The tech community has been watching closely since Facebook went public in 2012 and began its mission to engage mobile web users. News about younger users abandoning Facebook for the trendier Whats App and Snapchat have fueled many a doomsday warning, but refinements made to the platform’s app over the past year appear to have been successful. According to Facebook, an enormous 945 million out of 1.2 billion monthly active users were using the company’s mobile products by the end of 2013.

Now Facebook wants to offer content serendipity with Paper, a standalone iOS news reader app that delivers human and algorithm-curated full-screen articles and photos in categories you select like Tech, Health, and Pop Culture. Mark Zuckerberg said back in March that he wanted to make Facebook “the best personalized newspaper in the world.” However, it seems that the designers of Paper have come up with something closer to a glossy magazine. more…

Traditionally, brands have interrupted consumers to talk about their product. Whether we’re reading a magazine, watching TV,  or browsing online, the advert that inevitably appears is an unsolicited marketing message from a brand that we may or may not care about.

Consumer research often highlights that most of these marketing messages are indeed irrelevant to our interests and needs. Coupled with the increasing control a consumer has over the marketing they receive (opting-out of telemarketing and direct-mail; unsubscribing from email; skipping TV ads) this has become a cause for concern for brands.

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In August last year London listings magazine Time Out became the latest high quality title to drop its cover price (£3.25), say farewell to the news-stand, and become a commuter freebie. 

It looks, feels, and reads like its paid-for predecessor. There are film, theatre, dance, music, comedy, shopping, food, cabaret and club previews, and full-page ads for products including Hertz, Tesco Mobile, BA, and Fullers Brewery confirm that advertisers have stuck with the title, which now has an average weekly circulation of 205,530, a fivefold increase on the 54,875 copies it was selling each week in 2011. 

Time Out is not routinely discarded by commuters, a trend it shares with glossy rivals Stylist (distributed on Wednesdays to affluent 20 to 40-year-old women with high end fashion, travel, beauty, people and careers content), and Shortlist (distributed on Thursdays to professional males)

But unlike Time Out, both Stylist and Shortlist launched as “freemium” titles and have never had a cover price.

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In the past month, almost 1 million new magazines have appeared on Apple’s iPad. Rather than heralding a long-awaited comeback from traditional publishers, nearly all of these collections of articles, photos and social-media updates are the handiwork of ‘armchair editors’, using a new tool from the social magazine app, Flipboard.

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There were a number of key themes at this year’s Guardian Changing Media Summit — an annual conference which brings together a mixture of CEO and director level executives responsible for commercial, creative and digital strategies.

Most significantly, it was clear that publishers are beginning to see more opportunities than threats from digital technologies and much time was spent discussing the innovative monetisation of digital products.

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