Mr. Magazine

On Thursday Oct. 9 a keynote panel ACT 5 Experience presentation titled “THE CHANGING LANDSCAPE: THE PRESENT AND THE FUTURE TOUGH SOLUTIONS FOR EVEN TOUGHER PROBLEMS,” took place at the Magazine Innovation Center at The University of Mississippi. James G. Elliott, of the James G. Elliott marketing and advertising company was supposed to be the moderator of the panel discussion. An illness kept him away from the Experience. Robert “Bob” Hanna, co-founder of Burst Media replaced his role as a presenter to that of a moderator. Joining him on the panel were: Alysia Borsa – SVP, Data & Mobile, Meredith Corp., Steve Davis- President, Kantar Media’s SRDS and Katriina Kaarre – Publishing Director, Octavamedia Ltc., Helsinki, Finland. Click on the video below to watch the panel discussion.

Espen Tollefsen, CEO of Interpress, Norway, presented a view from Norway on single copy sales and distribution. His presentation took place on Oct. 8 at the ACT 5 Experience at The University of Mississippi’s Magazine Innovation Center. Click on the video below to watch his presentation.

Gil Brechtel, president of MagNet, and Joshua Gary of MagNet presented the MagNet latest research on covers and single copy sales. Click below to watch their presentation on Oct. 8 at the ACT 5 Experience.

From the Foredeck of the Titanic
by Joe Berger

I vividly remember my reaction to Dr. Samir Husni’s announcement that he was forming the Magazine Innovation Center at Ole Miss University. It was the winter of 2009. The economy was deep into a slump. The smoldering wreckage of Anderson News was still wreaking havoc on newsstand distribution. It seemed like every day there was another article in the industry trades about the death of print magazines. The web was full of snark and Schadenfreude and the Reaper at Magazine Death Pool was getting more coverage than most writers who covered the magazine world.

Dr. Husni had an interesting response to this roiling mess. Thoroughly fed up with the news that another magazine was shutting down, he announced that he was fighting back. The Magazine Innovation Center at the University of Mississippi was going to be a place where publishers could re-imagine, amplify, clarify and testify to the future of print.

I don’t think anyone would ever say that Samir Husni isn’t bold. My reaction that day was a fist pump, and loud “Yes!” that startled the cat.

A year and a half later, after a job transition, several client changes, and more non-stop bad news in the industry trades, I made my way down to Oxford, MS for the very first ACT I conference. Two thoughts crossed my mind as I looked at the agenda during the first full day of the conference:

“I had never attended a publishing conference that wasn’t thoroughly dominated by the largest magazine companies in the industry.”

And “I had no idea that so many students still wanted to go into magazine publishing.”

Over the next three days, an Ole Miss student and a young startup publisher and me swapped notes, ideas, advice and hope while we listened to a panel of speakers that included consumer, B2B, custom and foreign publishers. We learned about the potential, promise and pitfalls of digital publishing. We learned that in the world of print publishing, the future didn’t have to be an early grave and a post in the Reaper’s Blog if we were nimble, willing to change, willing to work hard and produce quality publications.

That was the best feature of the conference. Not that the speakers weren’t excellent. They were. Not that the speakers spoke about a diverse series of topics ranging from custom publishing, digital editions, social media and e-commerce. They did. But for the first time in a long time, I was able to interact with the next generation of magazine publishers and it was revitalizing to see how committed they were to their career paths.

Last week I landed in Oxford again for ACT V. ACT stands for “Amplify, Clarify and Testify” and there were surely plenty of speakers who attested to that fact. The keynote address was from Michael Clinton of Hearst who gave a good case for how and why Hearst’s print magazines and their digital cousins co-exist and mean so much to each other.

But the next day, it was the students who responded enthusiastically to the presentation by Vanessa Bush, the eloquent and engaging editor of Essence Magazine.* Billy Morris, the CEO of Morris Communications connected the dots between magazine publishing and the need for continued journalistic integrity. Greg Sullivan, one of the founders of the successful startup Afar Magazine, kept the audience spellbound with his description of how the magazine got started and all of the other avenues, many digital, that the magazine has taken the publishing company into.

For me the experience was much like going back to college. And sitting next to the schools undergraduate and graduate journalism students reminded of how important it is for our business to recruit the talented, the dedicated, the enthusiastic, the committed. A few snarky comments written by a reporter who’s never spent five minutes understanding the intersection between social media and circulation shouldn’t control the future of magazine publishing. Clearly these kids don’t think so.

If the future of our industry lies in the hands of the four talented, engaging, thoughtful and interesting women and men who joined me for dinner last Thursday night, our business has nothing to fear and nowhere to go but up.

This week, it’s back to work. It’s back to the grind of airlines, presentations, galleys, reports and Account Executives. That’s fine. I’m armed with a bevy of information, hope and excitement for the future.

*Note: Essence Magazine is the creator of the Essence Festival, a live event the magazine hosts each year. The Festival features performers, speakers and a wide range of activities that attracts African American families from all over the country. This year, the event was hosted in New Orleans and attracted over 500,000 participants. That’s larger than ComicCon, Coachella, South By Southwest and Sundance. Considering that this event doesn’t get mainstream media buzz, can anyone wonder or deny the power of branded magazine publishing?

By Bo Sacks

BoSacks Speaks Out: On Hearst, Mt. Olympus, Oxford and Great Publishing Conferences

You would think that a guy who goes to a dozen publishing conferences a year and is also the writer/publisher of a daily newsletter on the subject of media, would find it easy to explain why the annual ACT magazine events at the University of Mississippi are so compelling. My problem is that it is hard to exactly define magic, and this special event is filled with magic and marvel. It is hosted by my good friend and industry debating partner Professor Samir Husni, who continuously attracts a world-wide concoction of diverse speakers. But it is not exactly the diversity of the presenters that makes it so special. If that was all it took, it would be easy to replicate, but nobody has an event quite like this one.

Perhaps the most unique thing about the conference is the intimacy of the event along with the interchange with the students. As conferences go it is probably the smallest by population, yet the biggest in comradery and geniality. The auditorium is filled with 40 professional speakers and about the same amount of journalism/media students. We are an intentionally mixed group sitting randomly in the journalism school’s cozy auditorium, senior publishing professionals hobnobbing side-by-side with the next and soon to be leaders of the noble enterprise we call media.

As a professional speaker I think that what I like and look forward to the most is the odd blending of presenting simultaneously to professionals and students. It is a special process to be able to mentor the young and eager and the seasoned professional in the same talk. It has to be detailed enough to keep the interest of the professional and exciting enough to entrance the apprentice.

The list of luminaries was impressive. It started with a keynote by Michael Clinton, President, Marketing and Publishing Director of Hearst Magazines. Michael gave a truly passionate account of what Hearst is up to in this age of publishing transformation. He started with the declaration, “Our children and grandchildren will still read print.” He advised us all interestingly enough with the same advice delivered by Brian Hoffman of Hoffman Media two days later, that you should design your covers and content based on what you know your readers want and urged that we get into the “pulse of the zeitgeist” to know what Americans are looking for.

Michael questioned, “If print is dying, why was the 2014 launch of Hearst’s Dr. Oz, the Good Life such a fantastic success? Its first issue sold out on newsstand and it achieved 300,000 subs in 4 months.” He pointed out that magazine readership has been relatively constant at 187 million, even while there is massive disruption in other mediums such as TV audiences. (I actually disagree with the implied serenity of that conclusion, but my reasoning will have to be discussed in another Bo-essay, at another time.)

Michael went on to familiarize us with Hearst “Unbound” and how magazine brands should now exist on a global scale and on many platforms with social media, you tube videos, websites, mobile applications, tablet editions and narrowed targeted editions; for example, Cosmo for Latinas.

Michael also went into some details about how the size of the audience matters more than the measurement of ad pages, (another conclusion that I reserve the right to explore and discuss at a later date.) He previewed the now available “Magazine Media 360,” which is the MPA’s new measurement tool for capturing how readers are connected to magazines across multiple platforms, and not only the print product. This is a bold attempt to combine total magazine reach, a combination of digital audiences and print circulations.

Michael discussed the many paths that Hearst is traveling down other than their core print products. The list of adventures and undertakings at Hearst is as huge as it is possible to imagine and an outside inspiration for publishers everywhere.

A few days later on in the event, when it was my turn to stand before the audience, I offered the following observations: “We heard from Michael Clinton on Tuesday night. His talk was enthusiastic, and uplifting. Indeed Hearst is doing many wonderful things. But he is from a group of Publishing Olympians. If you have as much money as a Greek god, it makes the transformation of our industry look pretty damn easy. They (Hearst) and the other Olympians, such as Time Inc, Meredith, Conde` Nast, Bonnier and a few others can afford to fail many times without effecting the long-term bottom line.

As wonderful as it is to hear of what is possible in the extreme, there are 9,000 other titles working down here on the planet earth, who oddly enough don’t have Olympian resources and yet some are still doing quite well anyway.

After that observation, I focused my discussion in an attempt to make a case for the students to understand that in the midst of the downward trends of print in today’s market place there still continues to be many success stories. In the next session, when I moderated a panel of printers, including Publisher’s Press, Democrat Printing, and Shweiki Media, they confirmed the same thought and took it a step further. The printers brought to everyone’s attention the many thousands of unaudited titles that exist in their shops and the vitality of free circulation magazines.

A thought worth remembering is that when it comes to counting magazines that are produced, it is the unaudited titles that are in the majority and the audited magazines in the minority. And that ratio is by a very large margin.

There is much more that is worth discussing, but I am writing this on my plane ride home and will have to end my recap here. In the next few days I will attempt to go over the many other highlights of this terrific conference.

Post Script: One part of the conference is the assignment of student “shadows” whose job it is to meet, greet and work with all the professionals for the duration of the event. A special note of thanks to my articulate, hard-working and impressive shadow, Jared L. Boyd, with whom it was a pleasure to work and mentor.

Here are just a few of the people and the notes that I’ll be writing about:

William Morris III (Chairman, Morris Communications):

* We’ve moved from information scarcity to information overload

Vanessa Bush (Editor in Chief, Essence Magazine):

* Print is giving birth to countless abundant opportunities to engage with our audiences

John Harrington (Publisher, The New Single Copy)

Malcolm Netburn (Chairman, CDS Global)

John Phelan (Executive Director Consumer Marketing, Rodale):

* Predictive data is the connective tissue between an issue and its readership

* The distance between content and audience must narrow

* We don’t know how to measure success right now — digital tools and platforms are changing everything

Gil Brechtel (President, MagNet)

Joshua Gary (MagNet):

* There’s turmoil in the newsstand but there can be a predictability to be made from it

* 15% of magazines sold are now bookazines, which are starting to flood the market

Espen Tollefsen (CEO, Interpress, Norway):

* Magazine markets are declining

* International titles are declining as well as domestic titles

* #1 reason for large drop is not mobile — it’s a decline in “in-store” focus and distribution issues

Keith Bellows (EVP, Editor-in-Chief, National Geographic Traveler and Travel Media):

* We’re still in the middle of the bridge between print and digital — still driving “dazed and confused”

* Natl Geo is not a media company — we have only 3 mags — rather it’s all about Natl Geo’s mission to teach people about the planet

* The era of relying on subs and advertising to keep the company profitable is over

* The stories are what drives media — don’t lose sight of that

Roy Reiman (founder, Reiman Publications):

* The Act conference brings together people who are “doers instead of dreamers” who are not afraid to share both their mistakes and their successes