From January 31t
I went to this fantastic conference last week. At the glorious old St Bride Library off Fleet Street, all about the history and future of magazine design. You were probably all there. What could be a better place for an art director or media planner to deepen their expertise? I didn't notice any agency names on the attendee list though. Maybe you were all being anonymous. Hmmm. Anyway, for those of you who missed it, here are a couple of things that popped out to me.
The first thing I hadn't realised was how reliant the UK and bits of Europe are on newsstand sales, compared to the US and emerging markets like Russia and China. The physical scale of those places means the only viable way to do distribution is via subscriptions and a largely subscription based relationship with the readers let's a magazine take many more risks - both commercially and creatively. I guess that might not matter to those in the UK except that there are clearly commercial and ecological downsides to printing 200,000 copies of something in the hope of selling 100,000. You have to imagine sensible magazine owners are pursuing subscription sales wherever possible, and that must have implications for their relationship with advertisers.
There was also good discussion of how to react to the challenge of digital - best summed by Jeremy Leslie of John Brown and magculture.com saying that magazines need to get more magaziney. There are things only magazines can do; that solid object quality, the deep blacks of the ink in Grazia, the feel of the different paper stocks in Monocle, the striking cover images of Time Out, the unrivalled readability of ink on paper and all those little give-aways, tip-ons, bind-ins and extras that can make a magazine experience such a delight. William Owen of Made By Many was equally eloquent about the need for magazines to dive into the web without just porting their pages into a content management system. He summed that up rather smartly as 'magazine as service rather than magazine as product'. This means abandoning some of the magazine prejudices - beauty's more important than utility, the editor knows best - and embracing the community of readers, giving them a platform to create their own experience.
But the thing that's really intrigued me, and made me make plans to do more research, was realising how little advertising income magazines had during the 40s and 50s, a time when they did a lot that was innovative and important. There have to be some useful lessons in that for the future of magazines. We media folk don't know enough about our own history, if we paid more attention to the past maybe the future would be less frightening.
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