Asset Aggregation

A Printmaking Magazine online essential  

Copy-writing over one of the nation’s expert adviser’s words, the author recycles text to fit a vision of an online printmaking magazine. Assets are the most precious possession of artists, and artists who make prints have the most valuable assets of any.  

Asset Aggregation

In 2014, every publisher—including publishers of fine art prints—must study the model subscription website, called “the nexus” for all the other publishing platforms by the authors of the Digital Magazine Publishing Handbook from the Mequoda Group in Boston. Nexus means connection; therefore, the hands-on, real and personal artist who makes prints must connect to his or her world of patrons by being connected to—or creator of—a subscription website. 

Of course, the subscription website must enable the user to experience their magazine using all the criteria of traditional magazines, with the modifications such as I described in my earlier essay, Multifaceted Magazine. 

With a companion, global magazine website (such as my planned PrintmakingWorld Online), independent fine art print publishers will disaggregate all the magazine content of the main title—PrintmakingWorld Online—and create a searchable content database. 

Searchable magazines is like when you are confronted with a stack of back issues of, say, Journal of the Print World or Print Collector’s Newsletters and you want to get something you remember having read. You have page through each issue. It’s kind of fun, in a way, to browse.  

However, even though this can bring new things to light serendipitously, it may not be the best way to reach your audience if you are a producing artist with prints to offer. Or, if you have more to offer than prints, such as workshops, parties, presentations, etc., you definitely won’t find your audience in a stack of back issues of paper magazines.  

While the traditional paper-based print magazine could only be searchable in a linear review of past issues, a companion magazine website enables the fine art print publisher a way to offer subscribers a searchable Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) database of content. For example, take the following story.

Cruise

My wife and I happened to be going to Myrtle Edwards Park and we arrived near the pier where the cruise ships dock and passengers were streaming from there in taxis. It was like a train—bumper to bumper taxis all headed toward downtown Seattle. There were buses, too. It is likely they would be going to, among the other sites, the Pike Street Market. 

I picture some of these tourists using their smart phones and tablets to see what there is to see, in addition to the printed brochures and travel magazines. Printmaking artists, I realized, should be online and at the Pike Street Market. In the past, it was enough to be represented by an art gallery as surely there would be some tourist who would go there.  

Printmaking is, in my opinion, a public kind of art—a social art and, if you can be with your audience and printing—a performance, too. I think that stream of taxis and buses headed to town made me think of somehow getting my Mini Etching Press in front of those tourists.  

Also, it made me think that the tourists who plan their day partly by going online should find the printmaker at the Pike Street Market by way of the website, PrintmakingWorld Online. A few months later I was able to interest a printmaker in trying out for a spot at the Market, and—by the next season—he will be there.  

Illustration: Ethan Lind checks out an unfinished Mini Etching Press loaner which he will use at his spot in the Pike Street Market. He is the Market’s “Busker Etcher,” so-called because his specialty is musicians—like himself—who play on the market’s streets (buskers).

Asset management

In 1984, I advised the UW art school to build out the printmaking division to get students ready for the coming age of digital reproduction, but the administration and faculty were not interested. I persisted and, since they thought I wanted to transform printmaking, they took me out of the printmaking division and, eventually, eliminated the printmaking major—transforming it themselves (to become something by a name that is impossible to remember).

Of course, I gathered up my assets and I left. I figure I had a fortune in experiences built over my 19-years there, for which the State had paid me roughly $350,000 in salaries. Because I managed my assets--my investments in R&D and teaching--I came out smelling like a rose.

Thus, today, I can independently build out my concept for the perfect PrintmakingWorld Online magazine, designing it to publish on ten platforms and offer two separate subscriptions for each one.  

(1) One is a good old print magazine, for a linear, one-hour, once-a-month kind of experience.

(2) The other is a persistent, online database that is like a reference book or even an encyclopedia, if you like, for researching previously written but not necessarily published on paper editorial content.  

Too much emphasis, in my opinion, is devoted to advertising in a “hidden message” manner. Magazine publishers who publish only on dwindling natural resources must give their readers preparation for making a purchase of a consumer good or service.  

Advisers like those at Mequoda offer the same advice for online magazines—treat everyone like a consumer because, unless you are a hands-on producer of prints, that’s what audiences are. Thus, artists like Ethan—who is used to playing for his supper—now can be in both worlds—the online magazine and the public space, an artist-in-action, a real art activist.  

Mequoda group recommends the launch of a second website — a truly subscription website — that would enable subscribers those “nine magazine user experiences” that Mequoda Group described in their articles online.  

End note

At this point I got tired of copy-writing over the Mequoda’s original essay; what follows is their original text, which bears thinking. - BR

Digital

“As one studies the article about the nine experiences, make note of the difference between a “subscription” to the “reference book” website and a subscription to the magazine content website. The magazine website would enable users to buy and download individual issues or a 12-month subscription.

“The magazine website would power the digital issues, viewable on the iPad and other tablet platforms, and would have a searchable archive of all the editorial content that appeared in the magazine as a subset of the reference book website.

“The subscription magazine website and the subscription online reference book are different products with different uses. These differences are detailed in our handbook on subscription website strategy. The Consumer Reports reference website is used exactly like a book. The average subscriber accesses it 2.7 times annually for 5-10 minutes each time.

“In contrast, the average Consumer Reports magazine subscriber spends 50-60 minutes per month with each new issue. Subscribers access the online reference book for solutions. They read the magazine for mastery. Users can buy either the subscription magazine, or the subscription reference book, or both.”