Where Will Magazines Be Ten Years From Now?
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Off the Record
In the next five years in Graydon Carter’s world, you’ll walk onto a plane, or a subway, or a soon-to-be-invented mode of transport, and you’ll tuck a little electronic book under your arm. Inside that little book, which will be very expensive at first but soon will cost $150, there’ll be a series of mylar “pages,” and there will be small buttons off to the side, and once you hit one of them, whoooosh, words and photos from Vanity Fair will suddenly appear.
“You’ll subscribe to five magazines and six newspapers,” Mr. Carter said. “That is what I see as the future. … That I know is coming.”
“Ultimately, there will be some sort of device!” said Peter Meirs, the vice president of production technology at Time Inc.
“In a decade time frame?” asked Chris Anderson, editor of Wired. “No. Technology adoption happens slowly. This is the editor of Wired telling you no. Obviously, newspapers are going to be changing dramatically over the next few years, but magazines are not newspapers. And I think magazines 10 years from now are going to look something like they do now.”
Interviews with editors of magazines like Wired, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, Us Weekly and several others elicited more of the same:Magazines are not, for the most part, worried about the Internet.
Most magazine editors seem to have emerged from 10 years of mostly noncommittal fiddling around with the Web confident that the magazine of the future will be largely the magazine of the present. That is, when they are willing to look past the next print deadline to contemplate the magazine of the future at all.
“Sorry, not dodging you,” wrote Janice Min, editor of Us Weekly. “I just think I have nothing to say because I don’t really know the answer!”
What if you put on your thinking hat?
“I cannot answer that without putting on my silly hat!” said Kim France, the editor of Lucky. “It’s just impossible to imagine.”
“I THINK IN the late 90’s, when those first e-books came out, there was an assumption everything would go online,” said David Granger, the editor of Esquire. “But that’s what it’s like with every new technology—anytime a new medium comes out, it’s gonna kill all previous mediums and it never does. We’re in a more realistic view of the future of magazines.”
For Hearst, that means all sorts of new ways to think about the print magazine. To Mr. Granger, that means using some more expensive paper, perhaps. A cover that folds out into a piece of topical origami? Maybe!
“Magazines have to become more magaziney rather than less magaziney,” said Mr. Granger. “There are things you can do with your cover where the paper will actually fold into different shapes—this cool experience that will let you do novel editorial things, but it’s all very expensive.”
To prove its interest, on March 11 Hearst held its first ever “print innovation expo” at its new skyscraper on Eighth Avenue. The printers and manufacturers there showed editors and publishers all sorts of new magazine covers, including “lenticular covers (holographic treatment that allows two images to interchange), gatefolds, pull-out sections, metallic printing and more,” e-mailed Nathan Christopher, a spokesman for Hearst.
The point, then, is to capitalize the physical experience of reading magazines. If it’s all about textual and textural experience, then the more dear that experience becomes, the more of a luxury object it becomes.
“The correspondence between physical luxury as a subject and physical luxury as a thing,” Kurt Andersen, the former editor of New York, thought out loud. “As paper magazines become rarer, it might seem like they become a physical luxury and thereby gain. The affinity between thing and subject might be greater in 10 years.”
It’s the argument magazine editors have been making for ages—even as their magazines themselves become more luxurious objects, chronicle more luxurious lives.
The question is, when did we start thinking of magazines as luxuries? And is it there that magazines will have to look to scratch out their survival—among photo shoots of country estates and fancy cars and couture clothing?
“The strength of our magazine is that it’s not disposable and clickable,” said Sally Singer, the fashion and features director at Vogue. “It’s a fundamentally different experience from reading it online.”
“We tell long, narrative stories with fantastic pictures,” said Mr. Carter. “You can’t replace that on the computer screen.” Next Page >
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“Sorry, not dodging you,” wrote Janice Min, editor of Us Weekly. “I just think I have nothing to say because I don’t really know the answer!”
This is so embarrassing - is that what you're paid high 6 figures for Min?
Bye bye US Weekly!
Oh, Kim France.
Whether or not paper based magazines will be around in 10 years really has less to do with emerging technology than it does with factors such as the price of paper, the cost of fuel, and the environmental impact of printing.
It seems that a perfect storm is developing here and if there isn't fundamental change in a number of different sectors, the profitability of printing and distributing paper based media products will surely dry up. The fact that there is an alternative medium there to pick up the slack will only hasten the decline. It remains to be seen if magazines can make the switch from pulp to pixels. So far not many are even coming close to transitioning their paper based profits to online properties.
So, bottom line: magazines in their current form will continue to exist for a while... maybe beyond the next ten years. It's profitable magazines that are in real danger.
The same dynamic happened in radio. Broadcaster/owners were replaced by investors. Broadcasting companies became marketing companies, with the focus shifting from attracting an audience to attracting advertisers. The number of well paying on-air jobs went from two or three per successful station to a handful per market, at best. The industry niched itself into narrow formats, gathering them together to form big, multi-station companies, bowing to the "economies of scale" god.
Radio and magazine audiences have followed a similiar path of seeking alternative sources for info and entertainment. After a while, a few big stations and periodicals will remain and the rest will evolve. The refreshing thing; the new media is allowing for the innovative passion of actual broadcasters and writer/editors to be accessed. We just have to look for them a bit harder.
I don't know, but when you see how well certain online magazines are doing already, like Viv Magazine (vivmag.com), it just makes you wonder. That new realm is already here and appears to be taking off!
For a dose of media schadenfreude try The Magazine Death Pool http://www.magazinedeathpool.com/magazine_death_pool/
or in the UK, Private Frazer's Doomed Magazines
http://privatefraser.wordpress.com/
You want to know why the magazine is dying?
Just read David Granger's words here. This is unbelievable, folks. Makes we want to ralph a big one.
The EIC of the magazine that once published Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, and Ring Lardner is telling us that you can do fun things by folding and bending the pages into shapes, that this is the future of the magazine.
Mr. Granger, I suggest looking at the words. Forget all the funny folding and typographic trickery, forget the origami and games you're playing with yourself, forget the boobs and butts you put on every page, forget all these base and childish instincts and please, please, take a good hard look at the words.