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| Magazines | |
another challenging year Publishers will struggle to respond to changes Jan 5, 2010
What was the biggest story of the year in magazines? The magazines that closed and the downturn in advertising. The floor literally fell out of the magazine business. What will be the three biggest storylines in magazines this year? The big thing for the year will be how everyone is jumping on the digital magazine bandwagon. Esquire has an iPhone app. Sports Illustrated has a prototype. Bonnier has an international push aimed at 20 countries. The real issue with digital is, No. 1, there’s no e-reader yet that actually works for all. The magazine industry needs to agree on a common technical format. Also, how many people will want it? Will advertisers jump in? So that's what all the noise will be about in 2010. And certainly charging for content on the web, which is sort of a byproduct of that, and not allowing all the aggregators complete access to content. Above and beyond it all, it’s about magazine companies ceasing to be publishers per se and becoming communications companies offering a wide variety of communication vehicles—videos, music, books, TV affiliations, etc., as well as print. It's about becoming more and more of a creative source for advertisers, and in many cases bypassing the ad agencies, which are having their own problems. Do you anticipate advertising in this category to begin recovering in first-half 2010? Why or why not? If not, then when? If you looked at the January numbers it's sort of a mixed bag. Some will do a bit better, and some will continue to decline. The luxury and automotive magazines don’t seem to be picking up. I would think we’ll see flat to a very small increase in advertising, if at all. Some titles will do great, some will do much worse than the rest of the pack, but that will have more to do with the business model of the individual magazines. I think there will also be a lot of testing in higher subscription prices to make up for the loss of advertising. What is the single most important thing for media buyers and planners to know about magazines in 2010? It’s always the uniqueness of the magazine’s audience. Media buyers tend to get overly dependent on pure numbers, and with business being increasingly difficult, it’s more important for them to get into the context of the individual magazine and understand the degrees of passion readers have with one magazine versus another. The problem with a lot of young media buyers is they don’t read magazines, or they have pre-determined opinions about the magazines. What magazine categories (women's service, food, parenting, etc.) have held up the best during this downturn and why? It’s spotty. You look at the numbers and you can’t see any categories that did particularly well. Within each category there are strong magazines. Gourmet folded but Saveur was up. Was it because Gourmet screwed up and Saveur was smarter? There are all kinds of reasons, but something resonated with advertisers. Some of the larger publishing companies will have trouble with their smaller titles because of the massive overhead. Whereas at smaller companies where the smaller magazines don’t have to pay an enormous corporate overhead, they might hold up better. Do you expect to see more magazine closures in 2010 than in 2009? If not, why? What titles seem to be most endangered? I don’t think we’ll see more closures, but I think we’ll see more surprising closures of well-known brands. I’m not privy to everybody’s numbers, but everyone has Entertainment Weekly on their closure list, which Time Inc. denies. Condé Nast obviously thinned out its ranks significantly over the past year, and Time Inc. also initiated another large round of layoffs. Do you think other publishers will follow, or did we see most of the major cuts this year? I think that there was a lot more cutting than got reported. Condé Nast and Time Inc. are in the public eye. I don’t know what Meredith and Hearst did, but I would bet there was a significant amount of cuts at both of those companies. They may have just been more under the radar. What you do is you sort of reach a point of diminishing returns. Ultimately you’ll have to have a product with editors and salespeople, if you continue to cut, cut, cut, you don’t have enough people to produce a compelling product. Everyone reaches a limit to what they can cut. It’s going to have to be more about increasing revenue rather than cutting costs. Publishers unfortunately historically have not valued their product enough. What does the future hold for Bloomberg's BusinessWeek? Can it return to profitability with the staff cuts and new, more general-interest focus? Well, what I don’t know is what resources Bloomberg is dedicating to replacing those staffers who were cut, or what Bloomberg plans for its own business magazine, and how they plan to market both of them. I don’t think that Bloomberg wants to turn BusinessWeek into Portfolio. It’s really too soon to know, but they are very smart people, they have deep pockets, and they were probably the only company in the world that could have possibly saved BusinessWeek. It’s really a question of how they integrate and share news resources. And they didn’t pay very much for it, it’s like petty cash. If it doesn’t work it would be a bit of an embarrassment but not a disaster to the bottom line. Do you think the changes the newsweeklies have made the past two years have succeeded in keeping the category relevant, or do you see more changes/closures ahead? I don’t think that the newsweekly category will ever be relevant again. It will be a lingering death. If you think about the magazine industry and you think about all the other media out there, it makes it very hard for a newsmagazine to compete. You get all of that stuff by the minute on the web. They're moving more and more towards being feature magazines and analyzing the news, but that’s not why people buy them. They were at their peak when they reported the news, but you don’t need a newsmagazine for news anymore. The notable exceptions are The Week, which is really short takes and well-written summaries, and The Economist, which is really for very smart people who are concerned and interested about what’s going on in the world. It’s sort of the New Yorker of business magazines, although I’m not sure they’ll like that comparison. [Laughs.] But it’s really well done.
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