PSFK recently caught up with Karen Bard, the Pop Culture Expert over at eBay. Her insights were a follow-up to our recent coverage on the creation of instant nostalgia.

As many magazines go the way of the dodo, other publications are staying strong despite industry woes.  A recent survey of listings on eBay show that people are actively sharing issues of their favorites, even from recently defunct magazines.
Domino Magazine, which folded earlier this year, fetches prices across eBay well above the original news-stand price.  Teen Magazines, which some may argue are one of the lowest forms of magazine value, occupy more than 5,000 listings on eBay including the dead publications, CosmoGirl and Teen Magazine.  The common tactic to dub an issue as a collectors edition now has more relevance [...]

Online Journalism Blog’s Paul Bradshaw has written a primer on how the internet has irrevocably changed the way news does business, and why any newspaper that hopes to survive needs to understand—and take advantage of—the new economics of journalism.
Among all of the 12 factors Bradshaw enumerates (ranging from the atomisation of news content to the rise of PR firms), the common theme is the diminishing power of print media in the face of emergent online entities. Where a newspaper once held a monopoly over classified ads, now stands Craigslist; where a newspaper once dominated arts criticism, now users turn to [...]

According to a recent New York Times article, major magazine publishers are considering raising prices on their newsstands and subscription issues. However, the short term benefits may hurt the publications consumer base and reputation in the long run. Magazines are getting desperate to retain revenues during the recession, but considerations of online content pay walls and higher prices are threatening readership numbers, data highly valued by advertisers.
A careful balance of readership retention and advertising value is necessary for the long term survival of print media. Subscription prices per issue are barely covering the price to mail the [...]

While the current trend sees print media downsizing in the face of a slowing economy, smaller ad revenues and increasing numbers of readers opting for online content, one Chicago-based startup is taking the opposite stance, viewing this moment as an opportunity to revolutionize the beleaguered industry.  The Printed Blog, founded in late 2008 by Joshua Karp, wants to upgrade the traditional model of the newspaper into a user-generated, hyper-localized, scalable version made specifically for the Internet generation, released in hundreds of unique editions across the country twice-daily.  
Hardly a short order, but one that Karp and his team feel is [...]