PR 101

This is the headline from the Dec. 11, 2009 crainsnewyork.com online business magazine: “367 magazines shuttered in 2009.”

The article goes on to report that: “As bad as the news is, the pace of decline appears to have slowed. In 2008, a total of 526 U.S. magazines ceased publication. In 2007, there were 573 that shut down.

The number of titles that folded may actually be higher, said Trish Hagood, president of Oxbridge Communications, parent company of MediaFinder, which describes itself as the largest online database of U.S. and Canadian publications. She explains that it will take until well into the new year to do a final tabulation.”

A knowledge gap is being created

I decided to write this blog because of last week’s announcement that two venerable magazines were shutting down: Editor & Publisher and Kirkus Reviews are being shuttered.

I know neither of these of magazines would be the kind likely to be sold at the grocery store checkout (except maybe for grocery stores in Cambridge, Mass, the lower East Side of New York and Berkley, Calif.). But, they served important purposes in their niches.

The century-old Editor & Publisher covered the newspaper industry. When I started as a reporter in 1975, it was a must read. If you wanted to know what going on in the business, you read E & P. I got my first two reporting jobs from classified ads in the magazine. It was a magazine in which readers’ actually read the ads first, especially the classified job listings.

Kirkus Reviews published over 5,000 book reviews annually. It was an important outlet, especially for new authors. It was often the first public exposure a first novel received. Kirkus was an important resource for bookstore buyers. They would often choose a novel to offer to their customers based on something they read in the magazine.

Personal note: As one who is writing a novel, and hoping to get it published, I mourn the loss of Kirkus. I also mourn the loss of E & P. It was an important press watchdog.

The closing of those two, and other magazines, is creating a knowledge gap.

Magazines used to occupy a unique place in news and information publishing. Newspapers were looked to as a daily source of information. That role has largely been taken over by Web-based news sources, including Twitter. Magazines were the source of the longer, more in-depth pieces. Magazines had the space and time to really tackle a subject. But, they were more immediate than a book.

With the death of so many magazines, a valuable source of explanation and analysis is going away. Oddly, to me at least, many newspapers are trying to turn themselves into daily magazines. They write long investigative stories that often run for several pages. That’s not why people read newspapers. They want to know what’s going on in the neighborhood. People don’t have time to ready long stories in the morning – when newspapers are delivered.

There is a solution

Yeah, you guessed it – I think magazines should be moving on line completely. I know Editor & Publisher has been on-line since the ‘90s. Kirkus is also online.  However, I don’t think either did a very good job of bringing readers to their websites. Like a lot of other publications, I think they saw the websites as an auxiliary to their print editions. It should have been the other way around.

There is precedent for this – the move of soap operas from radio to television in the early 1950s.

A little history first. In 1946, there were approximately 10,000 television sets in the United States, according to questia.com. By 1950, there were 3 million and by 1953, half of all households in the United States had a television. Kind of sounds like the growth of social media, doesn’t it?

Proctor & Gamble started soap operas on radio during the Depression. It was a marketing decision to sell more laundry soap and other products. When television began to dominate, P & G moved the soaps to television. After all, you go where the customers are – which is a rule of social media by the way.

So, why can’t magazines do the same thing? The web is becoming the dominant media – so why not move to the customers are? More and more people are doing their reading online. I still get Sports Illustrated’s print edition, but I also read it online every day. SI and other publications can do more on the web – post videos, run a lot more pictures, link to other relevant sites and be a lot more immediate in their analysis.

I think that move would save a lot of magazines. In cost alone, it would be a good move. No longer would a publisher have to factor the cost of production and printing.

Seems logical to me. Any thoughts anyone?

Note: I will not be posting on either next Monday or Wednesday. It is a holiday week and I am taking some time off. The next blog will run Jan. 4, 2010.