Now More Than Ever, Content is King for Magazines

After we covered their London conference last year, the good people at FIPP, the global magazine industry body, have sent over their Innovations in Magazines 2010 World Report. And like the conference before it, it’s a blend of forehead-slapping obviousness and genuine insight.

First of all, for a report that costs £99, and that frames itself as taking the magazine industry forward, there’s an awful lot of low-res photography, sub-editing errors and terrible writing. “Mm! Smell that? You’re getting a whiff of the citrus-scented pages of Lemon magazine”. No, I’m not. Other cringeworthy moments include 2 pages on Entertainment Weekly putting a video screen in its pages, which in an iPad world quite thunderously misses the point; and the section on what makes a good cover, which your average journo undergrad would balk at being over-simplistic. It also overplays the potential for the likes of Issuu – while it’s great for cheaply archiving content (and we use it for exactly that), it’s not going to be “leading the way” in the future. There’s still a residual sense of believing you can shove the qualities of print into the online and tablet space.

This report is being aimed squarely at the lumbering giants of the publishing industry, who haven’t got up to speed with apps, augmented reality and the rest. To be fair to FIPP, it’s collated a lot of significant recent developments in one place, and it’s a sad fact of publishing that those at the very top are usually the least nimble and need this education. Witness Jonathan Newhouse, Conde Nast’s international CEO, using his conference speech last year to deliver a sentimental hymn to print.

But there are points that this report fails to hammer home. It underplays the importance of social networking – this is an opportunity to get a vast group of people effectively advertising your magazine for free, while getting an unprecedented level of emotional attachment to your brand through online discussion. It’s more powerful than the idea of putting ads on the cover, or any little gimmick. There also needs to be a continuing breakdown of the idea that a magazine is words and pictures, something that Monocle, with its 360-degree lifestyle, does very well, even if its products have the occasional whiff of emperor’s new clothes about them.

And the thing that’s really missed out is the very thing that FIPP themselves are doing so well – selling intelligently collated, sought-after information for a high premium. The internet is a challenge to mediocrity in print, because of its democracy – anyone can dredge up some Jennifer Aniston red-carpet pics. Similarly, the internet is very good at providing free information you didn’t really need but enjoy anyway, but its infinity means that getting exactly what you want is a lot harder. Magazines, in whatever form, need to address the need for specificity and excellence, and as the internet becomes more and more fractured and time-consuming, people will increasingly pay a premium to get what they really need quickly and easily. Data sets, quality journalism and writing, and trustworthy information – these are what make money, and because of the internet, you can charge more for them now than ever before. Creating niche brands, that allow you to buy into a small, self-contained lifestyle and set yourself apart from the cultural homogeneity created by the internet, will also reap huge dividends.

The old guard are clearly, by the tone of this report, still queasy and uninformed about the decline in mass print. But the creative opportunities for the rest of the magazine industry are huge – we get to be event organisers, fashion designers, statisticians, product designers, and club owners, and all the while creating even more luxurious and beautiful print products. And for all the technological toys we get to deploy in all of these areas, the most important thing to remember isn’t an innovation at all, but the oldest adage in the book: content is king.

Posted by Ben Beaumont-Thomas in Creative Economy | March 18, 2010 12:50PM |