I am sure that sounds quite counter-intuitive. Today the latest issue of Mix Magazine came in. I was flipping through the pages and it occurred to me that it’s pretty much all advertising, loosely held together by editorial content I could have easily found online for free.
I am really into music production. I subscribe to Mix Magazine, Recording Magazine, Guitar Player Magazine and a few others. The problem lately is not only are the magazines getting thinner and thinner, but the speed at which I am finished with them is doubling faster than they are shrinking.
Basically they are selling more ads in less space to make up for the loss in subscribers. The end result is that I am paying a yearly subscription to them to send me advertising.
I might as well start sending checks to the people that put the stupid grocery circulars in my mailbox.
I don’t know if I will subscribe to another physical magazine. Even the experience of magazines on the Kindle seems to not make sense. I subscribe to a ton of sites that I am interested in via RSS, and every day I scan thousands of articles on Bloglines to find the content I really care about.
American Musical Supply, Musicians 1-2-3 and Musicians Friend regularly send me free catalogs, including new product editorial content. I don’t think I ever see a product in a magazine I didn’t already know about through some other means.
That leaves the publishing industry in a pickle. If the readers can find all of the content somewhere else, and the advertisers have plenty of other channels to get their products to the public, that leaves them with no magazine to sell and no income in which to make money if it did sell. Ouch.
I am not sure what Apple is supposedly trying to do to bail out the publishing industry, but I think just like the record industry that still doesn’t get it in spite of being forced to get it, the publishing industry has evolved.
I am reminded of a book I read by Malcolm Gladwell called Outliers. The premise of his argument is that due to the nature of the season beginning dates of Pee-Wee hockey, the system generates a set of players based on purely month of birth, and of those, the most excellent are selected, get more experience and eventually go on to be professionals. The rest get sentenced to mediocracy just because they were born too far away from the cut off date to be able to play.
I think journalism has followed a similar path. Due to the nature of the post graduate education system, a group of would-be journalism students fight for a small amount of positions available. The excellent ones rise to the top and write the articles that you and I read in the newspapers and magazines of today.
The only problem is that now anyone has a platform and all of the other would-be journalists that did not go to college for journalism, but still have the talent and personality to be widely read, can rise to the top outside of the established system.
The process itself not only grows the reputation of the writers, but the platform itself. Today many blogs are considered first class news and narrative platforms. Writers that would have otherwise never made it to major newspapers or magazines are heard, loved and read. Many of them without ever intending to be a writer!
I am not counting myself as one of those, but for a guy who doesn’t intend to be a journalist or columnist, who is in the computer software industry and doesn’t claim to be a writer, I am betting based on historical website statistics that more than a thousand people will view this article. That’s a thousand readers of a story that ran on what Alexa.com says is the 231,113th most popular website on the internet.
Meesa thinks magazines are newspapers are in deep doo doo betcha betcha.