Pivot! Pivot! Pivot!
Back where we started...Do it again...Issue #104
Occasionally I have to remind myself that many years ago I was feeling bored with my career. My path was a non-stop whirlwind of travel and repetitive report writing. Monday through Thursday. Rinse and repeat. The only thing that kept me moving along, aside from a halfway decent income, was the simple fact that I couldn’t think of anything else career wise that looked interesting. So, I kept at it.
No doubt you know what happened next. That old adage, “Be careful what you wish for.” It’s pretty darn spot on. Want a little excitement, Joe? OK, let’s throw an entire industry into a blender of mass consolidation and see what happens. It’s August, 2023. We all know what happened.
Meanwhile, like so many of the magazine media clients I serve, I’ve pivoted. And pivoted. And pivoted. And pivoted. Not surprisingly, you eventually wind up back where you started.
You get the picture. Learn new stuff. Sell new services. Pivot. Pivot. Pivot.
Over the years we’ve seen the trades and pundits hype the next big thing for magazine publishers. Digital replicas! Digital subscriptions! Video! Podcasts! Memberships!!!!
A week or so back, I picked up on an interesting article from Brian Morrissey’s Rebooting newsletter (see below) about the latest pivot. It’s a good idea, and digital first publishers and legacy publishers that still have some mojo in the bank are taking good advantage of it. Not surprisingly, nearly every regional publisher I’ve ever worked with has been doing this for many, many years.
So, is it really a “pivot”? Or is it more like, “If you haven’t tried this, you probably should?”
one___Didn’t we already pivot to events?
In this late July post, Morrissey reports on how events are becoming a more important part of a publisher’s income statement. He points out the favorable economics of events. He has an excellent point.
It helps, of course, if the publisher has a budget to get the event started. Staffing, or access to staffing helps too. So does something that fits with the editorial of the magazine. My regional city and state clients obviously have easy fits: Food, weddings, music. An outdoors publisher can host trips. A craft publisher can host a crafting event. The possibilities are pretty enormous.
two___What the Grub St. Journal learned while making a magazine…
Longtime UK magazine media figures, Peter Houston and Joanna Cummings decided to put their money where there mouth is and created a magazine for and about the magazine business: The Grub Street Journal.
Their premiere issue (Which I was more than happy to buy and add to my premiere magazine collection) featured a beautifully rendered Don Quixote meets The Grateful Dead style illustrated cover and contained articles such as “What kind of idiots still make magazines?”
In a recent Media Voices newsletter, Houston released an article entitled, “Nine things we learned making an indie print magazine.” and I continue to love the fact that one of the well spoken voices for our industry went out and tried this thing.
Three of the “things” he and Joanna Cummings learned while creating this publication (issue two is now out) really stood out for me:
#2 Print is different-really different: No kidding. And I’m happy to reinforce what they said. A few years back I had a client that was digital first and decided to go into print. It was an incredibly hard (pivot) for them. Worse, they were underfunded and seemed to think they could do it all on their own. I think you know how that worked out.
#3 Magazines are manufacturing: See above. There are a ton of moving parts. Sometimes the parts jam up. Can you handle that?
#8 Community is everything: Small, niche magazines operate at scale just like their big cousins, Future or DotDash Meredith. It’s just a different scale. If you’re going to do this, make sure you’re serving your community. And the community better be willing to buy what you’re selling. 300,000 TikTok followers are lovely. But will some of them be subscribing to your magazine or buying your merch?
three___The 10 best indie mags right now
Print, the design focused magazine recently put out a list of what they consider to be the “10 best indie mags right now.” As writer Steven Watson points out, the really great ones are the ones that survive past the first few issues.
And what a list this is: Venerable titles like MacGuffin have are on it including others such as Delayed Gratification and Racquet.
But my personal favorite, both for their title, their look and their covers has to be Dirty Furniture, a design publication that focuses on what happens when “design leaves the showroom.” Of note, like several other indie mags I’ve come across while putting this newsletter together, this magazine has a specific lifespan and it’s run is supposed to end this year.
Talk about becoming something to collect.
four___Is Heavy Metal Magazine Dead? Or Not Dead?
While I still enjoy a good fantasy novel or series on Prime, I couldn’t remember the last time I thought about Heavy Metal Magazine. In my teens and twenties, Heavy Metal was something I followed and occasionally picked up from the newsstand.
When one of my favorite bands had a song in their movie, I was all in.
Unsurprisingly, my first job in the magazine business was representing a publishing company that made a copycat titles. They had one of Heavy Metal.
Of course, as you age, your tastes can change and my interest in the title waned
Comicsbeat writer RM Rhodes tracks the long, slow fall of this title, the multiple ownership changes, the shrinking frequency, rising cover price and the weird, quiver demise to a title that probably deserved a better end.
five___Why X got rid of Twitter
I couldn’t resist reading this because so many writers, columnists, journalists, magazines and authors were a big part of why I spent any time on Twitter. Recently I logged in, saw that “Epsteined*” was trending, and logged off.
According to newly minted CEO Linda Yaccarino, becoming “X” was always the goal and the platform is going to become the “Everything” platform. She says “You look at video, and soon you’ll be able to make video chat calls without having to give your phone number to anyone on the platform.”
So, just like Facebook.
One thing that sort of made sense was the comparison between a legacy brand making incremental changes vs. Musk’s thinking about what’s possible.
For all of its troubles pre-Musk era, Twitter was a well known place to go for verifiable news. Oddly, many news orgs are still there despite the exponential growth of conspiracists, Neo Nazis and trolls.
Twitter was never going to be a giant business in the mold of a Facebook or Instagram at its peak. Considering how toxic the site is now, I can’t see how they would ever get someone to trust it enough to let it become their “Everything” app.
Does anyone even want an “Everything” app? If you did, would you want to do your banking on the same platform that hosts Neo Nazis and supremacists?
*For the record, I have no idea what it means to be “Epsteined” and I never want to know…
Not Your Moment of Magazine Zen…
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So, are your kids back in school? The arrival of all those football annuals on the rack should have tipped you off. But don’t panic, if your mornings have gotten more hectic this week, head on down to the break room. I hear there’s a little “Back to School” celebration going on!
See you next week.
Thank you so much for the Grub Street write up Joe!!! As we said in the 'Nine things' piece, your friends are everything in this game 💜