Mr. Magazine

Here is the direct link to the interview on Fox Business on Tuesday August 19, 2008. See blog below for details.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Here is the direct link to the interview on Fox Business on Tuesday August 19, 2008. See blog below for details.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Yesterday I was interviewed on the Fox Business News’ morning show Money for Breakfast. Read what the show’s host Alexis Glick wrote about the show on her blog and watch the interview with me, Matt Kinsman, Managing Editor of Folio magazine and Dave Kansas, President of FiLife.com.
Click here to read and watch The Glick Report.

I have received more phone calls this week asking about the reasons single copy sales are down by 6.4% and subscription sales are up, thus keeping the level of circulation figures the same as the last six months. Well, I have decided to visit the newsstands one more time, and this time not to buy any magazines, but rather to collect the subscription cards (one of the major ills of our industry today) found inside the magazines on the newsstands maybe I can get my answers.
What I found, and this by the way, came as no surprise to me, is that what we used to call the “dandruff of the industry” has exploded to an extremely shameless effort of forcing the newsstand buyer not to purchase a magazine on the newsstands. My first pick was the newsweeklies. Newsweek has a hefty price for its current double issue of $5.95. I picked up the magazine and a card screaming at me, “you stupid Samir, you are going to pay almost six dollars for a magazine instead of sending four more dollars and getting the entire year for ten dollars!” I put the magazine back. The rest of the magazines were no different. I moved to the women’s magazine section, the same can be said about them, buy a year of Cosmopolitan and we will send you a year of Marie Claire, for less than two dollars, yes less than two dollars. The men’s magazines are no different. Buy GQ and we will send you Details, or buy Details for a mere $7.97 a year. The sports category offers no surprises either, a year of Sporting News start at 29 cents an issue (compare that to the $3.99 cover price), and so is the music category with Rolling Stone being sold at 33 cents an issue.
Take a look at the above wall of shame and ask yourself why newsstands are not selling as they used to in the “good old days.” Do you remember when Cosmo used to cost more to subscribe than to buy on the newsstands? Do you remember when Family Circle and Woman’s Day were only sold on the newsstands? Do you still see the success of the single copy driven Woman’s World? Try to ask yourself what can we do with a “numbers” driven model that worked for years, but is no longer working today? Our magazine industry is at a crossroads and unless we make the right choices we are doing to end in the graveyard of history. Magazines must and should start charging the realistic cover prices and subscription prices. For what it’s worth, here are few simple ideas for us to make the right choices:

1. Magazine subscriptions should not be less than 20 – 30% of the cover price. In fact we should sell magazine subscriptions as a service to the reader, delivering the magazine home, saving on gas and effort to go to the newsstands, etc. Think about any retail mail order business…sometimes you pay for shipping and handling a heftier price compared to the product itself.
2. Magazine cover prices should be slashed down. If you truly want your magazine to reach that single copy market why not selling at a fair price that does not scare the readers. Why should I pay $5.95 for a 72-page issue of Newsweek and $3.99 for a 400-page issue of GQ? It just makes no sense. Newsweek, Time and the rest of the newsweeklies should carry a cover price of no more $1.99 if they want the magazines to move on the newsstands. That will make them more competitive in terms of their subscription prices.
3. Stop chasing the numbers of customers and concentrate on customers who count. The first step in doing such is stop the rate base gimmick. You can’t anymore chase a rate base number and try to meet that number. Today’s customers are different and reaching those who count is much more important than counting them.
4. Go back to the business of selling content and not giving content away. If you value your content, you need to start making your customers pay for it.
So, next time you want to know why the newsstands sales are down, please do not blame the internet or the television or technology. Our problems are from within, and as long as we keep on burying our head in the sand our industry is not going to thrive and be alive.

Ladies’ Home Journal’s Sept. issue sports an interview with Michelle and Barack Obama with the picture of both sharing the cover of the magazine. Single copy buyers get an extra inset picture, with not so subliminal message, of an apple pie that readers can “rub and sniff” and the smell of the apple pie sends a wow through the senses of the customers. What can be more American than an apple pie? Well, you do not have to be a genius to add one plus one and the entire cover package is smelling like an apple pie. The subscribers of Ladies’ Home Journal have to be satisfied with the smell of ink on paper (and as much as I love the smell of ink on paper, I can’t write that the smell of ink on paper is as American as an apple pie…)
In my previous blog, I have asked the question about the coverage both Obama and McCain are receiving from the American magazines, well you can add this one to the Obama camp and you can keep on counting… My guesstimate is the score is at least 4 to 1 in favor of Obama. Have a different theory, please do not hesitate to comment.

In yet another magazine example of offering different single copy covers in different areas of the country, Reader’s Digest in its August issue took the Obama’s campaign slogan “Yes, You Can” and used it on one of the two covers being sold on the newsstands. I wish I can say the other cover is a page from the McCain’s campaign, but by its looks I doubt that.
Which brings me to a completely different academic topic, have you noticed how many covers Senator Obama has been on compared with Senator McCain. It will make a nice academic study to compare the two senators and the number of times they have appeared on magazine covers. Whether on the cover of American magazines or European magazines, my theory is that Senator Obama has appeared on more magazine covers than Senator McCain. It is just a hypothesis for now, but I bet you it will not be hard to accept after some research. A graduate student waiting in the wings for a master’s thesis topic can take this challenge and start the research. Please keep me posted, or just let me know whether you agree with my hypothesis or not…

Remember the old saying, “the freedom of the press belongs to those who own the press!” Well, the folks at MagCloud want you, not only to own the press, but to write, edit and design your own press. A product of years of research at the HP Labs, MagCloud wants to “ease the pain” of magazine publishing and give the opportunity to everyone with an idea, any idea, to become a magazine publisher. MagCloud’s own take on things is as such,

“MagCloud is an HP Labs research project evaluating new web services that will provide small independent magazine publishers, online content owners, and small businesses the ability to custom publish digitized magazines and economically print and fulfill on demand.”

Derek Powazek, whom I first interviewed when he helped launch JPG magazine, serves as a consultant to HP Labs on this project. I have asked him few questions regarding MagCloud. After a brief intro, Derek answered my seven questions regarding this new venture that wants to make YOU a magazine publisher overnight…

He wrote, “Before I begin, I want to stress that MagCloud is a project by HP Labs, currently in beta, to which I am a consultant. It was not my idea – it’s been percolating for years within HP, actually – but it happened to dovetail wonderfully with my interests, and I came on board to help guide it forward. The core members of the team are Udi Chatow, Andy Fitzhugh, and Andrew Bolwell – all brilliant HP Labcoats. I can introduce you if you like. With that in mind, here are some thoughts….”

1. MagCloud promises to make magazine publishing as easy as
photocopying at Kinko’s. Is this the future of magazine publishing or
the return to old memo-graphed underground publications?

I’ve run a magazine out of Kinko’s. It’s not that easy!
My personal hope is that MagCloud kickstarts a new generation of zinesters, people raised on the ease of publishing on the web, but who still hunger for the beauty and permanence of print. The last creative explosion in zines was kicked off by copy machine. The next will be powered by print-on-demand coupled with the internet.

2. Do you view MagCloud as a publisher, printer or distributor?

If I had to pick one of the three, MagCloud would have to be a distributor, because we partner with printers, and our goal is to enable our members to become publishers themselves.
But, really, MagCloud is is a connector. We connect publishers to their audiences, printers with magazines, readers with magazines, etc. We see an enormous opportunity to breathe new life into the magazine biz, if only publishing was as easy and accessible as the web.

3. When would a magazine produced by MagCloud reach the status of a
real magazine (i.e. mass distributed magazine)?

We’ve got a pretty loose definition of what a magazine is. But, in general, if you print on paper, on a schedule, to subscribers, we think you’re a real magazine.

The whole idea of mass distribution comes out of embedded expectations about the economy of magazines. You can only make money in traditional magazines at scale, because it’s just not cost-effective to do small print runs. But that’s a technology problem – traditional offset printing is just too expensive to do in small batches. But what if it wasn’t?

If you look at the cost per page of printing, traditional offset printing is actually getting more expensive because of rising paper costs, but the cost per page of print-on-demand is getting cheaper/better/faster ever year. As price points merge, and it will cost just as much/little to print a single copy as a thousand. That change is happening now, and the industry is just beginning to notice.

4. After your experience with JPG and moving it from lulu.com to a
regularly published magazine, are you looking for an encore with the
titles coming through the pipe line at MagCloud?

Absolutely, only this time, we want to empower other people’s magazines. The math here is simple: If it was easier to make magazines, more people would do it. More magazines means more potential breakout hits. Too many great magazines don’t get made today because the business of printing and distribution is so hampered by inefficiency.

5. How do you view the future of magazine publishing and what is the
biggest challenge you think it is facing?

Young people are abandoning print magazines for the web – they have been for years. The way to bring them back is to put them in charge and see what they make. It’s easy for the pros to scoff at this idea, but remember that groups of amateurs have made some pretty amazing things online (insert inevitable Wikipedia reference here).

And remember, MagCloud is not just for the amateurs. The pros are bound by the same difficulties. Show me a dozen editors and I’ll show you a hundred magazine ideas that would exist if only it was a little easier. Not to mention all the content remixes and short-run editions professional publishers could put together on a system like MagCloud.

6. Will technology help print and add more printed products to the
marketplace or technology will replace print?

I think that we’re still figuring out what kind of stuff belongs in print, and what doesn’t. Remember that, for years, if you wanted to find out what the weather was like in a certain place, you bought a book. A Farmer’s Almanac. Putting that kind of variable data on paper seems crazy now, because we have a better way to do it.

So, yes, technology will drive some print products to their grave. Personally, I would not want to be running a traditional news weekly right now.

But I we both know that print is not dead. There’s content that really belongs in print. Look at the success of Make Magazine, photography journals, recipe books. We just need to figure out how print and web can stop competing and start collaborating.

7. What do you consider the single most important selling feature of MagCloud?

That someone who’s fanatically into a topic area could create a magazine, build an audience, and actually make money selling it, without ever having to stuff envelopes. Hasn’t that always been the dream of independent publishing?

So, magazine dreamers of the world there is no need to unite anymore for each and every one of you can have his own “cake” and eat it too… you are indeed on cloud nine with your ideas now, or should I say you are on MagCloud.