The Future of Media: Brands Are Publishers Now Too

gigaom reporting:
As if newspapers and magazine publishers didn’t have enough problems already, what with declining advertising revenue and the difficulty of getting readers to pay via iPad apps and paywalls, the number of competitors they face is expanding almost daily — and it’s not just aggregators like The Huffington Post. High-end group shopping service Gilt Groupe has just launched its own cooking magazine, and the New York Public Library has launched an interesting iPad app that also has a very magazine-like feel. As the tools to publish become cheaper and cheaper, brands are effectively becoming publishers in their own right.
The Gilt Groupe offering, which is called Gilt Taste, is interesting in part because it is targeted at a very specific market: namely, the high-end food afficionado. It looks and reads like a high-quality food or recipe-based magazine that might come from a regular publisher, but it is obviously designed to help promote offers from the Gilt Groupe (which recently closed a $138-million financing that values the company at $1 billion). It’s more than just a catalog, however — Gilt hired the former editor of Gourmet magazine to run it, and it clearly wants to be the equal of any traditional food magazine.
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Even the New York Public Library has created its own digital magazine, although this happens to be a magazine filled with content about the World Fair in 1939 (other issues will be released in the future, the library said). The iPad app — which is called Biblion — was produced as a way of promoting interest in the library in an age when digital formats are taking over from print (Amazon said it is now selling more Kindle books than hardcover or paperback books combined). And as Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic notes, it is a stunning looking magazine, one that traditional publishes might want to imitate.

MH: it is a stunning magazine, check it out

http://gigaom.com/2011/05/19/the-future-of-media-brands-are-publishers-now-too