VentureBeat | New York Times
Five major magazine publishers launched their own digital newsstand today called Next Issue Media. Hearst, Conde Nast, Time Inc., Meredith, and News Corp. are basically trying to create a Netflix for magazines -- for $9.99 or $14.99 a month, subscribers can read unlimited amounts of the 32 included magazines. Its market is currently limited to newer Android tablets, but should come to the iPad later this year.

Cathy Sharick started as a producer for the website in 2002, "when the whole operation had a staff of six and the magazine cover story brought in half the week's traffic," writes Time Managing Editor Rick Stengel. "There is no one who has contributed more to making TIME.com a success -- including three record-breaking months of traffic and 11% growth in visitors to the site last year." The memo: (more...)

The latest issue of Time magazine, hitting newsstands today, echoes an earlier Mitt Romney cover to revisit ongoing questions about the candidate's popularity. "If this week's cover feels a little familiar, there's good reason for that," writes managing editor Rick Stengel in a letter to readers. "In early December, we put Mitt Romney on the cover and asked, "Why Don't They Like Me?"—a question that has been at the heart of the GOP primary process. "This week, in the wake of Romney’s razor-thin win in Iowa, we’ve updated and revised the question, using the other half of the same portrait of Romney. The first cover got a lot of attention, not least from Governor Romney himself, who began annotating the cover for those who asked him to sign it."

The January 16, 2012 cover of Time magazine (right) echoes the magazine's December 12, 2011 cover (left) with an image taken from the same photo.

The Baltimore Sun
The Sun's John McIntyre writes of Time's Person of the Year announcement: "It’s a tired stunt, which may have looked fresh in 1927, by another publication in decline. In recent years the person of the year hasn’t even been a person, but an attempt to pin a sociological label on the year. Remember when it was You? Remember which year that was? Neither do I." He grouses about other lame annual stories in his post. || Related: John Robinson writes on his new blog that year-end lists "don’t include enough information and emotion to serve a true journalistic purpose. ... With energy and emotion, they could be much more relevant than they are." || Tell us what you really think: Jeff Jarvis tweets:

Bullshit season begins. First: Time thing o' the year. Next: Top 10 lists. Then predictions. All bullshit. — Jeff Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) December 14, 2011

ShortFormBlog | Yahoo News
In the U.S., the cover story of the Dec. 5 issue was about anxiety, but international editions led with the protests in Egypt. "Does Time really think Americans are more interested in coverage of their own stress than another historic rebellion, albeit on the other side of the world?" asks Yahoo News' Dylan Stableford. Time acknowledges the criticism in its latest issue, which went on sale today, but cites a ShortFormBlog analysis of its covers that "concluded each edition gets the same amount of hard news, give or take an issue or two." ShortFormBlog's Ernie Smith wrote, "Have they played up the Arab Spring in the U.S. less than other parts of the world? Yes -- and we have the statistics to prove it. But they do in fact cover more news on their covers than fluff. It's just that more of the American edition's news is domestic in nature." Smith analyzed a year's worth of covers and broke down the percentage of each edition that focuses on hard and soft news.

Romenesko+ Memos
One is a shorter, more social version of Time's photo blog, LightBox. The second Tumblr, according to a Time memo, "aims to be a digital scrapbook of this institution’s vintage work, its indelible cultural influence and our own anecdotes on the work we do."

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Ad Age
A consortium of major magazine publishers, including Time Inc., Conde Nast, Hearst, Meredith and News Corp., is preparing to launch an app marketplace to sell digital editions on their own terms, Ad Age reports. "By the fourth quarter you'll see us offering our unified marketplace, which will offer a consistent user experience across all titles and unique features like cross-title search, personalization and flex pricing," said Morgan Guenther, CEO of Next Issue Media. For now the focus is on Android-powered tablets; on Wednesday the group started selling magazines via Verizon's V Cast store on the Samsung Galaxy Tab. || Related: Report: 40% of magazine app users opt to let Apple share their data with publishers.

Adweek.com
Jon Meacham says he was asked by Time managing editor Rick Stengel to profile controversial evangelical pastor Rob Bell. “I was happy to do it and had a great experience with Rick, Nancy Gibbs and the folks there," the former Newsweek editor tells Lucia Moses. "No plans to write more, but am very open to it.”