Magazines have always been a personal favorite of mine but it’s becoming more and more apparent that unless many of even the most well read title don’t change and adapt that they are heading for trouble. I don’t like to use the word extinction but they will certainly need to look quite a bit different to be viable in the digital era.

One way that can happen is to branch out into a services model. We are seeing this approach with large publishers like Hearst who purchased icrossing to provide online marketing services to its stable of offerings. Others are following suit as well.

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iCurrent was purchased by the Washington Post yesterday. In a nutshell, it’s a news aggregator that is able to be personalized. I honestly had not had any experience with it until I read about the purchase. In the past it has been reviewed by cnet

iCurrent contains no magical thinking or head-slappy reconceptualizations of news. It’s just an aggregation service done well, with useful and clear features for users, and a straightforward sharing mechanism.

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OK, I am always the first to ask in cases like this, “Don’t people have anything better to do with their lives?” There are now close to 150 videos on YouTube featuring the Old Spice man from the recent commercials that are admittedly as funny as they are disturbing.

As far as content goes though this is like cracking a good joke then repeating it over and over again until you kill it. At 30 seconds apiece (or more) you need to have a spare hour and fifteen minutes to devote to nothing in order to watch them all. That’s what high unemployment gets you I suppose.

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Part of what I hope to offer here at Content Mission is the occasional editorial that isn’t about the news of the content marketing industry but an observation of the good, the bad and the ugly.

Today what I am writing about falls somewhere between the bad and the ugly. It’s the misleading headline that is obviously there to get clicks and give nothing of value. In the past, this may have been called ‘link bait’ but even with link bait there can be value attached.

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