In his Advertising Age article (“Trends to Watch in 2008”), Bob Liodice, president-CEO of the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), follows up on Steve Ballmer’s claim that all media is going digital. He notes the richness of digital features —including the portability — and wonders if marketers are skilled enough to take advantage of this rapidly changing landscape?” We might ask the same question of the folks who make the media — you know, like magazine publishers?
The Australia’s Herald Sun reports that bookseller Dymocks is selling ebook reader the iLiad. The device which uses the mobibook format also accommodates a variety of formats including html and pdf. A nice twist to the iLiad is that the screen is touch-sensitive and — with a supplied stylus — you can do such things as Suduko and crossword puzzles, make notations or sketch. It’s a pricey $899 Australian (or $750 US). The iLiad comes from iRex, a Royal Philips spinoff. Hmm. Wasn’t Philips the co-creator of the audio CD-ROM, the LP buster?
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Back on 30 November “Magazine Death Pool” blog’s The Reaper announced that the next 60-90 says are “officially magazine hunting season and” offered these telltale signs.
Take a good look. Many ads? Can you get the same stuff easily on the web? Does the content seem pointless? It may be time to start saving back issues as souvenirs of the "good old magazine days."
We would add the following: How sharply focused is the editorial? How fetching are the covers? Are retail copies moving? Is there effective consumer marketing going on? (This last is based on the touching notion that consumer magazines are consumer products and as such might even benefit from consumer marketing.) Is there any marketing going on at all? Does it vibrate with today and tomorrow or does it reek of yesterday?
In his latest “Bo Sacks Speaks Out,” Bob Sacks tells of the plaintive reader requests for good news about the survival of print. He honestly and sympathetically explains that he tries to find positive gems and that he does pass along what he finds. But there isn’t very much.
He says: "So in my writings and my daily newsletter, I am offering a new kind of hope. Nature abhors a vacuum. For every job that is eliminated in print there are even more new jobs created in the digital arena. Look it up. It is in the US census bureau data. Graphics jobs, editorial jobs, production jobs, and jobs we have never heard of. Those jobs are the new frontier. And it is growing by leaps and bounds."
"What I am dead sure of is the future direction of information distribution. The king of the information forest is not tree based life, but silicon based information distribution."
Is there available technology to emulate the print magazine digitally? Almost. We already have specifically magazinoid digital formats. We are awaiting a relatively cheap reader. And there is a sense it is coming, so help me Microsoft.
The marketplace is trickier. Marketers and technologists can reason, declare, insist, bluster and foist all they want; but consumers (you know . . . people?) decide what makes sense to them and what doesn’t..
In the mid-‘80s I was at a 20th Century Fox Home Video press conference at the Consumer Electronics Show. The news? The studio declared it would not distribute to any video dealers who let their customers rent instead of buy. So, how did that turn out?
It is entirely possible that current and future magazine buyers will decide that paper covers screen— no matter how light of weight, portable, convenient, paperish the screening device is. But considering the current and growing comfort with the screen and the digital technology behind it, I’d have to say paper is a paper tiger
As I asked previously, when was the last time you said, “send me a photocopy” and the last time you said, “send me a link?”
Steve Ballmer of Microsoft delivered more than a keynote at the opening of the Association of National Advertisers conference last week. He delivered a shot across the bow of traditional media, including our friend the print magazine.
He stated that in 10 years, all media would be digital and delivered over the Net.
Advertising Age reported the following:
"What if in 10 years we can give you a screen that's this light, this manipulable," he said, pulling a sheet of crumpled paper from his pocket. "That's what hardware will permit over the next 10 years."
Here at Magazine Daze we agree with him. But sad to say his prediction did not receive unanimous agreement.
Brand Week reported
While some of Ballmer’s futurism (such as digital media that’s as thin and malleable as paper) seemed a bit too sci-fi, attendee Eric Leininger said never bet against Microsoft’s predictions.
Come on folks, that paper-thin reader is coming. After all if we can put a golf ball on the moon . . .etc., etc.
In Web mag 3:AM Roland Kelts tells about how the recording industry is trying to cope with the downloadable, digital sea change. Kelts, author of Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture has Invaded the US, suggests the US publishing industry might be in worst shape than the music biz. US book publishers, he suggests, are in denial. He cites as contrast the Japanese embrace of “cell phone novels.”
Kelts writes,
“when I raised the topic of cell phone novel downloads as a promising new format for writers like me and publishers like mine in the U.S., a prominent and progressive editor from one of New York’s major international houses shook his head. “They’d just outsource the work [of producing the downloads] to someone in Chennai [India],” he said, referring to his superiors. “And it would just be a mess.”
He adds,
“When the concept of the electronic book (E-book) surfaces at the American Book Association conventions, or other major book fairs, Western publishers begin their moaning and dread. But in Japan, the success of downloadable cell phone novels is being celebrated by young editors, who are pursuing the format avidly.”
If it’s any consolation to our bibliopeers, the magazine industry has a louder chorus of digital deniers. The most forward of these talk about cross-platforms —marketing and content programs that encompass Web and print and mobile and whatever other media platform buzzword is floating around. Fine!
But this neatly ignores the evidence that the foundations of print magazine publishing —readership, advertising, circulation —are collapsing.
There’s a simple formula that always helps when writing a blog about magazines. Just start with the phrase, “Samir Husni writes, “ . . .” and then blithely go on to agree or disagree with quoted comment, while adding a riff of your own. What’s the point of being involved with magazines if you can’t be formulaic? So here goes.
In yesterday’s Bulldog Reporter’s Daily’ Dog, “Samir Husni writes,
“When sporting events see small crowds, you don't hear the managers bemoaning the death of a sport; when stocks prices fall, you don't hear CEOs complaining that money is no longer a viable product; but for some reason a drop in new magazine launches makes our industry think our days are numbered.
The numbers this year are lackluster at best, but there is no reason to think this is the first step down a slippery slope to the death of the magazine industry. Just as many other industries experience every few years, we are seeing nothing more than a market correction. I said a few years back that we would see something like this during 2007 and 2008 with a rebound to normal form in 2009.”
Okay. Professional sports are not going out of business and money is probably here for the long haul. BUT some sports do crash and burn when they can’t take root. And some sports franchises move to (they hope) greener pastures. When people with means find one marketplace isn’t working, they move their action into an entirely marketplace.
I’m not sure that the quantity of magazine launches is a reliable indicator of industry health. I suspect they certainly are a good barometer of both individual and zeitgeist passion, and perhaps a slight indicator of the prevalence of bipolar disorder. The quantity of new specials and annuals might deserve notice. These are forays by experienced publishers into established markets.
The article’s main thrust was to remind PR practitioners of the classic rule of pitching: Know thy audience. In this case, Samir Husni was advising publicists that mass email blasts are not as effective as targeting niche publications and niche specialty freelancers.
It got me to musing, possibly even thinking. One of my wonderments about the consumer magazine segment is how little it relies on marketing to consumers. Its major marketing efforts are directed at advertisers and retailers. We understand why, of course. But isn’t the magazine a consumer product? Aren’t quality, quantity and loyalty of readership the foundation on which advertising and single sales are based? Or am I missing something?
The 28 September issue of PDNPulse (published online by Photo Dsistrict News) offers encouraging news to magazines — and I don’t agree with a word of it.
It quotes the Economist.
To wit:
There are good reasons why magazine owners should not feel despondent … many of the pleasing characteristics of magazines—their portability and glossiness, for instance—cannot be matched online. And magazines are not losing younger readers in droves in the way that newspapers are … On the advertising side, magazines are faring much better than newspapers, which are losing big chunks of revenue as classified advertising shifts online. Advertisers like the fact that in many genres, such as fashion, readers accept and value magazine ads and even consider them part of the product.”
My response:
In the same article, PDNPulse cites Advertising Age coverage of an MPA breakfast. At this meeting Economist publisher Paul Rossi said that as the increasingly eco-aware public looks at the retail sector’s awful waste of paper and petrol, "We as an industry are next on the list as a target.” He also said that the public will continue to accept magazines in paper form.
Wouldn’t it be lovely to think so.
The London Telegraph has a story about the magazine business in its business pages today (7 August 2007). Philip Aldrick reported on declining revenues, at EMI. His lead is "The demise of the CD is accelerating. EMI yesterday revealed that its first-quarter revenues from the music format had dropped by nearly a fifth."
Okay, the article is about the recording business, but we should take heed. EMI, one of the recording industry's Giants, was purchased recently for £2.4 billion. That's a lot of pounds but it's a heavyweight company. The article also noted that EMI "posted a 26pc leap in digital revenues."
You don't have to be a graphologist to see the handwriting on the wall.
Let's look at the timeline of recorded sound. Edison applied for a patent for the tin foil cylinder phonograph at the end of 1877. This launched what was to be the cylinder era. The 78 rpm disk became entrenched by the ‘20s. 1948 marked the birth of the 33 1/3 long-playing vinyl record from Columbia records. RCA struck back in 1949 with the 45 rpm. In 1963, Philips gave us the compact tape cassette. Sony, working with its partner Philips, introduced the CD player in 1982 and the compact disc. The CD-ROM has been a commercially available recording medium since 1983.
And now digital downloads are poised to replace CD-ROMs. Despite the recording industry's resources and resistance, the marketplace has voted with its feet — or rather, with its digits. Those pesky consumers apparently want downloadable media. The more they get it, the more they want it. We can chirp happily about the wonders of print — especially its virtues and longevity; but nothing is permanent and — dare I say it?— nothing is sacred.
Almost three-fourths of all consumers choose to read [magazines] even though they can find the same information online. There is also a greater receptivity overall to print ads compared with internet ads, the firm found.But before we roll out a magazine industry campaign that trumpets this welcome finding, let's not neglect the article's conclusion:
Looking toward the future, Deloitte found that there appears to be significant demand for a portable, stand-alone device that consumers can use to view content as well as communicate with others.Apparently, nearly 40% of the sample if, left to their own devices, would love to have their media content moved to their own devices.
Texterity has released a new platform to access publications on your Apple iPhone (not my iPhone because I don’t care for one just yet), according to knowledgespeak.com (which covers the scientific, technical and medical (STM) publishing sector. The digital edition readers see emulates the magazine, as published. It’s a beta test and 20 publications are taking part and providing free iPhone editions of their mags.
The magazines, according to a Texterity press release are:
The American Lawyer, ALM Media
Baseline, Ziff Davis Media
Cabinet Maker, Watt Publishing Company
CIO Insight, Ziff Davis Media
Cottage Living, Time, Inc.
Craft, O'Reilly Media
eWEEK, Ziff Davis Media
Elite Traveler, Universal Media
ID Magazine, F+W Publications
Industry Week, Penton Media
Make, O'Reilly Media
Northern Home & Cottage, Prism Media
Oracle Magazine, Oracle Publishing
Popular Science, Bonnier Magazine Group
Quest Magazine, Quest Media
Quick & Simple, Hearst Corporation
Every Day with Rachael Ray, The Reader's Digest Association, Inc.
Ready Made, Meredith Corporation
Statement Magazine, EJJ Publications
Taste of Home, Reiman Media Group
Telephony, Penton Media
Vibe, Vibe Media
WoodenBoat, WoodenBoat Publications
Knowledgespeak reports that Texterity’s iPhone interface uses “the company’s long-standing ‘browser-only format’ that does not require Flash or plug-ins to ensure broad compatibility and easy access.”
Several publishers quoted in the press release offer warm sentiments to the effect of “wowee, the iPhone owner is a great demographic and we want ‘em.”
The Texterity iPhone option is browsed — not downloaded. Still, it brings us closer to the day when the magazine as a portable, digital medium is the (pardon the expression) norm.
For anyone who still doubts the future of magazines, and print in general, here are two new magazines that were launched this year celebrating toys, yes toys…
Some years ago, while at a magazine industry conference, I sat at a breakfast table with a bright young man who worked for a wholesaler.
“Within 15 years,” BYM said, there won’t be any newspapers.”
“Sure there will,” I said. “We just don’t know what form they’ll take.”
As it turns out we both may be proven right.
The New York Times reports that “Only 16 percent of the young adults surveyed aged 18 to 30 said that they read a newspaper every day and 9 percent of teenagers said that they did.”
This and a lot more depressing stuff comes out of a paper, “Young People and News” released by Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy.
While newspapers and, by extension, magazines (oh, say for instance Jane) matter less to that perpetually perplexing group known as “The Kids,” portable media do matter. When print magazines and newspapers finally go to that great parrot cage in the sky, their digital counterparts may well be going strong in whatever device takes its place beside the iPod and iPhone.
Anyone that tells you there absolutely cannot be improvement in the print-ten-copies-and-sell-three model is leading you towards a big iceberg in an increasingly digitized sea. Get off now or get off later, it's your decision, but I guarantee you are getting off that ship or sinking with it.I can attest to the self-delusional conventional wisdom that poisons the magazine publishing industry. In preparation for the launch of Magazine Retailer magazine, I asked a number of leading publishing people what information they thought I should deliver to retailers. They told me the following:
Since the magazine category is one of the most profitable in a retail store, they should know that they should devote more space to magazines.
SubHub is stating a simple truth about digital publishing when it compares conventional printing on paper to the Internet. The lessons are here not only for conventional publishers but for custom publishers as well. Custom publishers — companies that create and manage publications (i.e. marketing tools) for nonpublishers — are an esteemed part of our community. They provide service, eyeballs, work, and a really neat (if not necessarily new) paradigm. Whether using the single sponsor or multi-advertiser approach, the editorial and demographic focus they provide tends to rock.
Even so, SubHub may be showing a bit of the future of custom publishing. The company’s stated mission is to provide “an affordable solution for publishers who wanted to control their own site and have the option to make money in different ways from their content. . .[the site would be] comprehensive yet simple to use; fully managed, but would leave the publisher in control.”
Granted, most SubHub clients seem to have deeper roots in products and services than in content. Neverthless, the SubHub tools enable smaller businesses to do their own custom pubs.
On December 2, Felix Dennis of Dennis Publishing was the luncheon "entertainment" at a meeting of the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME). His stateside publications – Maxim and Stuff – are relative newcomers to the North American scene. Their verve and, even more importantly, their success have made Dennis Publishing a player in the new world market. In a brash, droll and informative talk, he told the assembled New York editors about the power of single copy. The crème de la of prime time editing understood this intellectually and many had personal experience with the concept.
He cited some delightful statistics about Maxim's growth. The print run jumped from 175,000 copies to 2,700,000 in 25 issues. An MRI study revealed the average Maxim reader is a 30-year-old male with a median household income of $62,000 a year. He reported that the October 1999 issue "brought in 55,000 new subscription blow-in cards." Then he topped that nugget with the news that Maxim's newsstand percentage sale is currently 73% nationwide."
And then he shared his company's authentic success secrets. Staffing levels are lower than the norm which leads to "an environment where creativity and risk-taking dominates our company's culture." He also told the New York editors that "the cult of the celebrity editor" has no adherents at Dennis Publishing.
"The concept of one man or one woman," said Dennis, "as the big cheese, the font of all wisdom, is, in my judgement utter baloney. It leads to self-indulgence and a pomposity, which creeps inevitably onto the pages of the magazine."
He said that his company "worships at the altar of the reader" and that "the advertising community is a welcome and essential element of our congregation; but they are not invited to conduct the service or choose the hymns."
Dennis then gave a breakdown of Maxim's editorial content by category and confided that his company "arrived at these allocations of editorial content by the astonishing methodology of asking our readers what they wanted . . . and then supplying it." In looking at other magazines he pointed to "a gap in real affinity between reader and content" and observed that the "paid circulations of hundreds of magazines have been declining for years." To attract subscribers, American magazines have, according to Dennis, have employed such "promotional smoke and mirrors" as "junk mail drops, promotional giveaways and stamp sheets."
He suggested another way: "What if magazine subscriptions could be driven primarily by newsstand sales, and newsstand sales driven by editorial that connected with the reader." Dennis acknowledges that he does do some direct mail and that he has a three-person circulation department.
"I believe," said Dennis, "that the real circulation department at Maxim is called 'the editorial team." And that is the secret of reader-driven success."
As we ponder the magazine’s fate, it’s kind of fun to look at the first time the word was defined. We take you now to A Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson. A magazine, sayeth the good doctor is:
A storehouse, commonly an arsenal or armoury, or repository of provisions. Of late this word has signified a miscellaneous pamphlet, from a periodical miscellany named the Gentleman's Magazine, by Edward Cave.Built into the very meaning of a magazine, then, are the notions of power and sustenance. You can learn more about Cave and his magazine at John Lienhard's "Engines of Ingenuity " site.
In his blog, the Inksniffer, veteran British journo/international consultant John Duncan talks about what newspapers could learn from magazines. My God, man, haven’t papers suffered enough?
Actually he was reacting to a speech about “The Magazine in the Age of the Internet” that Canadian corporate exec Isabelle Marcoux of Transcontinental Inc. gave on 6 June at Mags University Conference. And he makes some good points.
Duncan says
Magazines are the handsome cousins of newspapers. They look like us in lots of ways, only they're prettier and they smell better. We could marry them if we wanted to and even have kids, but in the end we're just not attracted to them.He states that the lessons newspapers could learn from magazines might include “keep launching with confidence . . .try much harder to make newspapers beautiful . . .see the internet not in terms of terrifying migration but useful augmentation . . .copy relentlessly from abroad.”
I'm convinced. Maybe magazines could learn something also. Miracles happen, so help me Christopher Hitchens..
The 5-year-old bimonthly is chock-full of reviews; it summarizes more than 500 from over 50 major pubs. It’s a digest for those obsessed with new books and a user-friendly way to keep informed — and impress your friends.She cites other features worthy of notice, such as a regularly-appearing piece, devoted to a past writer or era. She concludes by praising Bookmark's "devotion to literature."
Okay, I have a flair for the obvious. (Why else would I have felt at home in magazines?) So here’s my two cents.
The magazine industry’s current hell only starts with cultural tsunami stirred by the Web. Yes, there’s been a migration of eyeballs to the Web. Yes, there’s been a migration of advertising to the Web. And yes, yes, yes, the Web is becoming a favored source for information and ideas.
The deeper problem is the entrenched structures and conventional wisdom of the publishing industry.
For example,The overwhelming majority of marketing and financial decisions are based, in my opinion, on enticing advertisers and retailers. Not a sin, per se. But aren’t they forgetting something? Oh yes, the readership.I
I know firsthand that publishers like, respect, maybe even love their readers. They adore the reader’s passion, knowledge and commitment. But I think that ultimately publishers do not see readers as customers but as bait.
Okay, I don’t back up my files nearly enough (if you consider never to be not nearly enough). Still, Business 2.0 has made it a point to remind the world that backing up is a wise policy. So,when the magazine’s system crashed in the midst of production, salvation came in the form of an unlikely ally — the lawyers. Here’s the story.
It’s battle of the bands time as Phyllis Fine of Mediapost.com compares Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar with each other. I was pleased to learn that a Vogue article “tests out the theory that shoulder pads are coming back.”
Tell people the print magazine is dead and you’ll get one of two responses.
1. Nonsense!
This Chicago Tribune article (registration required), for example, cites the tactile, portable virtues of paper.
2. Tell me something new.
Certainly some magazines (in-flights, for example) have more reliable structures than others, than most. And it’s not like a comet will strike the Earth and eliminate all magazines at once.
But still, when was the last time you said, “send me a Xerox;” and when was the last time you said, “send me a link?”
