2012 Awards and Categories

Title Allocations to Categories

Entry Instructions and Rules

Payment Form

Nomination form: Lifetime Achievement award

Entry form: Most Effective Use of Magazines by an Advertiser

Entry form: Best Launch or Relaunch

Entry form: Best Publisher’s Marketing Campaign

Entry form: Best Use of Photography

Entry form: Best Integration of Print with Other Media

Entry form: Best Subscriptions Promotion

Entry form: Advertising Sales Achievement

Entry form: Columnist of the Year

Entry form: Journalist of the Year

Entry form: Best Cover Design

Entry form: Designer of the Year

Entry form: Editor of the Year

Entry form: Magazine of the Year

GOOD LUCK!

The Listener is New Zealand’s highest-selling and best-read current affairs magazine, and editor Pamela Stirling says she is delighted to announce the appointment of such a high calibre journalist to the deputy editor’s position. “Karyn’s distinguished career has included everything from crime and business journalism to Maori affairs and political reporting, and she brings all that valuable experience to the role. She is the winner of many prestigious awards and it is a great pleasure to welcome her to the magazine. The team are very much looking forward to working with her.”

Karyn starts in her role on January 16.

About NZ Magazines

NZ Magazines is a division of APN New Zealand with an expanding range of magazine titles, including New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, New Idea, That’s Life!, the New Zealand Listener, Creme, Girlfriend, Simply You and Simply You Living.

 For further information please contact:

Pamela Stirling, New Zealand Listener Editor

Phone: 09 373 9413, Email: pamela.stirling@listener.co.nz

This will assist with identifying paid-for content that falls outside traditional display advertising (such as sponsorships, advertorials, special issues, etc.).  

Read More at http://www.stoppress.co.nz/news/2011/12/new-protocol-developed-for-nielsen-more-accurately-reflect-magazine-revenue/  by Ben Fahey

After the initial flurry of excitement surrounding the release of their digital editions, magazine publishers are now beginning to focus on the strategies behind the products. In addition to complete digital editions, many are seeking other avenues to repackage and sell digital content. Mag publishers don’t need to look far to see where the digital conversion is paying off: its literary counterpart, the book business.

In fiscal first quarter 2012, bookseller and newsstand provider Barnes and Noble saw its digital content sales quadruple. The retailer attributed this growth largely to its eReader offering; the NOOK business increased 140 percent during this period to $277 million. Overall sales for BN.com jumped 37 percent to $198 million. As brick and mortar bookstores topple (including the recent goodbye to former book giant Borders), the e-book appears to be finally taking hold.

To that end, magazine publishers are beginning to utilize their own content assets to enter the book game. While this is not a completely new effort (previous digital book titles from magazine publishers include the April 2010 e-book Love, Sex and Freedom and the Paradox of the Pill by TIME deputy editor Nancy Gibbs, and Vanity Fair’s 2010 title The Great Hangover collated by editor-in-chief Graydon Carter), the one-off opportunity is only growing stronger.

E-Singles, E-Books and E-Originals: Varied Monikers and Strategies, Similar Goals

Rodale is the latest publisher to enter the e-book game. Rodale launched its “Essential Guides” series in mid-October, beginning with content from its Runner’s World brand. The books are priced at a range of $3 to $10, and are available through the Kindle, Nook, Sony Reader, Google eBooks and the Apple iBooks store. This is not an entirely surprising move, given the company’s dual role of both magazine and book publisher. Runner’s World editor David Willey said at the time of the e-books launch, “We launched this comprehensive e-book series to fill that niche and provide our growing readership with even broader and deeper advice on selected topics than we have the space to deliver in an issue of the magazine.”

Hearst, another publisher with a book division, is also using internal resources, as well as existing relationships with publishing houses, to leverage its magazine content in the e-book sector. Previous magazine-branded books from Hearst include: The Good Housekeeping Cookbook; The Cosmo Kama Sutra; Food Network Magazine’s Great Easy Meals; O, The Oprah Magazine’s Words that Matter and O’s Best Advice Ever; Popular Mechanics’ Debunking 9/11 Myths and Harper’s Bazaar’s Greatest Hits, among others.

The publisher is pushing Good Housekeeping-branded mini cookbooks, as well as Cosmo’s Sexiest Stories Ever (a collection of three Cosmo fiction pieces), for $.99 through iTunes. Hearst creative director of content extensions David Kang tells FOLIO:, “E-singles are part of an exploration of introducing people to products they might not have tried if they were selling at a higher price point. We think of it as a way to graduate to the full products…there’s a big difference between free and a price of a dollar.”

Kang says many of these e-singles are being aimed as a service, “They are a great value, and a solution in itself.” Kang reinforces the low price as a chief selling point, as some of these one-offs contain upwardly of 60 pages of content.

Kang contends this content is not part of the recent Hearst announcement of 300,000 digital downloads, and was unable to share download numbers thus far. He says, “Think of these in the book world; though in digital, it’s all kind of blurring. It’s a paid content model.”

Publishing partners Sterling Publishing and Open Road have helped in the promotion of the new products, and NOOK created a virtual boutique exclusively for Good Housekeeping and related GH content. While Kang did not share specific plans for future one-off digital books, he says, “Across our range of 20 titles, there are so many different opportunities; we wanted to start with some of our flagship properties to establish proof of concept.”

Different Brand Road Maps Under One Publisher Umbrella

At Conde Nast, e-book strategies are decided by the brands individually, not the corporation as a whole.

The New Yorker has 15 book anthologies available in print and digital. Its recent 9/11 collection is the first e-book released that does not have a print counterpart, according to deputy editor Pamela McCarthy. The magazine also produces smaller anthologies dubbed The New Yorker Reader, packaged as apps download-ready for the iPad. The apps are available through reader subscriptions and for single sale.

McCarthy explains the difference in the e-content models, “The collections delivered via the iPad app have advertising sponsors (so far American Express, United, and BMW), help drive circ revenue and also bring in revenue from single-copy sales. The e-books we publish on our own via the e-bookstores (so far that’s After 9/11) are the usual e-book model; and the e-books that have print counterparts are based on the traditional publishing model, where we get an advance and royalties.”

As for deeming a topic appropriate an e-book package, McCarthy says content is vetted for “subsets of the archive that are intriguing, or surprising, or definitive.” So far, The New Yorker has 200,000 downloads from its e-book portfolio.

At Vanity Fair, three e-books (these are in addition to the joint effort with Harper Collins in 2010 of The Great Hangover) have been compiled in recent months. David Friend, editor of creative development with VF, says, “The e-books are an interesting golden mean between the length of the magazine and the length of a book. We’re seeing what collections will work; like in the early days of television, is it going to be more like radio, more like movies or live theater?”

Topics include Elizabeth Taylor, Rupert Murdoch and a deep dive into the world of contemporary book publishing through the lens of a case study (Chad Harbach’s struggle to get his Art of Fielding in print). The e-books are available for purchase through NOOK and Kindle devices and apps.

Friend describes the production process of the e-books as extremely fast. Elizabeth Taylor: Eight Remarkable Stories About Hollywood’s Most Beautiful, Most Controversial Star was put together in nine days; Rupert Murdoch, The Master Mogul of Fleet Street was compiled in eight. How a Book Is Born: The Making of the Art of Fielding is an extended version of the article that first appeared in the magazine.

When asked about strategy and overall purpose of the e-books, Friend says, “We’re not consciously positioning it one way or the other. This would be the tail wagging the dog if this was meant to draw people to a physical magazine. It isn’t ‘let’s expand the brand’, this is, ‘it’s a cool medium, how can we do things that we like and think other people will like because they think it’s cool, too?’”

Discussions on how to reposition The Great Hangover in the trio of recently released e-books are underway, as is possible partnership conversations with Amazon and Apple. Currently, there are no advertisements in VF’s e-books, with the exception of a sub ad in the beginning of the digitized content and a link at the end to another e-book in the series.

“We’re trying small collections, we’re trying large collections, individually expanded pieces. I think what we’ll do is one or two other permutations: one is a never before published [14,000 word] piece that we’ve been meaning to run in the magazine. It may not fit in an issue, but it’d be perfect on a device,” says Friend.

Publisher satisfaction grows but monetization continues to frustrate.

We’re only about a year into the tablet age but more than a decade of using digital editions. Today, with the rise of ever increasingly sophisticated mobile devices and apps, digital editions are poised to leap to the forefront of publishers’ revenue generation plans and serve as their flagship on devices such as the iPad.

But are they able to deliver? Nxtbook Media recently wrapped its 2011 State of the Digital Edition survey, which looked at audience development and revenue growth, as well as where mobile fits in.

The good news? Publishers on both the consumer and b-to-b sides are more satisfied with their digital editions than last year when Nxtbook first conducted the survey. However, there is some growing frustration as publishers continue with how to actually monetize digital editions.

Satisfaction Up by 40 Percent

Forty-nine percent of respondents said they are satisfied with their digital edition (12 percent are “quite satisfied” while 37 percent are “somewhat satisfied”), up 40 percent from 2010. “Publishers this year are more optimistic and they’re also more decisive than last year,” says Nxtbook marketing director Marcus Grimm.

However, while publishers are realizing digital editions have great potential for growing audience, they aren’t sure how to do so. Sixty-four percent of respondents say they are confident there are many more readers out there but they don’t know how to reach them (up from 59.3 percent who said the same last year). “That speaks to the youth of our audiences,” says Grimm. “Publishers are trying lots of things; we know readers are out there, but we’re not cracking the code. The iTunes store brought us to a totally different place—every time we think we have this space figured out, it changes.”

Just 21 percent of respondents said they know there are more digital magazine readers out there and they know how to reach them.

Still, Grimm advises publishers should strive for 15 percent of their readership to come from digital editions at this stage. “If you can get to that, it’s a vibrant number,” he adds. “It’s a large enough number that your advertisers will care about.”

Advertising Satisfaction

Publishers are less satisfied with digital editions as an advertising tool than as an audience tool. Just 29 percent of publishers say they are very or somewhat dissatisfied with the advertising revenue of their digital editions, about the same as last year.

However, the satisfaction gap between b-to-b publishers (Nxtbook’s main clientele) and consumer publishers shrank over the past year.

“The iTunes store has helped b-to-b pubs a lot and specialty optimized magazines are helping with sponsorship,” says Grimm. “Advertisers are getting excited about new optimized magazines.”

Still, just 12 percent of respondents say they have a firm handle on how to generate money with digital magazines. Sixty-one percent of respondents say their digital magazine can be a revenue generator but are unsure how to get to the next level.

Perhaps most troubling, the number of respondents who say they’ve tried many ways to make money with digital editions and are fairly convinced they can’t nearly doubled from last year to 8 percent.

“There are three rules of digital editions,” says Grimm. “You will have fewer visitors than on your website. People don’t go into it automatically, they look at it like print. However, when they go into a digital edition, they spend more time in it than on a website. Engagement time leads to clickthrough rates and websites typically have lower clickthrough rates than digital edition. You need to ask advertisers, do you want page views or do you want leads?”

Advertising options are growing for digital editions. Nxtbook offers several positions in the digital interface, including a marquee position that is “left of cover.” “One publisher years ago said that was his boardwalk space,” says Grimm. “Publishers will share simple toolbar positions. Others say don’t change for ads at all but let’s put a video in there, we’ll upcharge for that. A lot of publishers say you have got an ad in the print magazine, if you want to link live in a digital edition, pay an upcharge. I’m not a fan of that but if you trying to find simple way to start digital conversation, you can start there.”

Publisher APPtitude

Still, publishers are undaunted about the potential. Fifty-nine percent of respondents are “aggressively moving forward” with mobile devices, up 25 percent from last year.

Meanwhile, 25 percent say they plan to move to these devices but feel no rush, 6 percent say they’re uncertain if their digital magazine needs to be on these devices and 5 percent say they’ve decided to not worry about these devices at this time (up from 3 percent last year).

That’s actually a good sign for the industry, according to Grimm. “Publishers are now making decisions—two years ago, they were saying they weren’t sure what to do. Now some are saying we absolutely have to be moving in this direction.

The Rise of “Digitally-Optimized Magazines”

Twenty-one percent of respondents say they already offer designed-for-digital optimized magazines (which offer multimedia and no zooming) while 23 percent say it’s very likely they will do so in the coming year.

“Publishers are more bullish on optimized editions,” says Grimm. “Publishers say, ‘We’re tired of PDF, we want to do something special.’”

However, the biggest obstacle to offering an optimized digital edition remains staffing and resources. Forty-six percent of respondents say their staff is stretched too thin “to create a different looking product.”

“The first thing it aims to do is take away zooming by using larger font sizes,” says Grimm. “Once you do that you have optimized content, but not optimized ads. Truly optimized digital editions optimize ads as well. Generation 1 digital editions linked to video but optimized digital editions make video be part of the storytelling, not just because they’re cool but they’re there to tell story in richer and more elegant way.”

Grimm says publishers can have optimized digital editions without an app. “UBM does all kinds of special editions and supplements with brands like EE Times and they’re concerned about it being optimized in in the browser,” he adds. “We have publishers who come to us and say, ‘we have a PDF, we want to make it a Nxtbook,’ and they pay less than $1,000. Others come to us for layout and design and the costs are comparable for what you’d pay for. Others say we have time and talent for a digital edition, but they need a style guide, which ranges from $2,000 to $5,000 for a one-time charge.”

HTML 5: The Next Big Thing

The emergence of HTML 5 offers publishers the chance to offer a richer browser experience (and re-establish themselves as sellers of digital editions, rather than having to rely on iTunes or other third-party digital newsstands).

“Some of the online newsstands have been successful but at the end of the day, the best person to sell your magazine is you,” says Grimm. “Publishers are now addressing HTML 5 so they can sell it themselves. The Financial Times is selling an optimized browser experience—that gives them the ability to bypass Apple and do it themselves. If you have an audience that loves what you’re doing, don’t make it harder for them to find you in something like the iTunes store. In three to five years, you’ll be doing it on your own, through your own websites.”

Still, HMTL 5 remains a long-term solution. “Right now, the Internet world is app-driven,” says Grimm. “It’s a dynamic reader experience to download apps. In time, the Internet surfing experience will improve. Don’t overinvest in apps development now–eight years from now we’ll be saying, remember all those apps? Instead we’ll be having very cool browser experiences via HTML5.”

The team at Healthy Food Guide magazine have made their hugely popular recipe book, 101 Gluten-Free Recipes into a fully functioning iPhone app, released worldwide. 

Use the app to create shopping lists, email shopping lists to friends, and add your own notes to individual recipes. All 101recipes have simple step-by-step instructions, nutrition information including kilojoule counts, and the ability to save your favourites for easy reference.

Kerry Sutcliffe from Healthy Food Guide says, “we know that living gluten-free can be a challenge – but it can be dealt with positively and easily when you have great recipes readily at hand, and we think we’ve done it with this app.”

Available now through iTunes at www.healthyfoodguide.com/gluten-free .

For More details contact: Kerry Sutcliffe, Ph 09 304 1480, Kerry.sutcliffe@hlmedia.co.nz

Healthy Food Guide magazine is published by Healthy Life Media, a privately owned company, based in Auckland

The Glossies will showcase magazine advertising of all shapes and kinds — this could include an advertiser-commissioned cover, sponsored supplement, tip-on, advertorial, an ad series that reveals over a number of pages, or just a simple, effective display ad.  Ads may qualify if they are innovative, high impact, clever, beautiful, well designed, or thought provoking.

Creative staff, agencies and publishers can start now by submitting their best work – as pdfs or as video clip demonstrations – that has run in a New Zealand-published printed magazine since January 2010 (the magazine does not need to be a member of the MPA).  Ads will be displayed on the StopPress website each month, and readers asked to vote for their favourite.  The creative team behind the ad with the most votes each month wins the lunch at Vinnies restaurant.

In addition, all the monthly winners, plus top vote-scoring examples from across the year-long competition, will make up a ‘Top 20’ finalist pool, vying to be the supreme winner of The Glossies.  The finalist pool will be judged in October 2012 by a panel of industry experts, and the $10,000 travel prize awarded to the creative team behind ‘NZ’s Best Magazine Ad’.

Go to www.theglossies.co.nz for more information, and competition terms and conditions.