In March 2009 Samir “Mr. Magazine” Husni wrote a guest column for Publishing Executive entitled “It’s the Publishing Model—Not Print—That’s Dead.”
He talks about how print undergoes a natural cycle of life and death and how other innovations: television, radio etc. have never completely usurped print. Television took away advertisers, and some print publications died, but the real problem with print is a business model that relies heavily on advertising in the first place.
If content is king, let the people pay for it. Basically, that’s what we’re getting at it. And nay-sayers, Husni politely directs to Consumer Reports (offers limited free access and a three-tier subscription option: $5.95 monthly, $26 annually or $19 with magazine subscription), Highlights for Children (apart from selling merchandise, I’m not seeing what’s unique here) and Cook’s Illustrated. Well this non-believer will just have to go and take a look. People will really pay for content they can find elsewhere online free? I mean, I know a slew of people that love epicurious and won’t pay for recipes from Cook’s Illustrated but we must be a minority because they are apparently making money selling content (subscriptions are about $35 a year, and none of the content online can be accessed without subscribing).
So to reinvent the publishing model, we need to charge for content. Will print content come at a premium price? Say, yes you can get content online for free. And yes some of it is good. But will magazines have to depend on convincing its audience that the best quality content can only be found in print, and therefore charge a bundle for it?
I’m not sure how that will pan out. After all, many of us displaced journalists are finding that we don’t need publishers to print the quality content we once wrote for them. We can apply our editorial sensibilities and writing skills online, either on a platform of our own or a multi-blog/community platform.
Interestingly, Husni notes that “For every magazine that shut its doors in 2008, at least 20 new magazines were born.”
I wonder how many of those new magazines were niche publications, how many of those that closed were mass market consumer titles and how many of those new magazines are still around a year later.
The article provides a nice history lesson, and I suppose it’s of some comfort to know that we’ve been through this before. But, I wonder, how does the current digital disruption being widely reported compare to the disruptions created by previous new technologies, such as television. Is this digital shift more or less disruptive? That would give me more solace in believing that print can bounce back as a leader in content delivery.
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