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When The Presses Stop…
by Paul McGoldrick
The golden days of print are in great danger.
In these days of short attention spans, the written word in book form still seems to be a stable proposition. So far, at least, despite the electronic devices for reading book content without buying a spine. Not so with newspapers and magazines.
Newspapers are having the worst time of it with the bigger ones having the biggest problems. When The Chicago Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The New York Times are all apparently in big trouble, you have to wonder out loud, “What the heck did they think was going to happen?”
I would have said that their behavior is like a bunch of lemmings throwing themselves off a cliff in a mass suicide, but that would be unfair to lemmings who do not, in fact, behave in that manner. So maybe a more suitable new description of mass suicide could be that they are "acting like a lot of print newspapers who had at least ten years to think through their impending doom."
Smaller newspapers, even those that are group owned, do not seem to have the same massive problems – yet. But, instead, they seem totally devoid of content. Our local newspaper, The Times-Colonist, is 90% fluff with content that could be pulled from the wires by a single junior staffer. It is just how local radio was when the announcer, on the hour, would pull a few stories from the telex machine in order to offer a so-called news service on the cheap. Look where those stations went…
What can the newspapers do about the hole that they have dug for themselves? It is a huge question and I am not even sure that there is an answer anymore. As soon as they started posting their whole content on the web they were doomed as print publications. Before they made that leap of “faith” they should have thought it all out – the implications of where the new information age was going to take them. But they didn’t think about it, or didn’t want to think about it – next guy’s problem, right?
Combine the reproduction of content on the web with a dying advertising base and you obviously bring on your own demise. Restrict your content on the web by forcing subscriptions and the readers will go elsewhere. Put barriers in place – such as requiring registration, like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal do – then all you get is a rotten database with a good selection of Disney characters, Hollywood stars and sporting legends' names. And a decent search engine just blows right through such restrictions. No that blowing through doesn’t allow you to read the whole newspaper, but it does let you get at the stories you are really interested in.
Back when they were deciding to repeat their content on line, the newspapers should have said to themselves that, yes, the web was a necessary evil in their print business, and concluded that apart from the general news stories they should keep the intensive, expensive, material – the investigative journalism, the special travel, fashion, entertainment, etc sections – only in print, offering real value for a paid subscription. That approach may not have lasted forever, either, but it would have bought a few more years.
Too late. The genie is in full flight.
The same is true of trade magazines; look at any of them compared to ten years ago and you will see the obvious quite clearly. Many fewer pages, many fewer staff members (and less qualified). And a lot more pressure on readers to take the online versions so that the print runs can be brought down to less cost prohibitive levels. But those print versions will go away, without any doubt.
We already believed that when we started the then analogZONE in 2001 (before we morphed into EN-Genius). There was no question of starting a print publication. But now, in 2009, one of the major players in our industry is actually poised to launch several new magazine titles. Whether they will ever get past the dummy stage (a demonstration copy of a magazine that sales reps can show to potential advertisers) is highly questionable, and one title at least would seriously impact the revenue stream of another, from the same stable, that is already in deep trouble of its own.
What about the glossy magazines – the specialist ones for health, women, travel, etc – are they also going to be in trouble? At this stage of the game, probably not. People still want to read such material on trains and planes, and while waiting for trains and planes: and to show off on the coffee table. But the magazines are following the foolishness of the newspapers by publishing everything on line.
Even worse, some of them are giving the web editions the scoops…
Take the August 2009 issue of Vanity Fair. It has already been published on line and the most-read feature is undoubtedly going to be the quite wonderfully researched Todd S Purdum political story on Sarah Palin, "It Came from Wasilla" (ouch on the “It!”), an absolutely steamy set of revelations about the woman and her quest for greatness, now reduced to help husband Todd “slaying salmon.” (Wouldn’t most people say “slaughtering"? Or, you know, "catching"?) Anyway, Vanity Fair got not a penny from me nor from the hundreds of thousands of other people who downloaded that feature. Am I waiting for the August issue to hit the shelves of my local bookstore? No, of course I’m not. How can you hope to survive over the long term with that business approach?
Vanity Fair, born in 1860, is one of The Condé Nast Publications, a family with about twenty-five titles that include the likes of Bon Appétit, The New Yorker, Vogue, GQ, Condé Nast Traveler, etc, titles that are not going away tomorrow. But they better start thinking about how to protect themselves today, because they don’t have ten years to make the same mistakes…
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