I’m getting shit for this post no matter what. By insinuating business magazines are better off than papers when I currently write a column for BusinessWeek people will call me biased. (As Arrington would say, “consider that your disclosure.”) Likewise, I have a lot of friends at all three publications who probably won’t appreciate what I have to say, because it’s not in their economic interest.
But Arrington keeps berating me to write a post today, so here goes.
24/7 Wall Street did a post the other day saying the sun was setting on Fortune, Forbes and BusinessWeek, and its facts about the finances of these publications are sad and mostly indisputable. Indeed, cutting frequency and staff are near certainties for at least BusinessWeek and Fortune. But I don’t agree that those realities mean the magazines can no longer afford quality, edited, long-form investigative stories.
There’s an obvious option for these magazines, and I’m surprised more people aren’t talking about it: Ruthlessly collapse the print and online staffs, run everything online as soon as they write it, except one or two cover-length, long-form glossy pieces. Those will anchor the print issue, rounded out by the best stories from online. Then cut the money spent on trying to court new subscribers, shifting the entire marketing budget to promote the Web or real-life conferences and branded events. You could even use reader comments to flesh the online pieces out more for the print edition, driving more engagement in both the print and online versions. Voila! One publication, not two pretending to be one. And guess what? One publication is a hell of a lot cheaper, even if it’s printed on dead trees.
Under this system, you still have the enterprise articles, like the Fortune piece 24/7 cites about Bernie Madoff. You just focus and only do one or two of them an issue, keeping 99.9% of your staff focused on writing stellar daily online content. And you optimize your staff to be scrappier, more productive and adapt from an old way of doing journalism, to something closer to blogging. People who can’t or refuse to adapt won’t have jobs. That may sound cruel but if the magazines themselves don’t adapt, no one there will.
This plan would save a ton of money. That’s right: They can save tons of money and still print a publication. Big national magazines have different economics than a metro daily paper. In some cases the biggest cost is a bloated staff, in others a highly-paid staff with generous corporate credit lines. Remember, most of these staffers were hired during better times and while layoffs have been frequent, they haven’t been as far reaching as they probably should have been. With all due respect to 24/7 Wall Street, the average compensation package at one of these three publications isn’t $60,000 unless you got hired out of school in the last few years. Think higher. Much higher.
Now a lot of these publications will tell you they’re all one staff now. But go through the staff boxes and see how many of those names blog, write breaking news online or write anything online with any frequency. Hint: If the question “Is this for print or online?” keeps coming up in your organization, you’re doing it wrong. Aside from one investigative piece per issue, there shouldn’t be a difference between the two. As a practical matter, it’s not that different from all of the magazine copy running online after the fact. But if you think about it, that policy elevates the magazine above online. It should be reversed.
Why not go the route of closing print completely and going online? First off, you’d kill the print ad revenue stream which is still the bulk of these magazines’ business. But it also abandons the magazines’ competitive advantage. For a lot of people magazines are different from newspapers. They’re printed on nice paper with glossy, glitzy photo shoots and painstaking graphic design for a reason. People in them like putting them on their coffee table—or better yet, framing them. Don’t underestimate the power reporters working on a cover have to convince a reluctant CEO to talk to them or give them exclusives. It may be one of the few advantages they’ve got over increasingly influential blogs. Similarly, there’s still a huge swath of readers who like flipping through a hard copy of BusinessWeek or Fortune on the plane, or even on a Sunday afternoon. The business world isn’t all tech, after all. And as a reporter, I have to be honest. There’s nothing quite like seeing your article printed in a glossy magazine. That can be a valuable retention and recruiting tool when used well. As can the implicit promise that the publication still values long-form, investigative reporting that has some shelf life to it.
It’s not that big, glossy, deeply-reported magazine stories are better than blogs. But they are a different way to tell certain important, complex stories, the same way a book is a different way to tell a story than an article. Not all news needs that kind of methodical, intensely-edited and graphic designed treatment, but I’d argue one or two per month do. And if newspapers keep crumbling, magazines are going to be the only places left that know how to do it.
Personally I think there will always be a need for printed magazines and books. At least as long as my generation lives there will be an inherent status and ‘feel’ to printed material.
That said, printed general news and gossip mags will die a fiery death if anything in life is fair. Who wants to show off that they read the enquirer or Hello anyway?
Daniel
I don’t know if I agree with you totally Daniel when you say that there will always be a need for printed books and magazines. I understand the need to “feel” the paper in your hands and have a pen in the other but is that because we were indoctrinated into using the pen and paper?
What if we had grown up using an electronic tablet to read and write on? I imagine we would feel the opposite. Do you not think so?
I cannot imagine such a possibility. Stop going outside because for what? waste of time travelling and you can get robbed.
Sit down in front of TV or go thorugh flicker. Those will be a substitutes for a sunday walk.
There will always be a need to touch paper, and good quality print wont replace monitor, as even your eyes obviously hurt less.
However, personally I think that junk-newspaper and junk-advertise “magazines” I got my mailbox filled in with every couple days should be literally banned!
Yet another proclamation of the paperless society that was supposed to come in … 1960? 1970? 1980? 1990? 2000?
This is getting old.
There is more money in advertising in magazines than online. Most people completely ignore online advertising and it is very ineffective. But if a magazine advertisement is done correctly, it will have a very good marketing effect. Besides, if advertisers want people to buy real things with real money, looking through a physical magazine will have a more powerful effect of connecting the potential customer to the brand. Online is just visual senses, but magazines also appeal to the sense of touch and ownership. There will always be a need for business cards, catalogs, postcard flyers, and its about good graphic art as well. We can’t all live virtually and be jacked to computer servers like in the matrix. What happens when your laptop battery on the beach dies. For the rich, a vacation and enjoying luxury is about stepping away from work and relaxing. This includes books, and viewing artwork. Besides books, magazines, and artwork live forever. Bibles are hundreds of years old, but how long will an online blog entry last, maybe twenty years at most on a server? There is still value in creating timeless writings.
Their challenge has been in not embracing the social media fully. Most of their writers (even their best bloggers) haven’t engaged their readers in online conversations for several reasons, one of which is the pressures to jump on the next story. They sort of needed to do what Scoble did at FC,- be out there constantly.
The media space is definitely being re-configured.
Separating deep investigative journalism (a la 60 mins) from online news and issues discussions makes a lot of sense.
I wouldn’t call 60 min “deep investigative journalism”.
LOL. But seriously Sarah, can’t you write a single post without going on and on about yourself. This obsession renders your writing unbearably unreadable. You should get a psyc evaluation, seriously.
I don’t really see it as a magazines versus newspaper thing, I guess. Newspapers seems to be crumbling for various reasons, but I’d be surprised if we actually found ourselves without three or four large national dailies (NYT, WSJ etc) while local publications that use to try and do national and international coverage might roll back to state and local coverage on a weekly or several-times-per-week basis. I think people do want that local coverage, and they do want it in newspapers.
But I don’t see people thinking “Hmm, should I read either the Los Angeles Times or Fortune today?” Completely different audiences and news needs, in many cases.
Bottom line, neither newspapers or magazines should be doing the “should this go print or online” mentality. They should be figuring out how to make print and online both generate revenue to remain profitable businesses. Honestly, some blogs probably are missing a step by not doing print options. Crass, but it’s hard to read a blog in the bathroom (ooh).
And no, I don’t think magazines have some type of better need or mechanism to tell a deep story over newspapers. But that’s my newspaper background coming out against your magazine one. The fact is, there are plenty of local and state stories that need deep-dive journalism that national magazines would never touch.
I don’t care where the good journalism comes from and where it’s published. Blogs, papers, magazines, whatever. What I remain annoyed about is how many in the print world continue to ramp up the rhetoric about how their demise is all down to Google, rather than them simply not getting the digital age and getting on with adjusting to it.
I agree totally with you on that last paragraph. I’m sick of whining newspapers execs and journalists that didn’t act sooner to adopt Web publishing and welcome the new medium. Moreover I’m tired of them constantly claiming to be held to a higher standard of writing when newspapers and their writers consistently pump out biased content that’s inline with their owner’s political viewpoint/agenda. It’s almost near impossible these days to find a news source that doesn’t doesn’t do this and merely delivers the facts to its audience to let them decide for themselves.
I receive the 3 magazines mentioned. And, have been a subscriber for many years because of my corporate background.
I suffer from information overload because of online sites like TC.
I feel guilty everytime I throw the magazines into the recycle bin without opening them.
Then, I think about the advertisers that thought I looked at their ads.
The one thing I keep noticing – they are less and less pages.
information is about timeliness and quality, not platform
digital trumps paper every time
these magazines have lost their integrity and turned more gossipy over time
so that’s that
Can’t we let Forbes die? Isn’t it enough that they’re the US Weekly of financial news?
The endless ‘famous’ lists, the invasive reports into personal wealth & the overall breathless reporting style.
It’s content’s performance is matched only by it’s web presence; welcome screens, auto-playing video ads on the front page, the thin distinction between Forbes’ content & it’s ads.
If that not enough, it’s part owned by Bono…
I have been huge fan of all these for decades and also Inc. and Fast Company. I hope none “fade away” but evolution continues and some may not survive. Legacy and fixed costs contribute push to online only. Like example in movie Other People’s Money “the last buggy whip maker made the best damn buggy whip you ever saw”. . . .
I believe there will be a place for great magazines like Forbes, just not as many spots to go around.
On the other hand, I doubt Time and US News will be around for too much longer.
US News will still be around for quite some time because they’re real business isn’t news, it’s rankings! They combined their print staff and online team into one unit seperated by content channels 3 years ago and they’re still chopping jobs -> http://www.medi...ews__115545.asp
Time and Newsweek are definitely in trouble. What do they have to fall back on?
I agree, but why the need for a printed edition of the rankings?
Currently it’s the only way to see the results from past rankings. Their site doesn’t offer this data from say 2 years ago. I hear they are working on that though.
Using an expletive in your lede doesn’t make you edgy or authentic.
You should wear boxer shorts instead of budgie smugglers, you’d relax more.
I prefer boxer briefs – they provide the proper balance for both relaxation and productivity.
A few things, in rambling order:
“Everyone” claims to bemoan the seemingly inevitable death of print “journalism” (no offense), but “no one” is really willing to pony up for it. If the managers of these businesses can’t make the difficult choices to adapt their business models to an ever-changing world, then frankly they, much like GM, don’t deserve to continue in their current form.
You kind of dance around at least two semi-conflicting perspectives; On one hand, you make the obvious conclusion that online is a perfectly fine medium for a virtually every type of writing, from short & sweet blog posts to longer-form, “traditional” type stuff. On the other hand, especially towards the end you seem to revert back to the “classic” PoV harbored by many more traditional media types, that the “real” reporting and journalism should be relegated to paper.
Are you making the argument that the highest-quality (and thus capable of demanding the highest-price ads) should be put in print, because the ad revenue and sales price of the mag more-than offset the cost of printing/distribution/etc, I’m not quite sure why you’d take that view.
Love the post though, media needs to suck it the f*ck up and deal with reality already, sheesh, its been 10 (15 really) + years since this whole interweb thing started to catch-on…
Frankly, I think publications need to join the 21st century. Why not make content available for a monthly subscription rate online and get rid of the paper magazines, journals, and periodicals? If some die-hard reader still needs their paper magazines, then charge them a premium for a hard copy.
Paper printing is a huge cost to the periodical industry. Magazine owners should switch to online subscriptions. There are several successful models magazine and print publication owners can use to generate healthy revenues. Perhaps they are trying to squeeze too much money from their subscribers in this harsh economic climate. Why not simply provide online subscriptions at a rate comparable to monthly printed publication fee? I am certain other publications are having great success with this model.
While I prefer to read from books and magazines the old fashion way, the simple truth is that printed publications are dying. Perhaps electronic paper will help to carry the old paper dinosaurs into the modern age. Certainly Amazon is placing a lot of faith on the Kindle devices. But all these things rely on one key factor, good content.
Well-gathered information is worth its weight in gold. These publication industries have a world of journalistic talent who probably already send submissions to the publishers electronically anyway. Why not revolutionize the delivery method by embracing the web and making their online content so desirable that people would happily pay the price of an annual subscription to have access to it.
“If some die-hard reader still needs their paper magazines, then charge them a premium for a hard copy.”
Death. In practice, these “die harders” will just cancel. And poof, there goes your subscriber base and advertisers.
“Magazine owners should switch to online subscriptions.”
Magazine owners can’t yet because too many free competitors exist right now. Last man standing after the print media holocaust is over will get to begin charging.
However your last paragraphs are right on point.
I have a friend who operates an online community that people pay subscriptions to be members of, and they pay well. If you have good content the subscribers will come. If you have great content you can set your prices pretty high.
Newspapers and magazines are fading away. Yet I never hesitate to pick up a ‘Wired’ magazine when I get the chance. But at $5.00 a copy the data is outdated by the time my subscription arrives. ‘Wired’ supplements their subscribers with online updates.
Perhaps ‘Forbes’, ‘Fortune’, and ‘BusinessWeek’ should change the nature of their content to attract online readers. ‘The Economist’ does a great job supplying online content to subscribers. ‘The Economist’ has balanced their printed material with their digital content because they have credible journalistic skills, as do the previously mentioned publications. However, ‘The Economist’ has nurtured their subscriber base by offering academic subscriptions as well as business and personal subscriptions.
Many publishers have crossed over. Yet some still cater solely to their aging customer base, who do not embrace reading publications on the Internet like younger people do. I have not picked up a ‘BusinessWeek’ since I left my parents house in 1981, except for the few times at the doctor’s office when I was bored to tears.
Oh, and I would like to add that I have been watching some of my favorite shows on Hulu that has ads placed throughout the broadcasts. I do not feel inconvenienced with advertising. In fact, I am more likely to purchase products from online ads then I am with magazine ads. These people will not lose advertising revenue; they can have better revenue if they use statistics to present ads that would interest their viewers and subscribers.
I think one of the things I like best about online ads is that I have not seen any crappy ads for a long time. Sure, you get the idiotic “singles” ads if you say you are single in your membership; however, for the most part, I see ads that contain content that interests me. Don’t you log online metrics?
If someone wants a print copy let them download a printable pdf. I doubt people would cancel a subscription if that were an option.
I agree Joe.
I don’t know about you, but I still have a hard time balancing a netbook on my lap in the shitter.
Print magazines will always have their place.
Well, I have held my laptop or a tablet PC when indisposed otherwise. But I do still read books while visiting the throne room.
Well said. I don’t think your tribe will be upset by this post. You didn’t reveal too much.
For a writer, it’s indeed all about the location of that byline. Sure, you can break it down by old school print vs. new school digital. But it seems more than ever today, across all sectors, messengers of news need to become double threats (writing and broadcast).
Used to be one majored in journalism or you majored in broadcast. Ever since the web, it seems the lines are getting really blurry (i.e. broadcasters more frequently using spell check and writers, well, spending more on their hair?
No one mentioned this but I read an article about a month back about how they were going to come out with a kindle-like book reader for magazines. If they were able to create something like this then in theory it should be able to completely reallign the entire system and still keep it running effectively. That way consumers still get solid, well-written articles and magazines still get their subscribers and their advertisers. I hope that this will be the next step in the form of magazines, because it would really suck if magazines and newspapers died out and all we had left was blogs and online news.
You’re quite bad at writing intro’s, Sarah… you should look into that.
Furthermore, a great article!
The bottom line?
These magazines can’t go 100% on-line because they can’t get the same kind of ad revenue on-line as they can with print to support the bloated salary over-head? Why is that?
Surely it would actually serve these magazines better to beef up their on-line ad sales efforts… after-all, the closure of the print edition is INEVITABLE… it’s only a question of when not if.
If their on-line ad revenue isn’t cutting it, why is that? Do something different, innovate. I think the long-form cover stories would be better done as 60 min style TV stories… and basically that is where the net ad revenue is headed.. on-line video.
Sure the costs of setting up for a new style of video reporting my be steep, and it’s a culture change that may require they cut a lot of dead wood, but best to do it while they still have income to spare. Anything less than putting all efforts into going on-line full time is just avoiding the inevitable!
Paul is right about the demise of advertising – both online and in print – for news magazines. It’s difficult for a traditional media company, even after making substantial changes, to compete with blogs like TC for cost efficiency and to consistently bring in high value online ads. I have, unfortunately, intimate knowledge of this. The numbers simply don’t support long form content, or even blogs for that matter. How many blogs actually make good money… really?
I disagree with Paul that video format and ads are a savior. They’re nice and sexy, sure. But at the end of the day, advertisers are looking for more targeted audiences than most news magazines offer. Video doesn’t solve that. If I’m selling enterprise servers, I want to advertise in media that people who buy servers consume. The Internet makes this easy and gives me a high return. So why would I advertise in a print or online news magazine? Who on earth would, given better options?
Wait, where is the link to your latest book?
After reading it, I feel somewhat guilty since the piece echoes a lot of what I’ve been talking with my media friends. Myself, I’m a programmer. Sorry for the comment.
pls. get Sarah Lacy OFF Techcrunch.
Thanks
I couldn’t agree more. Apparently Arrington doesn’t care that his site has lost its credibility & is pissing readers off by exposing them to her self-indulgent drivel on a regular basis.
Not sure why Sarah is writing articles on TC either … boring narcissistic crap every time …
Dude, where have you been? People have been complaining about TC losing its credibility since 2006, even back before all the commenters were spammy shitheads and clueless losers. If you don’t like SL’s articles, then don’t read them and shut the fuck up.
I like to give Sarah shit for her writing, and god knows she deserves it, but this was a well thought out piece. She has the experience in both of these industries, and laid out a cogent idea and business model. Give her credit jerks.
Sarah,
I say this with 100% no bullshit and as a newspaper man of eight years: This is the best TechCrunch post I have ever read.
Wow, what a terrible post. Are you a grammar school student? Does using the word “shit” make you really cool like on HBO?
Sarah why the hell don’t these guys leverage their connections to get their interviews and reports in online video, tools, charts and graphs that readers would go online to view? The WSJ is the only company that consistently is adding quick format content on their site. I can’t remember watching a video on these sites in the last 3 years!
I don’t think these 3 ones can survival as well. Put their businss online, may be works. It’s sure be painful to the traditional media. Here are ‘Business Valuation Model Excel’ software. Just try. Maybe do you good personally.
http://www.111d...odel-excel.html
Sarah and Michael:
You need to both see State of Play to better understand the difference between online, print and the blogosphere. All have a role to play, but the blogger and online editions, never take the time to do the quality reporting that breaks the big story. You news cycle for online and the blogs is too short, too sloppy and doesn’t check the facts. Unfortunately, I have seen TC print stuff without the quality of sourcing print journalist do — but then again that may not be your shtick! Online only will do the print, what cable news did to quality broadcast programming and leave the important stories untold.
Sarah,
Please explain to TW why this is a viable option for Business 2.0. I really miss that magazine and although there were issues that completely sucked for the most part I thought that it was the best option for a good print publication that brought stories of interest to “this demographic” (nerds). Why did they kill it off completely, why not at least keep online. Someone buy it out from TW and resuscitate it.
Hmmm, a Lacy piece that actually feels thoughtful? It’s smart, practical and only minimally self-referential or artificially naughty. Encouraging.
Also, check the referenced 24/7 post, where the only thing we learn is that McIntyre has given up fighting his addiction to the passive voice, a revealing indicator of purely binary thinking. See if you can read the whole thing without feeling like you’re somehow getting strangled by a weakling.
I think the best solution yet to be offered for saving newspapers can apply to these and other magazines too: higher quality and less frequent issues. Explained thoroughly at http://borgger....ival_QuickGuide
Sarah –
This is a great, well thought out piece. I completely agree with you about the need for these magazines –
I’ve run a HR tech company for four years. I’m in my early 20s, and read 2-3 newspapers (old style – on paper) per day and BusinessWeek/Forbes/Economist (print edition) weekly. I don’t really care if the articles get digged. Call it OCD but nothing beats reading hard copies and it’s tough to put down once you open them.
My company was written about on ForbesOnline – a relatively long piece – it wasn’t in the print version. They need to consolidate editions and your ideas are spot on. Each organization needs to reduce costs, salaries, scope and most importantly evolve but if we lose the print edition the business world would be much worse off.
Keep up the good work. Just figure out a way to replicate yourself 100 times and each publication would be alright.
I heard a rumor that Sarah is going to use “shit” twice in her next article.
I hope so!
You can’t get rid of print media . no matter how many advocates are out there.
Just take case of kindle . Not everyone is going to buy it (due to financial or whatever reasons) and you can’t just set up the whole business model around it .
The most pathetic part is that It has not hit th mainstream yet and DRM advocates have already set up there camp.
Now take case of newspaper . Ok…you can go and read various blogs out there.Read news about whatever you like and affects you, but in the end if you’ll see is this that the content of newspaper is so broad that it can relate to different sections and segments anytime and that in itself is a market.
I never understood why papers and magazines created separate staff for online and print and that they are still doing it. Who was the first moron to think that was a wise thing to do?
The issues in print media have got nothing to do with the business model – and nothing directly to do with the web or digital media – this isssue is an irrational / human problem which conventional thinking won’t fix.
The problem is we don’t believe or trust our newspapers anymore – and a tipping point has been reached. It’s the same reason why Mysapce is dying – and why every perky digital entity absorbed into a conglomerates sweaty hand will turn to ashes.
Forget kindle, forget charging for content, forget 100% real time news – all irrelevant.
Sack everyone except your commissioning editors – and print the best blogs – on demand.
I think in general, magazines pay closer attention to colour. Certainly the paper quality and print capabilities allow for greater use of colour, but it seems like the colour palette extends beyond the typical graphical elements found in a newspaper and into the photos. I suppose that’s a bit of a generalization and some more sophisticated newspapers do this as well, but overall I think colour plays a more important role in magazine design.
First off, very provocative and interesting article. When it comes to Tech Crunch (like many other blogs) the more interesting posts are compelling enough to get readers to provide significant feedback and I think that is the case here. It is also a very timely, hot button topic.
Point 1. I used to buy alot of the the old print rags during the runnup to the internet bubble. I read Business 2.0, The Industry Standard and Fast Company religiously. In fact, I have a bunch of them sitting in a box somewhere in my garage. The point is, when I try and dig around for an old article about a company that had some crazy (good) idea that was way ahead of its time, I generally have a hard time locating it because there is no way to recall exactly which issue it was run in. Or, it was a story in one of the mags a friend copped or got tossed when I moved, etc. So basically many of the articles and info has been lost over time.
That is a problem.
By going completely digital with an online version of your publication, management can invest in smart, forward thinking tools like providing your readers with a good archival search method and making it easy for me to gain access to all of the well written content in any digital form I wish (mobile, web, IPTV, etc) whenever I choose, in whatever format I need. It is all about having access to your entire library of content instantly accessible at my fingertips with a few clicks. That’s powerful AND is an incentive for me to pony up a micro-payment or two.
Point 2. Print cannot incorporate all of the bells and whistles I have come to expect while using the web. And while I hate to admit it, there is NOTHING like actually watching a well edited online video on a topic I’m interested in. Everybody reads and sifts through a ton of emails, texts, articles and other stuff online everyday. It takes time and energy and is a lean forward activity online. Online video is a nice “lean back” break that is often very compelling and informative if done well. By providing me with a solid 4-5 minute online video to coincide with one of the longer, more in depth stories, you are closer to opening my wallet, in fact I would expect quality video if I was going to pay for a subscription.
Cut some of the old fat and get a couple of good videographers, an excellent video editor and someone who is good at interviewing people on camera. Send these staff members on all of the interviews you do for your top stories. Also, archive these videos for your subscribers and make the video library available to television news agencies to gain access to later when one of the companies invents something that changes the world or the CEO gets caught in bed with Brittany Spears a year after your recorded interview. Build the library, license everything you can. Video is a valuable asset, adds invaluable dimension to a print story and is a critical component if you are going to charge subscriptions online (and that is the only way i think the old magazines will survive).
Just some thoughts…
oh god… longest piece of crap post ever written
The logic still makes no sense in terms of real economics. Online sites — even the best — bring in roughly $1 per month per regular visitor. Print publications have traditional brought in $8 or so per visitor. So unless you can figure out how to reduce the cost structure 7/8 and still put out a magazine, you are out of luck. Oh, unless you want to turn BW or Fortune into TechCrunch — and fire 7/8 of the staff. Which wouldn’t be saving the magazine — it would be turning them into blogs. Give us some numbers behind your assertions here, please. Thanks!
of course you need to turn them into blogs!!
in blogging you have a human, flexible, sucessful business model – why in god’s name would you want to try and reinvent the wheel?
“an unsolvable problem isn’t a problem – its reality”
what is the fascination with blogs in these comments? how do you plan to make money? i agree, the numbers don’t add up
blimey – this isn’t rocket science – has the entire business model of web 3.0 passed everyone by?
of course blogs themselves don’t make money (and probably won’t for a few more years) – but you’ll eventually leverage the exposure and data – U2 make 10% of their income from music sales – they don’t give a fig if people download their album – newspapers will eventually follow exactly the same model
bear in mind this is a global enterprise as well – so times all numbers by 200
I haven’t worked out what 25% of the consulting, public speaking, t-shirts, semantic web apps and myriad other fees – thousands of bloggers will create (with 0 overhead) – but it’s a lot
Nice post. Very interesting points.
Nothing discussed here, respectfully, is a new or original idea. Print v. digital content has been debated at length for ages.
What I did find compelling is the question of intangible v. tangible. Tangible will always make a compelling argument. The question is what form will “print” take in the future. Is digital paper, for example, the “two birds” answer.
I love the internet. I live on the internet. I make my living because of the internet. But I still like picking up a copy of business week and forbes from time to time, in my hands, sitting on an airplane, on the sofa or on the can. And I don’t mind paying a couple of bucks for that, just to get away from my computer once in a while.
Like all journalists you are forgetting the issue here – ad revenue. The way the newspapers and magazines do advertising online is wrong. They need to try to sell smaller banner and keyword text ads page by page for companies that match the context of the content on that page. Relying on Google and other ad agencies will not bring enough money to these online properties. Every page on a site indexed by search engines have a separate value depending on the page rank, number of monthly visits and link backs. You need to be able to value each page and sell ads on a permanent monthly fee basis on each one of these pages. Search engines may not like them but that is not your concern. Unless every page is monetized separately you will not survive.
Why not offer a bargain priced Kindle and put all the newspapers and mags on Kindle. There could be a newspaper and magazine consortium offering cheap Kindles plus a monthly subscription fee, so they are making money on the downloads each month. Given enough mass, Kindle might become affordable.
I would also purchase “Tech Crunch” magazine, every time i am at the airport.
Do you really need to start your article with a curse word? I mean seriously folks… where’s the professionalism?
The key is that Print or Online is just the media. The content is what is important. The newspapers and magazines seem to forget that.
Media mogul Rupert Murdoch says “the current days of the Internet will soon be over” referencing the fact that corporate media websites cannot continue to survive under their current failing business model. Murdoch believes newspapers, magazines and other corporate publishers will have no other choice than to charge subscriptions going forward. He also specifically referenced the 360,000 people who downloaded the WSJ Apple application as targets for fee/subscriptions. Murdoch is dead serious as News Corp took a beating with a 47% slice off last quarters profits. They are definitely circling the wagons, as I would imagine many other big publishers are.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, if that is the case, then corporate media publishers better get their shit together and provide value added services such as advanced search and discovery and also migrate portions of their online publishing to online video content…ASAP .
Whether or not Murdoch is totally off base or spot on, there is no question that “the times, they are a changin’.
Remember the copy of USA Today that updated itself in “Minority Report”? A magazine version of that should help everyone’s business models. Just make sure it translates Mandarin and works underwater; in a few decades, we’ll need those features.
Om Malik wrote an report recently on the state of color e-books. He found “a group of researchers at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio came up with a new technology that allows them to re-create the brightness and color capabilities of paper-based media.” Those researchers claim they can “mimic the experience of glossy magazines.” http://www.tech...-with-nextstop/
Pasted wrong link to Om’s article. It’s here: http://gigaom.c...make-it-happen/
I very much disagree. These business magazines bring tremendous value to business people. They do in-depth research, they analyze data, and they write meaningful and interesting articles that give us insights and perspective.
And by the way, doing this is not easy – “bloggers” do not do this type of work. They typically post opinions (like the one above), which are only a very small percentage of what magazines do.
As for the business model, I agree with Murdoch. It’s pretty silly to give your content away and “hope” to make money through advertising (by the way, giving away 70% of the revenue to Google in the process). I think well run magazines with good content can and should charge for it, and not get sucked into the “everything is free” approach.
As a business reader, I am very happy to pay for great content (I’m reading it for business value, not entertainment). The “glossy news” page which the writer above refers to is what I’d call “worthless news.” I can find that in my local newspaper, on CNN, or anywhere else – and if you think you’re going to make money selling Ads by syndicating this type of content, you are in a different business model – one driven by eyeballs. These “aggregating” portals (Guy Kawasaki for example) are going to be competing with thousands of other “Rss readers” out there, and that is a business model driven by technology, not really content.
Its a tough transition, but I do believe the ultimately “good content” will be worth paying for, and this is where these companies should go.
I think that both the newspaper and magazine businesses are dying.
The only reason I get Fortune is because they offered it to me at $9.95 a year and in a week moment I subscribed.
I read the Bernie Madoff story online before ever receiving the magazine. IMHO Forbes will be the only one of the three that survives.