Are Magazines Doomed Too? 19 comments
an article to
-
Font Size:
-
Print
- TweetThis
Condé Nast folds Portfolio even as it starts Wired in print in the U.K. So which are we to take as the harbinger for the future of magazines?
I hate to be calling doom for yet another medium, but I fear that Portfolio is the better indicator. We’ll see magazines fold and it’s going to be a lot riskier to start new ones to replace them — riskier because, just as on TV and in movies and music, it’s harder to create a blockbuster and consumer magazine that depends on a blockbuster economy. Magazines don’t make money until they hit magic numbers of circulation (which come only after renewals reduce marketing costs) and advertising, which is sold at heavy premiums. The advertising market is bound to suffer both in a recession and against unlimited competition from online. In the U.S. market, subscriptions are so heavily discounted ($1 per issue for a product that can cost $5 or more to print and distribute) and marketing costs are so high (subscriber acquisition can hit $20 or $30) that the risk is only greater.
Entertainment Weekly, my baby, went through an astounding $200 million before becoming profitable. No one is going to invest that kind of money again. If anybody would, it was Condé. Oh, well, so much for that.
A few years ago, I was asked to speak on a panel at a magazine industry meeting. A few days before the event, the organizer called me and said, “Uh, Jeff, are you going to say that magazines are doomed? And if you are, could you not come?” So in a rare moment of preparing for a panel, I actually thought about what I thought and I concluded that magazines weren’t doomed. They have the unique value of slickness and focus that their publishers always brag about. And, I reasoned, magazines already were communities and so they should be perfectly positioned for the community-based internet. Magazines are collections of people who are interested in the same stuff. The challenge for an editor is to figure out ways to enable them to share with each other, to become a platform for that community.
I'm afraid I was wrong. Or at least, it’s hard to name a magazine that has done a good job becoming that community platform. The problem, as I said of newspapers in relation to GeoCities and MySpace the other day, is that magazines can’t stop thinking of themselves as content. They’re not communities.
If I proposed EW today, as I’ve said here before, I wouldn’t make it a magazine, not for a second. It would be a community of criticism about all forms and tastes in entertainment, growing far, far bigger than its razor-thin page-count these days. But those communities already exist online; they’ve organized themselves. They don’t need EW. I hear that EW is suffering as a result. And it’s probably too late to rescue itself. It would pain me if EW followed Portfolio. But it wouldn’t shock me.
Can other magazines save themselves? I still think it’s possible. But then, I said that magazines weren’t doomed.
Mind you, I’m not saying that magazines are going to start dropping like flies and newspapers. When the economy comes back, many will still be able to sell their targeted, engaged audiences to advertisers for a premium… at least for awhile. Some may even manage to pull off a metamorphosis into community platforms and a few high-value titles — see: The Economist — can even grow. But when the weak ones die, there’ll be none to replace them.
And there are so many ready to die. Who needs newsmagazines? Business magazines are suffering the tragic irony of being at the same time more necessary and less supportable because of the financial crisis. Men’s magazines have been folding. Entertainment magazines are dicey. Trade magazines are dropping. And the list goes on and on.
So what about Wired? I don’t know, knowing what you know now about the state of the economy and magazines, would you have decided a year ago or so to start a new one?
The death of Portfolio doesn’t yet presage the doom of magazines. It marks the doom of magazine launches.
Related Articles
|
-
The Seeking Alpha 100
See allThe top 100 stock
market authors
selected for publication
Seeking Alpha 100 » -
Fastest Climbers
Authors with the largestSee all
increase in followers
in the last 7 days
Fastest Climbers » -
Top Commenters
Top commenters,See all
as ranked by their peers
Top Commenters » -
Top Instabloggers
The 100 most active
Instabloggers.-
1
David Fry
-
2
TraderMark
-
3
Don Dion
-
4
Cliff Wachtel
-
5
Joseph L. Sha...
Top Instabloggers » -
1
-
Top StockTalkers
TopSee all
StockTalkers.
Top StockTalkers »
So, what is the benefit that magazines bring to the advertiser? They have generally higher costs relative to the reach, less measurability (is the reader opening the mag, opening to the page where the ad is?), less targetability (not as many geo-targeting options), and less interactivity (video ads, expandables, link back to advertiser site, etc.)
Yep, doomed I say.
As Alex Filinov says, "they've always done it this way..." Traditional media online is gaudy, loaded with popups and usually you need a subscription or at least a password. I don't need them since I believe many new sites are far better. And I rarely buy a newspaper or magazine ever, anymore.
It's a tough new world and we have to stop rewarding failed old ways with the last of our dwindling resources.
Instant comments about stories and conversations with authors will create a following and a way to id and track how effective ads are. Subscription prices need to drop to increase readership. Provide pretty pictures to relieve the non-reading generation of the need to process words and link ads to purchases.
I used to subscribe to a dozen magazines, now I subscribe to 3. And those are only because I had paid up several years in advance. When those run out I doubt I will renew because they dont satisfy a need in my life.
And don't forget the financial part. Conde Nast spent $100 million (!!) to launch the thing. That's not the Internet's fault. If you pulled the plug on the Internet tomorrow and went back to a 100% print world, a $100m magazine launch would still make very little sense.
I subscribe to a few magazines via Zinio one of which has recently gone all digital - PC Magazine for example.
It costs less and because it is a special interest magazine I am quite happy to print out the pages I need. Mostly I read it online. The Economist is also available.
Thing is I am not interested in a community, or exchanging views with other readers. I simply want the info.
They would have been better off with a $5K Wordpress blog.
Cheap off-the-shelf tools rule!
Most of the time, I couldn't care less about being part of a "community." Just tell me what I'm interested in hearing about. I don't need to read slutbanger17's oh so insightful comments.
I have read and downloaded magazines, yet they just don't have the same affect on me as the physical printed item. The pages cannot be as randomly accessed, and the images never seem as compelling on-line as they do in print. I never seem to like long articles on-line, yet I enjoy longer and more well written printed articles. I want the insight, and not just a summary, and I don't think I am in the minority with this.
That stated I do feel that some realms and titles just miss the picture entirely. Technology reviews would need to be more in-depth than available on-line, yet as a writer at DPReview noted, there is a public demand for faster production information (especially technology). Magazines will never cater to the instant gratification crowd. News magazines or newspapers that only report what already happened fail to enlighten anyone wanting a more in-depth look at events, whether they are sports, international issues, or politics.
Where I think Portfolio failed was that it didn't seem to have a cohesive direction. There was little integration of content. Definitely some great articles, careful choice of advertising images, and compelling editorial imagery. Yet that all in one cover-to-cover feel was missing. Perhaps they found that there was just not enough to discuss of the core idea, and decided to pad the rest with whatever content they could scrounge up.
I have no doubt there will be more magazine failures. You can see it on nearly any newsstand just by glancing at how thin some mags have become. Yet a few titles continue to thrive and attract an audience, and more importantly advertisers. We are no closer to a magazine-less society than we are to a paperless office.
Come on, it wasn't that bad. I liked the pictures!!
On Apr 28 04:51 AM evroth, SA Managing Editor wrote:
> Though I do agree with the author that the magazine business model
> is in peril, I find it interesting that Jarvis, as well as just about
> everyone else who has commented on Portfolio's demise, seems to have
> missed a key point. Portfolio was a magazine that never actually
> found its footing, published by a company that never had any understanding
> of what a business magazine should be, and was launched into an environment
> that neither needed nor wanted yet another business-related publication.
> In an effort to be all-things to so many readers it ended up being
> hardly anything to anyone. From the get-go it was poorly conceived,
> lacking both a real mandate and a real vision of who its audience
> was supposed to be. Granted, during its short life the magazine published
> some really good articles, and featured some very good writers. But
> it's a mistake to use Portfolio as yet another example in the conversation
> about the demise of the magazine model. Portfolio proves nothing
> about the state of the magazine business. It was a misbegotten idea
> that never should have been started in the first place.
The magazine was well written and carried original content not available elsewhere.
But it lost circulation because the average reader's perception was that she could get the same info on a board. Indeed, our own active board published more content in a week than the bi-monthly could in each issue.
The reader-supplied content ranged from chit chat to serious postings by physicians and other professionals. A search engine allowed anyone to find what they needed. After six or seven years, there were several hundred thousand postings by thousands of members. No mag could match that.
Translate that experience to most magazines, many of which actually don't have natural communities because they're not focused enough. As far as I can tell, Fortune, BusinessWeek and Forbes don't have active communities.
SA serves as the active community for investors. And there are plenty of other such investment communities online. Few, if any, involve mags. wsj.com attracts lots of comments on its articles, but I don't think it really has a "community" per se, although it's been trying to start one.
You can't have a real community on line, I believe, unless members can start conversations, as the author of the opening post (op) has done here. On most newspaper and magazine sites, threads feed off articles published by the site owner, not off posts by members. So their sites feature reactions to articles, not real communities.
Unless ads come back, most mags will fail. Only those that publish critical, proprietary market data and competitive info dug up by really good reporters will survive. They'll be like BNA, Morningstar and Value Line, which charge big bucks for their content and serve relatively small audiences compared with today's mags, I think.
For me, Barron's is the only mag for investors that is worth paying for. IBD and WSJ also are worth what they charge. I also subscribe to BusinessWeek and Forbes, but often don't read them.
So the challenge for mag and newsletter publishers is to overcome readers' perceptions that they can get the info they need free on the Web and that they don't have to pay for mag subscriptions.
That will be a tough nut to crack.
fly fishermen
small airplane pilots,
etc,
go to a large library and see the topics,
these magazine may have a small circulation,
but the advertisers know they are hitting the target audience
they want and pay a premium for ads.
these magazines won't be going away any time soon.
Pick up a woman's magazine, or even a "news" magazine and you don't have to search hard to find a heartwarming story about some rare, yet horrible, disease that has been "cured" (covered up) by a pill.
Then, lo and behold, the next 3 pages are an ad for the miracle drug.
We are sheep and due to the blatant content sell-out to advertisers, I refuse to support them.
Yet another American industry crushed. Just where are we going to find 30 million or more jobs?
========================
Karen Walter
callaway x