Bucking the online trend

"Magazines would seem to be among the most vulnerable of all "old media" as peoples' time and attention shifts to the internet," says Jonathan Weber in a comment article about bucking the online trend. "But even though magazine companies are having their problems  they are actually showing more resilience than one might expect."

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Magazines would seem to be among the most vulnerable of all "old media" as peoples' time and attention shifts to the internet. News magazines lost their role as news-breakers a long time ago, and the long-form analysis and trend spotting that's now their specialty is increasingly the territory of newspapers. Niche magazines, be they business or consumer-oriented, serve just the kinds of specialised communities that can connect most readily online. Service magazines, well, Web 2.0 is all about services, be they listings or shopping tips or restaurant reviews.

On top of that, the traditional means of selling magazine subscriptions – direct mail – becomes less effective all the time as people are inundated with marketing messages. Advertisers are fed up with inflated circulation figures and the absence of good tools for measuring effectiveness. Newsagents, at least in the US, are carrying fewer titles and cutting tougher deals with publishers as sales decline.

But even though magazine companies are having their problems – Time Warner, the largest of the lot, is slimming its portfolio and cutting costs after decades of expansion – they are actually showing more resilience than one might expect. And that may hold a few lessons about what's not changing in the way we use media.

Consider Condé Nast, the second-largest US magazine company. It's privately held so it's hard to know exactly how it's performing financially, but by all appearances it's doing just fine. The New Yorker, an intellectual title that lost money for years, is now turning a profit under the brilliant editorship of David Remnick. High-quality, long-form journalism, it seems, can still find a market, and the best medium for it (at least for the long-form part) remains the printed page.

Condé Nast's bread-and-butter is fashion, and titles like Vogue and Glamour and GQ show no signs of weakening. When it comes to displaying extravagant clothing, there's still nothing like the thick, sumptuous pages of a glossy magazine. Even Vanity Fair, an unlikely mix of fashion, celebrity-worship, investigative reporting and opinion making, is fat as ever and remains a powerful cultural arbiter – without, until recently, any online presence to speak of at all.

Closer to home here in Montana, there is a veritable glut of lifestyle titles, many of them brand-new. I doubt any of them are making much money, and they are all freebies, but still: in state with fewer than one million people, there's Montana Magazine, Montana Living, Montana Quarterly, Distinctly Montana, Big Sky Journal and even sub-regional books like Flathead Living and Outside Bozeman. I'm not sure how much reading is going on, but advertisers and consumers alike seem to enjoy pretty pictures on a physical page.

Some of this is undoubtedly a temporary phenomenon: online marketing is still a new thing, especially for smaller businesses in smaller markets, and old habits die hard. But there's something about the "thing-ness" of a good magazine that retains a powerful appeal. And that's lesson number one: form matters. Media is not just about content and how best to access information; it's also about packaging and presentation, and over the long run many forms will bloom. It's interesting that the hottest magazine category at the moment is celebrity gossip, which is also one of the hottest categories in the consumer internet space.

Lesson number two is that even in interest areas where online would seem to reign supreme, brand power matters a lot. Sports Illustrated is still a hugely profitable magazine (if perhaps less profitable than it once was), and si.com is coming on strong. At the same time, ESPN, which built on its cable TV franchise to become the dominant online sports site, has successfully extended its reach to print. It's the authority of titles like Vanity Fair and the Economist that make them successful, and there is every reason to think they can continue to build on those brands, both in print and online.

I have more than a passing interest in all this, in that my company, New West Publishing, has aimed from the beginning to build a media brand, which will have various dimensions, or forms if you will. We started out online and intend to expand into print, reversing the typical patter. But the basic thing that magazines do – provide information, services and connections for people with common interests, and help define those communities – will need doing for quite some time to come.

Jonathan Weber is the founder and editor in chief of NewWest.Net, a new type of regional news and information service focused on the Rocky Mountain West in the United States. He was previously the co-founder and editor in chief of the Industry Standard

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