December 15th, 2006

What Kind of Publisher Are You?

by Scott Karp

  •  Comments

Business 2.0 editor Josh Quittner pushes back on Chris Anderson’s treatise on “radical transparency” in magazine publishing:

I don’t mean to be too much of an old-media-reactionary running dog. And some of the things he says make immediate sense. In fact, I asked all my writers and editors to start blogging a few months ago. (See the sidebar of B2 bloggers on the right, or go here.) But Wired’s radical transparency would help me—radically—when I make strategic decisions about how to put my magazine together. That’s because one of the most powerful attributes of my medium—the monthly magazine—is the element of surprise. What Chris is describing might indeed be wonderful online media, and yes, surprising to watch as it’s being created. But I bet the PAPER product that rolls off the printing press months later would have a much smaller audience than it does now—and would be creamed by the competition.

Editors like Chris and Josh are facing a moment of reckoning — they need to decide whether they are principally magazine publishers or online publishers. Given the “radically” divergent imperatives of online publishing, it will be difficult if not impossible to serve both equally well — one will ultimately have to be the primary medium.

Magazines face the same terrible quandary as newspapers — online audiences and revenues are where the growth are, but that growth is nowhere near sufficient, at least from a revenue perspective, to reverse the polarity from print to online.

The first step towards what promises in many cases to be a fraught transition may be to formalize the commitment to online publishing as a principal endeavor, knowing that will force decisions that ill serve the needs of the print publication.

At the end of the day, the focus needs to be the reader — are you going to serve best your online only readers, your online and print readers, or your print only readers? In print, readers can only be readers — and for many people, that’s still all they want to do. But online, readers can be participants and value creators — the community is interconnected, interactive, engaged.

In life, you can’t have everything. Brands that publish both in print and online face some tough choices indeed.

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Topics: Magazines | New Media | Online Publishing | Print Publishing | Publishing 2.0 | Traditional Media

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  • ted
    I strongly disagree that this will degrade the quality of the print magazine. Have you read Wired lately? I do on airplanes, and while they do publish a ton of stuff, the tone is way too "magaziney" for people who spend any time online. There's a certain archness, slickness, whatever you want to call it, that attempts to couch the obvious fear of the writers that they, in any small way 'don't get it'. I would hope that transparency would create less of a wall between writers/editors and the readers, and thus improve the magazine and set it apart from other magazines steeped in specific magazine conventions.
  • tim
    I agree with Ted, magazines are at their best when they do what they're best at: deep, insightful, exploratory journalism. The magazine, because of its slow monthly frequency, is the only (news) media left that really gets to take some time with an issue, giving readers a more complete or unique perspective.

    Quitter is operating under one massively faulty assumption -- that he and his magazine can surprise anyone. There is no information scarcity anymore. Whatever happens, people talk about, whether he decides to assign a story or not.

    And having his staff blog doesn't necessarily accomplish anything, there's no direction or business model there, so it could end up being a complete waste of time, fatally weakening the magazine in the process.

    Oh wait, maybe that's the surprise? :)
  • Tough choices? You're kidding right? Print and digital media are so extremely different at what they do well it's really kind of laughable that a publisher would need to choose one or the other.

    The idea that magazine publishers can only make print artifacts just doesn't stand up to the actual history of the magazine industry. Countless successful publishers have long used ancillary products such as books, trade shows, conferences and television programs to augment their bottom lines... a thriving and successful web presence should be no different.

    What it comes down to, for traditional print publishers at least, is whether or not they want to leave that big and growing chunk of revenue from digital media on the table for someone else to take or will they create an ancillary digital product that capitalizes on all the things that the web and digital technology offer.
  • Michael,

    The difference is that Chris Anderson is talking about opening up the entire process of creating the content that appears in the magazine as well as online, which is fundamentally disruptive to traditional print magazine editorial process. It's not an "ancillary digital product" -- it's a product that could become the primary product, thus making the print product a secondary consideration.
  • Understood... but the print product is well on its way to that on its own. It may take a number of years, but eventually the dollars online will outweigh the dollars in print. For any publisher that needs to make a profit that will be enough all on its own to make print a secondary consideration... no choice needed.

    There may be publishers who will stay with a print-first model, but I would be willing to bet that their readership will be fairly small and stagnant and they will most likely struggle to keep their product afloat. Without a vibrant community that lives online supporting its print versions most magazines will sputter out into irrelevance.

    "...Chris Anderson is talking about opening up the entire process of creating the content that appears in the magazine as well as online..."

    He may be... but his ideas are clearly cut for the web. The print process will benefit from the practice of these ideas online IF the print magazine that's produced heeds what we have learned from centuries of working in print media and does not try to replicate the non-linear fray that lives online.

    Ultimately I just don't think its possible to do "Transparency" in print... the very nature of the medium requires a certain amount of editorial reflection and guidance. Chaos may thrive in digital networks, but on the printed page it comes out as noise.
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