The Evolving Newsroom

The first one is Portfolio's takeout on Maghound, Time Warner's plan to turn magazine subscriptions into an a la carte business: basically, you'll be able to decide which issues of which magazines you take on a subscription, switching back and forth between Time, People, Sports Illustrated and 100-plus other magazines. The idea is that you'll pay a set fee of a few bucks a month and then choose what mags you want delivered to you.

I'm not sure magazine subscribers are truly that eclectic and fickle. Do you really want to have to manage your magazine choices every month? The whole point of a subscription, after all, is a sort of set-it-and-forget-it model. Still, it's an interesting approach that might find a nice niche market.

If you haven't caught up with the appointment of former Observer editor Roger Alton as editor of the UK's Independent, here's a nice piece from the Guardian's Peter Wilby.

And then comes this blog post from Richard Addis with a few suggestions for Alton as to what he might do with the Indy once he gets his shoes under the desk:

Launch a daily magazine instead... The paper is already half magazine. The famous ‘viewspaper’ covers are straight from the magazine world. The consumery parts (50 best etc) and the promotions (mini-books) would sit comfortably in many a magazine package.Drop the idea of covering news at all, at least in the conventional way.

Instead you could transfer 85% of the staff to features duties and retain 15% to provide an excellent and intelligent news aggregation service that would be printed, say, in a single column on page one.

As for the website, apart from becoming the central exchange for directing readers to news sources, make it a TV station. All those new feature writers, not to mention educated readers, will have so much to say, so many background stories to tell and will so quickly learn to take a camera with them everywhere that you can see the Indy becoming a upmarket mini-You Tube in just a couple of years.

Why is it that favourite magazines become so unappealing once you've subscribed to them?

They always seem to end up in a reproachful plastic-wrapped pile in a corner. Yet just a month or two earlier I couldn't wait to get to the newsagent to pick up the latest edition.

Is it misjudged appetite - ie thinking you read the magazine every week when in fact you only read it once a month and thus quickly get inundated?

Or is it familiarity breeds contempt?

Whatever it is, I hope it doesn't apply to holiday books. I've just ordered a pile and have a suspicion that my eyes are bigger than my reading capacity.

Santa's more or less assured me I'll be getting Wikinomics in a week or so along with The Wisdom of Crowds. But then I went and ordered a few more for good measure: Everything is Miscellaneous, Glut and The Cluetrain Manifesto.

Here's hoping they're readably written, if you know what I mean, else I'll be starting the new year with a reproachful pile of paperbacks by my bed.