Magazines don't belong to the pixelheads or the pagesniffers. They belong to the audience
OLD-SCHOOL MAGAZINE PUBLISHING VALUES STILL MATTER. THE ONE CONSTANT IN MAGAZINE PUBLISHING – IN DIGITAL AND IN PRINT - IS TO TELL STORIES WELL, COMMUNICATE PASSION AND BUILD RELATIONSHIPS
PETER HOUSTON
Before the digerati reach for their pitchforks, let me clarify. What I mean is that there is no binary solution to the problems that currently plague magazine publishing.
No ‘On’ versus ‘Off’
No ‘Good’ versus ‘Evil’
No ‘Print’ versus ‘Digital’
There is only what the audience wants and, in case you didn’t know, the audience wants it all.
From smartphone apps and tablet magazines, through social media and the web on mobile and desktop, to mainstream and independent print, people are viewing more magazine content in more places than ever before.
Binary has a crucial role to play in the future of magazines - digital publishing is all about ones and zeros read and shared on digital devices. But magazines also have an analogue future, a paper-and-print future that will be as long and distinguished as its past.
Maybe this sounds like a ‘have-your-cake-and-eat-it’ position taken by a perplexed publishing professional hedging his bets until the future reveals itself properly. Possibly, but I prefer to think of it as a ‘best-of-all-worlds’ position that celebrates the amazingly varied publishing landscape we find ourselves in.
It’s also the position that has been enthusiastically embraced by magazine audiences who see no reason why they can’t read their magazines wherever and whenever they want.
OLD-SCHOOL MAGAZINE PUBLISHING VALUES STILL MATTER. THE ONE CONSTANT IN MAGAZINE PUBLISHING – IN DIGITAL AND IN PRINT - IS TO TELL STORIES WELL, COMMUNICATE PASSION AND BUILD RELATIONSHIPS
Searching for sustainability
Last autumn I published The Magazine Diaries, a little book about how magazine makers were feeling about their chosen profession. In the introduction I wrote of the magazine business…
“Everyone is frantically searching for a sustainable future, endlessly debating where our industry is headed, how best to make money, how best to save money, what new platform will or won’t work”.
The next 60 or so pages of The Magazine Diaries collected the thoughts of 100 publishing professionals, all submitting 100 words on how it made them feel to be working through the biggest disruption in publishing history. Each entry is a little different, from the naively optimistic to the cynically pessimistic. A few bemoaned the industry’s impending doom, but many took the chance to write their own love letter to magazines and the skills needed to make them.