Hamish McKenzie's Magazine Dream: One Subscription to Rule Them All

Photo by Longzero; Found at Fotopedia 

Today PandoDaily ran a guest post by Hamish McKenzie about how magazines should look at how to transition from glorified RSS readers like proprietary apps and Pulse, Feedly, and Flud. McKenzie's post, titled "The Future of Magazines Should Look a Lot Like Spotify," made a compelling case that publishers would do well to partner on something like an interactive version of Instapaper or Read It Later with aggregation. McKenzie's thesis essentially argues for à la carte article availability. Spotify comes into the picture because an all-you-can-read subscription model, so says McKenzie, would be very, very popular.

So say we all.

I think McKenzie is absolutely onto something here. He explains the fragmented experience that results from having an app for every magazine or newspaper, as well as RSS apps, as well as what I call "read-shifting" apps like Instapaper. Some are available on one or two platforms, few are available on all, and when they are, the experience varies wildly.

McKenzie's idea is brilliant, and I share his dream. He mentions Flud, the latest entrant into the aforementioned crowded news reader app war. I have been trying out their Android app for a week or so and it's very compelling. You can follow and be followed from within the app, like Spotify, and you can share—or "flud"—something especially wonderful that you read to other Flud users.

That functionality is a step in the right direction if you agree that "one subscription to rule them all" is a better future for reading high-quality reporting and editorial content from the web. There are some problems, though. Despite being a fan of the idea, I see DRM for interactive, primarily text-based content as more problematic than for music.

Spotify can be "ripped" by people with enough knowledge and time (and few enough scruples), allowing one to save the stream and even split it automatically into individual songs, complete with metadata. But it's hard. The service is wonderful, and unless you have an old-school urge to own your tunes, you'll probably find yourself amenable to paying them.

I suspect that McKenzie's imaginary "Mag Reader" service would be easier to rip content from, and therefore even more difficult to get off the ground than subscription music services. Publishers are scared, and they should be: their business model is on its way out. But the distribution control problem has to be solved before they'll risk involvement in the new media economy.

That problem shouldn't stop someone ingenious from building something awesome on top of McKenzie's idea. Flud is close, so is Instapaper, especially with features like, well, "The Feature." These are bold new ways of doing something where the tired old ways are no longer sufficient, from an economic or user-experience perspective. A great idea like "Mag Reader" coupled with great development and even better execution could truly change how publishers and consumers alike approach the distribution and consumption of journalism (and who knows, why not fiction?) in the 21st century.

We can all agree that that's something worth doing.