Welcome

Magellan Media provides research, benchmarking and business planning services that help smaller and medium-sized publishers manage and grow their top- and bottom-line results.

Magazine, book and association publishers often engage Magellan to improve their content workflows across platforms and uses.

Our About page provides a summary of the firm and this web site. The site also includes information about Events (conferences at which Brian O’Leary is presenting or participating) and Magellan in the News (links to coverage of the firm’s work).

Written by Brian O’Leary, our blog (to the right) maintains sections for magazine, book and association publishing.  Themes cross over and you may find posts of value in each of the areas.

Magazines

Portable approaches
Leveraging HTML5 to open up some "walled gardens"

Two questions
Figuring out when apps make sense

The digital replica
The escalating cost of trying to control everything

Writing for humans
Be careful what you wish for

“Readers aren’t stupid”
Not quite the end of traffic-driven strategies

Indentured servitude
Interns should be paid for their work (3)

Reinventing journalism
Think less about traffic and more about outcomes

The principle matters
Copyright is not a business model

More in magazines...

 

Books

Not helping
Solving problems that pre-date browsers

Silicon Galley
On the privatization of censorship

The sky is rising
Techdirt challenges piracy orthodoxy

Practical and informative
"Publishing in the Big Data Era"

Community organizers
The risk of sticking with what you know

Process opportunities
An overview of a metadata assessment

Publishers Forum 2012
Making a business case for context (1)

Making information pay
Big data, 'little' data and metadata

More in books...

 

Associations

Perceived value
Permissions-based subscription models (1)

Speaking of outcomes…
Two associations join forces to foster positive change (1)

Association publishing
Using content to acquire new members (and other fun stuff)

Not just PR
Start by having a good story to tell

Lunch, and learn
Kicking off an educational program in New York

Best foot forward
Published content can help land new members

(Almost) free lunch
Using content to acquire new members

The ties that bind
What for-profit publishers can learn from associations (4)

More in associations...