Although there’s considerable pressure on magazine and newspaper proprietors to deliver multi-platform content, it’s become far more difficult to cure underperforming titles, or ‘media properties’ as we perhaps must now think of them. A decade or more ago, life was much easier as just two main income streams – advertising and circulation – made it relatively straightforward for managers to identify and correct under-performance.
Sure, if the advertising team improved paginations and yields, in the interests of sustained profitability it might’ve been necessary to clamp down on the client-oriented jollies that their hubris might’ve encouraged. Ditto the need to watch, say, subs marketing cost creep, an area where just a penny or two’s increase in securing a new reader can cost thousands of pounds over the financial year. But nowadays it’s become much more complicated, and just because Excel spreadsheets can be engineered to accommodate a zillion different cost bases and income streams doesn’t mean that identifying the root causes of an ailing title is a clear-cut process. Much less the vital business of wiping the red ink off the balance sheet or launching a recovery plan.
In fact, the performance of both advertising and circulation can be boiled down to just one thing: reader appeal, and that still holds true in today’s multi-media world where, to borrow an over-used but seldom really understood epithet, ‘content is king’. Seldom understood because whilst every publisher knows that what appears on the page, the computer or mobile phone screen is crucial to securing a contented and loyal customer, the different criteria they apply to each medium are often misguided. Which is why when the bottom line gets a little shaky, wise publishers take a multilateral approach to recovery.
I’m no fan of jargon, but the term ‘holistic’ is valid here, and I’ve worked with several publishers who, having realised that something’s wrong with a title or group of titles, have been reluctant to stand back and look at the big picture before wading in with the toolbox. Think of what follows, then, as chapter headings in a virtual workshop manual that could help publishers recognise the warning signs that remedial work might be needed and, equally important, re-organise or re-focus their efforts accordingly.
Making connections
As has been eloquently argued in these pages before, it’s imperative for editors to understand what their readers really want, as opposed to what the editor, often high up on his or her hobby horse, thinks they want. Reader surveys and focus groups have their uses here and web-based panels drawn from subscribers can provide useful feedback… but they’re not infallible. An editorial team who regularly go out into the world to meet their market will garner meatier feedback than any amount of box-checking. Indeed, one small but successful title I’ve worked with, Real Classic, took that editorial modus operandi several stages further, completely eschewing the newsstand and selling only at motorcycle events its editors set up their stall at throughout the year, signing up loads of subscribers and finessing editorial policy in the process.
Conversely there are also editors who’re so sure of themselves and the rightness of their product, that even though circulation and ad yields were dropping, their bosses engaged in little regular dialogue with them about content, much less question its efficacy. So challenging the appropriateness of the editorial product is vital: what is it that makes your title better than the rest? And for ‘title’, read all delivery platforms.
Are you integrated?
Editorial and ad sales people liaise all the time, but structured, long term feature and supplement planning is vital, with web managers and editors an essential part of the process. If this isn’t happening in your company, you’re missing out… probably on income.
And ensuring that the webbies are working tightly with the inkies is just as important. Often, especially on well-established print titles, this isn’t the case and, in time, efficiencies as well as quality will suffer. Although this raises another key issue with multi-platform publishing…
Is quality really an issue?
Small (and not-so-small) publishers who have to stretch resources across two or more platforms are obliged to demand more of editorial staff who often have to write, edit and design content for different formats and, often, audiences. Without subs or specialist designers to facilitate this, the stresses and strains can result in reduced quality all round, high staff turnover and low morale - one local newspaper I’m familiar with churns 30% of its five-strong editorial staff a year - and this needs to be carefully monitored or readerships, hit rates and eventually ad revenues will suffer.
Some argue that quality, and the old editorial crafts that ensured it, matter less in the digital age when younger readers in particular are too busy texting and twittering to even notice an elegantly-honed sentence or reasoned argument, and that is undoubtedly true with many titles. But for those that rely on an older, slightly more literate market, excellence is still important and slipping standards do lose readers.
Systemic failure
Attention to the relationships between readers and editors, and editors and advertising sales teams is no less crucial in assessing the health of a publishing operation than the systems you need in place to effectively support and promote the goods. Again, in today’s market, the pressure to wring every last drop of cost-effectiveness out of your teams is obligatory, but it pays dividends to compare costs with outsourced services. Nowadays, almost every aspect of the publishing process can be sub-contracted and often at substantially lower cost than you might expect. However, the catch is that external service providers often can’t see or respond to opportunities or downturns as quickly as in-house staff can, and also that they have a canny tendency to do more than you might actually need… and of course charge for it.
I recently managed the re-launch of a controlled circulation title that outsourced virtually its entire operation, and the consequence was lower unit cost and by consensus, a better product. But the downside was that the company who published it didn’t have the mind-set to properly manage the service-providers and it took considerable re-training and some internal re-structuring to make it all work properly. Which begs the next and final question…
Education, education and re-education
Too many companies rely on personnel learning new skills as if by osmosis. Others, recognising that they need expertise which they don’t currently have, often hire new and expensive people when either re-training the existing staff or using freelancers would give them greater flexibility at lower overall cost. In my experience, editorial and design people are inquisitive creatures who’ll embrace new developments quickly if they’re given the right encouragement and training. So give it, and watch your margins grow.
However, this extends beyond the creative talents in your company. Managers often don’t understand the full implications of new technology and publishing platforms, much less how they actually function, and I have worked for companies where dangerous levels of ignorance, and indeed fear of the unknown, have been masked by bullish pretence that ‘they’re on top of it’. Dangerous, financially debilitating stuff but something that can be addressed by proper training. And let’s not forget that one well qualified staffer, if given the time and the support, can pass on skills and knowledge to their colleagues more cheaply and often more effectively than bringing in outside specialists woefully unfamiliar with a company’s culture.
In the final analysis, you have to look beyond wobbly circulation figures and thinning ad yields because they’re merely the symptoms of what lies beneath.
Finding the answers
One crucial factor in declining fortunes that I haven’t mentioned thus far is of course the state of the opposition, but that’s something few publishers will not already keenly observe. Equally common is what is all-too-often a knee jerk reaction to someone else’s success, namely to slavishly copy it – just look at the plethora of celeb-driven, me-too weeklies.
Sometimes of course you can’t buck a trend, especially in mass-market publishing, but to go back to the beginning of this piece, recognising and developing editorial strengths and backing them up with canny ad sales and subscription promotion can be a more durable and rewarding strategy: just look at the Hachette Filipacchi’s Psychologies magazine, Haymarket’s Classic & Sportscar and Dennis Publishing’s The Week to name but three wildly different titles who’ve achieved this.
However, even within well-run publishers both large and small, there are often instances where managing decline is no longer an economic option and having made that bold and even uncomfortable root and branch review, a publisher simply has to DO SOMETHING. But what?
Well the most commonplace solution is a re-design or even a re-launch, and once again in today’s cost-conscious environment, this can often best be accomplished by out-sourcing design and editorial re-focusing, not least because it allows a fresh, objective and confidential approach. But beware an ‘us and them’ mentality which can sour relations between the consultants you may call in and the teams who have to subsequently carry out their brief. Re-launches also rarely work unless you again take that holistic approach and really involve all media platforms, plus ad sales, production and of course circulation marketing teams, in brainstorming and strategising.
Refreshing the look and editorial feel, never mind the basic remit of a magazine and its associated websites, blogs, texts etc may not always be appropriate, especially if it’s perceived that readers are being lost to competitors who haven’t much changed their own acts. And in such cases, a tightening up of internal systems and enhancing reader-involvement can literally pay dividends, especially if combined with tightly focused promotional campaigns. Here, data capture and viral marketing are useful new tools in the box, but thinking often needs to be taken outside that same box.
Turning a newsstand or trade title into a custom (ie contract) publication is one radical option, albeit with margins that may have limited growth potential. Ditto bookazines which re-cycle editorial content to a different market, or if you can make money at it (which let’s face it, few can), a website that does the same. However, when year-on-year revenues decline 10% or more – my trigger point for a re-launch or a radical re-appraisal – then the bottom line really must be to focus on the bottom line… but never forget that creative thinking means more than just finding new ways to punt your content.
