Tag Archives: print medium

Honoring two who stayed the course

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Do you have staying power? Some 20, 30, or 40 years from now, will people look back at your career in publishing and see a faithful communicator who skillfully and consistently carried out the ministry to which he had been entrusted by God?

Two such faithful communicators were honored recently for their decades of service in Christian publishing.

KennethTaylorPhotoThe Evangelical Christian Publishers Association posthumously honored writer/publisher Ken Taylor, author of The Living Bible and founder of Tyndale House Publishers, when they announced the Kenneth N. Taylor Lifetime Achievement Award at an Industry Awards Celebration May 3. According to ECPA Executive Director Stan Jantz, the award was “established to recognize a Christian publishing leader who exemplifies a lifetime of achievement through initiatives and programs that have spread the Good News of Jesus Christ.”

Les_StobbeTwo weeks later, the Blue Ridge Mountains Christian Writers Institute presented a Lifetime Achievement Award to Les Stobbe, whose career in Christian publishing to date has spanned 60 years. Over the years, Stobbe has served as a writer/author/journalist, magazine editor, bookstore buyer and supervisor, book publisher, educator, CEO, trainer, and literary agent. He continues to serve as a writer, literary agent, and workshop leader.

Not everyone is recognized with a lifetime achievement award as they come to the end of their career in Christian publishing. But there is One who does recognize the years of faithful service. And his “Well done, good and faithful servant” is all the recognition we need.

Young people opt for print

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When students at Penn State decided this summer to start a magazine called Impact, they planned to have both an online and offline presence—that is, a print magazine. “We feel print is really important,” stated co-founder and co-editor Frances Starn. Speaking on the magazine’s Kickstarter video she said “We feel that having people be able to hold the magazine in their hand and see something will help us reach the widest audience possible.”

What? These are college students, the people raised on the Internet, wirelessly connected 24/7. Wouldn’t they prefer to consume content on one of their several devices? Not so, according to a poll released this summer by the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project. The poll found that 75 percent of young adults aged 16-29 years of age said they have read at least one book in print in the past year, compared with 65 percent of adults 30 and older.

“Younger Americans’ reading habits and library use are still anchored by the printed page,” said Kathryn Zickuhr, a research analyst at Pew Research.  Americans under 30 are just as likely as older adults to visit the library and borrow print books, she said.

Sure, they love their technology, but there’s something about the look and feel of the printed page which they find attractive.

The silver lining in the bad news about magazine publishing

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“Magazines, all kinds of them, don’t work very well in the marketplace anymore.” This startling statement was made earlier this month by David Carr in his Media Equation column in The New York Times. Reflecting the generally negative atmosphere surrounding any discussion of the future of magazines, he went on to say that “like newspapers, magazines have been in a steady slide, but now like newspapers, they seem to have reached the edge of the cliff.” As evidence he pointed to a recent Audit Bureau of Circulations report stating that newsstand circulation in the first half of the year was down almost 10 percent. Advertising is also down 8.8 percent year to date over “the same miserable period a year ago,” according to the Publishers Information Bureau.

Magazine publishing in the United Kingdom has also suffered a series of setbacks, according to Mike King of Companiesandmarkets.com. Moreover, he states that the UK magazine publishing market has been forecast to continue to decline over the next five years. However, he is a little more optimistic than some market observers, predicting an eventual recovery, or at least stabilization, as the UK economy recovers.

In South Africa, some observers are even more optimistic about the future of magazine publishing–with one caveat. “There is a definite downward trend within the magazine publishing industry, both in terms of readership numbers and ad revenue, locally and internationally,” says Tanja Carruthers, editor at Fitness magazine and publisher at Maverick Publishing Corporation. “However, certain niche titles seem to be the exception as consumers become more discretionary with their tighter expendable income.” Her magazine is a case in point. South Africa’s only dedicated female health and fitness magazine has posted its fifth consecutive year of circulation growth.

Carruthers says that instead of consuming more general information, people now prefer to consume content on a specific subject through their preferred media platform. This phenomenon has been evident for decades, appearing as long ago as 1971 with the demise of Look magazine and the introduction of a plethora of new specialized magazines. However, Carruthers predicts this trend of “narrow-casting” to  increase and eventually overtake the older more-general once-venerable publications, which like dinosaurs, will eventually drift into obscurity.

Is print dead? It’s too soon to start writing the obituary

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The news continues to come with gasps of amazement. Twenty years after its founding, SmartMoney magazine will dump its print edition in order to focus on SmartMoney.com! Twenty-five print staffers will lose their jobs! By the end of the year the Financial Times could have more digital subscribers than buyers of print copies! U.S. publishers report that foreign e-book sales last year increased 333 percent over 2010 sales! Is print dead? Or, at best on life support?

Probably not. A 2012 Reynolds Journalism Institute study confirms that tablet users continue to read print newspapers and magazines. Nearly half of Apple iPad owners and a quarter of Android table owners say they have a subscription to at least one print publication. A recent Pew State of the News Media study noted that a quarter of Millennials (18-24 year olds) said they read a printed newspaper the day before. Some 22 percent said they read newspapers at least every other day. That is compared with 40 percent of adults overall who say the same. The New York Times reports that 10 percent of its hard copy subscribers are Millenials; 9 percent subscribe digitally.

In the U.S., more print magazines were launched than closed in 2011, the same trend as evident in 2010. The Economist, a highly-respected British news magazine, writes about a new sense of optimism among publishers due to the increased readership of magazines. In fact, magazine audiences are growing faster than those for television or newspapers.

So, what accounts for the statistics of the first paragraph? The editor of SmartMoney magazine says the volatility of markets and asset classes has increased the need for rapid delivery of personal finance intelligence. Also, the magazine was losing ad pages. Thus the decision to cut their losses and try the digital model. Why is the Financial Times increasing digital subscribers at such a rapid rate? The magazine was one of the first to recognize the possibility of monetizing content on the Web and from the beginning charged for content that they made sure offered quality, rather than quantity. And, they were innovative in their approach to technology, opting for HTML5 very early on, with the result that their Web app drew 2 million users in less than a year.

What about the growth of foreign e-book sales? After all, a 333 percent increase is pretty amazing, isn’t it? Perhaps not so amazing when you realize that even after its phenomenal growth last year,  e-book sales still represents only 6 percent of total sales.

Perhaps some day print will die. But that day will not come this year, next year, or even next decade. Save the obituary writing job for your grandchild.

Print magazines—not yet on the endangered list

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Are print magazines lumbering dinosaurs about to be overwhelmed by the Internet tsunami before they can reach the safety of the ark? Not according to leaders of some of the largest magazine groups in America, who joined forces to organize an advertising campaign titled “Magazines: the Power of Print.”

Here are a few of the facts they presented:

* Magazine readership has grown over the last five years, with paid subscriptions reaching nearly 300 million in 2009.

* Four out of five adults read magazines and the average reader spends 43 minutes reading each issue.

* Since Facebook was founded, magazines gained more than one million young adult readers and magazine readership in the 18-34 year group is growing.

It appears that print magazines are not only not on the endangered species list, but are actually flourishing. Will the Internet eventually kill magazines? Probably not. Magazine experts point out that people find room in their lives for new experiences alongside the ones they already love. But in order to continue to thrive magazines must provide value to the subscriber. It’s no longer possible to take the subscriber for granted. And, many magazine publishers have found they can harness the opportunities offered by the Internet to add value to the print publication. In fact, some large publishers are now putting people with primarily digital experience in key positions in the company.

Those of us who have been involved in the print medium for many years may be tempted to see the Internet as competition, while those who grew up with the Internet may be tempted to see print as a dying medium. Yet, magazines that harness the best opportunities offered by both will enjoy more success and be able to offer more value to their constituency.

For a very interesting short video about the “Magazines: The Power of Print” campaign, check this link: http://powerofmagazines.com/