Most people know Jimmy Wales’ story. They know that, almost 10 years ago, the former Chicago futures and options researcher launched an open-content encyclopedia that has become one of the most popular sites in the world, a blessing for millions and the bane of school teachers and university professors everywhere. They might not know, however, that the Wikimedia Foundation, which oversees Wikipedia, has other user-generated projects similarly focused on spreading knowledge to the four corners of the earth, including Wikimedia Commons, a repository for public domain and Creative Commons-licensed images, and Wikinews, a user-generated breaking news site.

And while most people might know that Wikipedia is a commercial-free, nonprofit venture, they might not be aware that, back in 2004, Wales launched another company, the for-profit Wikia, where millions of volunteers also use wiki software to create sites on everything from pop culture blockbusters like the television show Lost and the video game World of Warcraft, to domestic pursuits like cocktails and vintage sewing patterns. And in an era in which the revenue outlook for most newspapers and magazines seems increasingly dismal, last year the advertising-supported Wikia hit profitability. It also broke into Quantcast’s top 100 list of the most popular sites on the Internet, and has over 10 million unique users — and growing.

We caught up with Wales, who regularly circles the globe, speaking at conferences and meeting with members of the Wikipedia community, to ask him what he’s focusing on these days, what newspapers and magazines can learn from Wikipedia and Wikia, and why there’s a dish in China called “stir-fried wikipedia with pimentos.”

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Position: Chair emeritus, Wikimedia Foundation; Chair, Wikia
Resume: Taught finance at the University of Alabama and Indiana University while doing graduate studies at each. Research director at Chicago Options Associates. Founded the web portal Bornis, Nupedia (the precursor to Wikipedia), Wikipedia, and Wikimedia Foundation. Co-founded Wikia.
Birthdate: August, 1966
Hometown: Huntsville, Alabama
Education: B.A. Finance, Auburn University, M.A. Finance, University of Alabama
Martial status: Single
First section of the Sunday Times: Front page
Favorite TV shows: Lost, Flash Forward
Last book read: “I’m always reading about five books at once!”
Guilty pleasure: Pringles
Twitter handle: @jimmy_wales

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Where are you right now?
I just got back from the World Economic Forum in Davos, and then I was at the Wikimedia Foundation board meeting in San Francisco over the weekend. Now I’m in Washington, D.C., for a few days. Then I’m home in Florida for about a week and a half. Then I’m back in D.C. for one night only, and then I’m going to London.

How many days of the year are you actually home?
I’m probably home less than a hundred.

What are you focusing on these days?
The biggest thing is pushing forward the usability of the wiki software platform, to get more people involved. We’re doing a lot on that at Wikia. We’re trying to branch out beyond the tech-geek early adopter crowd, in terms of who’s doing the editing.

We’ve done a lot of testing to get data on what helps people contribute more. And we now have the WYSIWYG [“what you see is what you get”] editor, which is a much easier editing environment. It’s much more familiar to people, more like a word-processing program.

And we’re branching out topic areas. So, for example, we have the Recipes Wikia, which is doing very well and bringing in a whole different kind of audience from the people who are editing the World of Warcraft wiki.

“We’re the fifth-largest Web site in terms of reach — 350 million people a month or more. And yet [the Foundation has] only 35 people [on staff].”

Wikipedia seems to loom so large in our consciousness that I think most people would be surprised to discover how small the organization really is.
The Web site has been incredibly successful, and the community around the Web site has been incredibly successful. But the foundation behind it all has been very bare bones. Even today, when we finally have capacity to do things, we’re talking about 35 people, still a very tiny organization compared to the reach of the Web site. We’re the fifth-largest Web site in terms of reach — 350 million people a month or more. And yet [the Foundation has] only 35 people [on staff]. That’s very different from everybody else in the top 10 [most popular Web sites], where you’re looking at hundreds or even thousands of employees.

There was a dust-up last year about a study — which was later proven to be flawed — asserting that volunteers were abandoning Wikipedia. And yet, Wikimedia’s strategic plan still talks about the “health” of the editing community — in other words, that the organization needs to put systems and processes in place to ensure that enough people continue contributing to Wikipedia. Are there natural limits to a project of this kind, which depends on volunteers to create the content?
That’s always been a focus for us, and it will continue to be a focus. The community has been very successful, so making sure that that community is healthy and happy and growing appropriately — and is sufficiently diverse — will always be a priority for us. When you’re talking about user-generated content as we are, it depends on those users.

Particularly as compared to more social Web sites — like Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, where the community does whatever they want to do, and it’s for entertainment and hanging out with your friends — that’s very different than the Wikipedia world, where we have a clear mission that unifies the community and defines what the work is. So the health of the community means more than just numbers of people participating. That’s not really the goal. We’re concerned about having quality participants doing good quality work.

What’s the difference between what people are doing on Wikia and what they’re doing at Wikipedia?
Wikia is building the rest of the library. If you go into a traditional library, and you look for the encyclopedia, you find a set of books, 30 volumes, A through Z. And then there’s all the other books in the library. So people are using Wikia for all different kinds of things that are not [in] an encyclopedia. For example, Uncyclopedia is a humor site that parodies Wikipedia. And one of the ones we’re focused on right now is the Recipes Wikia, where people are sharing recipes.

“The idea that people will pay for quality, and that the traditional magazine is quality — that doesn’t really hold up.”

Big-name advertisers like Verizon and Toyota have discovered Wikia and started placing ads on its content sites. How much of a disruptor is that for traditional media?
I don’t think we’re big enough yet to be that much of a disruptor, but I’m hoping to be a disruptor in that area. (Laughs) The interesting thing that’s going on with advertising and Wikia is that advertising today is trying to reach the influencers. At Wikia, the editors are the influencers. These are the kinds of people who have lots of knowledge and share it with their friends.

How about on the content side? Is that disrupting traditional media in any way?
There’s a shift among what are called the magazine audiences. We’re not talking about headline news journalism — CNN or The New York Times — but among the kind of things you traditionally would associate with a magazine. Gaming magazines are probably where we’re having the biggest impact. These days, consumers want information, and they want more information than they ever did before. If they subscribe to a traditional magazine that has 90 or 100 pages of content every month, and a lot of that is advertising — they’re finding [the magazine] to be quite lacking, compared to what they’re able to get online. So with something like the World of Warcraft wiki, which has 70,000-plus articles, there’s really no competition. No traditional magazine can compete with that level of detail and quality of information.

I don’t know what the future is. I’m not predicting the death of the paper magazine, because the physical form of the magazine is useful in certain contexts. But I do think that, right now, readers are realizing, “Why should I subscribe to a photography magazine, when I can go and get massive amounts of information, that’s much more detailed and much more in-tune with my interests, online, and it’s good quality?” The idea that people will pay for quality, and that the traditional magazine is quality — that doesn’t really hold up.

Wikinews hasn’t taken off the way Wikipedia has. Why is that?
There’s a couple of reasons. Volunteer contributors are really drawn to writing about current events in Wikipedia itself because of the traffic. When some large-scale global story like the earthquake in Haiti happens, volunteers really want to go to Wikipedia, to contribute, do the research, find all the background information, and put in all the links. They do that in part because they know people are going to go to the Internet, type “Haiti earthquake,” and find Wikipedia. So if you want to actually be useful to people, you need to go to where people are going to be.

Then there is the question about the way people are consuming information. Wikinews generally follows the same kind format as any kind of Associated Press-type news service. They write a single story. They update it at some point. They cut it, and then they move to the next story on the same topic. But that’s less and less the way people want to consume information. For example, me. I’m not following the news every day, particularly not about Haiti. I check in every few days to find out the latest. But if I go to a news story about it, I get what’s happened in the last 24 hours, when I actually want the summary — what’s the overall status? The Wikipedia-style entry is more useful for that.

What lessons are there in Wikipedia’s and/or Wikia’s success for news organizations and magazines?
Communities are capable of high-quality work. Journalists and magazines both operate in communities and should consider moving away from the “top-down” and “broadcast” way of thinking towards more of a “community facilitator and moderator” way of thinking.

Media reports about you tend to repeat the same details over and over. What’s one meme about you that’s either wrong, wrongly emphasized, or wrongly framed?
There are so many small ones that I don’t know where to begin. (Smiles)

There’s a restaurant in China that has a dish called “stir-fried wikipedia with pimentos.” Why did they call it “wikipedia”?
There’s a whole weird meme about this. People keep sending me photos of menus in China with all kinds of different dishes being translated as “Wikipedia”. The best we can figure is that someone is asked to translate the menu into English. They ask, “What’s the name of this dish in English?” And someone says, “I don’t know, look it up in Wikipedia!” And they just write down: “Wikipedia”. But honestly, I have no idea!

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E.B. Boyd is a WebNewser contributor and San Francisco-based freelance writer.

“When I go to events with existing journalists, it feels like a wake,” says Sree Sreenivasan. “But when I’m on campus, students are much more optimistic. And they should be.”

As Columbia Journalism School’s dean of student affairs, Sreenivasan has watched first-hand as waves of students flock to J-school despite a bleak outlook for the business. His advice? Work smarter and harder. He urges everyone in his popular social media classes to at least be knowledgeable about all forms of new media, (yes, even Foursquare), even if they’re not interested in Tweeting every detail of their lives.

“It’s fascinating the way journalists have used and struggled with technology. They’re both the savviest and the most skeptical. That’s fine. But they have to know what’s going on.”

With 10,000 Twitter followers of his own, a pragmatic approach (“I’m an evangelist and a skeptic,” he likes to say), and a schedule more transparent than the president’s, this in-demand speaker and TV commentator is now embarking on a different experiment. He’s scouring the globe for people who, like him, are turning 40 in 2010. How on Earth does he have time for all this? Check out his guilty pleasure…

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Name: Sree Sreenivasan
Position: Professor and dean of student affairs, Columbia Journalism School
Resume: Earned his first byline in The Fiji Sun at age 15; Began lecturing at Columbia after graduating with a M.S. in journalism. Promoted to professor of professional practice in 2007. Served as dean of students from 2005-2007 and later appointed to a newly created position, dean of student affairs. Former freelance tech reporter for WNBC and WABC. Co-founder and former president of the South Asian Journalists Association. Contributing editor for DNAinfo.com, a Manhattan hyperlocal news startup he helped launch with Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts.
Birthdate: October 28, 1970
Hometown: New York, NY
Education: M.S. in Journalism, Columbia; B.A. in History, St. Stephen’s College, Delhi; Marist Brothers High School, Suva, Fiji; also: P.S. 6 in Manhattan and kindergarten in Moscow, in the former USSR
Marital status: Married with twin children.
First section of the Sunday Times: “I try to read the Magazine, Book Review and Real Estate sections on Saturday.”
Favorite TV show: Pardon The Interruption, Psych, Monk, and NCIS
Guilty pleasure: Starbucks Frappuccino in the glass bottle. “My wife says the last thing I need is caffeine, but the Starbucks bottled drink reminds me of the iced coffee my grandmother made in India.”
Last book read: Curfewed Night: One Kashmiri Journalist’s Frontline Account of Life, Love, and War in His Homeland by Basharat Peer.
Twitter handle: @sreenet

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When it comes to technology, you call yourself both an evangelist and a skeptic. What have you been skeptical about?
Things like Second Life; I have too much trouble organizing my first life to play that game. I’m not a user of Foursquare, Google Wave or Google Buzz, I have given them a test run but I just don’t have the bandwidth to add them to my media diet right now. But I still have to be knowledgeable. Today I had to teach three people how to turn off Google Buzz. So even the things I don’t use, I need to be able to understand them.

What are you evangelical about?
I use Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Those are the three that work for my lifestyle and my work style. Now, if you’re a music journalist, you must use MySpace. But those are the three things that work for me.

“A lot of people spend all their time hiding on the Internet. You don’t have to give away information the way I do. But you don’t have to hide either. A good journalist is reachable.”

Your daily calendar, beginning with taking your children to school, is available for anyone to access on your Web site. Do you have concerns about having your entire day publicly available?
Am I concerned, yes — but I can’t keep that concern from using technology to make my life easier. Having my calendar out there means I have eliminated the voicemail and email phone tag I used to play: Can you meet Friday at 2? How’s Thursday at 6? Monday at noon? I know very few people who would do something like this. Besides, it can raise awkward questions at home. “Lunch with Kathy? Who’s Kathy?”

I believe journalists should be open and available and engaged. I’ve also had the same phone number and email address for 17 years. A lot of people spend all their time hiding on the Internet. You don’t have to give away information the way I do. But you don’t have to hide either. A good journalist is reachable.

You have more than 10,000 followers on Twitter. What kind of advice do you give to people attempting to amass followers on Twitter?
I Tweet very carefully. I very rarely Tweet what I’m doing at the moment. I try to bring something into the conversation. No one wants to know who I am hanging out with or what I am eating — unless I can find a way to make it relevant to as wide an audience as possible. I’ve had dinner with celebrities and sorta-celebrities, but I don’t Tweet about it. That doesn’t engage anyone. It’s self-serving and I’m hyper-conscious of it. If I’m at a bar, I’m not Tweeting that. But if I’m at a bar offering a discount on the weekend or has a new recipe, I’ll Tweet about that, or the two-for-one drinks. I want my Tweets to be interesting/informative/relevant/timely/generous/fun or funny. I don’t always manage to meet that criterion all the time, but I try. That takes time and effort. Oh, and I never try to Tweet more than 120 characters, allowing people to easily retweet my stuff with comments.

Is it true that although the media is experiencing a tidal wave, numbers are actually up at Columbia University’s Journalism School?
The numbers are up, it’s true. We haven’t done [an] exact number. But generally we’re seeing apps from 60 countries and across the countries. There is a level of optimism that is exciting and palpable.

What do you attribute that to? Is it because they’re younger?
It’s that, yes. But also, we have a large international population of students. The media across the world is not fragmented or mature the way it is here. And the young people in general are more optimistic. They have entrepreneurial spirit that serves journalists well.

“Social media is just one optional credit out of 30-plus in the Journalism School. What you really need is to be a good, trusted reporter, editor, and storyteller.”

But the fact is, the jobs are not there the way they once were. Are you being direct with students about this?
Of course. That’s always a worry. Part of my job is to have a teaching role and an administration role. I have a direct stake in making sure our students get suitable, satisfying work. We have invested heavily in a four-person career service office that does an incredible amount of work connecting our students with hiring editors and others around the globe. In fact, on March 27, we [hosted] one of the largest journalism job fairs in the country with more than 80 media companies — large and small, old and new.

What are you telling your students about how to prepare for landing a media job in this market?
You need to be able to do multiple things. My colleague Sig Gissler, who runs the Pulitzer Prizes and teaches digital media here, coined the perfect term: the tra-digital journalist. Someone who has all the skills and values of a traditional journalist, but who also has a digital overlay, understanding the tools and techniques of the current Internet. The media still needs people to report, write and tell stories — and do it fast and well. A small part of what they need to know is things like social media. I want to be clear: social media is just one optional credit out of 30-plus in the Journalism School. What you really need is to be a good, trusted reporter, editor, and storyteller. If you are, you can make your way in this changing media landscape.

There’s been some discussion about the president’s Twitter account. It’s updated in the first person. But he says he doesn’t Tweet. Does it matter if he’s using a ghost Tweeter?
Twitter rewards authenticity — why not just have his staff Tweet in the third-person? In any case, I would rather have the president concentrate on other issues. Like how the economy is affecting our country. Why should he be on Twitter? He had to struggle mightily just to get a Blackberry. Mistakes you make on Twitter are much bigger than mistakes you can make on email.

When you have 10,000 followers, do you care about losing a few here and there?
Yes! I care about the people I lose, because these are folks voting with their feet. I can get obsessed about that. I use a program called TWunfollow.com. But I beg you, don’t use it unless you’re ready. You might need psychotherapy. They will email you when people unfollow you with the Twitter handles and how long they’ve followed you. I get those emails and I obsess over them. It’s pretty sad. You’re better off using Chirpstats.com, which gives you aggregate numbers, telling you the total number of people you’ve gained and lost.

Even though you’re an obvious technophile, you still want to see print journalism remain available.
I love print. There’s something magical about it. No technology can ever completely replace all forms of print (I hope). I subscribe to two daily papers, the NYT and the WSJ, and to five magazines/weeklies. And as long as there’s a print edition of The New York Times, I’ll be a subscriber.

On a more personal note, you’re married to a former sports rifle sharpshooter…What’s that like?
It’s true. My wife, Roopa, who has a terrific food blog at RoopaOnline.com and is a Pfizer exec, used to be one of the world’s top women rifle shooters. Her father was a cop in India and her mother won a state pistol-shooting championship when Roopa was still in her belly. She can shoot a dime off your shoulder from 50 yards away, without a scope. We are always looking for volunteers.

So, is it safe to assume that you generally stay out of trouble?
Well, yes. But I also make sure we don’t have rifles in the house.

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Aliya S. King is an author of two works of nonfiction and an upcoming novel. She also blogs at www.aliyasking.com and Tweets even more @aliyasking.

Susan Lyne can do anything, and she has. After 20 years in the print world, she jumped headfirst into television, at Disney/ABC. With zero TV experience, she rose to president of the entertainment division, where she oversaw development of Desperate Housewives, Lost, and Grey’s Anatomy. Then she was fired, and they all became big hits. But Lyne didn’t sweat it for long: “Stewing over things is a huge time waster. You spend all your energy on either getting back your job or explaining how it wasn’t your fault. It’s never attractive.”

With that experience now firmly in her rearview, Lyne is employing both her business and creative sides as CEO of the cult luxury shopping site Gilt Groupe. Ahead of her appearance with other women in tech and media at Mediabistro Circus, the resilient leader spoke with us about breaking the glass ceiling on and off the tube.

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Name: Susan Lyne
Position: CEO, Gilt Groupe, New York
Resume: Began her career as managing editor of City, a San Francisco alternative weekly, then moved to the Village Voice. In 1987, founded Premiere magazine. Spent eight years at Disney/ABC, rising from head of movies and mini-series to president of the entertainment division in 2002. Joined board of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia in June 2004 and named president and CEO in November ’04. Named CEO of Gilt Groupe in September 2008
Birthday: April 30, 1950
Hometown: Boston
Education: Attended University of California-Berkeley, George Washington University
Marital status: Widow. Two daughters, ages 21 and 24.
First section of the Sunday Times: Real Estate.
Favorite TV show: Glee. “It’s brilliantly executed. It’s so hard to combine a musical and a one-hour drama. I smile from the moment it starts until it’s over. I wish it was my show. It’s kind of risky. A lot of people would have run from it. I’ve downloaded every number.”
Guilty pleasure: Scrabble. “I play every day. I’m addicted to iPad Scrabble. It’s a sickness at this moment. I will tire of it, but right now I’m heartbroken because I left it at the office last night.”
Last book read: The Help, by Kathryn Stockett
Twitter handle: “Don’t use Twitter.”

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How do you feel about not having a college degree?

I left school ultimately because I wanted to work. It bothered my parents a lot. It bothered me much less. I always had amusing moments. When I’d work for some company and they’d want to update their website or put out a press release, they’d keep coming back to me about my education. I would say I have no degree. They would never believe me, because I was so far along in my career at that point. It was hard to imagine someone moving into a senior management position without a degree.

“I’m always more alive and happier in a startup, or a company that needs to be turned around. You have the ability to have a greater impact.”

You’ve moved from print to TV to media conglomerate to eCommerce. What are the upsides and downsides of changing industries so frequently?

The upside is that I am always learning. I can never get too comfortable in one spot, so my mind has to work that much better and harder. It’s easy to get excessively comfortable in a world you know really well. You can phone it in. You can’t do that when you’re learning a new language. I get itchy staying at the same place. I’m always more alive and happier in a startup, or a company that needs to be turned around. You have the ability to have a greater impact. I’m not necessarily the right person to move into a large, successful company.

The downside is you have to literally learn a new language with each new industry. When I first went to ABC, I didn’t really know what a rating point was. I had no idea what the rhythms of the TV season were or what 18-to-49 demos were. It was a huge learning curve. You have to learn a new culture every time, too. When I came here [Gilt Groupe], no one had an office. It was an open floor plan. For the first week, I thought, ‘There is no way I can do this. Everyone will be listening to my phone calls. There’s noise all around. I’ll never be able to concentrate.’ One or two weeks in, I was no longer hearing noises. I’d never go back.

How are sales doing at Gilt Groupe?
Our sales in 2009 were $170 million. We’re projecting $500 million for 2010. Our sample sales [every day at noon] are so popular that the system has crashed, so we keep upgrading our platform.

Are you engaged, creatively?
We put on a live show at noon, seven days a week. It’s incredibly creative to mix sales, curate sales, figure out how to describe items. What goes into each sale is hugely creative in building the brand and figuring out how to expand the category mix and draw in new members. I’m having a really good time.

Why did you leave Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia?
It seemed like the right time. I took on the job for multiple reasons. I joined the board and really fell in love with the company. It was surprisingly robust for a company that had been through a year of trauma. I thought, ‘I could really have an impact here.’ I also knew it was not something I would be doing the rest of my life.

“If you specialize too much and stay in one piece of your business — marketing or content or finance or operations — it’s significantly harder to get the leadership job.”

With women increasingly breaking into the CEO ranks, what advice do you have for those looking to reach the top?
You have to learn every part of the business you’re in. There are very few good women CEO’s who haven’t worked their way through and up the industry they’re in. If you specialize too much and stay in one piece of your business — marketing or content or finance or operations — it’s significantly harder to get the leadership job. You need to really understand most of the moving parts. I’ve worked in most of the core functional areas at some point in my career as I’ve moved through different industries. Another thing: If you can work directly under a good CEO, it’s extremely good training.

What are some of the common mistakes women make in business?
I’m not sure there’s a huge gender gap there. The mistake everyone is realizing is easy to make is not getting under the covers and asking questions deep into the company about how it works. We saw this in the financial crisis.

At ABC, you helped launch two female-driven smashes, Desperate Housewives and Grey’s Anatomy. What do you think of TV’s presentation of women these days?
Most of the characters on TV are highly exaggerated. I love ‘Nurse Jackie,’ but her faults are magnified as well as her skills. I like Damages and Real Housewives of New York. Extreme characters seem to work on TV right now. It’s a different era. I just don’t think TV provides a way for women to be themselves, which it did 20 years ago.

It’s not good or bad. We go through cycles in TV, wanting realism, then wanting heightened drama. We’re definitely living through a heightened drama period. It might be because cable has raised the bar on that. It’s very hard for slower shows or less hysterical shows to get attention.

How did you deal with getting fired by ABC?

I was devastated for 24 hours. Then I decided I had to move on, and I just didn’t sweat it. You can look at something like that either as a disaster, and rage at the world, or you can look at it as the opportunity to take the summer off, which I hadn’t done since college, and choose what you want to do next. It was the first time in my life I hadn’t reacted to offers right away. [The ability to focus on the future] is genetic, I think. It can be a blessing or a curse. I rarely look back.

Do you miss anything about TV?
I miss pilot season. That’s it. I love the process of going from hearing an idea to seeing a fully-formed show, or at least the first episode, in four months. It’s a hugely creative period. So many things can go wrong. When you come out with something great, it’s pretty thrilling.

We hear that your younger daughter declined your offer to buy her a TV when she moved into her apartment. True?
Yes! She looked at me like I was from Mars. I couldn’t believe it. She didn’t want to pay a cable bill. To her, a TV is an old-fashioned piece of hardware. She watches everything on her laptop.

Do you want your own company some day?
Not really. I loved every job I took, at least for a good long period of time. When I didn’t, I moved on.

Susan Lyne tackles “Business Refresh: From Media to eCommerce” in her upcoming presentation at Mediabistro Circus on May 20 in New York.

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Gail Shister is a TVNewser columnist.

If print is dead, Samir Husni has been working in a mausoleum. Running a $30,000 annual tab for his magazine collection, the issues are overflowing from his three storage units and onto his office floor and couch at the University of Mississippi, where he educates the next wave of journalists and runs the Magazine Innovation Center.

From his first comic book at age 8, Husni’s passion for print grew to the point where he was publishing a daily paper from his bedroom in Lebanon, writing his own news stories and using candle wax to imprint the ink from old newspaper images. When he set out to earn his Ph.D. in magazine journalism 30 years ago, there was no such thing. When he wanted to turn his magazine research into a book on which publications succeeded and failed, his peers said, “Didn’t you do this last year?” Husni recalls complaining to his wife, “They just don’t get it.” She said, “Why don’t you put it in a book and just send it to the industry?” He pitched the idea to Jim Autry, then president of Meredith Publishing, and he bit. Within two weeks of publication, every copy was gone, and he became a household name — as Mr. Magazine, a moniker from a student who couldn’t pronounce “Husni.” “At the end of the semester, he gave me a plaque,” says Husni. In 1989, The New York Times ran a photo of his desk in a profile story, and the name stuck. “I figured, if everybody wants to call me Mr. Magazine, so be it.”

Today he lives up to the title as the country’s preeminent magazine expert. On the eve of the 25th edition of his eponymous Guide To New Magazines, coming out in June, mediabistro.com caught up with Husni to discuss what it takes to succeed in today’s magazine marketplace and the real salvation of print (Hint: It’s not the iPad).

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Name: Samir A. Husni, aka Mr. Magazine™
Position: Director of the Magazine Innovation Center at the University of Mississippi and Professor of Journalism
Resume: After moving to The University of Mississippi in 1984 to start the country’s first Magazine Service Journalism program, he published the first edition of Samir Husni’s Guide to New Magazines in 1986. He has consulted for almost every major magazine company in the country. Founded the Magazine Innovation Center at The University of Mississippi in 2009, where he is also a professor.
Birthday: March 8, 1953
Hometown: Oxford, Miss.
Education: Earned a master’s degree in journalism from the University of North Texas in 1980 and a Ph.D. in journalism from The University of Missouri — Columbia in 1983.
Marital status: Married to Marie Mikael. Has three children (two daughters and one son) and one grandson
First section of the Sunday Times: Sunday Times Magazine
Favorite TV show: Sanford and Son
Guilty pleasure: “Buying lots and lots of neckties.”
Last book read: Mandela’s Way by Richard Stengel
Twitter handle: @MrMagazine. “Tweet like a bird!”

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How did you know that you wanted to focus on magazines as a career?
I was maybe eight or nine years old, back in my old country, in Lebanon, and I bought a copy of the first issue of a new magazine that just came out — and back then we didn’t differentiate between a magazine and a comic. To me everything was a magazine. So Superman came out in Arabic, and I picked up — in the early ’60s. And there were three of us who bought the magazine. Two of my friends fell in love with the, you know, with the cape and the flying and trying to jump from the window, and I fell in love with ink and paper. My parents wanted me to be a dentist. When I finished high school I said, “Mom, dad, I’m going to journalism school.”

What’s your personal branding advice for other people who want to become the go-to source in their niche?
Have a specialty and know it A to Z. [Recently,] Dan Rather came to speak to our students. I picked him up from the airport, and we were talking, and he was telling me, “You know, I read this article in this magazine I’m truly not familiar with, called Armchair General magazine.” It’s about old wars and stuff like that. And I looked at Mr. Rather and I said, “Well, what if I tell you I have the first issue of the magazine?”

You have to know — and you have to be able not to be afraid to voice your opinion. I mean if your opinion is based on facts, as long as you deliver the facts correct[ly], then people will know that it’s your opinion. I mean when I say, “I don’t like this magazine,” or “I love this magazine,” it’s not just because, oh, I didn’t feel good about it. There are reasons.

Where do you keep all of these magazines?
I have three offices that are 12×12 [feet] that I rent that have all these magazines in boxes by month. And I grew out of space from these offices… If I have a guest, I just have to move some of the magazines from the couch so they can sit down. I have now maybe a collection of maybe 26,000 first editions, volume one, number one. Hopefully one day I’ll be able to create a museum or something, because it’s the best pop culture history.

“When the Food Network Magazine first came out, I looked for what I call the seeds of addiction in that magazine, what will get you hooked so you will want more of the same.”

You said that Food Network Magazine was the most notable launch of 2009. What are some early signs that a magazine will flourish or it will fail?
The No. 1 [determinant] is finding a willing audience who is not only capable but can afford the price of your magazine. All the magazines that are actually surviving and are doing very well, they have the seeds of addiction built in them. When the Food Network Magazine first came out, I looked for what I call the seeds of addiction in that magazine, what will get you hooked so you will want more of the same. They had two major ingredients. They had food, which is, you know, everybody is addicted to eating. And then they had celebrities. And you combine the two together, and I felt, I mean they must have a winning formula.

And of course there was like three examples [Every Day with Rachael Ray, Cooking with Paula Deen, Sandra Lee Semi-Homemade] ahead of the Food Network Magazine that told me there’s an appetite in the marketplace for something like that.

The second one is how clear and concise the concept is. If you look through the pages of the Food Network, guess what? It’s either celebrities or food. It has a very specific DNA. So the more specific, the better the chances are that you are going to make it.

Is that the advice you would give somebody who wants to launch a magazine?
Definitely. From the name — you know, so many people come to me with those like whimsical names, fancy names, and I say you know what? If I am going to start a literary, political, fiction type magazine today, there’s no way on earth I am going to call it the Atlantic Monthly. Because if I launched the Atlantic Monthly today, it would be a magazine about the Atlantic Ocean.

How do you think magazine brands can meet people’s expectations digitally and end up making money from that?
We have created what I call a welfare information society. We have created this sense of entitlement that all what I care about you is just like, “Hey, read my magazine.” Somebody else will pay for it. What really bothers me more than anything else: Now you are talking about you want to charge for your magazines online. Well, how about you start charging in print? You know? Since World War II we are giving our magazines away. When I subscribe to Auto magazine for $5.00 for an entire year, or for Elle magazine for 10 bucks, or for Newsweek, which until recently was $10 for an entire year, am I really paying for the magazine?

So this whole concept of charging the customers the real price of the publication — we don’t even have it in print. I mean there’s a few exceptions, but the majority of the magazines are still being given away because we are in the business of counting customers rather than being in the business of customers who count. September 2008 happened, the economy crashed; now most of the publishers, the small publishers are starting to think, “Oh gee, we need to find a way to start charging.”

“If you are not interested in the subject matter, no matter how many bells and whistles you are going to add, it’s not going to convince you to buy it on the iPad instead of print.”

Because ad models aren’t working anymore.
Yeah. It’s not working anymore. So the Web is going to be next to impossible for anybody to pay. I ask my students, “Where do you get your information about sports?” Almost all 80 of them raised their hands and said, “ESPN.com.” I tell them next week ESPN.com is going to charge five bucks or $18 or something per month for you to get that information. Without hesitation all of them had this simple answer, “We’ll find it another way.”

What about the iPad?
The silver lining here is those iPhones and iPads and the apps, where people are now used to paying for apps, unlike the Web. I bought an iPad. I am forcing myself to love it. I mean, heck, I figured I spent $700, I better love this thing. I mean I didn’t really enjoy the magazine experience on it, like some people who were like — because, you know, if you are not interested in the subject matter, no matter how many bells and whistles you are going to add, it’s not going to convince you to buy it on the iPad instead of print. People who think the salvation of our magazine industry is going to be on an iPad or in digital delivery, they need to think twice.

At the Magazine Innovation Center, you said one of the first goals is to come up with new ways for magazine distribution. How’s that going?
We are going to have our first big event in October 20–22. We’re going to have an “ACT Experience,” which is Amplify, Clarify, and Testify. And we are going to bring a group of experts worldwide from all different countries, all different media. The goal for the first experience is going to be reimagining the future while we still have time. I will match each one of the professionals who’s coming with one student, so we’ll have like 100 students and 100 professionals, and the students will be like shadowing the professional. Then we’ll divide into four groups each of 25, whether you want to focus on distribution, whether you want to focus on printing, whether you want to focus on paper…

Do you think that these are conversations that aren’t happening now that really need to be?
If they are happening, they’re happening in a very superficial way. And if they’re happening they’re happening in sort of like this, somebody screaming, “Jump,” and we all jump.

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Blake Gernstetter is mediabistro.com’s associate editor.

Say the words “Google News” to a journalist in this age of decreasing newspaper revenues, and you’re likely to get a lot of teeth-gnashing. Interestingly, however, the site was created back in 2001 by a Google engineer with intentions any journalist could respect: Sept. 11 had just happened, and Krishna Bharat was looking for an efficient way to access a wide range of news reports on the attack.

Eight years later, Bharat is still the lead engineer of Google News (his formal title is Distinguished Research Scientist). Having grown up in India, Bharat went to Georgia Tech for his doctoral studies in the early ’90s, where he first started tinkering with ideas about how to display news online. (If you want to really geek out, check out his paper on the project here.) Today, Bharat speaks frequently on the subject of what Google is doing in the area of journalism. “Google didn’t sign up to solve the problems in the industry,” he told mediabistro.com, “but it feels itself inevitably drawn into it, partly because we are a premier access point for many people seeking information.”

mediabistro.com caught up with Bharat to learn about the origins of Google News and about the company’s other journalism-related efforts.

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Name: Krishna Bharat
Position: Founder and head of engineering for Google News
Resume: Research staff member at DEC Systems Research Center. Joined Google in 1999. Founded Google News and set up Google’s R&D operations in India. Received the World Technology Award for Media & Journalism in 2003.
Birthdate: January 7, 1970
Hometown: Bangalore, India
Education: Ph.D. in Computer Science from Georgia Tech
Marital status: Married, three children
First section of the Sunday Times: Front page
Favorite TV show: None: “[I] don’t watch TV.”
Guilty pleasure: “Researching travel destinations I may want to visit.”
Last book read: Before the Dawn by Nicholas Wade
Last favorite gadget bought: iPad
Twitter handle: @krishnabharat

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Did anyone in the company ever raise concerns about Google News possibly violating copyright?
We were a search engine where people came for information. We’d show the title of a document and a small snippet and source information. From what I could see, Google News was doing the same thing, albeit without a query. The query was “Show me news.” So it didn’t strike me as any change in the model as to how Google was operating.

Eight years later, has Google News turned out the way you expected?
Initially we didn’t know how this would take off. It was a new paradigm. Trying to get people to read multiple points of view, I felt, was very important as a social good. Democracy depends on a good understanding of issues…. Whether people indeed wanted to consume news that way was a big question mark. But when we launched it, the response was tremendously good, and it has been tremendously good ever since.

The second question in my mind was: We tried this in English in the US; how is it going to work in other countries? We’ve now launched it in 60-plus editions. It is, in fact, applicable in all of these different locations. So that’s also been very satisfying.

“In order to be successful, you need to get inside the reader’s head and understand how you need to adapt your presentation to what they want.”

News organizations have generally thought they understood pretty well how people wanted to consume news. What have you learned about new ways people want to receive their news?
The news industry developed a lot of their thinking around the constraints of print and the other types of mass distribution, like TV. For example, the idea that everybody gets the same thing. The Internet has shown that everybody doesn’t have to get the same thing. In order to be successful, you need to get inside the reader’s head and understand how you need to adapt your presentation to what they want.

Online, the news experience is a mix of [four things]. First, you have to know what everyone needs to know. Then, you have to follow your personal interests. Beyond that, you also want to understand what’s popular, what the social networks are buzzing about, what are my friends suggesting to me. So the four things are: editorial “required reading,” if you will, personalized news, social recommendations, and audience popularity. Those are the four components that make up a news reading experience, and I think Google News will evolve to accommodate all of those.

What else is ahead for Google News?
Being much faster. What we discovered from FastFlip [a Google experiment launched last fall] is that when people get an opportunity to read news fast, they read a lot more. Giving you an opportunity to flip through many pages increases the probability that you will find something that you will want to read in-depth. And of course you can show ads in the previews, as well. It’s an interesting paradigm, and it has potential in the following sense: A publisher can monetize their content not just on their site, but elsewhere, by allowing people to host and preview it. It drives traffic to them, and revenue.

The other thing we need to address is how to make it easy and natural for people to pay for content and… how to make it work with search and social networks. On the one hand, you want people who have never experienced the content to discover it. On the other hand, once they become a fan, and if it’s high-quality journalism and expensive to produce, it should be convenient for them to pay for it.

“Our challenge isn’t trying to introduce the concept of payment to consumers. It’s to explain to them why this is different from everything else and worth paying for.”

A recent article in The Atlantic said you and your Google colleagues think free-versus-paid is an “empirical rather than theological matter” — that it’s not a question so much of whether people should pay, but of what works in the market. Do you think people will pay for content?
Yes. People pay for media in other settings. They pay for movies, they pay for music, they pay for magazines off the shelf. If it is high-quality content, and the billing is natural, I think they will pay. The issue is how do you make the value proposition to them, [by offering] something for which there is no obvious substitute. You’re not going to pay for one article that is just like any other article that covers the death of Michael Jackson. The brand, the quality of the journalism, the depth of insight, the look-and-feel, the experience, the infographics — all of that comes into play. Our challenge isn’t trying to introduce the concept of payment to consumers. They understand that. It’s to explain to them why this is different from everything else and worth paying for.

What’s Google doing to help publishers build paywalls?
We are looking for ways in which Google can help publishers put content behind paywalls if they choose to… There is an intersection between the world of paid content and how search engines want to operate in the future. We want to make sure that we a.) help publishers achieve what they want to achieve and b.) also are in a position to make search work with that. We’re providing one piece of technology that publishers could use to implement paywalls.

Last winter, Google road-tested its Living Stories idea with The New York Times and The Washington Post. What’s the idea behind Living Stories?
The core idea of Living Stories is to have a persistent URL for every story. It shows you the latest update up front, so you can catch up. But if you want some background, it shows you the background. If you want to look at opinion pieces on the topic, you can look at that. If you want to see images, you can look at that. You can go back in time, in a timeline view. It is a “living story” in the sense that it’s not an article that’s frozen in time. It evolves all the time. You can link to it in social media and discover it through search. When you come back, you get the latest rendition [Example: Washington Post living story on Fixing DC’s Schools.] of that same thing.

From an SEO perspective, it makes a lot of sense for the publisher — one link that people will want to link to. It also allows the investment of journalistic effort today to pay dividends not just today but in the future. We partnered with The New York Times and The Washington Post to showcase what can be done, but our longer term goal was really to have the industry involved in building Living Stories — either using our technology, which we open sourced, or building their own.

If you could wave a wand and have news organizations do three things differently than the way they do them today, what would you change?
They should realize that “value add” is something that will ultimately influence how their content [performs]. If you’re producing content that is substantially similar to what everybody else is producing, it doesn’t help. It would be nice if they specialize in ways that allow them to do an excellent job on where their core competency lies. So if you view yourself as a local paper, then that would mean investing a lot of resources on local news. If you’re a technology-focused publication, then technology is your forte. So, rather than having every publication cover everything, trying to get more focus within a publication would be a nice thing.

The second thing is that while networks have become much faster, websites have become much slower. A lot of it is because they’ve piled on media elements without realizing the consequences on download time. They should really focus on making it super-fast to load content. That’ll pay dividends in terms of how much content their users look at and often they come back.

The last thing is they should move into personalization as a way to engage and retain users. There is the news that you need to know. I don’t think we want to personalize that. And then there is all the other 500 things the site could show you. In that space, if, for example, there are certain sports you don’t follow, those sports should recede, and the ones that you do follow should come to the forefront.

I checked out your Twitter feed. You’re not a big tweeter.
I tweeted for a while and then I got tired of it. But I’m a really bad example of many things. I study the Web, I use the Web, but I don’t contribute very much to the Web, sadly speaking.

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E.B. Boyd is a freelance journalist based in San Francisco.

Just over a year ago, you might not have had the slightest idea what “I just unlocked the ‘Superstar’ badge on @foursquare!” meant. But since its launch in 2009, social media startup Foursquare has grown to nearly 1.8 million users, rolling out new products and accumulating serious cash (the company secured an additional $20 million in funding in June) along the way.

Dennis Crowley, along with Naveen Selvadurai, started the company around his kitchen table after shuttering a similar service called Dodgeball. “One of the reasons I think that Dodgeball suffered is because it wasn’t really a fun one-player experience. If you didn’t have 10 friends on it, you really weren’t getting much value out of it,” said Crowley. “So a lot of stuff we tried to build into Foursquare from the very beginning was about [exploring] the city by yourself. There’s a reason to check in beyond just sharing it with your friends.” Eventually the pair got out of the kitchen and made their first hire, and today they have a team of 27 that barely fits into the office. “We’ve been waiting for years and years to be able to do interesting things with mobile phones in the location space, and it feels like all the pieces are finally lined up to make those things happen.”

WebNewser editor Alex Weprin caught up with Crowley to talk about how he’s grown Foursquare and what’s next for the company.

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Name: Dennis Crowley
Position: Co-founder and CEO of Foursquare
Resume: Started out as a researcher for Jupiter Communications before joining mobile app provider Vindigo as a product developer in 2000. In 2003, worked on MTV’s wireless product development side, and held stints at PacManhattan and ConQwest 2004. In 2004, he founded Dodgeball.com, one of the first mobile location-based services. It was acquired by Google in May 2005; Crowley left in 2007 and Google shuttered Dodgeball in 2009. Crowley founded Foursquare in January of that year.
Birthdate: June 19
Hometown: Medway, Massachusetts
Education: Bachelor’s degree, Newhouse School at Syracuse University; master’s degree, New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program
Marital status: Single
First section of the Sunday Times: Sunday Styles
Favorite TV show: The Neistat Brothers
Guilty pleasure: Peanut M&Ms, Adidas ZX sneakers
Last book(s) read: The Facebook Effect, by David Kirkpatrick, and Boo Hoo: A Dot.com Story from Concept to Catastrophe, by Ernst Malmsten, Erik Portanger, and Charles Drazin.
Twitter handle: @dens

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[Foursquare] struck a couple of deals with television networks, Bravo and C-SPAN — is that a mutually promotional partnership that benefits each of you, or do you think it can actually drive revenue at some point?
We don’t disclose the terms of the deal. Some of them are generating revenue, and some of them are just interesting and exploratory. A lot of it is an experimentation to see if we get media properties and different media brands on Foursquare, are they seeing some benefit in terms of leaving different pieces of content around [the] real world for other users to discover? So every deal that we do is a little bit different. We’re inching towards a strategy that works for everyone.

How do you handle suggestions from users, like if someone has an idea for a badge?
We built a forum a while ago, almost like a year ago. We still go through it pretty regularly, maybe once or twice a month. And now we’re structured to the point that we have these badge meetings that go on twice every week, and occasionally we’ll go through the queue and pull out four or five good ideas and try to push those out.

“We’re doing a lot of things to explore and experiment in [the location-based] space to try to tease out the things that are going to be most interesting to venues, but a lot of value to users, too.”

Do you think Silicon Valley has more people willing to fund ventures compared to New York?
Yeah, I think that might have been the case before. I know when Alex [Rainert] and I were trying to raise financing for Dodgeball back in 2004, we had a really tough time because there really wasn’t a strong angel network here in New York, especially for tech startups. And even when Naveen and I were trying to raise financing really just last year, it was a little bit more difficult. But I think even since that process, a lot of other firms have opened up shops in New York. There’s definitely a resurgence of the New York tech scene, and I think you’re seeing that and also in the presence of other investors here, too.

What’s the best business advice that you’ve ever received?
Well I think it goes back to what my mom used to say, way back in the day, because I never believed it. She was like, “If you keep working on the stuff that you really love and you’re really passionate about, then everything else will just kind of work out.” When I was like 20 and 22, it didn’t really make much sense, but with these projects, even Foursquare — I’ve been hammering on some of these issues or some of these questions for about 10 years, and it seems like her advice is generally pretty good now.

What advice would you give to an entrepreneur?
I think it’s being persistent with what you’re trying to do. I always encourage people to try and go out and team up with folks who can help them build a prototype. It’s funny, I go to these parties or conferences, and people will pitch me these ideas that they have: “What do you think? Isn’t this great? Can I raise financing on this?” And you know, I think all those are good and interesting ideas and stories, but it’s really difficult to take an idea and execute on top of it. So I really encourage people to team up with different groups of people or different groups of skill sets and really try to get something off the ground.

Where do you think the biggest revenue opportunities are in the location-based social space?
Location’s pretty broad, so I guess it depends on what you’re tackling. For the stuff we’re looking at ,I think there’s really good opportunities in connecting users with local businesses. We’re doing a lot of things to explore and experiment in that space to try to tease out the things that are going to be most interesting to venues, but a lot of value to users, too.

Is there any concern at Foursquare about Facebook launching its own location-based service?
We’ve spawned a lot of different competitors, and we definitely look at what Twitter and Facebook are doing. We’re really interested in the way that they’re approaching location, too. I don’t really have a lot of insight into what those guys are launching, but we look forward to seeing what it looks like when it does come out, and if there’s ways that we can work together with them.

“We’ve been waiting for years and years to be able to do interesting things with mobile phones in the location space, and it feels like all the pieces are finally lined up to make those things happen.”

What do you think Foursquare will look like in, say, five years?
I don’t know. It’s funny because we have a road map that could take us a couple of years. But again, you look at even four years ago the iPhone wasn’t out, and look at how much things are even going to change just with iPhone 4 coming out and all these background location tasks suddenly being available. It’s hard to really gauge, but we’ve been waiting for years and years to be able to interesting things with mobile phones in the location space, and it feels like all the pieces are finally lined up to make those things happen.

What’s a typical day at Foursquare like?
We’ve got this one floor in the Village Voice building, and there’s three different companies there, and there’s just no more room. Like, you walk in and there’s absolutely no more room. That’s after we moved about 10 people downstairs. There’s a lot of shuffling back and forth, people moving around trying to find a conference room, trying to find a place to sit, trying to find a place to work. It’s pretty hustling and bustling. A lot of people come in for their first time and take a look, and they’re like, “Oh my gosh, I can’t believe you guys actually work here.”

I probably get in around 9:00 or 9:30, and it’s really running from meeting to meeting and trying to catch up with as many people in our office as possible so I have a general idea of what’s going on. And then usually speaking to some brands and speaking to some potential partners that we’re doing, either media companies or mobile companies. It’s not a lot of coding these days. It’s a lot of coordinating and just communicating with people.

How do you and Naveen [Selvadurai, co-founder] work together?
We sit next to each other. He’s managing the client team, and I’m running around to get a bird’s eye view of everything that’s going on. A lot of what I’m doing is helping Alex [Rainert, chief product officer] out on trying to organize and get a lot of the product stuff up and running. And a lot of that touches what Naveen is doing on the client team. So we work pretty closely but not every single day together.

What mobile devices do you use?
I have an iPhone — not the new one, the old one.

There’s a bunch of them laying about in the office. We occasionally do this thing where someone will trade in their preferred phone and take out a Blackberry for a couple of days or take out the Android for a couple of days just so we can get a feel what it’s like to exist in one of these other apps.

What places are you mayor of?
I think I’m only mayor of one. It’s Scratcher, which is the bar across the street from our office. I’m pretty proud of that one because there’s a lot of people checking in there all of the time, and I’m still holding down the fort. I used to have a ton of them, including the Chinese food restaurant in my suburban Boston town, and someone took that away from me a couple of months ago. I don’t know who it was, but that’s a sign that the service is growing.

Tune in to our Media Beat video interview with Dennis Crowley airing next week on WebNewser to hear his take on Silicon Valley startup culture vs. New York’s, how Foursquare handles celebrity users, and his tips for media entrepreneurs.

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Blake Gernstetter is mediabistro.com’s associate editor.

When Seth Godin talks, millions listen. With one of the most successful blogs on the Internet, the New York Times bestselling author and marketing guru has guided his readers on topics such as leadership, viral marketing and new media. Corporations like Aol, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, Sony Music, and Sprint have hung on his every word, hiring him as a speaker for their private functions.

And as a testament to his influence over the media, after Godin broke the news in an excerpt from this interview posted on mediabistro.com’s blog GalleyCat that he will no longer publish his bestselling books with a traditional publisher, news outlets went berserk. The Los Angeles Times, New York Observer, Fast Company and even The Wall Street Journal took our lead in covering what some say could be a defining moment in the already shaken book publishing industry.

But this is just the beginning for Godin. He has plans to roll out his teachings via eBooks, print-on-demand, audiobooks, podcasts and apps on his terms, no doubt bringing his millions of followers along for the ride.

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Name: Seth Godin
Position: Author, entrepreneur and marketing consultant
Resume: Began as a brand manager for Spinnaker Software while pursuing his MBA from Stanford. Created Seth Godin Productions, a book packaging company, selling more than 120 books. He then formed one of the very first online marketing companies, Yoyodyne, and introduced the world to the concept of “permission marketing” — the basis of his book of the same name. Unleashing the Ideavirus, Purple Cow, All Marketers are Liars, and others followed while he spent a stint as the VP of direct marketing for Yahoo!. Wrote 12 bestsellers on marketing, formed mega-successful online portal Squidoo, and become a vocal advocate of change for media and the book publishing industry.
Birthday: July 10, 1960
Hometown: Buffalo, NY
Education: Tufts University with a degree in computer science and philosophy. MBA in marketing from Stanford Business School.
Marital status: Married
Favorite TV show: Does not watch TV.
Guilty pleasure: “80 percent or higher dark chocolate, the more handcrafted the better.”
Last book read: Nothing Sacred, by Douglas Rushkoff
Twitter handle: @thisissethsblog

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Starting with ground zero, how did you build your audience?

When I launched Permission Marketing, I had an email newsletter. This was before blogs, and it grew to more than 20,000 people. I would write once or twice a week; anything I felt was relevant to my readers. It wasn’t about me selling anything or me pushing things at people. It was about delivering a message I thought people wanted to get. The side effect was that every time I would send out an email, approximately one percent of the people would hit reply and argue with what I said. That meant I was getting 200 or so annoyed or angry emails every time I hit send. I got conditioned into believing that I shouldn’t send an email because I knew I would be hit with a torrent of “nasty-grams” in return. So, I just stopped ’cause it wasn’t making me happy.

“I’ve decided not to publish any more books in the traditional way. 12 for 12 and I’m done.”

A couple years later I was at a conference which Fortune magazine sponsored. I met the founders of Google and was introduced to TypePad. I started blogging for real and again, only 30 or 40 people were reading it. The secret is 3,700 blog posts later, if you add 10 or 20 or 50 or a 100 people every day, it’s going to get to be a big number. That’s, I guess, the short version of how the core of the audience came to happen. It’s drip, drip, drip every day — asking people for permission, not violating their trust, giving them what you promised and nothing else. I never try to make a profit from the interactions I have with people in that format. I think I owe them something, not the other way around, and so as long as I can write for them, I figure then they will keep reading.

You made headlines by giving away your book, Unleashing the Ideavirus, for free. Is the free model still effective today with so many choices now for free product?
Permission Marketing had already been a New York Times bestseller when I wrote Unleashing the Ideavirus, and as I was writing it, I was thinking,’Am I going be a hypocrite, or am I going to take my own advice?’ The book is about the fact that the ideas that spread win and the best way to get your ideas to spread is to make it easy to spread, and hardcover books are really hard to spread.

So, I decided to take my own advice and publish it for free. It’s worth noting that I made more money on that book than the book I sold a year before because after the book spread, we self-published it in hardcover for 40 bucks, which Amazon sold at a discount, and it went on the bestseller list. There is a lot of free stuff out there, but either it’s junk or it comes with so many strings attached that people don’t wanna touch it. Then, the amount of stuff that is out there that is free and juicy and worth sharing is actually pretty small, and so there is an opportunity. I’m not saying that everyone needs to be in the free content charity business. I think that there are ways that you can leverage the attention that you get for free into a permission asset, build the tribe, and actually make money doing so.

You could be described as a modern day philosopher on marketing with your parables and illustrations. But what specific advice do you have for those who want to create and build their brand?
You can’t be a wandering generality. You have to be a meaningful specific. You have to “stand for something,” as my friend Zig would say. And that is not so easy because a lot of people I know who write are just plain smart, and they are smart about a lot of things. They don’t necessarily want to be disciplined enough to be smart about just one thing. It’s also boring to be smart about just one thing, until you break through and your brand gives you the leverage to go really deep.

“There are ways that you can leverage the attention that you get for free into a permission asset, build the tribe, and actually make money doing so.”

I have a blog post called “First 10,” and what I’m arguing is that everyone has 10 friends or family members or colleagues or people in the street who will read something that they write, who will look at video that they made. Those 10 people, when they are exposed to what you do, if they have no interest whatsoever in spreading the word, then why do you think the next 10 people will? At some point, the work you do has to be magical enough that it spreads without you harassing people, ’cause otherwise it just doesn’t go anywhere. There is a number of critical masses, probably more than 10, but it’s less than a thousand. If it’s not, then you need to work on the work so that once your work is exposed to those kinds of people — 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 of the right people — they’ll spread it. Then, you’re on your way and if not, you have to think hard about who you’re exposing it to and what the work is like.

You blog every single day. How do you keep your ideas fresh for your readers?
l don’t buy that the people don’t have enough ideas. It is hard for me to imagine how someone can go through the whole day and have talker’s block, I have never met anyone who woke up in the morning and had so little to say they were mute until they went to bed that night. People don’t get talker’s block, so why do we get writer’s block? We get writer’s block ’cause we are afraid, it’s easy to talk because you can deny it later and it disappears, but once you write it down, that’s when the fear comes from. That’s where you say I don’t have any good ideas and all I do is write like I talk. If I have something interesting to say, I say it and then I write it down, it’s not that hard. I think that the art here is in chopping down the wall, the barrier between what you want to say and what you are afraid of, and letting people hear your best stuff.

“I’m at a loss to think of one thing the book industry does well in 2010 that it wasn’t already doing in 1990.”

You have been very vocal about what the book publishing industry could do better. What are a few things you see them doing right?
The book industry does a great, fabulous, miraculous job of doing what they needed to do in 1965. Great jobs for good people. Ethics that matter. Good taste. Products to be proud of. In terms of responding to changes in the world, I’m at a loss to think of one thing the book industry does well in 2010 that it wasn’t already doing in 1990. Not one new thing done well.

Authors have so many opportunities now to self-publish or publish their own eBooks. Is this something you as a multiple New York Times bestselling author would consider?
I’ve decided not to publish any more books in the traditional way. 12 for 12 and I’m done. I like the people, but I can’t abide the long wait, the filters, the big push at launch, the nudging to get people to go to a store they don’t usually visit to buy something they don’t usually buy, to get them to pay for an idea in a form that’s hard to spread… I really don’t think the process is worth the effort that it now takes to make it work. I can reach 10 or 50 times as many people electronically. No, it’s not ‘better,’ but it’s different. So, while I’m not sure what format my writing will take, I’m not planning on it being the 1907 version of hardcover publishing any longer.

What are three of the biggest mistakes people make when trying to build their brand?
Impatience. Selfishness. Spending money instead of conquering fear.

NEXT >> Making an eBook: Getting Started

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Jeff Rivera is the author of Forever My Lady (Grand Central) and the founder of GumboWriters.com.

In late 2008, Jeff Bercovici at Portfolio observed that, because The Atlantic was known for its “commitment to long-form narratives and quasi-academic takes on culture and politics,” it was a “somewhat unlikely” candidate for success on the Web. And yet, succeeding it seems to be. In June, when most people’s thoughts turn to beaches and bikinis rather than bills and bluster, TheAtlantic.com attracted 4.2 million unique visitors—numbers it had previously not seen since the frenetic lead-up to the 2008 presidential election. Also that month, The Atlantic Wire, the new standalone opinion-curation site the magazine launched last year, had almost one million unique visitors. The industry is also taking notice. The site won the 2009 Webby Award for best online magazine and was nominated for best magazine website at this year’s National Magazine Awards.

Leading the magazine’s charge into the digital future is Bob Cohn, Wired‘s former executive editor and a 10-year veteran of Newsweek‘s Washington bureau. He spoke to mediabistro.com about the future of the 10,000-word article and the necessity of, ultimately, surrendering to the chaos of the wild, wild Web.

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Name: Bob Cohn
Position: Editorial director, Atlantic Digital
Resume: Started in Newsweek‘s Washington bureau as an intern before eventually rising to legal affairs correspondent where he spent 10 years covering Capitol Hill, the Supreme Court, the Justice Department, and the Clinton White House. Became editor and publisher of Stanford magazine and executive editor of The Industry Standard. Served as executive editor of Wired from 2001 to 2008 before joining The Atlantic in January 2009.
Birthdate: April 18, 1963
Hometown: Chicago
Education: BA in American Studies from Stanford; master’s in the Study of Law from Yale Law School
Marital status: Married, two daughters
First section of the Sunday Times: “I triage by scanning the front page, looking at ‘Book Review’ table of contents, studying the magazine cover. I’m mostly in note-for-later-reading mode. The first section I actually read is typically ‘Week in Review.'”
Last book read: The Good Earth, by Pearl Buck
Favorite TV show: Friday Night Lights, Mad Men, Weeds
Guilty pleasure: Red wine and dark chocolate, late at night while working or watching TV
Twitter handle: @1bobcohn

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The Atlantic magazine, in print, is quite successful as a long-form, lean-back experience. Why bother investing in a Web presence?
Because there’s a clear sense that people want to consume news, analysis, and information on the Web. We want to be in that game. The Atlantic was actually on the Web very early. We were one of three magazines that America Online came to in 1994 and said, “Can we put your magazine content into our new online community?” The Atlantic‘s commitment to the Web has ebbed and flowed over the years. Over the last three years, there’s been a deep commitment to making The Atlantic robust and exciting on the Web and having the Web component of the magazine be as important as the print component.

What’s your mandate? At the end of the year, what are you judged on?
Editorial success: Can we create a website that is editorially vibrant, that attracts readers, that plays a role in the national conversation, that occasionally breaks news, and that is constantly pushing forward the ideas and themes that are out there in the news cycle?

Is the bottom line part of your responsibility, as well?
Everybody here plays a role in making sure that the company is both an editorial success and a financial success. I don’t have any revenue obligations as part of my job, but I certainly participate with the business side in trying to make sure we’re a success.

How does that influence the editorial strategy?
I don’t think it’s that different [from print]. Editorial leaders have always been in conversations with business leaders. Our day-to-day writers, editors, and bloggers are not thinking deeply about the revenue side. They’re thinking deeply about making great content. To the extent that that great content attracts readers, that’s part of the definition of great content. That’s not the only way. [Great content] can [also simply] be important and advance the conversation [while not necessarily] being a reader magnet. But one way to judge our success is whether people want to read our stuff.

“When I was working on magazines, I felt like I could touch every single page… At a site like TheAtlantic.com, where we put up more than 100 posts a day, you have to surrender to the chaos.

What are some of your short- and medium-term projects?
The main thing we’ve been doing over the course of the last six months is to really build out “channels” — vertical sections of the site which we can bring on strong writers and editors to run and which also are attractive to advertisers who like to buy into sections of the site rather than just build around generic blog content. Over the last year or so, we launched a Politics channel, a Business channel, a Food channel, a Culture channel, and now a Tech channel. Continuing to vertical-ize the site is a focus for the next six months. And also to expand The Atlantic Wire, which has been a real success for us.

What’s been the biggest challenge you’ve run into so far?
The biggest challenge for me personally was making the transition from print to the Web. What I learned pretty quickly, but took a while to live with and accept, is that you lose control. When I was working on magazines, I felt like I could touch every single page. I read every story three or four or five times. I could touch every headline and every photo caption — multiple times. At a site like TheAtlantic.com, where we put up more than 100 posts a day, you have to surrender to the chaos.

What’s been surprisingly easy?
The skills that go into being a good print editor are completely transferable — editorial judgment, managing processes and people, setting editorial goals, and trying to move the enterprise to achieve them.

You’ve been leading the Atlantic’s digital editorial strategy for more than 18 months now. What are some things that have worked surprisingly well online?
Contrary to what we all think, long-form magazine journalism works very well on the Web for us. We routinely publish 6-, 8-, even 10,000 word stories on the website. It is not surprising for a magazine story to get a million page views. If you accept that people still believe in high-quality, long-form journalism, then they want it wherever it they can get it. Some people prefer to consume that in print. Some people prefer to consume news and information online.

iPhone, iPad — What’s your philosophy?
We’ve had iPhone apps out for the Atlantic Wire and TheAtlantic.com since late last year. We have a couple of iPad apps coming out. One is just the magazine. Another is a premium iPad strategy which will have magazine content, blog content — basically everything that the Atlantic is doing in print and on the Web. [Ed. Note: One of the iPad apps came out subsequent to this interview.] We’re on the Kindle. We haven’t met a mobile device yet that we’re not trying to figure out how to put our content on.

“Pay attention to how users are using the site or the app, rather than how you think they will.”

If you knew when you started this gig what you know now, what would you have done differently?
We did a major redesign of the site that came out in February. We would still do it, but we’d go into it with our eyes open even wider about the ambition and the gargantuan nature of it. You’re touching so many pieces of the site, not just the technology, but also the look and the journalists’ interaction with it. It ended up being a very big task.

When the redesign came out, The Atlantic’s Daily Dish star blogger Andrew Sullivan was vocal about the fact he thought it didn’t work for the site’s blogs, which he said had contributed mightily to the site’s success. What did you think of that?
We did a lot of things right with the redesign, and we did a couple of things that weren’t perfect. We have incredibly intelligent, opinionated bloggers, and they weren’t afraid to let us know what wasn’t working for them. We reacted very quickly and made some changes within 48 hours. And they were good changes to make.

The Atlantic has been recognized, in the form of awards, for the quality of its online site. What’s one thing you think more news organizations and magazines should be doing as they build out their digital offerings?
Pay attention to how users are using the site or the app, rather than how you think they will. Pay attention to whatever data you get and whatever studies you do. And be flexible enough to say, “We thought on the whiteboard that this was going to be the way it would work, but in fact our readers are saying that doesn’t make sense. So let’s move this module this way. Or, Let’s not do a carousel, but instead do three side-by-side photos.”

Last question: Do you ever have people downloading the Atlantic’s iPhone app mistakenly thinking it’s the Virgin Atlantic iPhone app?
(Laughs) No doubt we do. But they’ll probably be disappointed with our soundtrack.

NEXT >> 10 Tips for Pitching Multimedia Content

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E.B. Boyd is a freelance journalist based in San Francisco.

A year and change ago, Justin Halpern was just another 20-something struggling to find a toehold in Hollywood. He and his writing partner had sold a script for an independent film and had another one optioned, and they were hammering out a show, on spec, for Comedy Central. But for all intents and purposes, his bank account remained bone dry. So he moved back home with his parents, where he was once again subjected to the quirky harangues his father had doled out as he was growing up. Halpern started a Twitter feed for no greater purpose that to share those mumblings with his friends, while he concentrated on his day job at Maxim.com and focused on breaking into Hollywood as a screenwriter.

Fast forward a year. After the Twitterverse caught wind of Halpern’s unintentionally hilarious tweets, an agent came calling, and a book contract was quickly inked with HarperCollins. The book, Sh*t My Dad Says, came out in May and debuted at No. 8 on the New York Times bestseller list. In the meantime, CBS picked up a pilot for a half-hour sitcom of the same, though slightly modified, name, $#*! My Dad Says, which premieres September 23. Halpern tells mediabistro.com how it happened.

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Name: Justin Halpern
Position: Author, television writer
Resume: Author of Sh*t My Dad Says, co-executive producer of television show $#*! My Dad Says, senior editor of Maxim.com, and self-described “lucky son of a bitch.”
Birthday: Sept. 13, 1980
Hometown: San Diego, CA
Education: B.S. San Diego State University, 2003
Marital status: Engaged
Favorite TV show: Breaking Bad
Guilty pleasure: Top Chef
Last book read: Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Twitter handle: @justin_halpern

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When did you first realize your Twitter feed might actually lead to something much bigger?
At first, I didn’t even know how to check “@ replies.” I didn’t think there would be any, so I never learned how to check them. Then I figured it out and started scrolling through them. I was getting so many, and I saw one that said, “Hey, I think there might be a book in this. If you get this, please Direct Message me.” I did, and then I talked to the guy on the phone. He was like, “What do you think about doing a book about this?” And I was like, “I haven’t even told my dad that this is going on.”

What did your dad say when you finally told him?
He seemed not to really care.

So what happened next?
I asked the agent to send me a sample of a book proposal, and I said, “I’ll write one, and we’ll see if anybody’s interested.” At first, I didn’t even know if there was a book in this. If there was, it wasn’t going to be just a collection of tweets. That’s not a book, that’s a wall calendar. I just sat for a few weeks and came up with the proposal and structure of it and how I wanted it to work thematically, and the stories I had to tell. Even though it’s a silly little book about my father and me, I was attempting to tell a story and make it centered around, not just the father and son, but stories to have lessons to them. My agent sent the proposal out, and we eventually signed with HarperCollins.

When the book proposal went out to the all the publishing houses — it’s pretty incestuous, in terms of publishing houses and studios. They’re all kind of intertwined. A lot of producers got ahold of it. My literary agent started getting a lot incoming [calls]. My writing partner, Patrick Schumacker, and I took a few meetings for feature-length [film] adaptations. But I felt like I wasn’t the right guy for those. I didn’t know if I wanted to write a movie about this subject. It’s a small story. There’s not a large, high-concept to it. It’s very relatable, and, in a sense, mundane, in terms of what was happening in my life, and in my father’s life. So we asked ourselves if this was a TV show, and we started concepting it. We went around to the studios and said, “If you’re interested in the idea, we’d like to meet with show runners that you have deals with.” I knew no network or studio in their right mind is going to hand over a TV show to two 28-year-old kids who have no credits. And I wouldn’t have been prepared to take that thing to where it needed to go. I would have failed. So we met these two guys David Kohan and Max Mutchnik who had created a hit show [Will and Grace]. They were good guys. They just wanted to create a good show. And they wanted to mentor us. That’s what we were really looking for. So we partnered with them, and we pitched the networks. And we ended up signing up with CBS.

“The Internet has, in a way, democratized ideas. If you have one that’s really good, or you have a piece of content that’s really interesting, it can make its way to the top. “

It’s really interesting that, for each medium — Twitter, book, TV show — you haven’t just reproduced the content from one to the other, but really molded the general premise into something unique for each medium.
The Twitter site was just a happening. It wasn’t premeditated. It wasn’t thoughtful. The book was much more so. The relationship I had with my father was very similar to the ones my friends had with their fathers, and there wasn’t a book on the market that, I thought, was an honest depiction of a father and son. They were very syrupy with these really saccharine moments, and I just thought that was bullshit. (Laughs) It wasn’t my experience with my father, and it wasn’t any of my friends’. So I wanted to write a book that people could say, “Yeah, this reminds me of my father.”

With the TV show, it’s funny because the first thing [people asked me after he signed with CBS] was, “Why are you doing this on a network?” Instead of for a cable channel, like HBO. The first response I would say is, “I don’t recall receiving any calls from HBO.” (Laughs) But also, I told the honest story that I wanted to tell in the book. Any recreation of that on TV or in a movie is going to be a bastardized version of it. I thought we should do it a different way, so it’s not me trying to film versions of these stories on television. I thought we should do the best we can to tell fun stories that have that same kind of vibe and keep true to the character of my dad, but also break free of that and make it work for television.

Why do you think Shit My Dad Says has resonated with so many people?
I think my dad reminds people of someone in their family or someone they know. I also think, as a parent, there are so many times when you just want to tell your kid what you’re thinking, and you don’t, because the social conventions that are in place right now dictate that we don’t do that. It’s somewhat liberating that, if you can’t do it, to hear someone else call their kid a dumb shit. (Laughs) But I also think that my dad has a way with words. He’s a hyper-intelligent dude who has this really blue-collar element to him. I think it was a take on that that people hadn’t seen in a while.

What have you learned in the past year that might be useful to those wanting to follow in your footsteps?
The first thing I would say is that, on the Internet, people like stuff that is honest and has a kind of voyeuristic element to it. If you look at videos that are popular, they’re real slices of life. They show someone who’s being really genuine but also doesn’t know that they’re funny. Like the double rainbow video that just became gigantic. That guy doesn’t think that he’s funny. He’s not saying these things as jokes. He’s unintentionally funny.
Next, I’d say, keep creating as much content as you possibly can. If something strikes you as funny, or you have an idea for something, keep at it. Because eventually, hopefully, you’ll break through. The Internet has, in a way, democratized ideas. If you have one that’s really good, or you have a piece of content that’s really interesting, it can make its way to the top.

And last, I’d say when you’re in a position where you have a piece of content that other people want, try to think long-term. There will be a lot of short-term offers that sound really good but that will really kick the legs out from what you’re trying to do.

“Son, people will always try and f*ck you. Don’t waste your life planning for a f*cking, just be alert when your pants are down.” — Twitter.com/shitmydadsays

Like what?
When the Twitter feed was blowing up, I was getting crazy-weird offers to do stuff. This one hotel in Las Vegas wanted to fly my dad and me out and have us tweet at this pool party. My dad is 74. He doesn’t give a f*ck about a pool party. He’s not going to do that. And if I did that — they were offering a good sum of money — if I did that, anyone who’s following my Twitter account, they’d say, “This is so stupid. I’m not interested in it anymore. I’m not following it anymore. And, in fact, I actively hate it.” (Laughs)

There seems to be only a single picture out on the Internet of your dad. It’s at a ball game, and your dad and this young guy are looking at the camera, and there’s this other guy, off to the side, with his face mostly in shadows. It turns out that last one is actually you. Do most people think you’re the guy looking at the camera?
People do all the time, which is fantastic. (Laughs) My poor friend Brad. The British publisher, who’s publishing the book, for a while they thought that was me too. They designed a cover that had that on it. In a starburst in the middle, it’s Brad and my dad. I showed [a mockup] to my dad, because I thought it was funny. My dad didn’t think it was funny. He wrote this scathing email to Macmillan Publishers, in the UK, and he tore them a new asshole. (Laughs)

What pissed him off about it? Just that they hadn’t done their homework?
Yeah, it wasn’t even that they were using the wrong picture. I think he just thought it was lazy and half-assed.

NEXT >> How To Be Funny Online — Even When You’re Not

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E.B. Boyd is the Silicon Valley contributor to WebNewser.

You might wonder if Starbucks has gone off its rocker, given its recent announcement that it plans to roll out a digital content network in its stores later this fall. Content is expensive. There are more publishers than ever competing for the same number of eyeballs. And as anyone who works in publishing knows, the secret to making a dime on online content remains elusive.

But spend a little time talking with Starbucks digital ventures vice president Adam Brotman, who’ll be speaking at mediabistro.com’s Think Mobile conference in San Francisco tomorrow, and your skepticism might start to waver. The coffee chain has noticed that its customers increasingly reach for their mobile devices to cure what Brotman calls “micro-boredom.” So if they’re looking for entertainment online, why not have Starbucks — with its long history of curating music, books, and DVDs for patrons — serve it up to them? And when you find out that the company got rock-star publishers like the Wall Street Journal, Nickelodeon, and Apple to pony up premium content — for free — you just might begin to think the coffee giant is on to something. Mediabistro caught up with Brotman to find out about the big breakthrough idea behind the Starbucks Digital Network, whether the network’s success is contingent on the rise of paywalls, and what he learned from his famous entrepreneurial uncle.

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Name: Adam Brotman
Position: Vice president of digital ventures, Starbucks
Resume: Founder and CEO of PlayNetwork, 1996-2006; senior vice president of Corbis, 2006-2008; CEO of Barefoot Yoga Company, 2008-2009. Joined Starbucks in 2009.
Birthdate: September 20, 1969
Hometown: Mercer Island, WA
Education: BA from UCLA in Classical Civilizations and Business & Marketing. JD from the University of Washington Law School.
Marital status: Engaged
First section of the Sunday Times: Sports
Favorite TV show: Monday Night Football (or any football on TV)
Twitter handle: @adambrotman

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Many companies are struggling to make online content pay. So what’s the big breakthrough idea behind the Starbucks Digital Network?
The unique combination that Starbucks is able to bring together for its customers to give a win-win-win is what makes this different. Starbucks has a bunch of unique assets. There’s our brand, our baristas, and our product. However, we also have hundreds of millions of customers coming into our stores every month. We have a huge footprint. We have this amazing “third-place” experience that we’ve built up. We’ve become known as the place away from home and work where you can go, collect your thoughts, meet a friend, connect with a barista, relax, and recharge. And on top of that, we have a history at Starbucks of curating and recommending content — whether it be books or music or newspapers. Our customers really trust our taste.

So how does this all come together?
We went to the various content companies that we wanted to hand-select for our customers, based on a lot of talking to our customers and based on the kinds of content they’d be interested in. And instead of charging them for access to our customers — and many of them would love to have access to our customers — we said: “Why don’t you provide something of value that they can’t get for free on the Internet, or that they can’t get at all because you make it a ‘sneak peek’ or exclusive to us.” That differentiates the content for our customers, but it still gives these content partners [the ability to raise] awareness [among Starbucks customers] and [have those customers give their content a] trial within our stores. Then we share revenue on the upsell, so we become like an affiliate network.

“We win because we’re enhancing the customer experience, and we’re doing so in a way where everybody’s happy to be involved in the transaction.”

So how does that produce the win-win-win you talked about?
We give this great awareness and trial benefit to our content partners. We win because we’re enhancing the customer experience, and we’re doing so in a way where everybody’s happy to be involved in the transaction. Hopefully, most of all our customers.

What’s the mobile angle to this?
More of our customers access Wi-Fi in our stores through mobile than they do through laptops. So we designed the site to be a seamless experience across different devices. The design of the site is meant to be easily touched and swiped. It works really well with a mouse, but it works just as well with your fingers on an iPad or iPhone.

Also, the site is a location-based site. It knows what store you’re in. So we can do a number of location-based features and engagement points on the Starbucks Digital Network that you normally would associate with a mobile phone. For example, we can work with Zagat to provide full, unrestricted access to their subscriber ratings for restaurants that are right near the store you’re in. Or we can work with Rodale — Men’s Health, Women’s Health, and Runner’s World — to come up with biking and running routes that start and stop at the very store that you’re in. We can even provide weather reports, down the latitude/longitude of the store. And we’re doing a lot of community-involvement services, like our work with DonorsChoose.org, where you can fund public school projects that teachers have posted at schools right next to the store.

It seems like you’re moving the idea of what constitutes “content” forward as well, developing stuff that can be consumed in brief “interstitial” moments.
I’ve heard it called “micro-boredom.” Particularly at Starbucks. You’re in line, or you’re waiting for your latte, or you’re waiting for a friend to arrive, or you’re just drinking your latte and you’ve got 10 minutes. A lot of time, people will pull out their phone and check email. Maybe they’ll want to learn something or discover something because they’ve got a few minutes. That’s happening in our stores a lot.

So will the content be optimized for the person who’s just got 90 seconds or 10 minutes, rather than a longer stretch of time?
Sort of. We are designing the content experiences to be “snackable.” If it’s a free iTunes pick-of-the-week digital download, that is something you can get done in 90 seconds or less. You can check out The Wall Street Journal for free and the New York Times e-edition, which you normally have to subscribe to. Those are very snackable. But if you’ve got an hour to kill and you were going to be online anyways, we hope that we can provide an interesting alternative to what you were going to do anyways on our free Wi-Fi.

Will people be able to take any of the content with them when they leave?
Some of the offerings will be downloads, like the iTunes pick-of-the-week.

“‘Premium’ doesn’t have to just mean you have to pay for it. It could be a window of an exclusive.”

Some observers have said the success of the Starbucks Digital Network is contingent on paywalls going up at content sites that are currently free. Is that the case?
No. We don’t know what’s going to happen in terms of paywalls. We’re pretty agnostic to what happens there. There will always be the desire and the ability to create premium content. But “premium” doesn’t have to just mean you have to pay for it. It could be a window of an exclusive. For example, right now [with ebooks], you can preview the first chapter or two of a book that is already in print before you buy it. When we work with publishers, we’re looking to say, “Let us have a preview before anyone else has a preview.” So that makes it premium for our customers. When we work with magazines and other publishers, we might say: “Why don’t you create something interesting just for us, by repurposing something that you’re doing, or at least give us the first crack digitally, for the first week, where you can only get it via the Starbucks Digital Network, before it goes on to your website.”

The Starbucks Digital Network is a curation play, and curation plays depend heavily on the curator. Who’s your curator and why do you have faith in them?
It’s a curation play, but it’s really a customer experience and engagement play. We’re not looking at ourselves as some grand arbiter of taste. We’re more focused on: What is our brand? What is the customer experience in our stores? And what makes sense for us and our customers around content and engagement?

You joined Starbucks a year and a half ago. What was your mandate?
Be entrepreneurial. Make sure to be innovative in how my group leverages Starbucks assets. Be nimble. Be humble to our customers and our brand.

Why did Starbucks decide they need more entrepreneurialism inside the company?
I have to give a lot of credit to my boss [Starbucks CIO] Stephen Gillett. He and [founder and CEO] Howard [Schultz] and the leadership team came up with the idea that there are certain activities — particularly in the digital sphere — that shouldn’t ladder up directly to traditional IT or marketing, that are more about engagement and innovation than other marketing activities. They believed that if we set up a group that worked very closely with marketing and public affairs and operations, but was tasked with being innovative and entrepreneurial, and leveraging opportunities with innovative engagement with our customers, that that could hopefully unlock some results that are harder to achieve otherwise.

Your uncle Jeffrey Brotman co-founded CostCo. The customer experience at CostCo is the antithesis of the experience at a place like Starbucks. Did he give you any advice that was transferable from running a large discount chain to operating intimate coffee shops?
The two companies share a passion for understanding what the customer wants and expects. My uncle has always mentored me to focus on the customer and focus on the customer experience. CostCo has always impressed me as a company that understands that the customer wants great product in a no-frills environment. If you boil it down, both companies are equally passionate about what the customer wants — and about the core competency of the company. And so whether it be at PlayNetwork, or Corbis, or now at Starbucks, that’s a lesson that I’ve always taken to heart.

See Adam’s presentation on how Starbucks Digital Network is harnessing content partnerships and location-based services at our Think Mobile conference September 23 in San Francisco.

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E.B. Boyd is the Silicon Valley contributor to WebNewser.