In your blog, you've said many times that print is not dead. Starting from the standpoint that print is alive and well and that consumers want magazines, what is the greatest challenge for the industry today?

   The challenge is no different from what it’s always been: to matter, to be important to a core of readers who can’t wait to receive their next issue, to provide something that taps into the passion of a tiny slither of the population.
   No doubt, there are certain segments and categories of magazines that are going to be plowed under by online alternatives or just by the passage of time. But what new technologies taketh away, they also giveth. 
   Ultimately, I think blogs will provide publishers with the ability to launch new magazines for microniche audiences they never dreamed existed. 
   There’s already a magazine created by and for amateur photographers who share photos online, JPG Magazine. It’s a print magazine format but published using on-demand digital printing technology and all of the fulfillment takes place online. Everything about it--everything from digital photography to how it’s manufactured to its business model and marketing channel--didn’t exist 10 years ago.
   Yet there was the will and the way to express all of this in a magazine format.

How should the magazine industry address that challenge?

   Ah, now that's where I think the internet is not the competition to magazines but the salvation of magazines. 
  Magazine people--and I am one--are near universally "us-you.” They think of those who create the magazine as “us” and those who receive the magazine as “you.”
   The radical idea--that’s not that radical--is that our readers talk among themselves. That's been enabled by the internet, and by especially the new participatory or conversational media like blogging and Podcasting. 
   Anyone who’s ever been to a trade show hosted by a business-to-business media company comes away knowing that the most meaningful “content” are the conversations that take place in the aisle ways. The metaphor magazine publishers should view as their great hope is that of the tradeshow aisle way (or alumni reunion, or cocktail party).
  Magazines pay enormous lip service to the word “community,” but, frankly, magazine people--and media people in general--have little idea of how to engage with the community of their readers.
   Here’s one of those areas where consumer magazines could learn something from some other areas of the magazine world, like those I spend a lot of my time in. Some custom magazines and association magazines, as well as non-profit institutional magazines and alumni magazines, do a better job of understanding their readers. It's because in those arenas the magazine's reason for being is about deepening a relationship and serving as a platform and cornerstone for a larger, self-defining community.
    Often times the institutional publisher is funding the magazine for indirect economic reasons that aren’t reflected in circulation or advertising dollars but that nonetheless greatly affect the institution’s bottom line. How many millions do colleges raise each year simply by having a section in one issue that lists all its alumni donors? Would they raise as much if they decided instead to list those names on their web site? I doubt it.
   And on the reader's end such magazines are greatly anticipated and appreciated on a level much deeper than anything a newsstand magazine will ever achieve.
    Again, perhaps the best example of this is the university alumni magazine. What other magazine is more anticipated by its readers and more effective for its publisher?

Are there any industry-wide practices that you consider detrimental to the business of magazine publishing? If so, what are they?

   I guess, in the same way there are things going on in our culture that I consider detrimental, I could note lots of industry-wide practices that I would like to go away, but a lot of those complaints are nothing new.
  However, here’s one that I see in so many areas of our industry: I think people who don't even read magazines, who certainly don't think about magazines, make way too many decisions about the business and editorial aspects of the industry. Unfortunately, there's nothing I can do about it. 
   Not to pick on your readers, but one example of this is how many advertising decisions related to magazines are made by people who don’t actually read the magazines they buy into or don’t buy into.
   Our magazine business model, especially the dominance of the renewal subscription model, means we don’t have the flexibility and creativity you can find when the market is conditioned over several decades to purchase magazines at the newsstand or to sign up for subscriptions that continue until the reader cancels it.
    Imagine if your phone or cable or water service carried the overhead of having to re-sell you every year? However, that’s the business model we have, and it isn’t changing any time soon.
   Likewise, too many magazine editors and designers, and the publishers who hire them, make design and editorial and business decisions for someone other than the reader. 
   Rarely are these decisions acknowledged, but I can flip through any magazine on the newsstand and see things that make no sense to me as a reader.

Over the last 10 years, what trends have affected the magazine industry the most?

    It would be hard to say anything has affected the magazine industry more than the internet during the past decade. Certainly, the dot.com boom and bust had a profound impact on business decisions and on the success and failure of magazines and entire magazine companies. And living through such a gut-wrenching advertising recession as 2001-2003 was certainly life-altering to lots of people who no longer have jobs in magazines. Media consolidation and magazines run by people who've never read a magazine are certainly business trends that have had profound effect.
   However, let me think of a trend that is more about what's on the page than about the industry.
   Here’s one: I think Men's Health magazine has had a profound effect on magazines during the past decade. The Rodale folks displayed how to adapt what had been, up until then, a format used by only the woman's service category–specifically some of the newer ones. Men’s Health displayed how such a format and style and voice can add life to almost any topic. 
   It's hard now to pick up a magazine and not see some influence that can't be traced back from Men's Health to the rest of the magazine world.


How can the magazine industry build consumer confidence in its product? I'm interested in both long- and short-term strategies here.

   I think consumers have confidence in magazines. Consumers love magazines. I think it's media buyers and, frankly, media company owners and executives who are having the crisis in confidence about magazines. I wish they’d just get over it and get back to publishing great magazines.
   Over the long term, I think that publishers of magazines need to realize that their medium is near the top of the food chain in its appreciation by the intended audience.
   Go onto eBay and see the tens of thousands of people who buy and sell magazines from the past and you won’t worry about consumer confidence. 
   Walk through a home in the suburban South and see the stack of Southern Livings on the bookshelf and you’ll not worry the future of the magazine medium. 
   Don’t just read any issue of the New Yorker, but check out how some of its advertisers are savvy about how their creative interacts with the magazine experience surrounding the ad, and you’ll be inspired for what the medium can be.
    Leaf through a great university alumni magazine and ponder what kind of foundational loyalty can be provided by the magazine format.
   Somehow, magazine people and advertisers--the industry--have to get over the misperception that the internet is supplanting magazines. Again, yes, some categories of magazines will die. But individual titles and categories of magazines always die.
   There will be more--probably lots more--magazines in 10 years than there are today. Some household and industry-specific titles will come to a sad ending, but there will be 10 titles for each one that dies. Perhaps nine of them will be produced using on-demand printing and go only to a few thousands readers. But all together these new titles will result in a larger universe of magazines than a smaller one.
   And, please, check back with me in 10 years to correct me if I’m wrong.

What do you think about the argument that magazine advertisements are integral parts of the magazine reader's experience, while television, radio and internet advertisements are essentially interruptions?

   I think compelling advertising can be an integral part of any medium and boring advertising is spam wherever it appears. 
   I do think there are certain pages in the magazine format that seem strange if an advertisement does not appear on it. The inside cover positions, for example. At Hammock Publishing, we’ve created and published enough employee and corporate magazines for me to discover that magazines that don't carry advertising need something that looks like an ad on those pages.
  And frankly there are some magazines that are purchased primarily for the advertising. For example, I was at a grocery store newsstand recently and was overwhelmed by the massive stacks of three different magazines about high school proms. I'll have to admit, that is a genre with which I was not familiar until that moment. They each were well over 300 pages, and a quick scan of each revealed that 80 percent or more of the pages were advertisements for prom dresses. And since all the advertisers were in each book, that meant that three competing magazines had 80 percent of the exact same content. Yet in the span of 10 minutes I saw two girls purchase all three of the titles.
    I think the readers of those magazines, and perhaps most fashion magazines, view non-advertising pages as interruptions. The category of magazine that Lucky has pioneered, the shopperzines, certainly proves there is a market for magazines that look like ads on every page, or at least look like buyers' guides or catalogs.
   Of course, there are millions of viewers of QVC and other shopping channels disproving the argument that the audience finds advertisements on TV an interruption.
   There’s another thing. No matter what they say, people like great ads. I have a DVR and jump through commercials, but I find myself rewinding to see one I find intriguing or compelling. 
   Enjoying good advertising is a part of our pop culture. I don't know why we think it's only during the Super Bowl where people will tune in just to see the new ads.

What emerging technologies should magazine publishers be watching in 2005?

   First and foremost, I still think great magazines are about the magazine. Technology that serves the magazine and its readers are what I'd be watching, not technology that can "replace" the magazine. 
   That said, if I weren’t a blogger myself and a typical magazine editor or publisher, I'd be trying to get over whatever prejudices I have against "bloggers" and quit viewing them as amateur competitors, and start exploring the underlying technologies that enable blogging.
   I’m excited about the current era of technology because it's not so much about being expensive and new but frankly about learning how to join in something where the technology is owned and controlled by your readers.
   The possibilities for me as a magazine publisher, or as a university or association or corporate brand, to be given the current opportunity to have a relationship with a community of people that transcends the printed page or the campus or the retail location, is a profound opportunity that technology enables.

We at Media Life love magazines, even though we often write about them critically. From both a professional and a personal standpoint, why do you enjoy the magazine format as much as you do?

   I'm rarely asked why I personally enjoy magazines; rather, I'm usually pitching why "magazines are an effective marketing tool."
   I love magazines for many reasons, most of which seem contradictory. However, I've decided that contradictions are what you find in great food dishes or paintings or music--creative tension, or whatever you call a balanced mixture of the expected and the surprise.
   For example, there's this contradiction that magazines are open-ended and recurring, while at the same time, each issue freezes a moment in time, both for the topic covered in the magazine and also for the reader. 
   If you want to see what I mean, browse through Time magazine's archive of magazine covers. Seeing a specific cover from earlier in your life is like listening to an old song. The song (and magazine) take you back to a specific time and place, and each one of us recalls that place individually.
   Another contradiction is that magazines can be substantive and serious and works of art while also being disposable (or recyclable). Some people can’t throw away magazines because they value them and view having them as an expression of who they are. That or they have some psychological disorder that leads ultimately to suffocation under large mounds of magazines.
   There’s something about magazines that offer me a reassuring consistency. My favorite magazines come at the same time each week or month or quarter and adhere issue after issue to the same structure and architecture and aesthetic and editorial voice. 
  But the magazines I love also surprise me in each issue by finding new ways to explore the foundation of all those that came before, yet they each add something new to the experience. We call them "issues," but perhaps we should think of them as "episodes"--episodic journalism, perhaps (am I coining a phrase)? In that way, magazines can be compared to the rare TV series that stands the test of time. I’ll use the best TV show of all time, "The Simpsons," in which nothing changes, but everything is new and surprising and pushing some new boundary each week, year after year. Always anticipated and familiar, but always new and different. I think in personal relationships, it’s called romance.