Magazines on Slippery Slope
August 3, 2009
I fielded a question about magazine publishing on Monday, July 27, 2009. A small publisher with a handful of titles wanted me to offer some new ideas for generating revenue. Magazine publishing has been a challenging business since the implosion of Life Magazine. I have seen interesting business school case studies about the impact of shifting consumer preferences for news and information upon the weekly that provided many Americans with news and visual information. You can now explore in a clunky and limited way some of the Life Magaazine pictures on Google. The service is free, which baffles me, but I am an addled goose and not able to keep pace with the really swift and smart bicoastals who make decisoins about high-value informatoin.
Like newspapers, magazines have some brutal economics with which to wrestle. Paper, ink, distribution, and other must have lubricants for the business are expensive. Forget what the White House says about inflation. The costs for these traditional publishing essentials continue to climb. Printing is a money pit as well. Digital technology helps by eliminating the centuries old multi-step plate process. But direct-to-press requires expensive hardware and software. Printing remains expensive. Finally, there is the cost for human brain power, even if those brains are contractors and 22 year olds from fancy universities. Try as publishers might, it is tough to create a newspaper or a magazine without people to write stories, make ad deals, and place the phone calls to suppliers.
Long a niche business, magazines find themselves on the wrong end of a pointy stick from Web sites such as Alltop.com. I can create a magazine with a few clicks. If Alltop does not suit you, try Congoo. There are quite a few choices created by people who don’t have the same fondness for flipping through Mechanix Illustrated or the Saturday Evening Post that I had when young.
$17 dollars worth of hard copy magazines from big gun publishers.
In short, magazines on paper are finding their corner of the publishing world under the same pressure as people who make wooden shoes or spin wool by hand. Even niche magazines for fanatics of a particular activity such as crafts or kit airplanes are going to have to come up with some new ideas.
In my conversation, I had to say, “Let me think about some ideas.” This blog post is my preliminary thinking about what is likely to be the next zero point in publishing. Let me run down the thoughts that I am pushing around.
The Traditional Product
I went to Barnes & Noble, a recently remodeled store. The magazines are still upfront but the selection has been culled. The new layout not far from my goose pond pushes book lights, book ends, and Moleskine products. The books are pushed to the rear of the store, and the computer book section has been eliminated. The free WiFi was not working but Barnes and Noble is a bricks and mortar business which is now jumping into electronic books. That will be interesting to track.
The magazines occupy four wooden bays. Crafts and kit airplane titles were not to be found. I could not locate the specialist magazines for those interested in archaeology. I noticed that the magazines devoted to watches and luxury goods were few and far between as well. When I did find a specialist magazine like Hemmings Motor News, there were three copies on the shelf. Maybe Hemmings is a big seller at this Barnes and Noble?
I bought two magazines with the idea that I would look at the hard copies and review my subscription copy of the recent New Yorker Magazine. The total cover price for the three magazines discussed below was about $17, excluding tax. Three magazines for about $20. Hmmm. I remember the commutes between New York and San Francisco when I bought four of five magazines on every flight. Not any more. I have info on my iTouch.
Car and Driver
My recollection is that Bill Ziff was into car magazines before he hopped on the computer magazine trend. Automobile fanatics are ideal for niches. I don’t pay much attention to automobiles or automobile magazines. I live in truck and gun-rack country. Car and Driver reviews vehicles that work well in Palm Springs but don’t have much to offer to a person who drives on dirt roads. I flipped through the magazine with the cover date September 2009 and in tiny, tiny type the $4.99 price. (I wonder if the small type communicates modest value?) The feature in this issue was new cars. I may have missed something but three points hit my knee like the weird door design on my 1973 Pontiac Grandville convertible:
First, where were the Hondas? I like Hondas. These are vehicles I can buy over the Internet, sight unseen. I drive them 100,000 miles and then get another. Odd omission in 140 page magazine. Honda is one of the top selling vehicles in the US. I wondered if the news hole was too small to slug in some Honda information or if the Honda vehicles were no longer interesting to Car and Driver readers. Ah, well, editorial decision. Honda information is available online.
Second, some vehicles rated data tables and others did not. I wondered why there was no Web link to the Car and Driver Web site for additional information about each automobile. I solved the problem with a quick visit to The Auto Channel. That outfit has data about the new cars.
Third, the writing was not crunchy. This means that if Bing.com or Google.com indexes an article, false drops are likely to pepper the search results. Let me give you one example. Writing about the Jaguar, Car and Driver used this phrase “evinced a strong whiff of femininity”. I hope Car and Driver has a great search engine optimization program because this type of writing will get the article in a list of results about women’s fashion. Maybe that’s the Car and Driver audience?
National Geographic Traveler
I could not locate the current issue of the National Geographic itself. Maybe it sold out? I paid $4.99 plus eight percent tax for a four color publication with 78 pages. There was a mini booklet glued between pages. The mini booklet was about Costa Rica. I tore it out, figured it was an ad, and tossed it. The magazine itself offers lots of really short articles. The problem with the stories is exemplified by the the discussion of flea markets in France. The write up provided some tips about dealing with Gallic merchants. What was missing was a list of markets in Paris, Lyon, or Bordeaux. Even more peculiar was the failure to include a link to a Web page where additional directory type information was available to the reader. In short, the article for me was not useful.
I may have missed the Web hook backs, but this travel magazine for affluent people who probably have an Internet connection, buy air tickets online, and surf for nifty hotels left them hanging. The remedy in my case was to zip to Google.com, plug in “flea markets paris” and click on the first link http://www.parisperfect.com/paris-flea-markets.php and get useful information. What’s this tell me? I am not buying any more National Geographc Travelers. I can get better information in less time without paying a $5.00 fee for information of no use to me.
New Yorker Magazine
I have been an off-and-on subscriber to the New Yorker for years. I find myself reading one or two articles in each issue. I used to read the entire magazine each week. No more. I am a subscriber. I admit to shopping around for good subscription deals. I find that Amazon is quite useful for this purpose, so my current subscription is in the name of one of my intelligent, hard working boxer dogs.
I have the current issue dated August 3, 2009, in front of me. It has a faux oil painting of a statue and a cow against what looks like an Italian farm building. I didn’t find this graphic particularly magnetic. We have farms in Kentucky with rusting cars as statues and pigs romping in the yard. The stories were okay. I wanted to scan the scathing critique of the Amazon Kindle 2, but I could not. The reason is that the magazine arrived with page corners torn off every eight pages. See the picture below of the damage the printer or the US postal service wrought on my New Yorker.
As a subscriber, we went online and told customer service that the magazine arrived damaged. Here’s the email we received a day later:
This is an example of a company trying to manage a customer without really taking any action. Software responded to my complaint about the trashed magazine. The magazine I get with my membership to a Photoshop association arrives in a plastic bag. The New Yorker is mailed “naked”. I assume the benefit is that I get to experience an automated system. that tells me an expensive, allegedly “high class” magazine is unreadable. I bet the executives at the New Yorker sit around and congratulate themselves on this bit of customer management. No problem for me, however. I got the full text of the Kindle review online at http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/08/03/090803fa_fact_baker. The link was not in the Web site but it was on Google. Bing.com’s search results required me to do some clicking around, but I found the article via that service as well. So, I am thinking, why pay for a hard copy if I can find the information on the New Yorker’s Web site? I also don’t understand why the Web version does not provide additional information for each week’s articles with a link in each story? I think it is wacky to put the same information on the Web site. If additoinal informatoin is on the Web site, the New Yorker has to find a way to communicate that informtion’s availability. Is this part of the reasoon why magazines are on a slippery slope. Maybe these folks are on a ski jump on their tail feather with their skies over their head.
Image source: http://www.lonecoder.org/images/ski_crash.jpg
Stepping Back
Each of these magazines is a big name. None has an editorial process that hooks content to Web sites. The obvious uses such as providing detail to support a story are not visible. As the financial pressure on magazine grows, am I addled to think that the Web makes it possible to go beyond the story, to offer the reader more. I think that the availability of the content is less of an issue than the ease with which a person like myself can find more and better information than that provided in the hard copy magazine. Services like Google point up the deficiencies of the magazine’s factual content. Maybe the graphics and presentation make up the difference. For me, I am happy with a way to become informed that is easy, comprehensive, and supported by advertisers. Finally, these three magazines feel light. The publishers or other wizards involved in this dicey business are using blow ins (cards and booklets stuff in a publication to add heft) and cardboard ad pages to make the “magazine” have some heft. Tear out this stuff and even at 140 pages, Car and Driver feels flimsy. Trade publications like ComputerWorld and eWeek are like Sunday newspaper Office Depot supplements. The $5 and up magazines are heading in a similar direction. Advertisers obviously look at the heft and quality of a publication, consider its readership, and look at ad alternatives. These three magazines, like the magazine industry show the effects of cost cutting.
I suppose I could offer some ideas for magazine publishers. I won’t. I will sit at the bottom of the ski jump and watch those sliding down execute a landing. Should be interesting.
Stephen Arnold, August 3, 2009
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