RicDay on Publishing

It seems another newspaper, or magazine, dies every week. Cottage Living magazine was given its last rites by Time Inc. this past week. Books are not faring a much better, with America’s three largest book retailers reporting poor business results and one, Borders, on the verge of bankruptcy.

The closing of Cottage Living came as quite a surprise. The rate card indicates readership of one million for the print version. The website was active, but it is also slated to close. At least PC Magazine, the previous week’s shut-down, will live on through its website.

The web is wreaking havoc on newspapers and magazines. Print newspapers used to make their money from display and classified advertising, with classifieds being especially lucrative. But why place a classified in a newspaper today, when you can place it for free on Craigslist, or for a modest fee on any number of specialist websites?

Magazines have also relied mostly on advertising fees for revenue — few magazines make much from subscriptions. Many magazine advertisers have also found they prefer the web to print.

Slow production

A second problem for both newspapers and magazines is the time and money it takes to produce and distribute the product.

Newspapers have fairly short production cycles, but hard news now breaks faster and more thoroughly on the web. Terrorists in Mumbai? Get on the web and there are bound to be dozens of credible news sources, from the Globe and Mail to the BBC, providing near-live reports in text, audio, and video. Not fast enough? Try Twitter for live updates. No other media can compete with that immediacy. So newspapers are failing in their primary mission — providing news.

Magazines have long production cycles. Seriously long. If they involve color printing (and almost all magazines do), the time between an article being written and the reader seeing it may be weeks, or more often months. Most magazines do not deal in news — they focus on in-depth articles on topics the editors believe will interest their readers a few weeks or months in the future. In other words, magazine editors do a fair amount of “educated guessing” about their readers’ future interests.

Internet magazines don’t have to guess their readers’ interests. If they maintain any sort of dialog with their readers, they know what their readers want right now, and can respond quickly. Readers know this.

The problem

The BIG problem is, where is the revenue model for web publishing? With an almost infinite number of websites offering information for free, news and content subscriptions models don’t work. Ask the New York Times — their digital edition has just 29,000 subscribers.

These are troubled times for newspapers and magazines. The recession is accelerating the demise of the print versions, and is going to make it twice as hard to come up with a revenue model that works for digital editions. I do think both newspapers and magazines are on life support, and that we will see many more close in 2009.

Wondering how any of this is relevant to book publishers? Think about your printers. How many of them do a lot of work for newspaper, magazine, or doorstep flyer producers? What happens to your printer when those revenue streams dry up?