As the Observer reported in November, the company will prepare digital versions of magazines that can work on multiple platforms, from the iPhone to the BlackBerry to digital devices that don't even exist yet.

Mr. Squires, an executive vice president at Time Inc., is planning to leave Time Inc. and become the managing director of the new company while the group will searches for a permanent executive.

What will this digital magazine store look like?

In an interview this morning, Mr. Squires said the format will be a "highly functioning, beautiful reading application similar to what you saw for Sports Illustrated or Wired." That means colorful, interactive digital magazines that can be updated in real time and personalized for individual users and advertisers. "We're going to enable that kind of product experience or reading experience across as many publications as possible," he told the Observer.

Mr. Squires said he is in talks even more media companies to join the venture, but didn't name names just yet.

Mr. Squires said he plans to work closely with advertisers to develop new immersive experiences on these digital magazines. "We have the potential to create a new and vastly important branding medium for advertisers in a way that has never been done before," he said. Signing on some ad sponsors for launch will be one of the company's major focuses during the next year.

As far as the iTunes-like digital storefront, Mr. Squires has a tagline to describe it: "easy access, easy purchase, easy download." He wants users to get universal access to their digital purchase on any device they like.

Mr. Squires wasn't able to give specifics on what kind of pricing or bundled packages the store will offer, "We've got a lot of work to do, we're really just getting going," he said.

Well, what if users want to be able to get, say, a subscription to digital magazine and the print magazine, as well as the publication's paywalled Web site, all in one purchase? It certainly won't be a universal pricing system, like Apple iTunes' original $.99 per song standard.

"It's hard to imagine how the Wall Street Journal will be the same price as This Old House," Mr. Squires told the Observer. "Clearly, that's going to be up to the publishers--setting their own pricing."

He said the company will work with start-ups and partnering companies' digital departments to build the technology.

"We're going to need as many resources as we can get," he said. "Building this middleware and this platform will be technically challenging. There's a lot of work to be done to get it right and big enough to work with companies at this scale, with very very large circulation products."

He said the company will also have to work closely with hardware companies to make sure they're building the right product for the platform. "We have to work in close coordination with the hardware companies," he said.

Are they working with Apple?

"We all call, we don't get a lot of return calls," Mr. Squires said.

The company would make up one of the biggest alliances among rival publishers ever formed in print media, with Time Inc., Condé Nast and Hearst all expected to join, houses that together publish more than 50 magazines, including The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Time, People, Sports Illustrated, Esquire and O, The Oprah Magazine.

The company will prepare magazines that can work across multiple digital platforms, whether the iPhone, the BlackBerry or countless other digital devices. The company will not develop an e-book, but create something that people familiar with the plans compare to iTunes—a store where you can buy new and distinct iterations of The New Yorker or Time. Print magazines will also be for sale.

John Squires, an executive vice president at Time Inc., is planning to leave Time Inc. and become the interim executive of the new company, sources told The Observer. His term is expected to be six months, during which time the group will search for a permanent executive.

The deal is not done, but if all goes according to plan, the company could be announced within weeks, and other publishers may join in as well.

“It’s very close and more imminent than it’s been,” said one source familiar with the situation.

In June, Mr. Squires gave up his job of running the business side of the news division for Time Inc, and became the digital futurist at the company.

With the blessing of Time Inc. executives, Mr. Squires immediately started taking meetings with other publishers and insisted that they pull together.

“He’s been the one generating interest,” said another source from a rival publishing house.

“Basically, this was his deal from the get-go,” said a source. “He had this idea. These guys are all big competitors and now they’re laying down their arms to try figure this whole new world out together.”

Each magazine publisher now believes it’s too risky to go it alone to find new ways to get consumers to pay. If they all join together, the reasoning goes, they stand a better chance of producing greater revenue.

The deal is taking time to complete because it involves so many moving pieces.

“It’s pretty complicated stuff,” said a source. “The really, really hard part is that you’ve got so many different kinds of devices running on different operating systems. And how do you handle that? The consortium provides one point of contact for the consumer. When you come to the main store, you can get the content any way you want.”

In addition to building up the store, each publisher will actually have to figure out how to build digital versions of their own magazines.

When we reached Mr. Squires on the phone, he would not comment, and referred us to a Time Inc. spokeswoman, who also declined to comment.

But Mr. Squires has been a proponent of building the magazine experience for devices for a while. Indeed, in an interview with The Observer back in February, he hinted that this was the only way out.

“Unlike books and music, I think [for magazines] it involves designing a new product in order for it to be something that consumers really love,” said Mr. Squires. “I like our chances to be able to design a product that consumers will want to pay for.”

In other words, something like the Kindle isn’t changing the form at all. It’s simply a repository for content. Mr. Squires believes that the magazine companies themselves have to remind consumers that the magazine experience, no matter what the form, is worth paying for.

“With magazines, the form has to change,” he continued. “All I’m saying is that there are ways to design magazines differently for that kind of experience that’ll be attractive and will feel different to a consumer.”

jkoblin@observer.com

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Publishers Pooh-Pooh Hearst's New "E-Reader"

Despite Dismal Year, Conde Nast Revives Holiday Hurrah

The first time Josh Quittner, an editor-at-large at Time met Mr. Isaacson, who, at the time, was Time magazine’s new media editor, Mr. Isaacson was on the phone trying to work out a deal whereby Time Warner would either invest in or buy Yahoo.

This was 1995, and Time, Inc., the magazine giant that had created new categories of journalism with Time, Life, Sports Illustrated, and People, was dipping its Ozymandias-sized toes into the Internet with a virtual newsstand called Pathfinder.

“When we put up the wall with our content, we got criticized roundly for that,” said Time Inc. executive vice president John Squires. “You know, ‘We don’t get it’; ‘We’re falling off.’ ‘Content wants to be free.’ Yadda, yadda, yadda.”

“For a variety of reasons that didn’t work,” said Mr. Quittner. “Free and unencumbered won.”

Or did it? According to Jim Brady, formerly a Washington Post Company vice president and executive editor for washingtonpost.com, “It’s a must for a site like The Post. It’s a unique audience, it’s a local newspaper with about 85 percent of its uniques outside of Washington. So, you cannot get advertising unless you can promise local advertising for local readers and national advertising for national readers. If you don’t have basic information on where people are and some registration data on age, and gender, and some other things, it would be very hard to build the Web business we did.”

The New York Times Company did the Post one better—or worse, depending on one’s perspective—in 2005 by introducing TimesSelect, a $49.95-per-year subscription that a press release at the time summarized as, “a new online offering … which for a modest fee will provide exclusive access to Op-Ed and news columnists on NYTimes.com, easy and in-depth access to The Times’ online archives, early access to select articles on the site, as well as other exciting features.”

And yet, the paper abandoned TimesSelect in 2007, a move that was met with headlines one might associate with the end of a hostage crisis, like this one from, of all places, the New York Post, which had reported internal discontent from “several of the columnists who make up TimesSelect”: TIMESSELECT CONTENT FREED.

At the same time, as media companies were giving away content online, they began experimenting with incorporating elements of the Web into their offline publications. As far back as the late 1980s, “multiple entry points” was an idea magazine and newspaper editors and designers tossed around as a means of harnessing the eyeballs of addled readers turned off by fields of uninterrupted text. But with the development of the Web, multiple entry points became a sort of gospel.

Since the publication of his Time cover story, Walter Isaacson, who is now the president and CEO of the Aspen Institute, said he’s received hundreds of emails. “I was surprised at the outpouring of people who wanted to fix this,” he said. “By the end of this year we’ll see new business models.”

But what will they look like?

“The good news is there’s still a fair amount of traffic,” said Jim Brady, who left The Post three weeks ago. “The Post has a massive amount of traffic, The Times has a massive amount of traffic. I’d certainly rather have the traffic and try to figure out how to monetize than not having the traffic, you know? The ability to monetize a miniscule audience is not a great situation. … Even if you figure out how to make money off it, your scale is just limited.” Don [Graham, CEO of the Washington Post Company] was always going by the Warren Buffet mantra: ‘Build an audience, you’ll figure out how to monetize it.’ You might not monetize it right away, but you’d much rather have the huge audience and then figure it out.”