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Magazines, manufacturing and boiling frogs

Magazines, manufacturing and boiling frogs

Peter headshot Colour
The problem with the magazine market is the vagary of change, not the shock of collapse says Peter Houston, founder of Flipping Pages Media. It’s like being a frog bobbing about in a pan of water that’s slowly coming to the boil – comfortable enough for the time being, but without the self-awareness to change its situation, the frog’s going to get boiled.

I grew up on Clydeside in the 80s just as the shipbuilding industry went south – South Korea to be precise. I remember thinking when I left school, watching the shipyards and the car plants and the coal mines shut down, ‘I’m never going to work in a dying industry’. So I became a magazine editor – Genius!

Magazine publishing – actually, pretty much any kind of publishing – is not a place for the fainthearted these days. You can read about closures, cuts and staff culls any day of the week. The death spiral being visited on print magazines, once the exclusive privilege of the newspaper industry, is a common theme in my Twitter feed.

There’s no hiding from the fact that magazine publishers have been taking a kicking. Industry analysts Plimsoll gave over 300 of the top 1,000 UK magazine houses a ‘Danger’ rating in its April 2013 Magazine Publisher’s Industry Report, listing over a third of the reported businesses as making a loss.

There’s a real sense of déjà vu about it all – first manufacturing, now magazines. But it’s not the same. The redundancies are painfully similar, but the underlying cause of the disruption in the magazine market is very different and for the most part, completely survivable.

The bottom line for British manufacturing in the 80s and 90s was that it was cheaper to make stuff somewhere else; the factories and the jobs moved where workers cost less. People still bought the things they had always bought, it just cost ‘too much’ for them to be made in Britain.

That’s not the problem for magazine publishers. People might be buying less magazines, but not because they’ve taken their custom to competitive publications made for less in far off sweatshops.

Back before the shipyards closed, the NME was the only place I could read about Robert Smith, Morrissey or Michael Stipe and I waited patiently to buy it once-a-week for years. This weekend, social media told me the name of the egg-lady on Britain’s Got Talent before anyone knew who had won the show… for free.

It’s something we all know – the rise of digital means that people have more media options than they used to have; options on information, options on timing, options on access. Their attention, once exclusively focused on print magazines for certain types of content, is shifting online.

You probably also know the old business-school story that explains, if the US railways had realised they were in the ‘people moving’ business rather than the ‘steel rail’ business, they would now own all of America’s airlines.

Smart magazine publishers have already joined the dots between these two notions. They have figured out that they’re in the ‘attention’ business and not the ‘ink on paper’ business, or even the ‘pixel pushing’ business.

And they are thinking about how to change the way they work to get, keep and monetise attention across a multiplatform portfolio. They’ve stopped trying to juggle the internal competition inherent in a print VS digital operation.

In the earliest days of this digital ‘revolution’, magazine publishing’s problem was that it refused to change. Most of the publishing houses that kept their heads completely in the sand disappeared a while ago. Now the problem is publishers who see the future as a stark choice between print and digital.

With print in decline and digital growing, the temptation to slash investment in ‘old media’ and go heavy on ‘new media’ is obvious. Cut the resources you once dedicated to print in favour of developing shiny new digital products.

But this is a false choice; resources should be targeted where return is greatest and for magazine publishers that has always been the attention of their readers. Print or digital, it doesn’t matter as long as the audience stays engaged and you can sell that engagement to advertisers.

The magazine business can survive in a way that the heavy manufacturing industries couldn’t; the tools to compete aren’t half a world away, they’re right there on the desktop where they’ve been since we took on computer layout. Magazine publishers just need to think hard about how to use them to engage their audiences and win back their attention.

Even the oldest of old-school publishers have a head start. Legacy print titles provide a rock-solid foundation for digital media and publishing teams should be working their content-creation skills and their print circulation lists hard to develop digital audiences.

From that starting point they can go on to offer readers a broader range of content and advertisers a greater mix of promotional opportunities, than ever before.

In a strange way, it was probably easier being in shipbuilding. When a whole industry goes, there are no choices – you might not like it, but there it is.

The problem with the magazine market is the vagary of change, not the shock of collapse. It’s like being a frog bobbing about in a pan of water that’s slowly coming to the boil – comfortable enough for the time being, but without the self-awareness to change its situation, the frog’s going to get boiled.

For magazines, the key to getting out of the hot water they find themselves in lies in playing to their strengths. All anyone in magazines ever talks about at the moment is digital. Digital content, digital audiences, digital advertisers.

What will we talk about when everything is digital, when everyone has an app, a mobile site and a social media strategy? Digital publishing will just be publishing again and magazine people will have to go back to talking about what they used to talk about – content, audiences, and advertisers.

That time is not so far away. PwC recently released its Entertainment & Media outlook for 2013 – 2017, a report that looked forward to the UK’s media economy growing to £65 billion, but forecast magazine revenues down.

Writing about the report last week, Raymond Snoddy quoted PwC’s head of UK entertainment and media Phil Stokes as saying that digital technologies are now so pervasive that it is wrong for companies to think about having a digital strategy. “Companies need a business strategy that’s fit for the digital age,” Stokes said.

For magazines to survive, that strategy has to start and end not with what PPA chief exec Barry McIlhenny rightly calls the “phoney war” between print and digital, but with content, readers and advertisers.

Peter Houston writes about magazines – in pixels and print – at the Flipping Pages blog.

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