Shortly after the national distributors reported on the new fee structure The News Group was rolling out, I started to work on a post for this blog. Through that first weekend and into the limited off time I had in the past weeks, I wrote, edited, pared down and and re-wrote.
Ultimately what was put together was a pretty good explanation of what had happened, what it could mean, and what, if anything positive, could come from this new arrangement. The people who previewed it for me thought it was a pretty well written piece that was fair, balanced, and for me, low on snark.
Then, I decided to leave it in the draft bin.
A colleague asked me if this was self preservation. That’s too obvious. Discretion could be a better answer. Or maybe just let’s wait and see.
The mysterious print blogger, D. Eadward Tree published an interesting piece last week entitled “A Funny Thing Happened on The Way to the Funeral of Print Media”. In it he pointed out a series of reasons why print hasn’t died. They range from the unwelcome return of junk mail to the launch of print versions of digital properties.
Hmmm, I thought, interesting.
Things finally slowed down late last week. I got a clearer vision of both where the News Group initiative may go and what was happening with some of my clients beyond News Group (Day to day operations will often tell you a bigger picture). One afternoon I found a response to Mr. Tree’s article from the Media Shepherds’ Noelle Skodsinski.
She rightly suggests that the question should no longer be “Will print survive?” but more along the lines of how print will change. She amusingly compares the whole “Print is Dead” question to an annoying gnat that buzzes around your head. Well, thank you for that earworm!
Which lead to this train of thought: At one time, about the only thing we saw in digital in terms of magazines were web sites full of free replicated content. Over the past few years, we’ve seen the advent of the following:
- Interactive web sites
- Pay walls that work
- Tablet replicas
- Unique tablet editions that readers will pay for
- A whole new digital subscription industry that looks like it’s here to stay and grow beyond what we can imagine
- Social media marketing
And I’m sure there’s more I can’t think of at the moment.
What’s happened to the newsstand business during this time period?
- Declining sales
- Consolidating wholesalers
- Consolidating national distributors
- Shrinking racks
To be fair, we have had some solid new title launches like the Food Channel Magazine, the rise of book-a-zines, and the advent of digitized store level data has made it easier to see where we sell our magazines. But overall, the negatives from our side of the business often seem to outweigh the positives.
So is the newsstand world condemned to be the trailing edge of the publishing world? The last piece that touches the digital air? The horse and buggy industry didn’t die off completely. Many suppliers tranformed themselves into suppliers for the automobile industry. But it is also true that other manufacturers could not change. They were held back by their legacy businesses and if they survived they remained much smaller niche businesses.
The question remains, does our newsstand DNA prevent us from transforming how we do business? Is there a way that we can take the initiative back, sell more product? Become profitable?
Seems to me that it’s sleeve rolling time.
From the Foredeck of the Titanic 