On magazine publishing

There seems to be a lot of hoo-ha over magazines figuring out what to do in the age of e-media. The magazine publishers ask themselves, how can they port their magazine over to the iPad or the Kindle or whatever technology is the flavor of the moment, as if the problem they face is that paper has been replaced by something else, and they need to transfer from their traditional paper to that something else.

They’re looking at it the wrong way.

It is the internet itself that renders magazines obsolete. (And, for that matter, newspapers.) The thing is, we turn to a particular medium for the benefits we can derive from that medium. Magazines provide us with content of varying lengths, but usually not too long-form, on just about any subject matter. It is no stretch to say that the internet also provides us with content of varying lengths, but usually not too long-form, on just about any subject matter. (Both, by the way, occasionally also do long-form.) The competition, in other words, begins at the core of what the content is that is in magazines and what the content is that is on the internet. The first question we should probably ask is if there is a qualitative difference between those two contents. Is one better than the other, absent its location? The simple answer is no. Since magazines have been an entrenched medium for a long time, they certainly have had the ability to draw on, and pay, a certain pool of quality journalists, but although the internet has no shortage of inexperienced, poor quality writers, many many sites also have the ability to draw on, and pay, a certain pool of quality journalists. There’s nothing about writing in a magazine or writing on the internet that makes one better than the other, aside from the fact that the entry level requirements for the latter are so low that there’s no inherent expectation of quality on the part of the consumer, whereas one does expect when one buys a magazine that, at some point, the editors of that magazine got some good writers to create the articles. (As magazines die and professional writers move over to internet positions, one can reasonably expect better quality in the internet, but that is beside the point I’m trying to make here.)

So, theoretically, content quality is identical. What else is different? Well, certainly the physical aspects of a magazine are quite different from a computer. Magazines are cheap, portable, and lightweight. Working against them is the fact that they need to be printed, and the production cycle of content is much longer than the production cycle of content online. With the creation of cheap, portable and lightweight devices for reading internet content, suddenly that advantage of magazines goes away, and we’re left with slower production of, virtually, the same thing.

But is it the same? If there is no New Yorker, for instance, either as a physical magazine or as an online magazine, do I lose whatever it was that I was getting from the New Yorker? Not really. This particular magazine has goings-on and reviews (readily available elsewhere), political analysis (way readily available elsewhere, of exactly the same liberal bias or any other bias you might prefer), fiction (ditto), commentary on the arts and life in general (ditto), and articles of serious journalism about whatever the editors think is important (ditto). Every single thing you can get from the New Yorker you can get from somewhere other than the New Yorker, and you can get it at a similar level of quality.

So why do I need the New Yorker? Especially when I can get an analogue to all its content, and I can get it on my portable device?

Well, that’s the big question, the one the magazines should be asking. If I can get everything in a magazine somewhere else, why do I need a magazine?

There’s only one real answer here that I can think of. A magazine like the New Yorker has, for lack of a better term, a brand identity. It has a recognizable editorial personality. I read the New Yorker not because I want a review of Iron Man 2 but because I want the New Yorker review of Iron Man 2. I want their comments on life in general. I like their brand. I like their aggregation of content.

The problem for most magazines is that they lack this sort of brand identity. They may be about something, foreign cars, for instance, but they don’t bring anything more to the table than their concentration on their particular subject. I can get tons of foreign car material on the internet and forego the magazine entirely. As a matter of fact, as one gets more specific on subject, the internet, with its low entry cost, becomes better able to provide content. There are people on the web who are fans of everything you can imagine, and there’s twenty-eleven websites devoted to anything you can think of. Magazines, with their production costs, can’t meet this level of granularity. How many Disney magazines are there? How many Disney websites? And Disney isn’t even obscure.

Magazines, to survive, will have to do a couple of things. First of all, if they don’t have a transcendent and viable brand identity, then it’s a hopeless cause. This is why I’m not taking my hard-earned salary and making a bid on Newsweek. I can’t think of anything about it that makes it a viable concept in the internet age, either on paper or on pixels. Food magazines? Tough, when I can get recipes online so easily, but if they have a face then they have a brand going for them. If you like Jamie or Rachael or whomever, then you’ll want their stuff and not just generic stuff. (RIP Gourmet.) Wedding magazines? Well, they have no content and are only repositories of advertisements, so they might be the last to go.

Computer magazines are an interesting case, seeing that the people most interested in them are the most likely to be, well, computing. Wired has an interesting paradigm. They have the magazine online, they have the magazine on paper, and they now are taking a device-specific approach on the iPad (which looks good but has gotten mixed reviews, but after all, it is v1.0). Wired certainly has a brand identity that I seek out, that will transcend medium. If Wired were a web organization and not a publisher, it would have that same identity.

Publishers need to become, simply, publishers, as compared to being magazine publishers or even web publishers. But they have to think it through. They have to learn what it is that they have to offer that is unique to their brand, and make that their selling paradigm. Make me go to you because whatever it is you have, I can’t get that elsewhere, for whatever reason. Publishing on paper, on websites, on apps, is beside the point. But it must be factored into the equation. Portable devices have arrived. They’re still boutique-ish, but not for long, and along with them is coming steadily growing wifi access. And they enable the magazine-like content at a level of magnitude above a website, plus they replicate a magazine’s portability. Going forward, a magazine on paper can have the best photographic reproduction, but websites have video and audio and apps have functionality. You can’t just translate from one medium to another, you have to rethink from one medium to another. You might even be able to survive in multiple media; smart thinking will, at least, allow you to survive in one of them.

Bottom line? Draw a chart. On one axis, put the number of magazines in print. On the other, put the price of portable reading devices. They will both got down together. Print magazines have had a good run. They won’t go away completely, but they’ll go away mostly. To tell you the truth, many of them already have.