RAP debuts free podcast walking tour of Riverside

[grimss]

From RAP's website:

We've just released an innovative video podcast walking tour to celebrate Riverside Avondale’s recent designation as one of the American Planning Association’s Ten Great Neighborhoods for 2010. The free, self-guided multimedia tour begins at RAP’s popular Riverside Arts Market (RAM) and concludes in the heart of “new” 5 Points. It allows tour-goers to explore a small slice of historic Riverside and experience first-hand what makes the neighborhood such a wonderful place to live, work and visit. Downloadable tours are a growing trend worldwide, but RAP’s “sound-seeing tour” is a first for Jacksonville.

The walk lasts approximately an hour and covers two miles, winding through and around some 20 blocks of historic Riverside. Among the 40 sites discussed on the tour are several of Riverside’s oldest and most interesting homesâ€"including a haunted house that once played host to Abraham Lincoln’s widow, a grand Jacobethan mansion built for the owner of Maxwell House Coffee and the erstwhile office of Leonard Skinner, the former coach who gave his name to Jacksonville’s most famous band. Those with video-enabled players will enjoy vintage photographs of the various sites on the tour that reveal how the structures have changed over time. At the tour’s conclusion, tour-goers can further explore the historic 5 Points area by selecting one of two proposed routes back to RAM.

Here's the link:http://www.riversideavondale.org/index.php?id=133

[cline]

Downloaded it yesterday and plan on doing the tour this weekend.  Really cool idea, especially with the pictures. 

[uptowngirl]

This is fabulous, I am so glad one of the historic groups finally did this-we also downloaded and plan on doing this tour soon!

[Dapperdan]

I think a Haunted tour should be on the agenda next for RAP. these are hugely popular in ST Augustine. An ordinance to allow horse drawn carriage would be neat too. Not sure how the residents would feel, but this neighborhood needs these kind of things.

[Wacca Pilatka]

Something like that would be terrific.

Part of the reason people have the misperception that Jacksonville lacks history is that tours like these are not available.  I've never taken a visitor to Riverside/Avondale who was anything short of delighted with the neighborhood.

[grimss]

I think a Haunted tour should be on the agenda next for RAP. these are hugely popular in ST Augustine. An ordinance to allow horse drawn carriage would be neat too. Not sure how the residents would feel, but this neighborhood needs these kind of things.

Actually, a new business called Eerie Owl Tours has just started offering ghost tours of Riverside.  Haven't taken the tour yet myself, but definitely want to! I believe it starts from Memorial Park . . .

[mtraininjax]

Just saw this in the new version, LAST PAPER VERSION, of the RAP magazine. From now on, it will only be available online, no more paper versions of the RAP local rag.

[grimss]

The RAP board voted to transition to a digital newsletter because the print version (which went to everyone in the district, regardless of whether they were a RAP member) was just too expensive to maintain.

[mtraininjax]

The RAP board voted to transition to a digital newsletter because the print version (which went to everyone in the district, regardless of whether they were a RAP member) was just too expensive to maintain.

And yet other local newspapers survive. The Resident is thriving, perhaps RAP should have looked at the Resident as a guide of how you can grow a newspaper, or even Folio. As long as the lights are still on at the press, its a newspaper.

[Ernest Street]

Great Idea! Should come in handy soon. I recently met a couple from Fort Meyers that are playing that game of living in "Currently listed" staged real estate. They are staying at a beach front property in Atlantic Beach.
Anyway they went to Riverside one morning...explored and ended up eating at several local restaurants,exhausted the entire day,and just plain fell in LOVE with our neighborhood.They already sent their kids to college and are looking for a place here.
They will love this tour,thank you.

[fieldafm]

I can attest, these podcasts are awesome! 

[Brian Siebenschuh]

And yet other local newspapers survive.

This is not an apples to apples comparison.  The RAP newsletter is a publication put out by a non-profit organization.  The Resident is a published by a corporation, and its profitability is based on ad sales.  Regardless, print media is dying, especially with regard to small, localized publications.  Slowly, and fighting valiantly, but dying nonetheless.  That being said, and totally off topic, I haven't paid for the print version of Wired in years, but the Wired iPad app is awesome, and I feel like the $4 I pay for the current issue is totally worth it.

[Ocklawaha]

That print media is dying isn't exactly true, in fact magazines are doing quite well and specialty magazines, hobbies, trades etc.. are still booming.

OCKLAWAHA

The Magazine Isn't Dying
It’s just the badly motivated ones that are going under.
By Gabriel Sherman
Posted Tuesday, March 17, 2009 - 12:43pm

It seems fitting that on March 11, a week after the Dow Jones industrial average hit its lowest mark since 1997 and shares of Citigroup slid to less than $1 each, the magazine publisher Rodale announced it was shuttering Best Life. The five-year-old magazine had been positioned as a lifestyle title for wealthy older men who were too mature for the babes-and-abs pitch of Rodale's most successful brand, Men's Health. But in a time of dismal economic headlines and a culture newly attuned to thrift, a magazine that celebrated the carefree consumerism of the bubble years with cover lines like "7 Secret Wealth Builders" and "Upgrade Your Image Instantly" seemed like a relic from a bygone era.

The news of Best Life's demise came on the same day that American Express Publishing announced it was folding Travel+Leisure Golf, an 11-year-old spinoff of its venerable travel title. Taken together, the latest magazine failures signaled to many publishing observers that magazinesâ€"long thought to be partly insulated from the digital forces battering the newspaper industryâ€"are locked in their own death spiral. For evidence, they point out that since last March, more than two dozen major magazines have folded.

But a closer look at the types of magazines that have closed reveals a more nuanced and, in many respects, hopeful portrait of the magazine business. According to a list compiled by Advertising Age, titles that have shut down in the past year come from the shelter, technology, travel, luxury, and teen categories. The reason for each category's challenges are obvious, from a meltdown in the housing sector to teenagers' wholesale abandonment of print for Facebook and Twitter.

Yet the general conclusion that many extrapolate from these recent shutdowns is wrong. It's not that magazines are dying; it's that magazines that were created solely for advertising or market-share purposes are. New magazine titles often fail from a combination of bad timing, bad thinking, and a bad choice of brands to extend. Put simply, there are too many mediocre magazines (as anyone who gazes at the newsstand at Barnes and Nobles would conclude).

In one way, publishers are suffering from the same tendencies as traders binging on mortgage-backed securities: When the advertising market in a particular genre begins to rain really hard, publishers respond by trying to create more buckets, instead of working to find the next bucket where passion resides. The reality is that once a market is mature enough to support a national magazine, chances are it has already peaked.

During the last boom, publishers conceived titles as advertising plays and targeted the areas of a rapidly expanding credit bubble. It's not surprising, then, that shelter titles sprouted up as the housing market inflated or that Condé Nast launched Portfolio, its business title, just as the finance bubble peaked in spring 2007. (Disclosure: I was a staff writer at Portfolio.) In many ways, Portfolio signified the strategy embraced by publishers during the run-up. Back in August 2005, when hedge-fund managers were the new rock stars, Condé Nast wanted to take a big piece of the advertising pie long dominated by Fortune, Forbes, and Business Week. Officially, Condé Nast's position was that Portfolio would reinvent the business category with more ambitious writing, photography, and design. But, fundamentally, Portfolio was a corporate move designed to develop a new market of business-to-business advertising for Si Newhouse's magazine empire, which had always counted on fashion and luxury categories for a majority of its ad revenue.

Publishers don't just look to new titles to grow their business. They also seek to leverage existing titles into new categories. Now, with advertising spending on the skids, spinoffs are another major casualty of the magazine pullback. Of the 27 magazines on Ad Age's list, roughly one-quarter of the abandoned titles were brand extensions. In the past year, Condé Nast killed Men's Vogue as a stand-alone title, and plans for Vogue Living have been put on ice. Time Inc. pulled the plug on SI Latino, while Hearst yanked O at Home and Cosmo Girl. Last Friday, Jann Wenner's Wenner Media announced it was delaying the launch of a quarterly fashion magazine, Us Style.

Largely, these magazines never caught on with readers. And it's not surprising. Magazines are emotional products. They are objects of aspiration, passion, and desire. No one needs to read magazines, but millions of readers still subscribe to their favorite titles because they harbor deep connections to the glossy pages. As one veteran editor once explained to me, the best magazines make you feel like tearing open the plastic wrap the second that they arrive in your mailbox and curling up on the couch with them, ignoring whatever plans you had for the evening.

Which is why the current downturn can be good for publishers. Magazines still offer an unsurpassed ability to marry literary ambitions with deep reporting, photography, and visual design. In this new media age, people talk about the importance of transforming readers into "communities." Magazines have never had a community problem. Great magazines have built enduring relationships with their readers that Facebook and Tumblr still aspire to. But in a race to grow their businesses, publishers put advertising first and editorial excellence second.

There are exceptions to this rule, of course. In 1974, Time Inc. spun off People magazine as a standalone title from Time, launching the modern era of celebrity journalism and creating a title that generates $1.5 billion in annual advertising revenue. More recently, in 2005 Condé Nast launched Domino, its hip shelter title. When the company announced earlier this year that it was closing the title amidst the worst housing slump since the 1930s, my girlfriend and her friends mourned the decision along with thousands of its devoted readers. Although Domino couldn't succeed financially in this climate, its knowing-but-friendly approach to home design gave readers the sense that the magazine was created expressly for them and not to service ad buyers.

Magazines still retain emotional capital, and publishers need to remember that they're not in the advertising-delivery business. If a magazine can speak directly to the reader, advertising dollars will follow. Titles launched to capitalize on a booming market segment will never survive over the long haul.

SOURCE: http://www.thebigmoney.com/articles/impressions/2009/03/17/magazine-isnt-dying?page=0,0

[Brian Siebenschuh]

I'll buy some of the points in that article, at least for now.  But with regard to the subject at hand, the RAP newsletter wasn't a magazine.  For that matter, it wasn't a newspaper either.  Threadjack over!

[Kay]

The RAP board voted to transition to a digital newsletter because the print version (which went to everyone in the district, regardless of whether they were a RAP member) was just too expensive to maintain.

And yet other local newspapers survive. The Resident is thriving, perhaps RAP should have looked at the Resident as a guide of how you can grow a newspaper, or even Folio. As long as the lights are still on at the press, its a newspaper.

If a kind sole(s) would like to donate $21,000+ (cost to produce the RAP newspaper) or if someone would like to volunteer to manage it at break even RAP would keep the presses rolling.  The Resident, Folio and others are in the newspaper business as someone pointed out so I think the comparison doesn't work.  Our ad sales are down since the Resident entered the market.  It is a monthly paper with a wider reach.  We wish we could keep printing the RAP newspaper but it just doesn't make financial sense as it is costing us quite a bit of money.