Mr. Magazine

Comparing magazines with music is like comparing a kite to the wind that carries it across the sky. The kite is tangible, and watching it brings its own kind of joy to the experience; the wind is gossamer with no visual substance, yet as real an experience as your hair lifted off your neck on a hot day.

It doesn’t matter to you how you receive that breeze when your skin is hot and sticky. It can be from an opened window in your kitchen, to the sun roof in your car; the end result you anticipate is the same…to cool off from that sweet breeze.

The kite floats back down to you when you’re finished running across the field with it, the diamond shape bright with spring colors and virtually alive from its race across the blue sky, plastic still popping and breathing from the exertion. It’s substantial and real…you can touch and feel its presence.

It’s the same thing with magazines and music. When people compare the two by saying something like, “Magazines are going the way of vinyl,” the observation is moot. First of all, vintage is back and trending like crazy in today’s world. And second, magazines haven’t gone anywhere, unlike vinyl records; check out your newsstands, they’re robust and healthy.

But the mootness of the observation is this: music has always been like the wind, ethereal and invisible to the eye. Your favorite song flowing out of your car radio or your iPod is an active participant in the joyful experience you are receiving, but it’s not a tactile presence that you can hold in your hand. It’s the sound of the melody romancing your ears that gives you that bliss. And to you, at that moment in time, you could care less whether you hear it from a radio, an iPod, a CD, or a twelve piece orchestra for that matter. You just want to hear your song.

But the experience of holding a printed magazine and reading from it is a very real occurrence. The pages are slick and smooth to your touch. The contents are what you selected, your choice of material. It’s an intimate and personal experience, devoid of any of the interruptions of pop-up ads or infinite internet eyes taking note of every click of your mouse. The advertising and editorial content live in harmony next to each other, complementing rather than annoying and fighting over your attention. Ads flow naturally and in a very logical and systematic way, so that skipping them seems almost sacrilegious to the experience. Music, on the other hand, is all about the tunes, the musicians, the band and not the vinyl, the tape recorder or even the iPod.

And while many people fall in love with the artist or group of their favorite song, and revel in a fantasy world created by some mystical connection with the singer, the odds of anyone falling in love with the editor or publisher of a magazine are pretty much slim to none; at least, not without a little one-on-one wining and dining first.

So to shackle magazines and music together in some comparison of antiquity is not only unfounded, but also ridiculous.

Vinyl records did take a backseat to other platforms, such as 8-tracks, cassette tapes, CDs and ultimately, digital apparatus, but magazines haven’t been replaced by anything. They have grown new branches, with their digital counterparts, but no one has replaced the tangible experience of holding a magazine. Not even the iPad. These accoutrements only enhance the print experience, they don’t replace them.

Digital is a new media; it’s here, it’s not going anywhere and we all enjoy its amenities. But it doesn’t replace the print experience. And it isn’t trying to. Digital isn’t killing print, publishers are. Instead of forcing the death of print down our customers’ throats, why don’t we give them what they really want and encourage both?

There was some controversy recently with Beyonce when it was reported that she may have been lip-syncing when she sang the Star Spangled Banner at the inauguration of President Obama, the real-live experience versus the virtual one, minus any imperfections.

This matters to the topic only as a reference as to how real and virtual can go hand-in-hand; how one can use the digital to enhance the physical. It’s a perfect union, really. Union being the operative word. There are times the physical, the tangible is what you want and need. Other moments, the virtual realms answer the call. But isn’t it nice to have both?

So when I hear someone say, “Magazines are going the way of vinyl,” and that they have so much in common, I have only this to say:

“I will surrender one thing to those out there who insist upon the similarities of magazines and music: they both start with the letter ‘M’.”

P.S.: The above column first appeared on CommPRO.biz website Jan. 27, 2013.

My friend Bob Sacks (www.bosacks.com) republished my blog entry All Good Print Magazines Go to Digital Heaven… Or Do They? on his electronic e-letter. Glenn Hansen, President and CEO at BPA Worldwide, responded to my blog entry to Bob. Bob, in turn, published the response on his e-letter. I have asked Mr. Hansen permission to post his response on my blog so my readers will have the opportunity to read it. Permission was granted and here is Glenn Hansen’s response:

Bob, Samir, as he often does to me, strikes a chord.

Can’t he come up with some successful converts to only digital to shine a light on the way forward?

Too easy to find the failures. He writes as if to say if you convert to digital only you are doomed. I realize that he is not saying that, but that is an impression I am left with. It’s as if he is saying, “if you are not a success in print, you cannot be a success in only digital”. Of course that is ludicrous seeing how many web sans print media outlets there are.

I agree that a print product may not sell as many subs or single copies as a tablet version as they did in print, but that may not be the goal of the media company. Further, undeniably it took the print version a number of years to get to it’s current rate base and not immediately out of the gate. I agree that from the conversion of print to an only digital product, if management loses its sense of purpose, the digital product will fail, but it’s not because it’s an “only digital” product, it’s because management did not make a compelling product taking full advantage of the technology available and were not good marketers getting the PR out.

SH wrote, “If your print product isn’t connecting with an audience, is it really going to flourish among a billion more nondescript URLs or a million other apps?”

Hell YES. But Samir seems to think it must flourish at the same rate base as its predecessor. That is not a requirement for financial success.

The smart entrepreneurial great communicator technologist can convert most any print brand into a going business as a only digital product. But I predict the pendulum will swing back on even the best of these folk and they will find print to be an avenue for communicating the digital brand.

Just me in the peanut gallery.
( Submitted BY Glenn Hansen, President & CEO at BPA Worldwide, name used upon request)

So, what do you think and do you have any success stories of print magazines that left print behind and are now thriving in the digital heaven? Please do not hesitate to comment, be specific and give me examples. Thank you.

Timeless Collectability will be the mantra for 2013. In the magazine world, 2012 brought about the death of two print weeklies (one originating in 2012 and the other from 1933), along with their less-than-promising resurrection online. It also redirected our insights to the value of diversity and print’s need to be a collectible force.

To engage the magazine audience, one must be willing to go beyond the informative and straight to the incomparable. One must become the king’s ransom for readers and never relinquish that role. One must provide the timeliness and timelessness that only print, in its inexplicable way, can. And one must divert from, and direct to, the continuum that is digital. If this seems contradictory and impossible … read on and I’ll lead you into 2013’s glowing light surrounding the future of print.

1. The future of print is becoming more a collector’s item than a disposable item. A magazine should possess some collectible value that offers something timely and timeless.

2. Think integrated print and digital. Your printed magazine has to keep the audience engaged, keep the advertiser engaged, perhaps through mobile linkage.

3. Killing a magazine in print, hoping it will survive on the web never worked, is not working and never will work. Once you are out of sight, you are out of mind. Even the “successes” in this case are a fraction of their print predecessors.

4. When someone tells you that print is dead or there’s no more room for magazines, give them $10 and send them to the nearest newsstand and ask them to buy a copy. Then let them judge for themselves whether there is room for more magazines or not.

5. Fear of failure and statistical analysis are the biggest reasons for doing nothing, in terms of launches, finding a new market, or creating a new brand.

6. As ever, remember that we are in the business of audience first, customers first. Not pixels on a screen … not ink on paper. Once you lose sight of the audience, you are headed for disaster. It’s simple: You need to offer the relevant message, via the relevant medium, to the relevant audience.

7. Invest in print, ink and paper. Feeling and touching are the first step to engaging with the experience. Cheap products mean cheap experience.

8. There is hope. More than 200 new titles were launched with a regular frequency in 2012 and more than 600 new titles as specials and annuals.

9. Like all creations, magazines have a time to be born and a time to die. No, not the demise of a genre of magazine; rather the loss of some titles and birth of others.

10. Unless your magazine content provides the readers with a “losing themselves and their sense of time” experience, you are better off killing the magazine.

11. It is time for someone to find a new name for all the digital stuff out there. As long as we refer to it as “replicas”, I know we are not there yet. When was the last time you called television, radio with pictures?

12. And Keep in mind, as a Dutch publisher often reminds me: “publishing is believing.”

So, keep the faith and go on publishing…and remember these words of wisdom: When times are tough and dark, start dreaming; when things are easy and light, keep on walking. Also don’t ever forget: print is the mirror and digital is merely its reflection. Let the believing begin…

Samir Husni, Ph.D., is founder (2009) and director of the Magazine Innovation Center at the University of Mississippi’s Meek School of Journalism and New Media. The former Ole Miss journalism department chairman’s Mr. Magazine™ monicker comes from his tracking more than 20,000 launches since 1986, when his Guide to New Magazines debuted. The 28th edition of the Guide (Nautilus Publishing/Oxford, Miss.) will be released in April 2013.

The Mr. Magazine™ Manifesto 2013 was published first in min Media Industry Newsletter on Jan. 7, 2013.