TheWayoftheWeb

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The messy future for magazines

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Two stories on the Mediaweek site today perfectly illustrate the complexity and confusion in the publishing world.

At 7.30am it was suggested that Bauer Media (Disclosure – I worked for Bauer Media/Emap until earlier this year) would be reviving The Face, with an all-digital proposition one of the possibilities. While I’m not alone in wondering why The Face would be picked, considering the recent closure of Arena, any re-launch is a rare occurrence. And particularly a digital one. Bauer Media, by the way, has officially denied any such plans.

Then at 4.10pm it was revealed that John Menzies Digital has folded. Which means the end of magazinesondemand.co.uk and white label versions for WHSmith and Asda. The service had allowed readers to download over 100 magazines in digital editions. Paid Content has some more context around the decision, which closes the business after just 14 months.

So we’ve gone from a possible digital relaunch of an iconic title to the loss of over 100 digital editions in the space of a day.

What this hopefully illustrates better than anything is that the future of publishing or broadcasting any content is full of uncertainty at the moment. And there is no ‘right answer’ to how best to transform for the future.

Actually that’s a lie.

The right answer is to try various ideas, keep optimising them, and count a reasonable time span in years rather than months.

Are print magazines a safer bet than newspapers?

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I’ve probably spent as much time thinking about the future of print magazines in the couple of weeks since I left the magazine industry as I did when I was in it!

The reason is that newspaper consultant/critic Jeff Jarvis recently asked ‘Are magazines doomed?‘ in an article inspired by the closure of Portfolio magazine just as publisher Conde Nast launched a UK version of Wired.

The comments on his article had an interesting split between those for and against print as a medium generally, as well as a few questions around the revenue streams employed in magazine publishing.

My hypothesis is that print magazines will prove more resilient than their newspaper counterparts, but eventually they’ll share the same fate due to a twin pincer movement.

Their resilience is in part due to the difference in content, and the difference in format. The majority of magazines are providing something in addition/as an alternative to the breaking news that the internet disrupts so effectively. Their strength is not only in providing analysis, insight and features, but also in conveying this information with fantastic photography and design. And by doing so, they can provide a far more engaged audience interested in a specific topic.

Here come the pincers…

The first claw closing on the magazine industry is that the online world is evolving far more rapidly, both in terms of community, as Jeff points to, but also in terms of more content-driven websites and blogs. As the market for blogs fighting to break news in niche topics has become increasingly saturated, and coincidentally many more journalists and freelancers are looking outside of print following recession-instigated redundancies, so the levels of insight and expertise available online will increase.

It’s easy to forget in the tech/online bubble that the ‘mainstream’ mass readerships are still located mainly in print, even as they start to move away in many cases. And as much as the online world can criticise traditional display advertising for irrelevancy, digital monetisation still needs to evolve in effectiveness around content.

But the people best placed to effectively make a decent wage online are those experienced journalists and writers who are able to produce specialist books and in-depth articles – those who are also most valuable to print editorial teams. As they increasingly look at digital opportunities, that’s where the biggest content threat will come.

The other pincer?

The other defence of magazines is due to the format – the incredible photography and design which can inspire as it’s displayed on your coffee table.

The problem is that the quality of a format is not a guarantee of it’s survival. While those magazines favoured for their design qualities will doubtless be the most resilient for the future, the fact is that the utlity of digital formats for accessing and sharing information will overcome the quality of the pile of magazines left gathering dust in a box under the bed.

And that’s assuming that technology stays roughly equivalent to what is available right now.

Even as I was about to write this post, a post by Om Malik appeared in my RSS feed – Vogue on Your eReader? New E-paper Tech Will Make It Happen. It happens that a group of researchers at the University of Cincinnatti in Ohio have created a new technology which allows them to recreate the colour and brightness of print. The link has a full explanation, but not only is it much closer to the beauty of print, it also is far more energy efficient than the current Kindle-type displays.

So what’s the answer then?

There are two very likely scenarios for print magazines in the next decade or less. One is that very small run, niche print magazines might survive with subscriptions, display advertising and additional revenue streams due to cult levels of devotion.

The second is that magazines will increasingly follow the ‘digital only’ route which newspapers are being forced into, and we’ll see some find ways to monetise more effectively than display advertising. The others will become marginalised or disappear due to the increased expertise of the new competitors they’ll suddenly discover that have been on the web for years already…

Newspapers continue to talk a bad game…

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Lumping together so many disaprate businesses into one homogeneous ‘newspapers’ group is always going to result in a bit of schizophrenia, but when you’re attempting to discuss an industry, it’s a bit unavoidable.

Still, a few recent bits of information point to an industry that as a whole are still running around pointing fingers without working out their own gameplan.

There’s been a lot of discussion about the position Google occupies by providing the discovery and aggregation mechanism for news content – While I disagree with some of his points, Nick Carr compiles a lot of the views in an interesting post, which is immediately countered by Nieman Labs Matthew Ingram (Whose name seems to be coming up a lot in the Nieman posts I’m enjoying the most).

Meanwhile Trinity Mirror’s Sly Bailey has talked about “Superdominant players like Google and the death of journalism as we know it.”at the Digital Britain Summit.

“We’ve become dependent on pats on the back from new kids on the block who tell us what the rules are.” – lots more via PaidContent.

However:

I don’t know whether it was Nick Carr or Danny Sullivan who first pointed out that by editing the robots.txt file, newspapers can cut their search traffic off to spit their face.

Obviously the drop in traffic isn’t an option if you’re still selling display advertising based on scale, but there are options.

Besides picking an alternative search engine to work with (Hmmmm)…

How about using more social media to minimise search – after all, there are reports it’s driving more traffic than Google in some niche areas already.

Or instead of introducing Facebook and Twitter as middlemen, why not play around with open APIs (Hello, The Guardian) or install your own newspaper Laconi.ca?

But here’s where it gets really confused:

‘Newspaper publishers will no longer be required to supply newsagents with the newspapers they order under a shake-up of the regulations governing newspaper distribution. ‘ from Brand Republic.

Now this comes from Government Business Secretary Peter Mandelson, but I would allege that a rule change generally doesn’t happen without at least some consultation or consideration of the big players involved.

‘Small newspaper retailers are concerned that they risk becoming dependent on the larger retail wholesalers’

Hang on – small newspaper retailers are worried that they’ll be stuck with hugely dominant middlemen – doesn’t this ring a bell?

At a time when local is seen as a newspaper saviour, is it right that small newsagents are likely to suffer, and get the blame when people who might not be able to easily travel to a large supermarket on a daily basis can’t find their paper?

And incidentally, if local newsagents disappear, then newspapers and magazines (which I work on/with), are then left with large supermarkets as the dominant distributors. (I hear the sound of a bell ringing again)

And despite my questioning of it, the small percentage of online newspaper readers compared to print shown by both Martin Lengeveld and Ian Duncan, and now followed up with a great comparison by Rob Weir at the Columbia Missourian, does indicate that people migrating online can completely bypass the newspaper site they might read offline.

Is anyone else’s head hurting?

Some clarity:

There have been some well documented cases of newspaper businesses doing things rather than just talking about them.  The Guardian and the New York Times being about the biggest and best known examples.

Watch what they do, rather than just what people are suggesting. And please share other examples of innovation and change in all forms of journalism/digital publishing.

See what happens to those emerging from the wreckage.

And keep a close eye on the results, but also consider the other factors. A Finnish online-only daily might have suffered since losing the print edition, but is that down to the editorial proposition, staff cuts, tech adoption in the region, broadband access, alternative news sources, etc? Nobody knows yet.

Somehow we need to cut through the confusion.

The serendipity defence of magazines and newspapers is a myth

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There are several reasons why the print editions of newspapers and magazines will continue for a while longer in there current forms before evolving into something new to survive alongside the increasingly dominent internet and mobile content networks.

But the serendipity argument isn’t one of them, despite the fact it’s so often wheeled out. Unfortunately, when you spend some time thinking about it, it becomes clear that the argument is based on a load of old cobblers.

Serendipity

The argument is that by reading a newspaper or magazine you’ll find things you didn’t realise you would enjoy reading or needed to know.

Which is true.

But the flipside of using this argument as a justification for print publications is that using the internet/mobile to find content will only give you exactly what you want, the majority of the time.

Which isn’t true.

It’s a reasonable assertion if you only consider search as the mechanism for finding content on the internet/mobile.  Given a reasonably accurate search string, Google et al will generally give me a reasonably accurate list of returns for the thing I want.

But I don’t just use search. In fact, I’m using it less and less.

The assertion falls down as soon as you use any social tools for the simple reason that humans are not powered by algorithms. Despite the reasonable assumption that the majority of people will share content because it is relevant/appropriate to the recipient, the judgement of relevance/appropriateness is a subjective one on behalf of the sender – which means you can end up with all sorts of stuff.

And that’s only the active senders – now add in the network that shares links on social networks as a broadcast because they found it interesting, and someone in their network might be interested, but they don’t know who, or can’t be bothered to target it individually.

Then add in the lucky dips of social bookmarking tools, RSS feeds, and the entire linking ecosystem.

And it’s always been the case offline:

Think about birthdays and Christmas. Close family and friends might send you incredibly relevant, thoughtful presents, but as the distance grows between you and the sender, the random factor increases exponentially, so you can end up with all sorts of good and bad presents.

That’s the random discovery of things you never knew you’d like, by your network – not by a brand of ‘taste makers’ and distributed by a publication.

And it means basing your survival on the following assumptions:

1. People will have the time and desire for something outside of their interests when there’s a huge abundance of highly relevant material taking up their limited time.

2. People will want something outside of their interests which hasn’t be supplied by friends, family, colleagues, acquintances, or the Stumble! button.

3. Anyone who enjoys this discovery will find it engaging enough to pay before discovering whether or not it’s worthwhile, and will then find it enjoyable enough to keep paying, and perhaps engage with the surrounding monetisation – usually advertising.

Really?

There is a future for providing services which allow for assisted discovery of content – whether by human means or computers (e.g ‘related items’ or ‘things you might like’). But the days of being able to charge purely for those services are rapidly disapearing.

Microblogging event dedicated to UK Media and Journalists

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If you’re based in the UK with an interest in Microblogging and journalism, then media140 looks like an essential event.

It’s on May 20th, on the Southbank in London, and features a mix of case studies and panels with journalists from The Times, Guardian, Reuters, Sky News, Journalism.co.uk and Frontline Club. Plus prominent social media bloggers.

Topics will include:
– how to persuade journalists to take and use twitter seriously.
– what is news worthy, how do you recognise it?
– breaking the news, how you can potentially undermine your own news room
– will local community create local news through microblog technologies?
– tools of the trade, what works and what doesn’t?
– is microblogging and twitter really a game changer?

Tickets are £45 and available now. For more details, see the media140 website.

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