Boys and Business – this year's magazine trends

The Mag-Dragons have decided. This year’s two course magazines for the Cardiff MA will be for –

• boys in the 12-13 age range, focusing particularly on those who rush to their games console as soon as they get home from school
• young entrepreneurs starting up their own businesses

Both are really interesting ideas for a number of reasons.

A couple of days before students pitched to the Mag-Dragons I had a conversation with Nick Brett, Managing Director of the BBC Magazine Unit and Cardiff’s Honorary Professor of Magazine Journalism, about the current Holy Grails of magazine publishing – a title that captured the attention of teenage boys was one such for many years. Professor Brett’s response demonstrated how times have changed – he hadn’t heard a “holy grail” conversation for a long time; it’s all about capturing the digital space at the moment.

Without any prompting, the teen boy development group did something that combined former holy grail and current concerns – they proposed their title should be screen-first; that is, not primarily a print magazine. It sounds odd to admit it, considering how fervently we preach the digital message to our students, but this is a first for the Magazine MA. Naturally it will require some tweaking of the assessment schedule and criteria – and thought about how to incorporate some print elements that test their editorial and craft skills – but nothing that we cannot and should not do. In fact it is an inevitable and necessary development.

The business magazine is another first by virtue of being strictly business. Another odd admission, since we stress the B2B career pathway from the very first day of the course. This idea feels very zeitgeisty though and the winning pitch came on the same day that David Cameron launched Start Up Britain – something our on-the-ball students included in their presentation.

There’s still a massive amount of development and refinement to do on both titles but they are very exciting ideas. Each of the six groups pitching had individual development sessions with Professor Brett the Friday before the Mag-Dragon panel and at the end of next week the two amalgamated groups will present their research and development findings to Mel Nichols, former Editorial Director of Haymarket and, like Nick Brett, the over-seer of countless launches, relaunches and projects that didn’t quite make the grade.

I hope the students appreciate the level of access they are getting with these and the many other people who will help them during the Magazine MA – I don’t think I even saw anyone that high up until I’d been working at Emap for a couple of years!

Magazine Brand Definitions, cont'd

"Does the magazine brand transcend the delivery platform?" asks James Papworth on the PPA website.

The answer is surely self-evident – of course it does, always provided that the magazine's Brand Definition includes a strategy for every platform it will appear on. And that means working out what those platform users want.

Interestingly, Papworth notes that a recent study of magazine readers shows they spend 65 minutes with the print edition and 200 minutes with the app version (the source of this data is not revealed but the illustration shows the iPad version of GQ, which may or may not mean anything).

And as he sensibly comments:

This does not undermine the appeal of the printed version. Readers read it for 65 minutes because it takes 65 minutes to read. They spend 200 minutes with the tablet version because there is 200 minutes of entertainment and information to be gleaned.

His conclusion, by the way, is the same as mine. Great minds ...

Magazines as Brands (again)

On the very day I tell MA Magazine Journalism students about Brand Definition, Bauer make this anouncement:

Bauer Media, the media group behind Grazia, FHM and Closer magazines, and radio stations Magic 105.4 and Kiss, is restructuring its commercial operations into platform-agnostic sales teams focused around individual brands. (via Media Week)

The move is not designed to reduce headcount, but instead aims to create commercial specialists who are able to knowledgably sell across a particular brand's integrated portfolio of digital, print and broadcast operations.

There were a couple of other interesting snippets in the release too:


• Clare Chamberlain has left Immediate Media, the lovechild of BBC Magazines and Magicalia, to take up a role at Bauer as Sales Director.
• Mark Frith, the guiding hand behind Heat for so long, has re-joined Bauer as an editorial director.

The Great War and the Illustrated Press

This call for papers is taken wholesale from the excellent ECREA mailing list. The conference seems to be a rare opportunity to widen the field of Magazine Studies: " the illustrated magazines conveyed images of the war that were shared by European societies both during and after the conflict. This symposium aims at seizing the opportunity of this anniversary to shed new lights on the European and American illustrated press, including its function and its influence on the cultural representations of the nations before, during and after the war."

The Great War and the Illustrated Press, June 5th, 6th and 7th 2013

We are pleased to announce an extended Call for Paper for the symposium organized by the OPIIM, LabSIC, MSH-Paris Nord, and Université de Paris-XIII
       
The year 2014 will commemorate the anniversary of the beginning of the Great War. This will be an opportunity to review our most recent knowledge about this event. One could assume, considering the amount of books published on the matter, that everything has already been said during the last twenty years concerning the cultural history of the Great War, leaving but few uncharted areas. However, as far as the iconography is concerned, there are only a few studies that have contributed to such historiographic developments, if we except those published by Laurent Véray on animated images, from news bulletins (1993) to fiction movies (2011). In the case of illustrated press, this fact is particularly striking. Although this field has benefited from more recent approaches (Beurier, 2007), it still lacks a broader, European point of view (Tomassini, 2007). It also lead to very few comparative works as it has been the case for the 1870 War (Martin, 2006). Yet, the illustrated magazines conveyed images of the war that were shared by European societies both during and after the conflict. This symposium aims at seizing the opportunity of this anniversary to shed new lights on the European and American illustrated press, including its function and its influence on the cultural representations of the nations before, during and after the war.

A research following various lines:     

1. Before the war started, we need to look at the visual culture of the pre-war societies. What about the “in-war images”? Is the public used to violence, to what extent and under which visual format? What are the kinds of information and images that make you sell more out of one event? To what extent the coverage of preceding wars (1870-1871, Balkans, colonial events) did introduce certain visual habits that reappeared between 1914 and 1918? Besides, magazines enable us to investigate the mental preparation to war. In the case of France, unlike what was long thought, there was no will for revenge. However, to what extent the veneration of the army that dominated illustrated press in the years 1910 can be understood as a psychological preparation? Was it also the case in other European countries?

2. Concerning the time span of the Great War, an account is needed on the articles and documents written by the illustrated press on the event. What are the most favourite themes in the various European countries? How do the words and images convey the violence of combats or occupation? How can they be analyzed in terms of gender? How the colonial soldiers are viewed? How important is the part played by the aesthetics of war in photography? What lines can be drawn in terms of chronology? It is also important to understand the links between the illustrated press and the war in the context of a history of the medium. To what extent did the Great War stimulate editorial changes, modifying the magazine’s conception, reversing the common hierarchy between photography and paintings, or creating new practices in journalism (as it has been the case in France)?

3. A third period ought to ponder upon the legacy of the war. What is the impact of the latter in the illustrated press of the years 1920, both in Europe and the United States? From a national point of view, what are the contents and representation of the Great War in the magazines that were issued afterwards? Did the photography play an important part in the reintegration of soldiers? What representation of the conflict or Nation does it convey? Is there a possibility left to forget about the war, or deny it; or on the contrary, is violence voluntarily shown? Here, the circulation of images is worth a specific study: did the numerous journalistic (Témoignage, 1931) or editorial (Krieg dem Kriege, 1924) publications have an influence on after war illustrated magazines? How do images circulate? From and up to where? Through which pattern or changes? In between which countries? Similarly, up to what point the iconographic legacy of the Great War is used without change in the following conflicts (Rif War, Civil War in Russia)? How far can it be traced as we close in on World War Two?
Eventually, from the point of view of media history, there subsists an uncharted area concerning the legacy of the Great War in terms of press professional practices. More precisely, it can be wondered why photojournalism had disappeared in France until the end of the 1920s and the issue of the Vu magazine in 1928 by Lucien Vogel. Similar observations can be made in other countries. What happened in the meantime? What became of the magazines that relied on pictures in the war time? How did they evolve to meet their readers’ needs? Did they learn from their war experience in terms of professional and editorial practices? How did famous post war photographers like André Kertesz use their experience of the Great War in their work? Last but not least, it can be asked whether there exists a possible link between information such as delivered by the Great War magazines and journalism today (such as the importance of amateur photographers, or pictures bringing back images of the Great War)?

Contributions on Eastern Europe and/or North America will be particularly welcome.

Travel and hotel costs of invited presenters will be refunded.

The symposium will take place in June, 5th, 6th, 7th 2013 in the MSH-Paris Nord. The articles selected by the scientific committee will be published in 2014.

The projects (250 words) must be sent to joelle.beurier@eui.eu andkarine.grandpierre@univ-paris13.fr before February 25th, 2012.

Scientific committee : Pr. Jean Jacques Becker (Paris X), Pr. Christian Delporte (Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines), Pr. Bertrand Legendre (Paris XIII), Pr. Jean-Claude Lescure (Cergy Pontoise), Pr. Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink (Sarrebruck), Pr. Marie-Eve Therenty (Montpellier), Pr. Luigi Tomassini (Bologna).







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The toybox as a toolbox

When I was much younger I had a wooden chest full of Meccano, the metal version with proper nuts and bolts; when my son was a bit younger he had a big box full of Lego, standard bricks and special kits all mixed up together.

In both cases we could build things, make structures that were stable or unstable, see how to fit pieces together to achieve a particular end – and learn about the physical world through play. The toybox became a toolbox without us even realising.

I got the same feeling watching our postgraduate Magazine students put together podcasts under the watchful eye of Broadcast tutor Emma Gilliam. The toybox was full of microphones, buttons, knobs, faders, flashing lights – all the paraphernalia of a radio studio control board. Under Emma’s practised eye the students built soundscapes that began to fit together into a structured whole; they adjusted bits that didn’t work and reinforced bits that did. Just like playing with Meccano and Lego, the words and voices and technology merged into a tremendous learning experience.

I loved being in the studio, listening and watching as Emma brought everything together. It was a great example of what we strive to do in the Cardiff postgraduate journalism courses – break down silos, work together and adapt the techniques of one medium to the needs of another.

But – and this was an uncomfortable thought – would we have been doing this if Rupert Murdoch hadn’t battered down the walls of trade union demarcation at Wapping?

Luckily I found an answer while reviving an old Palm m500 that had fallen out of favour. In the Wordsmith app I had written some extracts from the Penguin edition (1967) of The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. On page 222 they wrote:

“The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.”

In other words, if it hadn’t been Rupert, it was a historical inevitability that it would have been someone else.

Somehow, that made me feel better.

Whole lotta Economist

Image via WikipediaLeafing through last week's Economist (you know how it is, always too much to read in seven days) I settled into a very interesting feature about the economic advantages of diasporic communities (Weaving the world together, p 76, 19/11/11) – only to find myself somewhat distracted by the cross heads.

Whoever subbed it had used:

The immigrant song
In through the out door
Bringing it all back home
Going to California
Ramble on

Need a clue? Two words – Led Zeppelin




Whoever you are, thanks for a case study I can use in the second edition of Subediting For Journalists.

First you get your MA, then you get the job

A lovely coincidence today.

At 10.30am GMT Ganesh Ananthasubramanian became the first ever recipient of a Masters in Journalism from Cardiff University (his friend Naimul Karim was awarded the second ever, just seconds later ...)

The Bute Building, home to Cardiff University's School of Journalism

Ganesh gained a postgraduate diploma in journalism from the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai, and came to Cardiff to write up his dissertation project, which was about Cardiff City FC (the Bluebirds). During his time here he took in several of Arsenal's matches at the Emirates and, most memorably for him, bumped into Rahul Dravid making his way across Bute Park, from the Swalec Stadium to his hotel. This was an encounter that would never happen in India, so Ganesh came halfway round the world to meet one of his country's best cricketers. (The following day he saw his national team lose yet again to England.)

Image via Wikipedia

Dravid in action

At 7.15pm GMT I got an email from Ganesh saying he had been offered a job as a reporter-cum-subeditor on Sportal, an Indian sports website.

Job done!

More on how to make money from a magazine

Fascinating interview with Andrew Rashbass, chief executive of The Economist.

Lots of good stuff about print, the web and apps, but set in this very revealing context:

[Rashbass] is also convinced, on the basis of the rise in digital subscribers having had a relatively minor effect thus far on print sales, that there is little migration. The magazine is enlarging its audience.

He sees this as evidence of a phenomenon that he terms "the mega-trend of mass intelligence". People are "smarting up" rather than "dumbing down". 

There are no longer elite media and mass media because more and more people are mixing and matching, "going to art-house movies and Spiderman". People are no longer easily categorised.

Read the whole interview on the Guardian website.

How to make money from adverts and digital subscribers

Publishers, are you seeking the formula for a successful magazine?

One that will achieve "double-digit ad revenue increase" in the worst recession for decades AND "grow print subscriber numbers ... by 3% year on year to 1,486,838 in the first half" AND be able to say "We are discovering great opportunities in digital ... For us, as for many publishers, digital is not a zero-sum game."

NOW THE SIMPLE ANSWER CAN BE REVEALED – BE THE ECONOMIST.

The bare facts can be ascertained in this Guardian report but the underlying format is this:

1) Be about something people need or want to know

2) Invest in good journalists who can research thoroughly and write clearly

3) Have a plan and execute it well

4) Sell the information you have gathered for what it is worth

A SIMPLE IDEA! Yet all too often overlooked.

For more information, send £12 here and read everything that comes your way.

Content and intention in magazines

Cover of Roger McGuinn

McGuinn in his Byrds phase

At a Roger McGuinn gig in Aberdare recently I picked up a free magazine called Properganda, the strapline of which reads Shouting About Specialist Music.

After a quick flick through it, the magazine snob in me turned up his nose and made me put it down – it was all over the place designwise.

A few days later I picked it up again and started reading. The snob kicked in again, telling me what I’d say to students who started a feature that way or brought themselves into the story so egregiously.

But after a while the snob’s voice faded away and I became engrossed in the material. This was a magazine made by people who loved music and knew a lot about it. My magazine snob had given way to the tyro mandolin player who wanted to get hold of – no, make that had to have – the two Bill Monroe tribute cds put out by Rebel. Mike Scott’s project putting the words of WB Yeats to music sounded interesting too … could his version of The Song of Wandering Aengus possibly be as good as Donovan’s?

Cover of Donovan

I went out to the hazel grove ...

The experience made me realize all over again that the absolute focus of magazine journalism must be on content and intention –

• the intention must be a clear and driving force;


• the content must be compelling.

But what do we mean by compelling in this context?

Here’s a microthesaurus: authentic, raw, devoted, knowledgeable, passionate, committed, well crafted, skillful story telling.