If it's the end of print, what comes after?

Author:

Simon Bainbridge

If you read APE or PDNPulse, you'll be aware that US-based photography blogs are increasingly obsessed with newspaper and magazine circulation – not surprisingly, given the editorial market is in freefall, with the Boston Globe the latest title under threat, and others such as Portfolio, Christian Science Monitor, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Rocky Mountain News all folding or going online only. And some old staples are looking very shaky.

Some people are ringing their hands with glee that the media establishment is crumbling, while others worry what will become of news if it's left to the personal bias of one-man bloggers. But one thing's for sure – newspapers and magazines need to up their game.

At BJP, we think that print has a future (otherwise we wouldn't be putting out a weekly magazine), if it plays to its benefits. The big question is, where will future revenues come from? Advertising is migrating online, but few would predict that online ads will make the same money (or are as effective) as print ads in their heyday. Some argue the industry needs to introduce micro-payments for content. But, IMHO, the horse has already bolted on that one. So, we're giving it away free online, searching for more and more hits, and crossing our fingers this won't all backfire on us some day soon.

But, surely, somewhere somebody's got to pay? And it's not just media companies worrying about how they got into paying to supply content for free. The fastest growing websites – based on social networking – are predicated on the same model.

"It can't go on like this," writes Simon Dumenco in Advertising Age. "The digital Robin Hoods can't keep redistributing the wealth forever, because eventually the wealth runs out. Investors get sick of propping up private ventures that don't have viable business models, and shareholders of public companies, like Google, get cranky about flushing cash down the drain."

Comments

As a BJP contributor, I would be happy to see your own web version use more of the photos supplied with my articles and used in the mag. In fact, I would be happy to provide full res sample files for tests - although the bandwidth issues are not a light matter today, given the image sizes involved.

As a specialist magazine editor (for the MPA and for what's left of the old Minolta Club which we took on over 25 years ago) I have just started putting up complete issues of mags in Flash Player readable form. I did this free on both for about a week. After spending about 30 working hours creating 18 back issue editions for the camera user group mag, I made them accessible only by subscription, either separate from the printed item or bundled. The outcome indicates that people are indeed willing to pay, a smaller sum of course but the margin per reader is if anything better.

However, the key to this for my one-man publishing operation has been the back issue content. Those 18 issues covering 5 years are a big incentive to signing up for a year of future unseen issues.

For newspapers, that would be a nightmare - try 1,825 issues each fifty times larger than a skinny camera-owner club quarterly! Even for the BJP, digitising 260 editions would not be something a bloke sitting at a Mac can do over the weekend. I was lucky, I switched to InDesign very early and kept every single linked file needed so my five years of archives could be opened and output with just a bit of hard labour.

We took over this particular club in 1980 when it had just 800 members. By 1988 it had 13,000. Today it has just over 1,000 and slowly loses them (natural causes, mainly). By 2010 we may be back to 800 print edition readers and the switch gets thrown - website, forum and digital editions only.

To put that into perspective, we have over 20,000 unique readers per month for the website (Photoclubalpha) which started in 2007. If this kind of pattern holds good for newspapers, then something is bound to change.

David Kilpatrick

Posted by: David Kilpatrick on 06 May 2009 at 02:18

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