Why magazines will flourish in the digital age

Re Post-Medium Publishing

In his essay on Post-Medium Publishing (http://www.paulgraham.com/publishing.html) Paul Graham presents many reasons why consumers in a digital age will not be prepared to pay for content – then confesses he’s not sure what “content” means. To him the word suggests “undifferentiated slurry.”

To publishers and broadcasters the word is very clearly differentiated by way of the three missions they seek to perform:

(a)   To Inform

(b)   To Educate

(c)   To Entertain

If that seems a pompous formula for the current world of media that encompasses redtop tabloids and lurid soap operas, celebrity magazines and public executions by reality TV, it’s because it embraces the lofty principles laid down at the birth of the BBC more than 70 years ago.

The formula still holds good but is now interpreted in more basic terms:

(a)   News (what’s going on?)

(b)   Analysis and Comment (what’s to be learned from what’s going on and what does it mean?)

(c)   Pleasure (reading, listening and viewing need to be enjoyable)

In failing to distinguish those three strands, Paul Graham not surprisingly found himself floundering in a slurry pit of contradictions. And in regarding Content as a single commodity he could not recognises that consumers approach each element in a different mind-set.

News: No one in publishing (not even Rupert Murdoch) expects people to pay for online News any more than they would pay for bottled oxygen. News is happening everywhere and all the time and electronic media can deliver it to everyone wherever they are in next to no time. At best, ink on paper delivers last night’s news.

The staccato patterns of online traffic shows that the great mass of people go to the web for a quick fix of information – keeping up with what’s happening from whatever sources they stumble upon. They put no greater value on it than sharing in the office gossip. And no one would dream of paying for that.

Analysis and Comment: If News has to equate with the provision of free parking outside the store, newspapers have a much stronger case for charging customers to come inside and linger over the fruits of their costly investment in eminent editors, special correspondents and investigative journalists.  Analysis and Comment cater for people who need to know much more than what’s happening and where there’s a need people will pay.

Pleasure: Another confession of Paul Graham’s is that he prefers the solitary experience of watching films at home on DVD to the shared enjoyment of sitting in a crowded cinema. So he is hardly likely to appreciate the requirement of publishers to provide Entertainment for their great mass of readers, to make reading a positive pleasure. They do that with engrossing human interest stories, imaginative features, colourful columnists – items to curl up with.  Quick-fixers dashing online hardly go there in search of enjoyment. Pleasure-seekers have always been prepared to pay for their pleasures.

But I believe this third type of consumers will still want their pleasures cover-wrapped, they will want something more tangible than fleeting images on an impersonal screen.  While quick to go to the web for free News and quite likely to pay for online Analysis and Comment, they will continue to hand over their money for a printed product they can actually curl up with.

In foreseeing the inevitable triumph of new technology over the old, Paul rather grudgingly concedes that “some” magazines will survive by focusing on the magazine as a physical object – “at least for a while.”

He couldn’t be more wrong. Most magazines will survive and flourish well into and through the digital age.

First, because the web can be their ally and not their rival. Unlike newspapers which recklessly have tended to throw everything for everybody on the web, magazines have much more specific audiences to target, able to ensure their online material is shrewdly designed to complement the printed content, to add the exciting elements of immediacy, interactivity, sound and video.

Secondly, while every website which appears on your screen has to conform to identical dimensions, every print magazine projects a different personality by way of its size, shape, texture, typography and layout.  Above all, instead of the instantly disposable nature of a newspaper, a magazine is most often an elegant package to possess and cherish, something whose very purchase from a crowded news-stand makes a public statement of interests and taste.

Paul’s conclusion is that any established medium trying to compete with the new is likely to be the loser. But the invention of the gramophone didn’t stop people going to hear Dame Nellie Melba, movies didn’t kill the theatre, radio didn’t destroy the recording industry, television didn’t spell the end of the cinema. They all learned to adapt and are all still here.

Publishing now has the opportunity to take on many additional new forms but there will always be a demand for words on paper. And I’m prepared to state that in black and white!

Peter Jackson www.maximags.co.uk