MagBlog

It is a given of magazine publishing that content must be aimed at a specific readership. This enduring truth has resulted in a healthy spread of titles that cater for everyone from aspiring bass guitar players to the chief financial officers of global corporations. Everyone subscribes to this fundamental principle, including me.

But what if, in an age of multiple platforms and fragmented social media, it's not true any more?

I spent an interesting afternoon listening to students on the MA International Journalism at Cardiff University presenting their ideas for new, pure-digital, magazine concepts. One called Planet Reboot was so full of energy and ideas that it leapt out of the screen – a bit messy, slightly hard work to navigate but fizzing with life and interest and contrasting story formats. I loved the concept but my conventional magazine self found fault with the targeting – looking at the website, it was not clear whose interest this electric, ecletic content was intended to capture.

But the students responded with an interesting point – the targeting would be done on social media. They would use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and other social media platforms to attract very specific demographic/psychographic groups to very specific stories.

Then one of my colleagues made another interesting point – the website at the heart of this concept would act as a content hub, a digital container that could hold an infinite amount of material related to Planet Reboot's mission to alert people to climate change and other environmental challenges.

We have known for the last 20-odd years that in cyberspace there is no limit on pagination but wearing the blinkers of specific targeting has limited the way magazines explore the possibilities that digital publishing offers.

The ideas in Planet Reboot apply to literally everyone on earth but a conventional magazine interpretation of it would limit both content and reach by aiming for a segment of "everyone". Weapons Of Reason, for example, is a lovely example of using the magazine form to analyse and discuss environmental issues but each iteration covers a specific problem and the project as a whole is aimed at a particular kind of reader (print oriented, solvent enough to pay £6 per issue, appreciative of the production values ...) – deliberately limited in order to increase the chances of success.

But by incorporating a core multiple-social-media (1) strategy into a digital magazine concept it becomes possible to outsource the targeting – it does not have to be built in to the central hub. The targeting can be exogamous rather than endogamous.

Of course the magazine still has to be about a particular thing – it's not a universal encyclopedia – but it can be about many different aspects of that thing and can encompass many different approaches for different audiences. If those who are brought to the content hub go on to explore it, great, if they find more content that appeals to them or which they can share with another, different, audience (perhaps their children or their parents) even better – but if they don't, their attention can be caught again through the agency of strategic layered social media targeting.

This concept might also appeal to adherents of COPE (Create Once Publish Everywhere) and could have the potential to attract a wider range of advertisers – the loss of specificity might be a drawback but there would be more types of consumer to target and a lot of social media activity to draw on.


1: The concept of polymedia outlined by Madianou and Miller is useful here.

The first intake of students to Cardiff University's pioneering MBA in Media Management, a collaboration between the Business and Journalism schools, has arrived – from Pakistan, USA, India and China.

Here they are, waiting eagerly for the first session of the Managing Creative Digital & Social Media module.



Clearly the module will be about more than just magazines, but the new world of multimedia, multimodal magazines provides a really useful grounding – and some real-life problems that a big UK publisher has asked us to help solve will provide excellent project topics.

After a summer of looking like this


The Cardiff MagLab has now been populated by a new intake of keen young people who will be part the future of the magazine industry and it looks like this


Let the good times roll!

Writing For The Media Today got underway this morning. It's our shiny new "converged journalism" module for third year undergraduate students on the BA in Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies. I took the first lecture, which is a practice-oriented look at what journalists do and how they do it.

You can never be sure about asking questions of large student groups (there are 90 on this popular module) – sometimes you get a silence so dense you have to break it yourself, sometimes you can coax answers and sometimes they just come. Today was one of the latter, very pleasingly.

To my question "What do journalists do",  the answers included some very useful examples ("They report on events", "They provide information") and one that opens itself up to a number of different answers: "They maintain the status quo".

Now, if you are of the Chomskyist school of thought, maintaining the status quo will mean manufacturing consent, making sure that the mass of people are given sufficient mental pablum to stop them rocking the boat. Bread, circuses and gossip (did @CherylCole have an affair with @harveyofficial or not?) provide all that.

But it is possible to look at it in a completely different way too. If you take "status quo" as meaning that the flow of democratic information is or should be fairly evenly balanced – ie that sources of social, cultural and economic power are sharing information in an open and transparent way with the mass of people – then you can indeed see it as the journalist's role to ensure that the status quo is maintained as far as possible. Journalists do that by investigating, researching, asking awkward questions, developing strong sources. They do it, in fact, by holding power to account.

Top answer!

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!

To celebrate the centenary of Woman’s Weekly, Radio Wales invited me to contribute to a breakfast show slot discussing the magazine. Naturally I said yes even though I know next to nothing about the title. My first reaction was to rush out and buy a copy (good move – the 1911 launch issue is replicated inside) and my second was to email Diane Kenwood, the editor, to ask her what the secret is.

Diane was kind enough to refer me to the editor’s letter in that first issue. At considerable length the editor had set out a manifesto for the magazine, which was to be a practical publication for ordinary women, not the lady in the mansion. Down the years, the editors had stuck to that mission until the line reached Diane, who was clearly doing the same – Woman’s Weekly was one of two titles in the sector to increase its ABC figure in the most recent audit (the other being Hello, which is interesting).

But sticking to the last does not mean turning out the same style of shoes – clearly editors had adapted the magazine to reflect the changing needs of its readers. Open the centenary issue and the first thing you see is a QR code that takes you to a mini-documentary charting the development of the publication you have in your hands – these readers are not stuck in the past.