h, the power of Positive Thinking. The magazine industry is full of it. Positive Thinking I mean. But it won’t do them any good… if I am any kind of canary in a coal mine, the magazine industry is about to suffer a major calamity.
I have been an ardent collector of magazines since 1978 – when I subscribed to a brand new magazine called American Photographer. I have every issue of American Photographer, plus every issue of American Photo, as they have been called since 1990. I have every issue of WIRED magazine since I discovered that they were not a drug magazine in 1994. I have most of the issues of Taunton’s Fine Woodworking since 1984, and good sized collections of many other magazines in various disciplines. I am loath to throw a magazine away, unless it is a 10 year old home decorating magazine, and have a compulsion to save anything that says “Anniversary Issue’ or ‘Special Collectors Edition’ or ‘Premier Issue’.
In recent years however I have found that my new issues are not being read. Editors have found that they can still have a large variety of content in a smaller space if they off-load much of the content to their website. The magazines are getting thinner, the cover prices are getting higher.
Subscriptions are rising, I believe, because of motivated pricing. I refused to subscribe to WIRED as long as the Canadian subscription price was within a dollar of the shelf price. I held out for years until WIRED offered me a subscription for $24. How could I refuse that? Now I receive in my mailbox a folded-in-half and sometimes ripped copy of WIRED every month, which I flip through for 10 minutes, then add to the giant stack of WIRED in my basement. Even that $24 is a waste of money. I can get all I want from WIRED on their website. Why am I doing this? Things have changed since I started subscribing to American Photographer in 1978, and started reading WIRED in 1994.
A lot has changed in fact. In 1994 the addition of a CD to a magazine was a wonderful alternative to searching for and downloading 20 MB programs on a 14400 baud modem. In 1978 the only way to get current information was through magazines and yearbooks. There was no internet, you had to write to companies and ask for literature on things you were interested in. Store employees were the experts. Not any more. Today Google and twitter are the experts. We consume data as fast as magazine editors do, and when we finally get the new magazines in the mail, the news is a month old.
So… I’ve had it. I’m purging my magazines. The only magazines I’ll buy will be through cheap subscriptions. If cheap subscriptions are not available I won’t buy the magazine. The subscription rates might increase, but don’t be fooled… off the shelf sales are falling, and there’s nothing the industry can do about it.
imho (in my [most] humble opinion) 
So, if many magazines are no longer considered to be worth the paper they are printed on, what does that say about their on-line competition? Can the bar be set any lower if everyone can now publish for free?
Or looking at it the other way – what does it take now to have a successful publication? ( print or electronic)
executive summary:
Paid online subscription model
accredited online journalism
only publish magazines that are attractive and have timeless appeal
Full Version:
Do you want to start a magazine? Unknown Philosophers quarterly?
I hear you saying that magazines, newspapers, and paid TV supports journalism, and the the free online model couldn’t support the kind of journalism we see there. In a way that’s right. No money from content means no staff dedicated to getting the story. All we are left with is public opinion. For that reason I would support a pay-for-service model on the internet. We already have a pay-for-service blogging model where you can do all you see here for free, but if you want to tinker with the templates, you have to pay an ongoing fee. Some magazines like MAKE and MONOCLE have teaser websites, but if you subscribe to the magazine, you get the whole thing online.
There is the argument that the printed word is more authoritative because publishers are scared to death of making a mistake, while online journalism can be corrected silently after the fact, and negative comments can be screened out. In fact I think that online journalism points out something that magazine editors have been able to hide for years… some journalism is extremely controversial and generates bags of mail, both positive and negative. As readers we don’t see the bags of mail unless the editor wants us to know that an opinion generated bags of mail. Online journalism can be more accurate than a big budget magazine because we are all co-editors when we leave our comments. we have the raw information at our fingertips, not the edited incomplete version in the magazine. We can ask questions and make suggestions.
In the journalistic world, online publications are not yet taken seriously. At a press conference the newspapers and major magazines like Time/Life will have press passes while smaller online new agencies like Ars Technica, TechCrunch and BoingBoing might have trouble getting one. This is changing fast. When the iPhone4 was leaked and Gizmodo paid to get a hold of it, the owner claimed journalistic rights when the reporter got arrested. She wasn’t successful, but that hints to the mindset of tech-news websites. They are journalists and are just as dedicated to getting the story as CNN would be. And the comments to this story demonstrated the value of user comments… we now know that journalists do not have the right to pay for stolen goods (or goods known not to belong to the seller) to get the story.
Until all trees are dead, and we develop new ways of placing news in front of the reader, there will always be room for magazines. I’m not saying that they will go away completely. In a way a magazine acts like an art gallery where artists compete to get on the cover. DWELL is a magazine that features attractive covers, and places modular design, pre-fab and living in small spaces in the limelight. I have a hard time thinking about how that magazine would be successful as an online-only magazine. Some issues have to be in front of readers in the store because they will not voluntarily seek out new ideas online. But when a magazine has to dedicate 31 out of 85 of its pages to advertising just to stay alive, like American Photo (March/April – thats 27 editorial pages per month), it might be time to stop publishing and go online.
As to what makes a successful magazine these days, I have a few ideas…
1) pick a medium and use it exclusively. Magazines are terrified of being left behind if they don’t go online. But if they’re available online, why print the paper copy. I bought paper copies so I could read them on the can or in the car while traveling. Now with the 3G iPad and similar devices, paper is obsolete. I still have a magazine rack in the bathroom for publications like Monocle and Geez, that don’t have a free online presence. I subscribe to MAKE, so I get the full version on an internet device.
2) Publish larger issues bi-montlhy or quarterly. Most of the cost is in distribution. Why not publish bi-monthly, but don’t make them thinner like American Photo did. That’s a double whammy against them. Fewer issues and less content is the same as more issues and [next to] no content.
3) Make them pieces of art, to be saved and used for years. Pick good paper, use glued up square binding so they sit on a shelf properly, and make the content ageless. Rags like People, Computer magazines that aren’t even current the day they ship, are not worth the paper they’re printed on, which leads to my fourth point…
4) Make sure the medium matches the content. The Internet is a more logical choice for most magazines out there… anything that goes stale in a few weeks, like decorating, computers, people, news… should not be in print form. Content that can be used for years, like (insert your hobby here) techniques, recipes, lifestyle, high quality art magazines will continue to sell. Wired qualifies as a news magazine. Geez is lifestyle. Save the trees for magazines that will be useful until the replacement tree grows up. Otherwise… go online.
5) lastly… drop the prices. If the industry really has 300 million subscriptions, prints 150 billion issues per month and half of them are unsold and end up in the landfill… drop the price already! If some magazines find ways to publish and distribute for FREE… the electronics magazine HERE’S HOW, local magazines like WESTERN LIVING, CIAO… and subscriptions are often half of cover price, then certainly the cover price could drop accordingly. Save the landfills, let us buy the magazines, then relieve our guilt by recycling them. The Great Canadian Superstore already susbsidises magazine sales by selling them at their cost… 15% off. That 15% should be coming from the publisher.
There is something to be said for the well placed magazine on the coffee table that cannot be replaced by a computer screen. That is undeniable. The trick is to figure out which magazines people like to display, and which they throw in the trash.