MagBlog

I am looking forward to reading How To Launch A Magazine In This Digital Age, the new book by Mary Hogarth and John Jenkins, and while waiting for it to arrive I have been thinking about how I teach our postgrad students about launches.

At the moment I follow the tried and tested ideas laid out by John Wharton in his 1992 classic Managing Magazine Publishing. With a bit of tinkering to accommodate websites and digital media, and extra input garnered from industry figures like Mel Nichols and Nicholas Brett, the principles laid out there still make perfect sense.

Even Future's approach to developing Mollie Makes – which essentially boils down to "follow the social interactions" – can be accommodated into Wharton's plan; it's basically just another kind of reader research, albeit far more of a two-way and managed conversation than more traditional forms.

But the thinking behind the Wharton-style launch plan is highly commercialised – it works to the PTC/PPA agenda that accredited courses must be aware of. Yes, everything can be applied to smaller, independent titles and, if they are to succeed, their publishers must have answers to all the traditional questions. Passion for a subject can take you so far but to be able to continue publishing about that subject, and not to lose the shirt off your back, some of the assumptions and some of the details need a different emphasis.

For example, I have read a couple of things by small publishers, almost micro-publishers, that lay the stress not on making a profit but on breaking even – in essence, making enough so they can re-use the money to make another issue or a completely different magazine.

In this context teaching students about distribution takes on a completely new aspect. Trying to get 6,000 copies of a title in front of committed enthusiasts is a different job to contracting Frontline to get 60,000 into W H Smith and the supermarkets.

We do add this into supervision of MA students who undertake an Enterprise project but given the increasing emphasis on entrepreneurialism and small start-ups I really need to rebuild a couple of lectures.

Next Issue Media, an online store for magazines that challenges Apple's Newsstand, is about to launch.

It's a joint venture between Conde Nast, Hearst, Time Inc, Meredith and News Corp, so there's some serious firepower behind it, but an article in Forbes.com suggests that there may be some fundamental misunderstanding of the market.

In a piece entitled A Netflix For Digital Magazine Subscriptions. Will It Work?, Jeff Bercovici looks behind the scenes and asks CEO Morgan Guenther about the new service. One of the things Guenther says suggests the answer to Bercovici's rhetorical headline may be "No".

Guenther spouts the expected guff about innovation and customer benefits but – for me – gives the game away when he justifies launching with a fairly limited selection of top-selling titles from the group of publishers, titles from the 'short, fat part of the curve rather than the long-tail niche properties ... “These are the titles people care about,” he says. “They aren’t Arctic Birdwatching magazine.”'

If Guenther does not understand that (hypothetical) readers of Arctic Birdwatching are more likely to care passionately and deeply about their magazine than any given reader of a mass circulation title, then he simply does not understand magazines.

It's a classic mistake, one that nearly everyone outside the magazine industry makes.

The other thing Guenther and all the companies involved should be concerned about is the fact that Android users generally do not like to pay for stuff they see on their phones or tablets – that's why they buy Android-powered devices rather than an iPhone or iPad.

(I love the throwaway nature of that last sentence.)

(Again, love that "source".)