Gaines, the former managing editor at People, Time and Life magazines, and ex-corporate editor of Time Inc., has found a financial backer for a new company that he’s hoping to launch March 1. Called Story River Media, the company will work with government entities, non-profits, and corporations “to try to bring interactivity and multimedia to their online efforts,” Gaines told us.

One example Gaines can envision: working with the State Department to create multimedia curricula about the United States to export to foreign nations’ school systems. “A great multimedia curriculum, whether its on American history or on the American songbook, in all languages at once, would be easier to distribute everywhere all at once, with the added function of video, and audio and all the aspects of learning that interaction can bring,” he said. There are also endless uses for Story River’s technology for corporations (imagine interactive financial report meetings), public media and textbook publishers.

“We’re going to focus on how to combine media in a way that makes the experience fluent on behalf of one subject at a time,” Gaines said. “I’m trying to create a business model and company that allows us to stay at the leading edge of what is going on in technology. We’ll be on the leading edge of all the software and hardware until it becomes apparent what new products will be the most thrilling or magical in this new world.”

Heading towards the launch, Gaines is looking to staff up. He’ll be looking to hire videographers, multimedia producers, flash designers, and HTML programmers, among other roles, in the coming weeks. “There’s a lot of recruitment to do, particularly for the senior roles,” he told us. “I’m really looking for lead design people and I suspect we’ll start taking contracts March 1.”

Previously: FTC Conference: Panelist Jim Gaines Checks In

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

To get us started on this topic, we spoke to Jim Gaines, the former managing editor at People, Time and Life magazines and current editor-in-chief of digital publication FLYP, about the possibilities of citizen journalism and the future of journalistic storytelling.

Gaines is a big proponent of using journalism to start a conversation, and using collaboration from readers to continue that conversation and coverage of a story. Although his own pub FLYP doesn’t have the infrastructure in place yet to accomplish his vision, Gaines thinks collaboration is the wave of the future.

“I think 2010 is going to be enormously important as a turning point for digital publishing in general, citizen journalism in particular, because the facility — and by that I don’t just mean the software and hardware, I mean the culture and other supportive elements — are just getting into place,” Gaines told us.

“Google Wave is a wonderful example of a collaboration, but there are so few people on it that it has no scale. I think that it is an interesting model for the storytelling of the future, which is not going to be a one-way story told. A story is going to be the beginning of a conversation and that story will be modified by the conversation that follows. I don’t know exactly what that model is going to look like because the experimentation is only beginning. But it’s very exciting.”

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

We weren’t able to make the trip to Washington, D.C. ourselves for the Federal Trade Commission’s two-day conference discussing the future of journalism on the Web, but we wanted to get a sense of what was going on down there anyway. So we turned to Jim Gaines, the editor-in-chief of digital multimedia publication FLYP Media, who attended the conference and spoke on a panel yesterday entitled, “Engaging and Informing Consumers in the Internet Age.”

Not one to shy away from giving his opinion about the current state of the media industry, the former managing editor of People, Time and Life magazines gave us the skinny on what went down before the FTC over the past couple days, including his firm belief that the media should not get a bailout from the government.

FishbowlNY: What was the general feeling at the conference?

Jim Gaines: I’m not sure there was a general feeling. It seemed to be divided between legacy news businesses, which seem to be just digging in and starting to feel that the fate of the republic is dependent on their commercial success, and the entrepreneurial start-ups and foundation- and publicly-funded media, which were all thinking about the great possibilities of the future. That said, I thought I detected a little legacy mind set, too, in Arianna Huffington, whose opposition to paying for content seemed a little over-determined. Of course people will pay for what they want, as they always have. Whether they will pay for what Rupert Murdoch provides is another question.

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As Time Inc. prepares to shed upwards of 280 jobs, we wanted to take a closer look at these layoffs. Could they have been avoided? What do they mean for the future of Time Inc.’s publications?

We asked Jim Gaines, who spent most of his career at Time Inc., to shed a little light on the situation. Gaines, who is currently the editor-in-chief of FLYPmedia, formerly served as Time Inc.’s corporate editor and was once managing editor at People, Time and Life magazines. Here’s what he had to say:

FishbowlNY: Is there any way Time Inc. could have avoided these layoffs, as well as those last year? What could the company have done differently over the years?

Jim Gaines: I’m not sure anybody, even Time Inc., could have avoided the drastic altering of the media landscape that we have seen in the recent past. It’s a fundamental disruption for which no one was adequately prepared. Certainly, there were moments when all of us in the media industry should have realized the tremendous opportunities that exist within digital media. Hindsight is great. BUT there is no major publishing business that is not facing what Time Inc. faces today.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Fairback formerly worked as associate publisher at Entertainment Weekly and EW.com, and worked as Eastern advertising director at Life magazine before that.

Full release after the jump

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

“It made sense for a company that had two rival magazines to close one of them. It has been a very competitive year for magazines in the epicurean category, and we have had a lot of success. But Gourmet saw newsstand sales fall by 25 percent.”

–Merri Lee Kingsly, publisher of Gourmet rival Saveur

“Seeing a major media company like Condé Nast blindly shutting down four prominent publications without even trying to first migrate them to digital is a prime example of how out of touch many media companies are. Folding Gourmet, a magazine with over six decades of a strong readership, is the ultimate proof that the management of Condé Nast is very short-sighted when it comes to understanding the opportunities that exist within the digital publishing landscape. This is truly a sad day for magazines. I have this to say to all print publishers: Don’t kill off another publication! We have the opportunity reshape our industry with digital publishing. Major media companies need to have the vision to realize this.”

–Jim Gaines, former editor at Life, Time and People, and current editor-in-chief of digital media company FLYP

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

According to LHJ editor-in-chief Sally Lee, Hickey “will be overseeing the magazine’s books coverage, along with relationships, news stories and general features.”

In addition to roles at LHJ and Parents, where she worked for nine years, Hickey has also previously served as articles editor at Glamour. Throughout her 20+ year career, Hickey’s work has also appeared in People, More, Life, The Washington Post, USA Today, BusinessWeek and Working Mother. She has also co-authored the book The Working Mother’s Guilt Guide and currently works worked as an adjunct professor of journalism at New York University for eight years.

Related: Ladies’ Home Journal Takes Contributing Editors, Writers Off Masthead

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

In this special FishbowlNY post, Gaines envisions what an established media company, like Time Inc. or Condé Nast, might tell employees if it decided to abandon all its print operations and embrace the future of multimedia publications. Could this be the future for media?

To: The Staff
From: Print Media Conglomerate
Re: The Strongest Rumor You’ve Heard Yet
Date: September 10, 2010

Following on events in our industry with which you are familiar, we have today given notice to our printers, paper manufacturers, ink suppliers, newsstand wholesalers and subscription-fulfillment agencies, as well as the Newspaper Guild and the U.S. Postal Service, of our intent to become the first fully migrated print-to-digital publisher in America.

Once this transformation is complete, all of our brands will be multimedia titles, utilizing audio, video, animation and full-motion information graphics, brought together by a state-of-the-art platform and the most advanced design and communications software in the industry, which we have been developing off-site over the past eight months and about which you will learn more in the days and weeks ahead. Thanks to these innovations and the now virtually ubiquitous Digital Online NUmedia Tablet (DONUT®), all print publication will cease as of July 1, 2011.

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In the current era of searching for “what’s next” for the media industry, James Gaines, a former managing editor at People, Time and Life magazines thinks he has found the answer in FLYP Media, an online, interactive publication that combines old fashioned journalism with video, audio, animation and all number of treats for the senses.

“This is where all story telling is going,” Gaines, who is FLYP’s editor-in-chief, told FishbowlNY recently. “We’re making the optimal user experience. You don’t just read the stories, you experience them.”

FLYP’s tagline, “more than a magazine,” says it all. Published since March 2008, FLYP has produced 35 issues, which are posted online and emailed to 20,000 subscribers. The publication is privately funded by Mexican multi-millionaire Alfonso Romo, so there is no advertising and subscribers get it for free. The magazine’s business model may change in the future, but right now Gaines has no plans to charge for its content.

Like other digital magazines, or the digital versions print magazines love to publish on their Web sites, FLYP does utilize virtual page turning. However, there is so much going on each page — from interactive videos to charts and displays to animation — you quickly realize that FLYP is unlike any other magazine you have ever experienced.

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Starting in May, articles will be reorganized under four broad, new sections — one each for short takes, columnists, and commentary, long reporting pieces like the cover articles, and culture — each with less compulsion to touch on the week’s biggest events. A new graphic feature on the last page, “The Bluffer’s Guide,” will tell readers how to sound as if they are knowledgeable on a current topic, whether they are or not.

The new Newsweek will also be printed on thicker stock, and place more of an emphasis on photography, aiming itself to a smaller, richer audience. The result being? No way to tell yet but right now it sounds a lot like some strange print version of Life magazine meets the blogosphere.

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