Prepping (Or not) for the New Year
So what are things like for you when you get to the end of the year? Do your meeting schedules slow down? Do you start to put away files? Transition documents to the new year? Try to train yourself to write the new years’ date on some docs? Happily attend the company “Holiday Party”? Are you one of those?
Or do you try to ignore the whole thing? It’s just another day after all and at worst, you’ll have to answer to a new budget. Maybe you’re the type who has no problem scheduling a mandatory “All Team” meeting the Friday before Christmas and you’ll be very disappointed with anyone who dares to not show up.
Me? I’m somewhere in the middle. I do like the slow season. It’s nice that email from live people slows down (Spam never rests!), the phone calls dribble off to nothing, the projects wrap up. But as a self employed person, there’s still invoices to manage, projects to propose, reports that will never sleep.
But right now? At this moment? I see a little break in the clouds. I’m not feeling inclined to open the link. So let’s all go get another cup of coffee, raid some Christmas cookies from the break room. Shall we see what we can learn about magazines this morning?
1___Can “Added Value” justify higher prices?
Jim Elliott, the founder of James G. Elliott Co. offers a series of pretty valuable suggestions about how media companies can justify charging higher prices for their advertisers. I found his suggestions regarding bundling and creating custom content very helpful.
And it got me thinking, because advertising is not exactly my jam, but circulation and audience building kind of is and his suggestions could be translated easily to the circulation and marketing desk.
This line makes enormous sense: “…but there are many publishers whose print circulations have shrunk (thanks to digital copies) to the point where the hard cost of the printed product doesn’t make using a magazine as a value added tool quite as horrifying as it once was.”
There’s a lot of truth there. The banner ad isn’t the “value ad” anymore. But the print magazine may very well be. And that’s quite OK.
2___Pour out another one. WaPo ends their Sunday Magazine…
First, Parade Magazine was eliminated from the Sunday papers. Now the Washington Post is going to end their Sunday magazine. Clearly, we’ve entered that “inflection point” where it is no longer profitable for these types of newspaper supplements to be published. The cost of paper is probably too high as is the cost of distribution and the lack of advertising revenue.
This is a weirdly personal thing for me because my very first paying job was as a Sunday newspaper carrier in my hometown of Springfield, MA. Not only did I deliver the local Sunday Republican, but I also delivered many out of town newspapers including the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Hartford Courant and many others. I remember that most were very heavy and had some sort of magazine supplement in them.
3___Indie literary magazine “Astra” is shut down
What I found fascinating about this article was that the company that founded the magazine was willing to let it develop some legs and see if it was able to financially support itself. Until, of course, the plug was pulled.
The other thing I found very interesting: The distribution model for the magazine was very different. They used PRH to distribute to indie bookstores. I wonder if that link was also used to gain entry to Hudson Retail’s airport and transportation outlets.
4___Emmis Corp sells Indianapolis Monthly to Hour Media
The sale of their final regional magazine to Hour Media means that Emmis is now completely out of the print magazine business. The remaining brands for the company includes two radio stations, a sound masking company, a podcasting company and a pricing solutions operation.
At one time, Emmis had a diverse portfolio of regional magazines including Atlanta Magazine, Cincinnati Magazine, Los Angeles Magazine, Orange Coast Magazine and Texas Monthly.
The story of Hour Media is quite different. They’ve gone from just one title in Detroit, MI to one of the largest regional magazine publishers in the country with magazines in California, Minnesota, Georgia, Florida and elsewhere.
5___The Believer Returns
Unlike Astra Magazine, The Believer has been resurrected through the efforts of a Kickstarter campaign and has delivered their first two issues. The more I read about these types of campaigns, the more I think the long term future of regular frequency magazines may lie with small circulation niche titles.
Is it time to leave the big subscription lists and blockbuster single copy sales to the major publishers and their SIP factories? That’s something to think about.
On a related front, I’m very intrigued by the crowdfunding aspect of creating an indie magazine. On Kickstarter, I found 276 magazine “projects”. Three of them were live and one was already fully funded.
One of the most successful recent launches of a children’s magazine, Kazoo, was funded on Kickstarter. Likewise, 54 year old Locus Magazine is currently raising funds on Indigogo so they can maintain their operations
Your Moment of Magazine Zen…
So that’s all I have for you this week. I hope you enjoyed this newsletter. If you did, please give it a boost by clicking “Like” and then subscribe. You’ll get a brand new release in your email in-box every Tuesday. Sometimes I even have some “bonus” content for you.
Now, it’s almost the end of the year. Let's check in with our favorite magazine media work team as they wrap up their final meeting of the year…
If you’ve got a question or comment, please drop me a line. You can always reach me at joe.berger@newsstandpros.com.
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It’s only nineteen more days until Christmas and three more weeks to the New Year. I hope you have an easy rest of the week and that this holiday season is a good one for you and your loved ones.
See you all next week.