TheWayoftheWeb

I haven’t been able to fully digest the Digital Britain report to be able to dissect it and add anything to the commentary already online, so I thought I’d share the thoughts of those people who I value enough to have in my RSS feed every day:

Digital Britain Scorecard: So how did Lord Carter do? – Paid Content.

What does #digitalbritain mean for journalism – Adam Westbrook.

Digital Britain calls for pirate-free universal broadband – Ars Technica.

Digital Britain: 2015 – First thoughts on radio – Adam Bowie.

(Disclosure – Adam Bowie is a colleague of mine at Absolute Radio, although the views expressed on either of our blogs are our own, and do not necessarily represent the views of our employer. )

I’d also recommend the always erudite and interesting Bill Thompson, – Digital Britain engaging with the internet – but his blog appears to be down at the moment. Luckily he’s also available on the BBC site.

Two stories on the Mediaweek site today perfectly illustrate the complexity and confusion in the publishing world.

At 7.30am it was suggested that Bauer Media (Disclosure – I worked for Bauer Media/Emap until earlier this year) would be reviving The Face, with an all-digital proposition one of the possibilities. While I’m not alone in wondering why The Face would be picked, considering the recent closure of Arena, any re-launch is a rare occurrence. And particularly a digital one. Bauer Media, by the way, has officially denied any such plans.

Then at 4.10pm it was revealed that John Menzies Digital has folded. Which means the end of magazinesondemand.co.uk and white label versions for WHSmith and Asda. The service had allowed readers to download over 100 magazines in digital editions. Paid Content has some more context around the decision, which closes the business after just 14 months.

So we’ve gone from a possible digital relaunch of an iconic title to the loss of over 100 digital editions in the space of a day.

What this hopefully illustrates better than anything is that the future of publishing or broadcasting any content is full of uncertainty at the moment. And there is no ‘right answer’ to how best to transform for the future.

Actually that’s a lie.

The right answer is to try various ideas, keep optimising them, and count a reasonable time span in years rather than months.

I’ve probably spent as much time thinking about the future of print magazines in the couple of weeks since I left the magazine industry as I did when I was in it!

The reason is that newspaper consultant/critic Jeff Jarvis recently asked ‘Are magazines doomed?‘ in an article inspired by the closure of Portfolio magazine just as publisher Conde Nast launched a UK version of Wired.

The comments on his article had an interesting split between those for and against print as a medium generally, as well as a few questions around the revenue streams employed in magazine publishing.

My hypothesis is that print magazines will prove more resilient than their newspaper counterparts, but eventually they’ll share the same fate due to a twin pincer movement.

Their resilience is in part due to the difference in content, and the difference in format. The majority of magazines are providing something in addition/as an alternative to the breaking news that the internet disrupts so effectively. Their strength is not only in providing analysis, insight and features, but also in conveying this information with fantastic photography and design. And by doing so, they can provide a far more engaged audience interested in a specific topic.

Here come the pincers…

The first claw closing on the magazine industry is that the online world is evolving far more rapidly, both in terms of community, as Jeff points to, but also in terms of more content-driven websites and blogs. As the market for blogs fighting to break news in niche topics has become increasingly saturated, and coincidentally many more journalists and freelancers are looking outside of print following recession-instigated redundancies, so the levels of insight and expertise available online will increase.

It’s easy to forget in the tech/online bubble that the ‘mainstream’ mass readerships are still located mainly in print, even as they start to move away in many cases. And as much as the online world can criticise traditional display advertising for irrelevancy, digital monetisation still needs to evolve in effectiveness around content.

But the people best placed to effectively make a decent wage online are those experienced journalists and writers who are able to produce specialist books and in-depth articles – those who are also most valuable to print editorial teams. As they increasingly look at digital opportunities, that’s where the biggest content threat will come.

The other pincer?

The other defence of magazines is due to the format – the incredible photography and design which can inspire as it’s displayed on your coffee table.

The problem is that the quality of a format is not a guarantee of it’s survival. While those magazines favoured for their design qualities will doubtless be the most resilient for the future, the fact is that the utlity of digital formats for accessing and sharing information will overcome the quality of the pile of magazines left gathering dust in a box under the bed.

And that’s assuming that technology stays roughly equivalent to what is available right now.

Even as I was about to write this post, a post by Om Malik appeared in my RSS feed – Vogue on Your eReader? New E-paper Tech Will Make It Happen. It happens that a group of researchers at the University of Cincinnatti in Ohio have created a new technology which allows them to recreate the colour and brightness of print. The link has a full explanation, but not only is it much closer to the beauty of print, it also is far more energy efficient than the current Kindle-type displays.

So what’s the answer then?

There are two very likely scenarios for print magazines in the next decade or less. One is that very small run, niche print magazines might survive with subscriptions, display advertising and additional revenue streams due to cult levels of devotion.

The second is that magazines will increasingly follow the ‘digital only’ route which newspapers are being forced into, and we’ll see some find ways to monetise more effectively than display advertising. The others will become marginalised or disappear due to the increased expertise of the new competitors they’ll suddenly discover that have been on the web for years already…

One of the blogs I subscribe to, The Blog Herald, recently carried a fairly standard story about an company acquisition. In this case, it caught my eye, because it’s Teens in Tech acquiring The Youth Bloggers Network.

The CEO of Teens in Tech is 16-year-old Daniel Brusilovsky, while 15-year-old Patrick DeVivo runs the Youth Bloggers Network. And they’re offering ad revenue split between publishers and host, custom domains, pro accounts, increased storage space etc.

Image by daedrius (CC Licence)

It suddenly reminded of a quote (Thanks to @andjdavies, @neilperkin and @Rtyrie for reminded me of the source where Google failed).

It’s from the recently published and much discussed ‘Newspapers and thinking the unthinkable‘ by Mr Clay Shirky.

One of the people I was hanging around with online back then was Gordy Thompson, who managed internet services at the New York Times. I remember Thompson saying something to the effect of “When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.”

The point isn’t that 14, 15 and 16 year olds are doing these things, which would suggest it’s solely the preserve of the young – the point is that there is no reason why the very young or old can’t become CEO of their own business. I talked with someone recently whose salesforce is way above the age you’d associate with internet businesses, but who is incredibly effective at what he does. It’s about the attitude, rather than skills, and the reason it’s more prevalent amongst the young is due to the access to technology, and changes in culture, which are more familiar, and not challenged by legacy practices.

Which means you’re not just going to face young rivals, but old rivals, middle-aged rivals, experienced rivals, inexperienced rivals, and your existing competitors.

And, as Mark would say, expert predictions aren’t very reliable, so the only real defence is to have a clear vision and aim on how you’re going to best use new and existing technologies and techniques, and start making yourself different right now.