company.
3. Either Fareed Zakharia -- editor of Newsweek International -- or Shashi Tharoor, the outgoing UN Undersecretary General for Public Information -- will be hired by the New York Times to pontificate as a columnist on the op-ed page. Zakharia, a Muslim, has the edge. If Tharoor, a Hindu, gets the job, then Zakharia joins the Bush Administration as deputy secretary of state.
4. Qatar will buy out Newsweek from the Washington Post Company, and transform it into a global voice of Islam.
5. Qatar will also buy out the publishing company Simon & Schuster, and re-name it Sheikh & Shyster.

Rachel Sklar | editor, Eat The Press

Last year, I predicted that magazines would start getting their act together online; this year we saw it start to happen but next year is when we will really see who pulls away from the pack. Condé Net has been all about the soft-launch, Radar was about as hard a launch as a magazine gets without actually being a magazine, and everyone else is in varying stages of getting it. Somewhere in the next twelve months, the twain shall finally meet. We'll also see more and more reporting resources devoted to online journalism ( quel horreur, Barney!); VandeHarris and HuffPo's own Melinda Hennenberger caused a kerfuffle (what! Print journalists migrating to the Internets!) and the next year they'll be giving their old employers a run for their money. Finally, humor will be big in '07 as news orgs finally realize that Stewart and Colbert are on to something. Expect to see variations on the Comedy Central rip-off, as well as some genuinely inspired sites that will become equally essential complements to traditional media (also new video stars catching on like Amanda Congdon and Ze Frank, aka the "You" so astutely highlighted by Time magazine). Less likely are ripoffs of the Daily Show/Colbert tendency to call bullshit; the mainstream media still has a problem with that ("Hey, look! Bush just announced a New Way Forward!"). But baby steps are being taken, and maybe, just maybe, 2007 will be the year when we see them grow into leaps and strides.