It's Tuesday: Diversity is Not A Four Letter Word - Issue #66
Early in my career, I was assigned to spend some time on the West Coast calling on California magazine wholesalers and chain store retailers. One morning I dropped into one of the six independent magazine wholesalers that serviced the LA metro area. From the front desk, I was escorted into a noisy and smokey "Publisher’s Representatives" room. Rep Rooms were often the dingiest rooms in the warehouse where representatives of national distributors and publishers worked on the distributions of their magazines.
Wholesalers were required to make this space and their distribution records available as part of their agreements with their suppliers, the national distributors of books and magazines. They often resented having to do so, hence the grubby and crowded spaces. The publisher rep I was supposed to work with was an older man who was a few months shy of retirement. I spent a very interesting morning learning some helpful shortcuts, and got his version of the history of the business I had stumbled into so soon after graduation.
Just before lunch he turned to me and said, “Do you know when this industry went to sh*t?”
Well, that rocked me back a bit. I wasn’t aware that the business had, in fact, gone to sh*t. My first thought was, "What have I gotten myself into?"
I think I muttered something like, “Um, no, I don’t. When?”
“When they let all these g*d d*amned women in. Look at them all!”
I looked around the room and saw that about a quarter of the people in the room were women.
In the first article below, Media Post reporter Ray Schultz discusses a report from Texas congressman Joaquin Castro that points out that Hispanics are underrepresented in the media workforce.
Underrepresentation of minority groups has long been an issue in the news media and in the magazine business. Anecdotally it seems (To me, anyway), that women are making up for lost time and filling the ranks. Most of the people I report to now are women and I have to say that for the most part, they appear to be better managers than stapler throwing, binder tossing male managers of old.
However, I agree with the report: Ethnic and racial minorities do seem underrepresented. That impacts what we read, what we listen to, and what we watch. It impacts how the industry grows and innovates. As an industry, we can do better.
We need to do better.
1___Media Post: Hispanics make up too small a percentage of media workers
Hispanics Make Up Too Small A Percentage Of Workers In Media, Report Says 10/06/2022 — www.mediapost.com Hispanics Make Up Too Small A Percentage Of Workers In Media, Report Says - 10/06/2022
The report, from Texas congressman Joaquin Castro cites glacial growth of Hispanics into the media workforce over the past few years. Hispanic women lag even further behind Hispanic men.
The barriers to entry include educational challenges, lack of diversity among talent agents and media executives and limited access to professional networks.
A copy of the GAO report can be found here.
2___Barnes & Noble's Krifka Steffey on newsstands, magazines and the "Cover Rocket" program
Barnes & Noble on newsstands, products, and why magazines are the perfect addition to the bookstore - FIPP — www.fipp.com
We caught up with the company’s Director for Merchandise - Newsstand and Media departments, Krifka Steffey, at the recent DistriPress Congress in Portugal to find out more…(Registration required to read article)
B&N’s newsstand director was at the Distripress Congress in Portugal and unveiled the new “Cover Rocket,” a database that combines covers, sales and magazine categories to try and help publishers understand what is powering their sales.
I really liked this quote from Steffey and wish more buyers and department heads thought like her: “As merchants, our role is to think about what our customers want and expect from us, and that is a combination of looking forward and looking backward. By this I mean that we can use prior sales to try and predict buying behavior, but also you have to be a bit of a psychic to think about what your customers want, but don’t know it yet.”
I was fortunate enough to see a demonstration of the Cover Rocket program recently and I think it has a lot of potential beyond helping to design better newsstand covers. Remember, most publishers send the same cover to the newsstand as they do to their subscribers and subscribers often make up 95% or more of most paid print copies. If newsstand buyers don’t respond positively to a cover, how do you think the subscriber responds?
I’m just saying.
Maybe it’s time to invite the circulation people and their databases to the cover meetings?
I’m just saying.
3___10 Tech Mags worth paying for...
10 Tech Magazines That Are Worth Paying For — screenrant.com From Wired and PC Pro to Popular Mechanics and MIT Technology Review, discover the best technology magazines to invest money into in 2022.
What an interesting article. I had a lot of fun counting how many of the 10 mags I was actually familiar with (7). I was also blown away by this fact: MIT Tech Review is 123 years old. It was founded in 1899.
4___A conversation with master designer Steven Heller on his new book, "Growing up Underground"
Design Matters: Steven Heller – PRINT Magazine — www.printmag.com Steven Heller—legendary writer and author—joins to discuss his new book “Growing Up Underground,” an entertaining and humorous coming-of-age story at th…
I didn't know a thing about Steven Heller so finding this article was a revelation.
A thought that crossed my mind while reading this interview was: Do you think someone could create a career like this in 2022?
Well, what do you think?
5___Love the smell of paper money? Well, too bad!
Laura Washington: A pox on the cashless society — www.chicagotribune.com Cash will always be king to some of us. For one thing, the cashless society creates inequality.
I chose this piece from Chicago columnist Laura Washington because it reads a bit like the articles from the early aughts about the rise of digital magazines and books. Just like those critics of digital reading, she has a valid point so let's not discount the article.
On a personal level, I really didn’t notice my conversion to “cashless” until after the pandemic started to break. Prior to February 2020, I was in the habit of using a lot of cash. But the pandemic kept us home, ordering deliveries or getting out of the grocery store as quickly as possible. A year later, I noticed that I didn’t have any cash on hand and didn’t seem to need very much of it.
Your moment of "Magazine Zen..."
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May your workweek be filled with short meetings and stable wifi. Also, I heard Bethany down in marketing already broke open her Halloween candy. Go pay her a visit!