Exactly correct.
Mark
Founder and CEO BookRiff.com
Posted by Mark Scott on 04/06 at 06:13 PM
Publishing’s real problem
I learned much of what I know about magazine publishing while at Time Inc., where I spent 12 years working on three of the company’s four weeklies. Along with Conde Nast, Time Inc. has long been seen as more than willing to spend money on content. In return, the companies gained audiences and advertising revenues greater than any other firms.
Without focusing unduly on the magazine industry’s most visible players, it’s clear that the days of building outsize circulation levels and charging advertisers boatloads of money for a print ad are coming to close. In response, a host of magazine publishers have been “right-sizing”, reducing their ability to fund content development so that they can “get their cost structures in line with new fiscal realities”.
Some phrases make me sheepish about my MBA.
The debate has taken on the tone of a beer commercial: “Less filling,” say publishers. “We need to cut costs to stay afloat.”
“Tastes great,” say editors. “Without access to premium content, readers won’t keep coming back.”
Both sides miss the core point: the problem is not that content costs too much, but that it is too narrowly deployed. Fifteen years into the internet era, we still treat the magazine as “content” and other applications as “ancillary uses”. We develop content for a single use and only after it is published (often, long after it is published) do we ask, “What else might we do with this?”
We debate structure (writing for print alone, selling for print alone or combining functions) without thinking through the uses of content. Readers really don’t care how a media company is organized. They want to be able to find and consume content wherever, whenever and however it can be obtained.
Editors have been slow to see that their new roles, they need to think not just about what is to be published, but how that content will be discovered and consumed. Publishers taken with ad rates of old struggle with the idea that selling more while charging less can work, albeit not with expense-account lunches and great golf outings.
Already out of date: media models that focus on reducing the cost of providing content in narrow channels. Think instead about investing in and gaining the revenue benefits of more robust models built around content agility.
Comments
Mark, you win the pithiness award! When you get a chance, feel free to add what you are seeing at BookRiff, which is certainly an option when looking for new uses of existing content.
Posted by Brian O'Leary on 04/06 at 06:21 PM
Brian,
You are always analyzing things in a cryptic way. You makea a good point but you leave everyone scratching their heads (or, at least, I do) for an answer. You can’t say: “Editors have been slow to see that their new roles, they need to think not just about what is to be published, but how that content will be discovered and consumed.” because editors work for a magazine and they know how their edit will be discovered--by approx. 4 million subscribers, if its Time Magazine. To ask them to think about more gets in the way of creating that content. You should SUGGEST the ways that company could repurpose their editorial and become their consultant and make a lot of money. I find your ideas brilliant but you are much too stingy with solutions.
Jeff
Posted by Jeff Barasch on 04/27 at 09:05 AM
I think that our differences lie in the conception of the role of an editor. Old role = work for a magazine; new role = connect content with markets (readers) across multiple channels. I’d suggest not that editors (just) repurpose their content, but that they start with a broad sense of how that content could be used and then create content that can be easily distributed across a variety of channels. That requires a sense of market broader than (for example) “magazine subscribers”.
I do agree that this is a harder job than the one editors have now. I think that’s a necessary change given the challenges that publishers face.
Posted by Brian O'Leary on 04/27 at 10:22 AM
Brian,
Aren’t you really asking editors to re-purpose themselves?
I’m not sure why you charge editors and not publishers with re-imagining the “variety of channels”. If editors are out ‘delivering papers,’ who’s back at the office creating content?
Lisa D.
Posted by Lisa Duggan on 05/01 at 12:19 PM
I’d describe my advocacy as equal-opportunity: both editors and publishers need to re-create their roles. I don’t expect editors to deliver papers, as it were; that’s a business-side function. But I do see a need for editors to acquire, develop and manage content with an eye toward “how that content will be discovered and consumed”.
Publishers also need to change, particularly in thinking about reaching more than one channel and probably more than one audience with content that is significantly more agile than it is today. They also need to reconsider the debate about the cost of content - with broader deployment, money spent on content is an investment, not an expense.
Posted by Brian O'Leary on 05/02 at 02:23 PM
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