All power to Apple
It certainly looks as though Apple's Newsstand is holding out something very much like a lifeline to a very hard pressed magazine industry. In the weeks before Christmas, many publishers were quietly very pleased at the amount of sales growth they were seeing from this burgeoning quarter. There was single-copy interest from overseas readers who had previously been very hard to contact. There was renewed interest in the magazine reading experience from people who had slowly given up on paper over the last ten years. And thanks to the number of iPads which were being given for Christmas, there was good old fashioned novelty value. So far so good.
Publishers signing up to Apple’s terms and conditions in order to get on Newsstand are no more likely to ask difficult questions about the long term implications of those terms than the guy clambering up the side of the ship in the boiling ocean is going to check where the vessel is heading before slinging his leg over the side. Once on board, we realise that Apple have become at one stroke the wholesaler, retailer, promotional channel and regulatory body.
This last role could turn out to be interesting. The magazine business has traditionally been a functioning shambles. The wastage was huge, the supply chain was serpentine and mysterious but it had a tremendous ability to produce phenomena. Very often, these huge hits came from the racier side of the business. As we enter into this new world, I’m wondering how the descendants of Viz, Oz, Private Eye, Zoo and even Smash Hits will prosper in this new world. In the past, there was no body overseeing standards of “taste and decency” but we got by. It was always felt that the occasional run-in with WH Smith or the wholesale trade was the price you paid for a certain energy. Where will this kind of publishing stand in the highly polished, cinnamon-scented, closed circuit monitored digital mall that is the Apple Newsstand?
A sub category of humanity?
Talking of Zoo, I note that Dr Miranda Horvath of Middlesex University has published a piece of work claiming, with artfully feigned surprise, that it is difficult to distinguish between the statements about women made by convicted rapists and statements made about women in some so-called “lad’s mags”. You could no doubt draw the same parallels between their statements and those of some blokes who’ve had a few pints and it would be about as useful. Lurking behind these exercises in panic-mongering seem to me to be an increasing fear of the great unwashed (today’s academics having no longer done a few vacations on a building site really don’t know how people outside the chattering classes talk) and an assumption that the readers of these titles belong in a sub category of humanity which is not capable of placing any boundaries on its behaviour. If you were to comb the pages of some of our more allegedly sophisticated women’s magazines, you would find editorial statements that could equally well have issued from the mouths of anorexics or those with a serious shopping condition. Of course nobody bothers because these titles don’t provide such a tempting target as the less polished men’s magazines. Academics have always liked to get into the papers and having a go at magazines has always provided them with a bully pulpit. I suspect it will be a bad day for the industry when they no longer bother.
The one minute rule
In the last few months, I’ve been on the receiving end of a number of presentations from companies offering “solutions” to getting one’s magazines on to the iPad or Kindle. I have learned to estimate how much of a grip they’ve got on the magazine experience on the basis of the amount of time it takes them to show me a layout with a video on it. If they do it within the first minute, there’s no point telling them what you want because they’re not really listening.
People who know nothing about the magazine experience (they usually refer to it as ‘the mag’) always assume that we have been sitting there twiddling our thumbs for years, waiting to see how long it would take for editorial video to come along. Personally, I respond to video on a magazine “page” about as favourably as I do to a website which insists on playing me a piece of music before I’ve asked it to.
What I want more than anything else from a digital magazine experience is control. It’s like checking into a trendy hotel. The last thing I want is to not be able to find the light switch and to have to ring down to ask where they have hidden the bed. If, on the other hand, the company presenting their technology throw in video as a “nice to have” extra somewhere near the end, it’s worth prolonging the discussion.
What future for Future?
The day after I finished last issue’s column, Future announced the departure of CEO Stevie Spring. The company’s statements baldly pointed out that, by getting rid of her and finance director John Bowman, the board could “achieve substantial savings by eliminating an entire tier of corporate overhead”. While demonstrating once again the old saw that half the reason you’re paid a big salary is so that you can one day be “let go”, this also indicates that this kind of business is no longer banking on much in the way of growth. If you’re not banking on growth, you don’t need the big leaders who were traditionally associated with that growth. The next question for a company like Future is, is this state of affairs temporary or permanent?
Time to stop polishing?
I am holding in my hands a copy of a new quarterly magazine called Delayed Gratification, which is sub-titled “the Slow Journalism magazine” and then, as an afterthought, “last to breaking news”. It’s the kind of title I would no doubt have seen a while ago if Borders were still in business. Their shelves were always groaning with titles launched in defiance of the mood of the market. Delayed Gratification is a lovely thing, with features on when Saddam Hussein sponsored a movie starring Oliver Reed, when the Atlantic was first spanned by copper wire and when there were rock’n’roll riots behind the Iron Curtain. It’s all delightfully off centre stuff and it’s very beautifully put on the page. But there also is its problem.
No other medium spends more time polishing each separate edition of its output than magazines. The overwhelming majority of a magazine team’s time is spent excluding material, for reasons of policy, taste or space. I guarantee that the team behind Delayed Gratification, who will certainly be working for love rather than money, have laboured for days on tiny details which will completely escape the notice of everyone but each other.
If you’re going to do a magazine as marginal as this one in 2012, the sensible thing to do would have been to advance straight to a digital edition, where copy can be left hanging perfectly satisfactorily. A digital edition of the magazine would, like all digital magazines in the future, have been more about template than individual layouts and would have depended more on ease of use than impactful graphics. It could also have been done with less effort and found its way to a larger audience. But that’s not where Delayed Gratification have started out. “There is still nothing like the pleasure of ink on paper,” they say in their opening manifesto. I know what they mean. I’ve said it myself many times. Do any of us still believe it?
I would like to see the future grasped by people who believe in magazines but not in paper. That’s what we’re really short of. There are all sorts of revolutionaries out there who tell us the future is digital but still pay their mortgages with the proceeds of ink and paper. Some of them need to have the nerve to walk it like they talk it.
