During our Zoom interview, Katie Vanneck-Smith, new chair of the PPA, describes herself as a “white witch” and a “radical optimist”. In what she has spoken of as being a time of “transformative change” for the magazine industry, her unconventional approach might be exactly what’s needed.
Having spent three decades in news media means that Vanneck-Smith brings a fresh perspective to the magazine industry. She joined Hearst UK as CEO in December 2022 from Tortoise Media, the ground-breaking media outlet she co-founded in 2018. Before that, she was president and chief customer officer at Dow Jones, where she helped to build the Wall Street Journal’s successful membership business. She has also held senior roles at the Telegraph Media Group and The Times, where she was responsible for creating the UK’s first news membership brand, Times+.
In her new role, she sees her main job as supporting the vision of the PPA’s CEO, Sajeeda Merali. In the past, she has turned down such positions, saying she was too busy, but this time, she was persuaded because she believes it is a crucial time for the broader creative industries which need to come together to work out solutions for the challenges posed by AI among other issues.
Protecting the creative industries
No sooner was she in post than the PPA joined forces with the News Media Association and others as part of the ‘Make AI Fair’ campaign, on the last day of the government’s AI consultation. “It feels like this is a time for collective rather than individual action,” she says, explaining that while the government wants to make the UK a friendly environment for AI innovation, this shouldn’t come at the expense of the existing creative industries which are already one of “our major global stage assets”.
You only need to look at the Netflix or Apple charts to see that the UK punches above its small island weight creatively. While the government is currently choosing to pose the debate in a very binary fashion, Vanneck-Smith says: “It’s not an either / or game. You can be a brilliant environment and a healthy eco-system to create meaningful value business and new opportunities from AI and protect and support and underscore one of your best performing industries of the last ten years in the UK which is the creative industries.”
Fortunately, she points out, we already have a framework to do this in the form of copyright, and she believes there is no reason it shouldn’t be enforced when it comes to protecting the interests of PPA members, specialist magazines whose content is being scraped and regurgitated by giant AI models.
“It isn’t that difficult to imagine a world in which if Spotify can keep 50% of its money and give 50% to the content creators, if Apple News+ can do it, of course this is doable. All the industry is asking for is that we lean into the opportunity of being an AI superpower as the UK, at the same time as protecting one of our existing superpowers which is our creative industries.”
Her experience at The Times, where many thought she was crazy to pioneer a paywall for news, but which paid off, has informed her current approach. While the major platforms argued at the time that they were creating ecosystems which provide individual publishers with traffic, she counters: “We know twenty years later, it’s not true.” The same applies to AI, especially now that it is the first thing that comes up whenever we search on Google, an engine which consumers have come to trust, even though the information generated is frequently wrong.
“Let’s not sleepwalk into what happened with the internet and how it disrupted news, magazines, and others,” urges Vanneck-Smith. But she is also at pains to insist that PPA members are not Luddites, “standing there with the equivalent of a screwdriver and trying to shove it in the equivalent of the Caxton presses”. AI offers many exciting opportunities from a publishing industry perspective, for example in terms of productivity tools and workflow. The key is not to forget that “if you take a step back, we’re in the business of human content creation, and we value the expertise of journalists and expert voices. It is what our entire industry is built on.”
As a major global player in the media industry, Hearst has negotiated its own deal with OpenAI, including creating a walled garden version of ChatGPT called Hearst Chat.
But with her new hat on, Vanneck-Smith insists, “That’s not enough. Every publisher, every content creator needs to be protected from the small to the large.”
While she is a radical optimist, she believes the rapid pace of change means the PPA must join forces with creative partners to fight for the rights of its members. There has already been good MP engagement with the PPA’s arguments, although neither the association nor its partners want to accept the option the government is currently putting forward of making an exception to copyright law for AI training while allowing rights holders to retain their rights.
Paid-for proposition
Aside from the issue of AI, she believes there are several other challenges facing the magazine industry. In the consumer sector, there is not yet a playbook for how to create successful, paid-for propositions to provide future opportunities to scale up. This is an area where her alma mater, the newspaper industry, is ahead, she says.
“I think there is a more developed playbook for national news than there is for iconic magazine brands. There’s lots of great innovation, but I imagine that the playbook will not be quite as one size fits all, because the brands themselves and how magazine media lends itself to connection with audiences is a little less one size fits all.”
In the past, the strength of a magazine company lay in the same business model applying across its portfolio, but she argues that is no longer the case. We now need to reimagine brands in terms of print, plus digital, plus live, plus experiential. “That’s quite challenging because portfolio prioritisation is not something we’ve had to think that hard about from a product perspective. There’s no playbook yet for a paid-for consumer model that is a scaleable, repeatable, plug and play,” she says.
Alongside China, the UK is now one of the most mature digital media markets in the world, with 80% of all media spend being in digital according to recent research from Enders Analysis, compared with around 55% in continental Europe. Alongside that, there has also been a big swing to performance marketing, where businesses pay for quantifiable results such as clicks, leads and sales. Coming from a marketing background herself, she sees the challenge now as reminding marketeers why magazines are a different proposition offering “brand partnership, storytelling, amazing canvases” rather than “pile ’em high, sell ’em cheap”.
At Hearst, every brand knows it needs to have at least three revenue lines: strong advertising, strong consumer, and strong diversification from the brand, such as the Good Housekeeping Institute accreditation business, or the licensing deal between Country Living and House Beautiful and furniture brand DFS.
“I think you have to say to marketeers, have you overinvested in Meta? Why don’t you give me a bit of test and learn budget, let’s learn together? No one likes to put all their eggs in one basket, marketeers are no different to anyone,” she suggests.
Magazine publishers should also have the confidence to say ‘no’ when an agency sends a brief their way which is not a good fit, she adds.
Membership propositions are key at Hearst, both at a B2C and B2B level. Makers can pay an annual fee to become part of the Country Living artisan community, for example, with a lower tier giving them access to their digital marketplace and an upper tier granting stands at fairs and shows. There is also the opportunity for brands to become part of the Hearst Collective, where they might find themselves at Elle magazine’s 40th anniversary ‘40 For 40: Women In Film And Television Power List’ party rubbing shoulders with the cast of Black Panther, then onto a supper where they discuss fact to fiction storytelling.
“It’s about turning up and behaving and showing your point of difference. Magazines have a huge opportunity to do that, as do news, as do TV.”
What is a magazine?
The future of magazines is going to be more artisanal, closer to books than newspapers, she argues. It might mean going digital first or experimenting with Apple News+. The problem as she sees it is that the first iteration of magazines online was websites, but while a website is “a great way to find out what Good Housekeeping’s recommendations are for the best hoover, it’s not a magazine”.
On the other hand, podcasts, videos, and events can all be magazines. “A magazine for me is an experience that like great physical print magazines has a beginning, a middle and an end but is culturally interesting.”
To ensure a long and profitable future, the publishing industry needs to go brand first and meet consumer needs. While people in the industry still think ‘I’m in magazines’ or ‘I’m in TV’, consumers no longer see the media in that way. She cites the example that most YouTube consumption is now on TV to prove this point. “The Traitors can be a magazine and Good Housekeeping can be a Saturday kitchen TV show on YouTube,” she says.
During her time as PPA chair, she wants to help Merali and her team have a strong voice in policy debates. She also wants to ensure that membership of the association is a must-have for publishers — “default, not debate”. But most of all, she wants to help publishers move from being a defensive declining business to becoming successful, multi-channel operations, or as she puts it, “to get their swagger back”.
This article was first published in InPublishing magazine. If you would like to be added to the free mailing list to receive the magazine, please register here.
