Magazine Publishers Should Fight for the Good Stuff

Monday we mentioned briefly in our weekly magazine news round-up series that five top magazine publishers Time Inc., Hearst, Condé Nast, Wenner Media and Meredith have joined forces in a multi-million dollar ad campaign preaching, "The Power of Print."

The campaign, which has the support of the Magazine Publishers of America, targets advertisers, shareholders and magazine industry influencers, and according to the press release, “seeks to reshape the broader conversation about magazines, challenge misperceptions about the medium's relevancy and longevity, and reinforce magazines' important cultural role.”

As much as we are excited about this campaign—and we are because we are a part of the magazine industry and want magazine publishers to speak up--we’re a little disappointed. We feel the campaign misses the point.

Aside from the irony that the leaders of the aforementioned magazine publishers chose to make their case that print is still relevant in today's Internet-focused world by making a video and putting it on Internet, we feel it’s not the medium/format publishers should be fighting so hard for.

Instead, we think they should be making a stand for the good stuff in magazines. The stuff that makes magazine readers anticipate each new issue, the stuff that inspires us, the stuff that changes our lives, the stuff that informs us—the stuff that advertisers want to put ads next to—not the format that the stuff is delivered in.

You know, the good stuff. The stories. The keen observations communicated by people that carefully choose words to form sentences.  It’s the stuff that can—and should—exist in any and all available formats including the Internet. 

Yes, we love our print magazines. We could go on and on as to why we prefer to get our good stuff in the format of pages made out of paper to the format of a computer, even if it is hand-held and the latest technology marvel.

But we disagree with the magazine publishers’ goal to “challenge misperceptions about the medium's relevancy and longevity, and reinforce magazines' important cultural role.”

Instead, we want magazine publishers to argue even fight the current misconception that the good stuff and the people who create it are unworthy of our time and our money. We want them to fight for the good stuff’s relevancy, longevity and importance in our culture, on paper and on the Internet.

Comments

[Don Van Velzer]

This may not be the right forum for my comment. I'm just hoping that publishers read this although I have found they're not fast to change. My comment is that I absolutely hate getting renewal notices in the mail. I am 62 years old, like my magazines AND I am an online, connected guy. I do not renew magazines via mail. Publishers are more apt to get me to renew if they sent me an email and all I had to do was enter my credit card number. I try to do everything online from paying my bills to renewing my vehicle registration. Get with it publishers...I'm sure I'm not the only person that thinks this way.