Magazines = Luxury item?
Filed in Photo business - May 6, 2008You may have already seen this as a couple of sites are carrying it (original source on the web), but I think it is significant enough to warrant repeating.
I think we need to change our philosophy of what a magazine is. We are no longer a cheap means of dispensing information, and that’s what we were until the Internet came along. Now we are an inefficient and expensive means of distributing information. … We need to reinvent ourselves as a luxury item that people want and are willing to pay for. And until we change our own image of who we are, we’re going to find out that our vendors are gong to change it for us. Because, right now, postage is a premium. Paper is a premium. Soon printing will be a premium. How long can we buy at a premium and sell at a discount? We can’t.
It has been retyped (complete with typo) from a magazine called ‘Publishing Executive‘.
I’d add to the list that paper magazines are also expensive to dispose of, both in real terms (fuel, landfill etc) and also in terms of the financial charges that pay as you throw schemes are experimenting with.
If the product changes then the distribution channel must also change. Newsagents are not, on the whole, places that one associates with luxury items.
There are luxury photo magazines around already (Lenswork, Ag), and I’ve been interested to see how well they appear to be doing in comparison with the general news one hears about magazines and newspapers.
I don’t think that luxury is the only viable model for the magazine industry. Another one is the ‘joining’ or club model where you create some feeling of insider-dom. Although I can see this working in other fields, I don’t know of a mainstream photo title that has managed to pull it off. Maybe there is one in another country.
JPG is one example that seems kind clubby. It’s successful enough to be sold in my local outlet of the big-parking-lot-bookstore.
May 6, 2008 @ 8:07 pm
JPG would be the example that jumped to my mind too, even before reading matt’s comment. I see it in Borders and Barnes and Noble over here.
It started out as a $15 per issue Lulu.com custom publication.
May 6, 2008 @ 10:33 pm
Bill Pierce wrote something related to this in this months Digital Journalist, in case you haven’t already read it:
http://www.digitaljournalist.org/issue0805/nuts-and-bolts.html
May 7, 2008 @ 2:03 am
Sam,
For some reason digitaljournalist has fallen off my reading list. Thanks for the reminder. I’ve missed a few BP columns it seems.
Gordon/Matt,
I saw issue one of JPG and wasn’t greatly impressed. But then it was issue one. I wrote about it, but it is pretty unfindable. ‘jpg’ as a search term is as close to useless at it gets. I’d forgotten about it.
May 7, 2008 @ 7:52 am
The subheading/extract on Bill Pierce’s article sums up 95% of the photo mag market. I’m sure editors realise that the Internet is a much better source of the same material, but they seem determined to go down with the ship rather than change course. Once readers realise that the sole aim of the magazine is simply to tout the goods offered by their advertisers, the game is up (because obviously, to get that “Hollywood look” or “improve your photography”, you’re going to need a new software package/filter/lens/camera like the ones shown to the left of the relevant article).
On the other hand, at a time of economic depression, is it really wise to market your product as a “luxury item”?
May 7, 2008 @ 8:37 am
Ade,
I think that the key phrase was ‘want and are willing to pay for’ :-)
I would imagine it would be a very small market – regardless of any short term economic position. The question for EMAP and the like is ’small market or no market?’. It may, in fact, be a perfect sensible thing to go on running current titles into the ground to the point where they stop generating cash and then walk away. I mean, it would be horrid to work there, but it might make sense if you were the owner.
May 7, 2008 @ 8:53 am