Outlook for 2009: reinvention needed

Towards the end of last year, my eye was caught by a headline in an American trade paper. I probably wasn't the only one. Cathie Black, the chief of Hearst Magazines, had stood up at an industry event in New York and said, "we have stopped lying to each other".

Good, I thought. At last somebody else in the magazine business is tired of turning up to conferences and hearing competing magazine bosses make airy pronouncements about the robustness of their businesses, statements that seem in direct contradiction of the story being told by their own bottom line. In fact, Black was talking about the absurd claims American publishers had been making for their regional titles, but she might as well have been referring to the national market as a whole.

You don't need me to list the directions the bad news has been coming from on both sides of the Atlantic: rising paper and print costs, retailers demanding more and more outrageous rates for what is euphemistically called "promotion", readers who reckon they can get by without the specialist magazine that used to be so much a part of their lives and advertisers who find their shrinking budgets have to be shared with far more media than was previously the case. On top of that, we're facing the most significant economic downturn in twenty years. Old magazines are closing or cutting back. New ones are rarer than hens’ teeth.

The only major magazine launch I know of for 2009 is Condé Nast's Wired, which is coming back for its second tilt at the UK market. I wish them the very best. Whatever their hopes are in terms of both circulation and ads, I suggest they lop off 30% before they even begin. And this is Condé Nast who are very, very good at this kind of thing.

What can the rest of us hope for from 2009? It would certainly take a cock-eyed optimist to predict an upturn. If there's one thing previous downturns should have taught us, it's that as people are predicting a flattening of decline, things are actually getting worse. Only somebody intent on committing career suicide would stand up in front of their bosses and predict what is probably going to happen.

No going back

One thing's for certain. It's never going to go back. You're never again going to see a magazine selling what FHM or Glamour sold at their 90s peak. There are simply too many media options for that much attention to be focused on one thing. Nobody's got that much downtime anymore. Since the advent of the mobile phone, nobody's been that bored anymore. We live in a different world.

Magazines are going to have to be aimed at people who indulge in that threatened pursuit we used to call reading. That's reading as in the joined-up, occasionally demanding, strangely satisfying stuff. It's not the medley of charts, lists, box-outs and captions that have been passed off as reading matter in the early part of this century. Either that or magazines are going to have to offer page after page of exclusive celeb photography. Although the celeb weeklies may not be selling what they once were, they still offer something that other media can't match, even if that's ten pictures of Britney Spears gassing up her SUV. Many monthly magazines will want to increase their frequency in order to take advantage of the fact that the turnover of events in their specialist areas is faster than ever but they may find that this is the worst time to seek the investment that will call for.

Editorial rethink

It is not impossible that, in the future, people will look to magazines to introduce them to things they know nothing about rather than treat them to another trip round those things with which they are already familiar. This will take immense nerve on the part of editors and publishers. So much of their traditional success came from revisiting things that their readers already knew about. Now that people have the technology to be able to pursue relatively narrow interests on their own, magazines have got to be able to rise above all that and be prepared to set their own agenda.

The successful magazine will sit at the centre of a circle of related activities - websites, blogs, podcasts and, where applicable, events. It will be the piece of the experience that you read in a recumbent posture rather than the be-all and end-all of the entire enterprise. That means we have to be confident enough in the properties of the printed product as a whole to be comfortable with the fact that we may have already published lots of its constituent parts separately. If you're selling a magazine, you're selling something more than the information and entertainment therein. You're trying to convince people of the value of the experience of reading. This is an activity that has proved itself over the years. For some people, it is not about to be put out of business by the iPhone.

The feel of it

At the same time, monthly magazines will have to be marketed as luxury items and there will be increased emphasis on their sensual properties. It will be more about the feel of them, the smell of them, the pleasure of having them around, the way that they naturally fit into certain intervals in our lives. You can no longer rely on those qualities being self-evident. They require selling to people. Everybody's going to have to be persuaded of their virtues: readers for their power as brain food and fantasy factory; advertisers for the fact that unlike the web and television they are the best want-makers around; celebrities for the fact that a magazine cover is still the gold standard of having made it.

In some senses, consumers are benefiting from the fact that we are living through a short-lived transition period. Newspaper publishers have spent fortunes making their product available for free in the hope that they can get paid for it via advertising. Now that the economy is contracting, few people believe that will come to pass. The web is a happy hunting ground for a browser in 2009, because he can access everything from the Sun to the New York Times for free. There is an over provision of news information at the moment. There is no guarantee this will continue. How will people feel if some of those venerable mastheads disappear from the web? Magazine publishers may yet have reason to thank their lucky stars for the fact that most of them didn't race to give away their material. But while publishers can make chump change by selling their material via third parties, they can only survive if they can convince advertisers of the value of their traditional environment sell. Once you turn your readers into a commodity, then you're in the business of turning offline pounds into online pence. There's no future in that.

Shrink our cost base

Meanwhile on the shop floor, magazines are going to have to be produced less expensively. In the sense that such a huge amount of a magazine team's time is spent polishing, it is the least efficient arm of the media and since there's no indication that such polish actually pays off at the newsstand in the way it used to, it might be time to review how editorial effort is spent. I predict that companies will no longer be planning to take on staff journalists in the numbers seen in the past but might hire people on a project basis, much as has been the case in television production for many years. Certainly major companies like Bauer and IPC will not maintain the large executive class that they once did. I recently spoke to a class doing a Masters degree in magazine publishing and could only wonder whether most of them would find jobs. This new generation cannot rely on having jobs provided for them. The job hunter who hasn't already done something off his own bat, even if that's just a blog with some kind of following, is going to find it hard to convince an employer that they have something that can't be done without. But these kind of independent activities will not simply be a calling card. You'll also see familiar magazine names increasingly trading, and, where they can, selling advertising under their own name.

Can technology help?

At this point, it seems ill-mannered not to mention the Kindle, the Sony eReader, Cerros, Mygazines and all the other technologies that promise to be able to replicate or deliver the reading experience electronically. Given some of the problems outlined at the beginning of this piece - paper, distribution, the decline of the casual purchase - these seem a sensible place to look, at least in principle. The problem is the practice. You could see them working for the Economist and other high frequency, text-heavy, business-like purchases but the chances of them ever replicating the experience of reading Vogue seem remote. It will take a massive leap in technology to make it happen.

Having said that, a fillip from new technology is one thing the magazine business could really do with. In the last twenty years, technology has revolutionised the way that radio, newspapers and television manufacture and deliver their product. In that time, magazines have remained in the slow lane. They're long overdue for some kind of passing manoeuvre. There has to be an improved way of doing things. Too often when you walk through a magazine office, you are reminded of a medieval monastery's scriptorium rather than a place built for the speedy processing of information and entertainment. We are slow in a way that leaves even television executives dumbfounded. This can't go on.

But in the end, it's all about the desire to communicate. In the past, the magazine business attracted enthusiasts keen to mark their ownership of some area of the public arena by starting a magazine about it. For the last five years, people who wished to make that kind of statement have started a website instead. If there's going to be any renaissance, it's going to have to begin with a new generation of journalists, designers and publishers reinventing the medium and rediscovering its possibilities. That's something the whole industry must encourage.