On Magazines
Monday, January 4, 2010 at 11:31PM I visited my local 24 hour supermarket tonight. On the list was a copy of Good Food magazine for my wife.
Our local Tesco has five 25-foot-long, seven-foot high racks completely full of magazines. Magazines about investing, technology, travel, cooking, cars, motorbikes, sports, fashion, fishing, TV and "women's interest" (whatever that is). Then there are specific subdivisions of each genre along income boundaries, class boundaries and now ethnic boundaries too ("Asian Woman", for example).
We keep hearing that publishing is "in trouble" and, further, that the Apple Tablet is going to "save" publishing.
I really need an answer to this question: what is it that publishing needs to be saved from?
Not one of these laser-targeted magazines interested me. Not one. So I started to think about why not. Here's what I came up with:
- The writing is boring.
- The information is probably out of date.
- They're half-full of adverts.
- Even half-full of adverts, they're expensive.
- I'm not interested in most of the articles.
Now, I haven't read every magazine on the market. There may well be magazines which don't feature any of the above. If so, leave me a comment!
It's interesting that the reason I don't buy newspapers doesn't apply: most magazines are not available for free and in full on the internet. So what's so bad about these problems?
The Writing is Boring
I'm being a little provocative here but it stands to reason that with (much) the same people writing about different topics every month, they can't be awesome at it all the time. I'm looking for writing that makes me think deeply and in a new way about topics that I'm interested in or, on the other hand, writing that draws me in to a new subject.
My purpose here isn't to say "blogs good, mags bad", but in the field of what we might call "topical writing", I find the absolutely most compelling writing in blogs today.
There are a few other places that I find compelling writing, and it's usually authors or publications that feature some or all of these attributes:
- A strong, opinionated voice.
- An individual voice.
- No 'house style'.
- An active, muscular engagement with the topic at hand.
I guess this is goes some way to explaining my morbid fascination with Polly Toynbee's articles in the Guardian. She may wilfully ignore the evidence all around her, she may be jaw-droppingly wrong in so many ways and she may flip-flop between pro-Brown and anti-Brown opinions by the week, but you can't say she isn't a very good writer with a clear, strong voice.
Think about Jeremy Clarkson's column in the Times. You're welcome to love or loathe him, but I doubt if motoring journalism has had such an individualistic voice since LJK Setright joined the typing pool invisible.
Rod Liddle, in the Spectator, is an incorrigible old populist but has a deft touch in opening lines:
"I wonder what Stephen Fry would write on Twitter shortly after he’d been hit very hard on the top of the head with a large spanner?"
...and, indeed, headlines like "Thomas the Tank Engine is merciless and bigoted — that's why kids love it".
Reading things I agree with is absolutely not the point at all. Just. Please. Make. It. Interesting.
The Information Is Out Of Date
This is a problem for print magazines on a monthly cycle. By the time I get that paper in my hands, one of two things has probably happened:
- The world has changed, and what's printed is now wrong, or
- I already read about it in five places, read three or four great analyses on blogs and already know what all my friends think about it via Twitter.
They're Half-full of Adverts and Expensive
Well, of course they're expensive: look at all the costs. Aside from the pricey business of actually creating the content, there are all those trees to cut down, mulch, roll, dry, ship, print, chop, glue, package, ship, unpack and rack in the Greenock Tesco.
But what to do? Well, cutting distribution costs is one option. I think my Kindle subscription to The Spectator is great value at $4.99/week (roughly £3.10), even though I could have the print version for £2.50/week. The Kindle version is better than the paper version not because I'm anti-paper but because it doesn't carry advertising.
But back to paper: the advertising layout of most magazines is like the worst kind of intrusive website advertising. The front dozen pages of actual content are interspersed with full-page or double-page ads. Maybe most people don't care but I find it very distracting.
I'm Not Interested
This is the hard part about the mass-market for those of us who came of age in the days of RSS and the iTunes store. With blogs and Twitter, if an information source isn't of value to me, it's gone. There are undoubtedly some great writers in magazines today, but I don't know who they are because their work is bundled up with 100 pages of ads and filler that I have to pay a fiver for.
For a magazine to be a selling proposition, it needs to have a strong signal to noise ratio. This is why I stopped reading MacUser in the late 90s, as it disappeared up its own Photoshop-obsessed backside. Page after page after page of Photoshop how-tos and reviews of £10,000 drum scanners.
What Are Magazines For?
Why do we have magazines? There are undoubtedly some venerable titles - the New Yorker, the Spectator, National Geographic, Time, Newsweek - but so many of the magazines I was confronted with in Tesco seemed like generic templates filled with niche-specific nouns:
- 25 ways to get more
- We pick the best
- Comparisons between products.
- News (sometimes real, sometimes faux-celeb-news, sometimes fictional TV worlds reported like news).
It strikes me that publishers are acting a bit like some App Store developers right now: unable to make a living from one title, they create many to try and spread the burden of creating. That might actually work for publishing, but it's a terrible model for ongoing product development in software. However, that's another post for another time.
Will the mythical Apple Tablet ride over the hill to save topical publishing? I'm pretty sceptical, but I'm not saying it won't happen.
Can Apple remove the ads? Well, they did it for TV and I can't see Apple letting other people's adverts through their store. [Update: Peter Hosey pointed out the blindingly obvious: that Apple allow adverts in iPhone apps. How did I overlook that, when my own app contains ads? Writing too fast, I guess. Sorry.]
Can Apple decrease the time to market? Probably not. iTunes season passes, at least in the UK, lag some time behind broadcast (the Top Gear pass I bought lagged a full week). It's up to the organisations to either rejig their processes or change their angle to make it OK that 3 weeks have passed since this was news to me.
Can Apple make it interesting again? Strangely, this is where I see the most promise. Steven Covey recently sold the electronic rights to his books directly to Amazon for distribution on the Kindle. It went largely unremarked at the time, but I think that's seismic.
Indulge me for a moment: what if I could buy a 'season pass' to Jeremy Clarkson's column for, let's say, £10/year. Every week, a new Clarkson column pops up, Kindle-style, on my iTablet. At the moment, the Kindle model remains that I buy the magazines whole (or, at least, as whole as the publisher deigns to deliver on the device). Apple has already broken up the one-hit-plus-filler model in music albums. Could they do it for magazines?
Before you comment, please understand that I want magazines to be great. I want to have, as an adult, that sense of anticipation I had as a kid when the day came for the next issue of Spider Man came out.
Let me put it simply: I want to get as excited about a magazine issue as I do when Michael Lopp's feed lights up in my RSS reader.
Reader Comments (6)
The reason there are such a ridiculous number of magazines on different subjects is that 99% of them are simply advertising delivery channels. The more variety, the more targeted the advertising can be. Apart from the headlines the writing doesn't matter a bit as most people just buy whatever magazine happens to match their interests in order to pass the time.
There are probably only a handful of magazines (Vanity Fair, New Yorker, Time, etc) that sell based on the quality or timeliness of their content. Those might as well be in a separate section from all the Home/Garden/Auto/Motorcycle/Lifestyle magazines. If you haven't read Chris Anderson's (of Wired magazine) book "Free" I highly recommend it, especially the chapter early in the book where he describes the economics of magazine and newspaper publishing.
They allow ads in iPhone apps.
Couldn't agree more, very few of the written articles are backed up by the ability to "write", to say nothing of the weekly/monthly dross of reviews, best of …, top XX ..., type of articles.
The learned, opinionated, lucid expositions of LJK Setright were a delight to behold and delving back into his books is a delight much savoured. I personally find that there are some niche publications which still interest me, but they are small enough circulation that they can't compete on the addled shelves of the supermarkets and national retailers often.
For a bootstrapped typical publication, great writing, fantastic photography, but probably quite niche in uptake, take a look at www.theridejournal.com--its now of its 3rd publication and promises much. One of the highlights of many of these sorts of publications is the new authors, much like discovering Gruber/Lopp and the anticipation of each of their articles.
I think the point
is exactly the reason I was an early paid supporter of daringfireball, the tingle of each article appearing in NNW, made Gruber my first check on each subsequent morning. I think Gruber was quite prescient there.
As a prodigious consumer of magazines in my youth, I find I rarely if ever now succumb to any title anymore … instead surprisingly now I think of it unless put on the trail of great writing, typically via a contact or acquaintance, webpost or blog article.
Interesting times indeed … maybe Winer's early musings about the death of the traditional news source and journalism did have some merit, but maybe the change starts in the magazine arena spreading to the daily news sources.
An interesting article and pretty much spot on I think. They don't seem to differentiate themselves very well and spread too thin like you say. I used to read three types of magazines - Mountainbiking, Mac and Photography. The MacUser subscription ended about 2001 as I could get all the info and more insight on MACNN and then later places like Daringfireball with much more insight and better writing. I found by the time the copy arrived that it was out of date, fine if you add better insight or writing to add more to that story but not if it's a tiny article which is worse than the Mac news sites.
The same story for Photography magazines. Short reviews and you could get much better insight from someone like Thom Hogan (Nikon expert) or a variety of blogs setup for your particular workflow in whatever software - Lightroom/Photoshop/Aperture etc.
The one that has been hardest to let go is the Mountainbiking ones. I still subscribe mainly due to the outstanding Photography in them. I think that these are often more photo journals than detailed writing which is excellent. These often try not to cover the news but more long term tests and reviews. Much more engaging content!
I think another problem with magazines is market fragmentation. There may be perhaps two or three publishers with perhaps two or three titles in the same market segments. All chasing market share rather than profitability nd the only way to make any money is full the things with ads.
There are some great magazines out there, particularly niche titles as in Mountain Biking or my personal favourite Bike magazine. Wonderfully designed with great content and great writers. The online version is very compelling as well. Particularly in full screen mode.
I just allowed my subs to Macworld and Wired to expire end of December. I wasn't reading them, I was tired of killing trees for something I'm not fully engaged with, and most of what I DO read from those people I can get for "free" via RSS feed. I'm hanging onto MacLife and MacTech, for now, particularly MacTech, for it's code archives. MacLife offers some "freshness", still, that Macworld let fade away a long time ago. And you're right. In a digital world obsessed with up-to-the-nanosecond news, tech magazines in particular seem stale when they finally find my mailbox.