Tis the season to be jolly, drunk, kind and drunk. We’re feeling festive at and figured it’s time we spread the news about some good work being done by our talented, resourceful and clever friends. Chris Nee shares the love.
On the first day of Christmas, Ollie Irish gave to me…a ruddy magazine version of Who Ate All The Pies?. It’s a big step from blog to magazine, and Ollie’s taking it in style. Pies was one of the first football blogs I read and Editor Irish has been kind enough to publish a couple of posts by me and appear several times on our podcast, so I’m delighted to plug his new project.
Everyone knows that the actual magazine industry is on its arse, so the new wave of football media will involve both bloggers and innovative solutions. As well as a souvenir-style print version, Pies magazine is available as an iPad application. It’s a fascinating venture and it’ll do you good to look into it.
Elsewhere, our friend Emma Trotter at Football On The TV is also going all newfangled and has just launched the site’s new iPhone application. It’ll help you plan your football viewing (supported, of course, by the Football Fairground midweek and weekend TV previews), and it’s another example of footy folk from the interwebz stepping into a new area. Find out more here, and if you want to check it out for free let me know.
I also want to extend my season’s greetings to Picklive. Last week, our podcast was shortlisted alongside category winner Football Weekly, People’s Choice winner The Football Ramble, GibFootball Show and Back Page Football at the NOPAs, Picklive’s inaugural football awards event. It was a fantastic evening (which raised decent money for charity) and another example of (a) Picklive’s generosity and (b) Picklive’s nous when it comes to dealing with people like me.
On top of sponsoring Socrates, that makes it a year in which I’ve had many free beers and several brilliant evenings in the company of bloggers, podcasters and the wonderful Picklive team. Thanks, everyone.
Most importantly our partner charity, Cardiac Risk In The Young, has this year celebrated its 15th anniversary by continuing to raise awareness of the heart conditions that can lead to sudden cardiac death and sudden death syndrome, conditions that affect young footballers, sportspeople and others every year. We’re failing miserably in our quest to raise an initial £1,000 for CRY (you can donate here, by the way) but I’m very much looking forward to running a bloody great big event in the spring to make up the shortfall and then some.
When I heard about the Pies magazine this week, I tweeted that I thought it looked ‘half-baked’ (my cretinous sub-conscious slipping in a pie-based joke, clearly) and that I didn’t see the need for it. I instantly regretted this, especially when another blogger replied with an @mention for Ollie Irish, which meant he then saw what I’d said. Bugger - time for me to feel like a dick.
My sending such a hasty tweet rather spoiled my day. It’s always a bit crap when you feel like you may have hurt someone’s feelings - I didn’t need to judge it so quickly or so harshly. Damn you keyboard trigger fingers. Damn you social networking.
Having looked a little closer, and sussed out that the iPad is going to be a big part of the Pies mag’s strategy, things make a touch more sense to me. I am still confused about some things though, and it would be really interesting to hear Ollie’s vision of how he sees the mag developing. I for one would retweet a post on that.
The biggest thing I’m struggling with is how is it going to make money? As far as I can gather, Ollie’s not just running Pies just for the love of it - he’s an employee of Anorak Publishing, right? So the mag presumably needs to make money if he and his team are spending a chunk of their working week on it. But the iPad download is free, and the issue carries no advertising. I’d be interested to know if this is the plan going forward, or if the mag will carry advertising as soon as companies become interested. The iPad of course opens some interesting commercial possibilities, what with the potential for adverts to be ‘clickable’, contain video, etc.
Of course, if the magazine does become profitable, I then have a whole different set of questions. Presumably the bloggers contributing to the magazine are writing for free. Hypothetically, would it be a little bit exploitative to use free labour when all the writers get from it is their name in print? Or have things moved on so much now that this is par for the course in magazines? I’m genuinely not sure where I stand on the moral debate here. It’s a strange time for journalism. Maybe I have to adapt?
It would be different if the magazine were to bring talented young bloggers in on unpaid internships for a few weeks, because then they can really feel the benefit of working alongside Ollie and pick up all sorts of things from him - he’s the former deputy editor of Observer Sport Monthly, after all. Sitting next to someone like that for a while would do any young write the world of good. But if the plan is to print their articles just because there are a lot of people gagging to get their name in print (as they seek gainful employment in the media), I find that a little bit deflating. It doesn’t give me much hope for the future of journalism as a paid profession, that’s for sure. If people are going to write for free, I feel they ought to do so for people who are publishing (in web or print) for the love and not for profit.
Of course, I realise I’m jumping the gun a bit here and it’s very early days for the Pies mag. I apologise to Ollie for my initial tweet and wish him the very best of luck with this venture and I hope it succeeds. Publishing desperately needs the iPad to be an enormous success, and if football mags can blaze a trail - brilliant!
PS - One minor aside. Why such a high cost (£6.21 holiday sale price; £7.77 regular price) for those who want a physical printed copy of the magazine? That’s quite a restrictive price for a 48-page magazine. More than double When Saturday Comes, for a similar number of pages, while FourFourTwo is £4.30 for 170 pages. So your cost per page on the three is 2.5p (FFT), 6.1p (WSC) and 16.2p (Pies). Someone else will have to do the maths for World Soccer as I don’t have a copy handy.