It's Not The End of Print

A new book outlines a theory of the future of print—and it's not all doom and gloom for magazine publishers

by Jeremy Leslie

If, like me, you share author David Renard's love of independent magazines then this book is unreservedly recommended. If you need a little persuasion to open yet another book about magazines, then think again. The Last Magazine is a very ambitious and timely book. That it fails to achieve some of those ambitions shouldn't distract from some key messages that it delivers to magazine publishing at the beginning of 2007.

The book arrives as the latest in a flurry of books about magazines. Steve Taylor's 100 Years of Magazine Covers is a sound history of that one key part of the magazine; Charlotte Rivers' Mag-Art highlights a broad range of recent innovative titles. The Last Magazine stands apart from these in that it concentrates on the future of magazines.

Renard's central theme is established with the opening sentence of the book. "Magazines, as we know them, are dying," he states bluntly, before enlarging in some detail why this is the case. Such statements, along with the book title itself, are obviously designed to grab attention, but Renard knows his stuff—he divides his time between running Mu/Inc, the US's largest nationwide distributor of independent magazines, and consulting for more established publishers. He has assembled a strong cast of essayists to flesh out the detail of his argument.

This is how it goes: over the next 20 years, mainstream magazines will cease to be distributed as printed items, as a combination of pressures pushes publishers to move to digital distribution. These pressures have been documented before, most memorably in British publisher Felix Dennis' description of the "four horsemen" converging on the magazine industry. They are "the harbingers of a long, slow, inevitable decline in the fortunes of newspapers and magazines," he wrote in 2004, "as our readers mutate into viewers; as our distribution, sales channels and margins shrink; as the environmentalists batter us with claims of social irresponsibility and as our advertisers... migrate to the electronic sea". He was talking about the end of an era; Renard's words are subtly different. He has moved on to talk about the next era, a time where readers expect instant information and advertisers expect an accountability similar to that which they now receive from the web.

In the world of magazine publishing this is not hot news, as the selection of quotes from leading publishing figures on the opening spread makes clear. When you have senior staff from Time Inc, NewsCorp and Hachette-Filipacchi concurring with this argument, it's time to listen. But these people aren't bemoaning their fate; they are preparing their investors for what's next.

While the process of designing and printing magazines has been revolutionised in a single generation of digitalisation, the financial model behind the making of magazines has barely changed. The model has been successful because of continued growth. But recently this growth has stopped. As one of the contributors here, veteran publisher Bob Sacks, points out, it doesn't seem to matter how many more magazines we produce, total sales remains the same. In the US that total has stayed constant at 366m copies a year since 1990. That's despite 1100 new launches last year.

The big publishing houses continue to make hay while they can. In the UK this has meant a move towards the weekly, a move that not only quadruples potential income from advertising and copy sales, but also helps sate the readers' desire for the latest updates.

But whether a magazine is published weekly or monthly, the current model causes massive wastage. On average, over 55 per cent of all magazines produced don't actually get sold, ie they get trashed or recycled. In the US that means 180m magazines a year are waste.

Meanwhile in the UK, the recently launched weekly title Grazia is regarded as a huge success as it reaches for 200k sales and basks in an ongoing stream of industry awards. Yet it is years from earning enough to pay off the £16m cost of its launch. No wonder the industry is readying itself for a digital future.