Tag Archives: magazines

Do Social Media Users Link to Magazines?

31 May

But do they link to magazines' web sites? Photo by Annie Mole on Flickr.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism has posted a summary of its recent study “New Media, Old Media: How Blogs and Social Media Agendas Relate and Differ from the Traditional Press.”

The study compares the variety of topics included in news-related blog posts and tweets with the range included in mainstream media coverage, and found that:

Social media and the mainstream press clearly embrace different agendas. Blogs shared the same lead story with traditional media in just 13 of the 49 weeks studied. Twitter was even less likely to share the traditional media agenda – the lead story matched that of the mainstream press in just four weeks of the 29 weeks studied.

I don’t find these results particularly surprising, but – as a magazine person – I wanted to know how often social media users linked to magazine stories online. I checked out the tables summarizing the PEJ data [PDF] and found that they had added newspapers and magazines together in their breakdown of the sources of links provided by bloggers and Twitter users. Unfortunately, this means that the study – unless the raw data can be broken apart once they’re made available – doesn’t tell us much about whether social media users are linking to magazines’ sites in their conversations about news.

The researchers note that:

In producing PEJ’s New Media Index, the basis for this study, there are some challenges posed by the breath [sic] of potential outlets. There are literally millions of blogs and tweets produced each day. To make that prospect manageable, the study observes the “news” interests of those people utilizing social media, as classified by the tracking websites. PEJ did not make a determination as to what constitutes a news story as opposed to some other topic, but generally, areas outside the traditional notion of news such as gardening, sports or other hobbies are not in the purview of content.

So though newsmagazines’ web sites might be included in the analysis, we probably won’t see many other magazines in the dataset. That’s an understandable limitation of the study, given its specific interest. Magazines are also likely to be less represented because they don’t usually relate to breaking news, as Twitter users would most often be interested in sharing. But if magazines aren’t offering even slower-paced bloggers something to write about, perhaps publishers should be concerned.

I would guess that magazines’ web sites are also rarely linked to by social media users due to their typically poor layout and usability. But I’d like to see some data on social media users’ links to magazines – and think it would be helpful to the magazine industry to see how far they’re being left behind as web users share information and favorite stories using social media. (Or not. But I’m pessimistic.)

Magazine Subscription Pricing: Communicating Value

8 Feb

Subscription cards from four of the magazines I receive: Sunset, Smithsonian, Triathlete and Make, all priced around $30/year.

Magazines have a serious dilemma in pricing subscriptions:

  1. What’s the maximum price readers will pay? (Or, how much is this magazine experience worth to them?)
  2. What’s the minimum price that will generate profit, or supplement advertising revenue adequately to add up to a profit?
  3. What’s the minimum price that still communicates that the product is quality and has value?

An interesting post recently at Ad Age suggests that, although low prices might appeal to readers, magazines that cut their subscription rates may not gain subscribers; they might even lose them.

As magazines have lost circulation dramatically of late, subscription revenue will likely become increasingly important to replace declining ad revenue. However, readers are slicing away unnecessary expenses themselves – with magazine and newspaper subscriptions likely among the casualties.

I’m certainly a magazine enthusiast, and when I find a subscription card offering me a magazine for $1 an issue, that $12 per year for a fresh magazine experience is pretty tempting.

What I’ve noticed, though, is that – as the Ad Age piece calls it – I often become part of the “marginal readership” of the magazine if I take the plunge and buy the cheap subscription. I haven’t invested enough to feel motivated to take the time to read the magazine unless it turns out to be quite appealing.

When I have spent a lot of money (for me) on a subscription, as with The New Yorker, I’ve felt serious guilt over not being able to read every issue faithfully. I feel like I’ve let down my “pledge” to become a reader and am disappointed in myself and my failure to follow through on my spending. (Yes, I tend to be hard on myself; can you tell?) So, the greater the subscription expense, the greater my desire to fully invest myself in that magazine experience. The expense isn’t the only determinant of my reading enthusiasm, of course, but it is a factor.

This phenomenon is one reason why I’d argue that many magazines should charge more for their content. I think readers “buy into” a magazine’s uniquely constructed experience and offerings, and want to become part of its community through reading. Undervaluing that experience by putting a small price tag on it also undermines the sense of worth that readers ascribe to their participation with the magazine – and, as side effects, could diminish their loyalty as subscribers and their attention to advertising messages within the magazine.

In these times, magazines need to do everything possible to maintain their existing subscribers and attract new ones. Counterintuitively, the best way to do that might be to keep subscription prices at current levels or raise them slightly.

Of course, I’d also be willing to spend more on magazines to fund better content and to liberate magazines from the many editorial constraints they experience as a result of their reliance on advertising. I’d also like customizable magazines and other innovations. And, of course, it would be great to see magazines on iPads that are awesomely designed. I’ve written about all those things here. And if publishers want to have the funding to make those things happen, they need to communicate to the audience that their monetary investment is necessary to continue the creation of terrific magazine products.

My one nagging question, though, is whether it’s fair to raise subscription prices and inevitably price some readers out of the opportunity to participate in magazine readership. Would raising prices create a certain elitism around magazine subscriptions? (Maybe that already exists?)

Perhaps the growing field of print-on-demand magazines, along with the digitizing of magazines, eventually will lead to such efficiency in the publishing and distribution process that prices will adjust accordingly and remain accessible to a variety of readers. It may be that as these new approaches develop, the act of subscribing to a magazine will look so different that these concerns are no longer relevant.

MediaShift: On-Demand Magazine Publishing

2 Feb

I have a new post up at MediaShift covering some of the new opportunities in on-demand magazine publishing. Here’s a favorite selection from the piece:

“I don’t think that computers and the Internet make real people’s need for real physical media go away,” said Powazek of MagCloud. “There’s content that deserves to be archived in print and some that doesn’t. For moment to moment updates about news, the web does that really well, but longer-lasting community-based niche content will still have a home in print. I hope that some magazines that have fallen on hard times will find their way to MagCloud and publish their whole back catalog there.”

So which magazines deserve to stay in print? As environmental resources become more precious and distribution channels multiply, we’ll have to determine what content deserves print status.

I also see a lot of potential in these on-demand services for student publications. Though that wasn’t a focus of this piece, it would be hugely convenient for journalism educators to use on-demand publishing to create student magazines or other collections of student work. Students could be provided copies and then order additional copies themselves to distribute to friends and family, while readers elsewhere in the world could even become fans. This seems like a cost-effective and innovative way to create student projects.

The iPad, Magazines, and the Persistent Print Simulacrum

28 Jan

Photo by me. Just imagine that my iPhone is really big. There. An iPad with magazines around it.

I know it’s early yet in the discussion of how print media will adapt for tablet platforms like Apple’s iPad. But one thing I hope will eventually develop for magazines in particular is a movement away from the reliance on a simulacrum of the printed page.

Almost every iPhone app I have that involves prolonged reading of text asks me to flip a “page” with my finger to move on. It’s not the motion that I object to, but rather the notion that my reading on this new platform has to be a simulation of turning paper pages in an actual publication. Do the app developers think so little of us that they imagine we can’t understand any other sort of interface?

No, of course not; and users have easily adapted to the iPhone’s unique set of controls. And now it’s time to start doing some serious reimagining of what print content will look like on a larger touch-enabled platform like the iPad. Magazines, with their emphasis on creative design, can be the leaders in this effort.

We can go beyond just thinking about fitting a paper page’s content onto the screen of the tablet and worrying only about usability. Instead, can we imagine a magazine as something other than ads, departments, columns, a feature well, etc., all pre-ordered for consumption front to back? The manipulable and customizable nature of a magazine on an iPad can go far beyond the print magazine simulacrum.

Maybe the iPad magazine’s table of contents will be like the queue on Hulu that allows viewers to program their own order of video consumption. For fashion magazines, features could be added that allow you to try on models’ clothes, hairstyles and makeup by touching and moving them around atop your own uploaded picture. Ads could be “torn out” with a multi-touch swipe and saved to a portfolio or shopping list (making readers’ responses more measurable at the same time). Recipes, articles and so forth could also be saved and arranged like the photo albums shown in the iPad preview. And I’m sure there are a thousand other ideas even better than those.

I know Conde Nast, Time and others are already working on iPad-specific apps for their magazines. I wonder how they will move beyond the print simulacrum to take full advantage of the tablet. As a magazine fan, I’ll look forward to seeing what they develop, and I hope it’s truly innovative.

Making a Subscription a Source of Pride

30 Oct

“Engagement” is a buzzword in discussions of the survival of print media. In a world of shiny digital objects that distract readers from traditional print media, readers have to be more engrossed and invested in their uses of print, both within the print product and when they visit affiliated Web sites. (I wrote about this concept a bit in a recent MediaShift post with regard to the late Gourmet.)

natl geo

National Geographic maps. Photo by Flickr user retro_traveler.

One of my favorite books to pick up on occasion is a heavy, glossy volume called Magazines that Make History by Norberto Angeletti and Alberto Oliva. Browsing through it today, an interesting paragraph on National Geographic jumped out at me:

To [Alexander Graham Bell, who became president of the National Geographic Society in 1897], the National Geographic Magazine was a way to build a larger organization that would welcome into Society membership everyone interested in the world, exploration, and discovery. Until then, the privilege of contributing to the grand private expeditions that fascinated the nineteenth-century public or to accounts of unknown peoples, inaccessible places, and stern trials to overcome had been reserved to men of science and men of wealth. Bell understood that, even for the simplest of men, supporting these investigations was a source of pride. So he set out to open the Society’s rosters to all who were willing to contribute $2 a year for a magazine subscription, whether they were scientists or schoolmasters, aristocrats or artisans. Some members of the board of trustees opposed the proposal vigorously, but in the end it carried.

After starting this new program and hiring a new editor in 1899, the society and the magazine’s readership grew nearly tenfold by late 1905, to almost 11,500 members, say Angeletti and Oliva.

By opening the opportunity to contribute to previously inaccessible projects, National Geographic increased its readers’ investment – literal and figurative – in the magazine. Both magazines and newspapers today could experiment with similar models, by having readers contribute financial resources or time to larger projects as well as adding content to digital or print editions.

Newspapers may have a hard time creating projects like this out of fear of losing their purported objectivity. However, one possible reason for declining news readership could be the sense among the audience that their subscriptions provide them with little information that actually can be used to make a difference in their communities.

Civic journalism was (is?) an effort to include the public in the development of news content so it would better suit their communities’ needs. Citizen journalism, the actual production of news by citizens, is a more direct way to incorporate readers’ interests, as is crowdsourcing journalistic projects.

One magazine that has adopted a model similar to that of National Geographic is Good, which donates all subscription proceeds to a charity selected by the subscriber. The subscriber also chooses the price: $10, $20 or $50.

Good‘s rationale [PDF] is that magazines make so little on their subscriptions anyway that it’s worthwhile to make the subscription fee a donation, then sell advertising to pay the bills. Good has now donated over a million dollars to various charities using this method, while also drawing a spendy, attractive audience with a $100,000 household income.

Clearly, something about this model is working, and while Good‘s content is strong and interesting, the magazine is also likely pulling in readers through a sense of shared investment in social justice.

good party

Good Magazine also has events where readers and Web users can gather. Photo by Flickr user chuck_heaton.

So what else can print media do to create a shared participation in a mission, one that makes reading and continued subscription worthwhile? This task goes beyond just making a Web site interactive or encouraging reader submission of content. It’s a feeling of community and purpose that is intangible, but may be crucial to sustaining an active readership.

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