Print needs electronic to survive

Of all of the issues in business-to-business media, the health of the printed product continues to elicit the most discussion. The reason: there is no consensus on print's health, and the role of the Internet in this health is also a hot debate. Like Josh Gordon posted in "Print is alive" below, this topic requires a positive spin. But one can see the challenge faced and feared by print icons and feared by many business-to-business publishers. Crain’s New York Business reports today, that “a tough advertising market hammered the weekly newsmagazines in the first four months of this year.” Focusing on Time, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report, Crain’s cited “a sharp drop in advertising pages and revenue.”

MediaLife was more optimistic today as it attributed the rash of magazine redesigns to “the improving ad economy. With more advertisers out there spending, the competition for their dollars has heated up in a number of magazine categories.”

Yet the MediaLife also had to admit, as reported in a recent poll, that 34.1 percent of respondents said they read magazines less. Eyes were moving to the Internet.

It seems, no matter what the arena, the challenge they face is how to “stem the flow of eyeballs and ad dollars to the Internet,” as phrased by Crain's.

What Crain's said of the big three is critical for business-to-business: publications must “find ways to extend their brand of face a slide toward extinction, as happened with The Saturday Evening Post.

It appears, for all print products, that the best way to control the exodus to the Internet is to offer brand extension that reaches the Internet. The delivery of information in multiple platforms can actually resuscitate a print product.

Comments

[Jim]

The thing is, your "brand" as a magazine isn't just your logo and niche. It's your editors and everything they think or do while putting out each issue. Right now, your online content shouldn't be about June's stories- it should be about September or October's.

Get your editors to post notes from their editorial meetings, excerpts from interviews, and links to relevant news stories, and you'll do a better job of extending your brand electronically than you will by having them post press releases online.