SubHub's Super List

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.

Felix Dennis on Editing

The sale of Dennis Publishing's Blender, Stuff and Maxim US editions pretty much takes a sharp mind out of the U.S. publishing biz. A snapshot of how Felix Dennis thinks can be found in a report I wrote for the Spring 2000 issue of Magazine Retailer. It goes a little something like this.

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."

The Meaing of Magazines

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.

Learning From Magazines

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..

Don't Get Me Wrong

Don't get me wrong. I love magazines.
And to be honest I love print. Or maybe I've been indoctrinated since birth about the eternal life of print that I stammer and shiver at the thought of a (-gulp-) world without print. (A chorus, if you please, of "Gimme That Old-Time Religion.") No matter. Print is dead.
But back to my magophilia. Fern Siegel's witty review of Bookmarks magazine in MediaPost shows why we love this medium.
She notes:

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."

She paints a picture of a magazine that delivers focus, smarts and passion to its subject matter. . .in other words, it exemplifies the qualities we have come to associate with magazines.

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.

How do you like them peanuts?

If the medium is the message, then clearly BusinessWeek is declaring "come fly with me."
According to Advertising Age, the McGraw-Hill business title is partnering with Brand Connections to put ads and BW columns on airplane table trays. Now if only they could find a way to put some food on those trays.
I guess we can expect a magazine industry study that shows table trays will not replace print -- at least in the immediate future.

Et tu, Pecker?

In his Ad Age "The Media Guy" column, the ever insightful Simon Dumenco uses the Ron Burkle purchase of the Primedia enthusiast group to make a point: What's wrong with magazines? Look at executives within the industry.

Or as he puts it "the print-media industry is not only filled with f--k-ups, it coddles them." He hopes that Burkle, a newcomer to publishing might come in with less baggage and more vision.

I suspect that we already have passed the rearranging-the-chairs stage. (It comes somewhere after grief and denial.) And we need to look beyond print.

Newspapers Here to Stay?

A new report from the World Association of Newspapers sets "the record straight" on questions about the "relevance, vibrancy and future vitality of newspapers in this fast-growing digital age."

Glad that's settled.

Of course we'll always have newspapers. And we'll always dial our phones and type our copy.

Backing Up Is Hard To Do?

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.

Great Covers

While print magazines stll are with us, let's remember to take care of basics. As editor of Magazine Retailer, I had the good fortune to interview ASME (American Society of Magazine Editors) Hall of Famer John Mack Carter. He has developed a set of cover design principles to grab the consumer during the 60-second first impression sniff test. Most of the wisdom he shared pertains to the cover lines - a/k/a blurbs or sell lines. I offer his insights here for you to measure against your own experience.
"We put the blurbs where they're most likely to be exposed," says Carter. "We run the logo large at the top -- often with a banner behind it. We run it as clean as we can so it can be seen from as far away as possible and seen before other logos. We don't believe in covering up the name with the head of a model, which you can do once you're well known.
"We also have a number of guidelines that say you ought to have interesting blurbs about things people want to know about or are likely to want to know about. I'm a great believer that the sum of your cover lines ought to represent a value the magazine has that is greater than the price of the magazine. You can almost take a little calculator out and say what that value is worth. Dollar signs should be in there indicting that dollar is not money to be spent but money to be saved and the magazine is going to tell you how to do that. The magazine should do something for you or you're not going to buy it. Make your thighs slimmer, make you handsomer, make your abdominal muscles ripple, make you richer make you appear to be more intelligent and make you to come back for the next issue and buy another one of these magazines."
Another Carterism is to make a boastful promise.
"If you don't have something good to say about yourself," he says, "nobody else is going to, which means there are some superlatives which are useful [such as "best" or "most"]. As a matter of fact, the well-edited magazine can have superlatives on the cover. because it is the best accumulation of information about that subject."
Carter reports that when the first issue of Country Living came out, it immediately made money.
"You're not supposed to do that," we told him.
"It," he responded with a straight face," was awkward explaining it."

Harper's Bazaar vs Vogue

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.

Reluctantly, I’m in the second camp. The structures that have served magazines so well for so long are, shall we say, challenged. Cheap subscriptions, advertising support, retail distribution just don’t have the magic.

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?”