[Main image: Shutterstock.com/Niloo]
In September, a new US-UK study published by YouGov showed that magazine readers still prefer print. In other words, while we’re all increasingly accessing our news online – be that fake or otherwise – the paper product still carries weight when it comes to the magazine experience.
This is in some ways a reassuring trend for magazine publishers, but also an expensive one, particularly at a time when paper prices are skyrocketing, and carbon emissions are beginning to have a direct impact on businesses’ bottom lines.
To print or not to print, that’s the question… and at the recent DistriPress Congress in Portugal, we asked a number of leading industry experts for their answers…
Distributing positivity
DistriPress is the media association dedicated to supporting the global circulation and distribution of newspapers and magazines across both print and digital. The organisation’s recent Congress attracted speakers and delegates from all over the world, who painted a cautiously optimistic picture of print’s role in media’s future.
Busy moderating the Forum section of the event was Jim Bilton, Managing Director of Wessenden Marketing and an experienced media analyst in the sector. We grabbed Jim offstage to give us an introduction to the current publisher conundrum:
“Print is still paying the bills for a lot of companies,” he told us. “But they have to be diversifying and looking at revenue streams. I think behind it all, people still think of print as the real thing, whatever their age. They may not be prepared to pay for it, particularly younger audiences, and at a lower frequency rather than buying every single issue. But there’s something about the print experience… and that flips over into the retail experience.”
Disappearing newsstands
When it comes to retail, it’s no secret that physical newsstand space has been declining in recent years. David Atkins, Owner of Newsstand, the world’s largest online magazine newsagent, says that the real issue with shrinking shelf space comes into play when we look behind the industry’s flagship titles.
“It’s not easy,” says Atkins. “I mean over the years, certainly in the UK market, you’ve had supermarket ranges being tightened up and that left more titles going to the independent retailer – and we’re talking mainly mainstream titles here. So what happened generally was that independent retailers would get their shelves flooded – for want of a better term – with more and more stuff that wasn’t going into the ranges of the main chains.”
“This meant that it was harder for the customer to come in and find the title, or discover new titles that they might be interested in. Because whereas you would have seen a third of the front cover in the old days, you then started to just see the spine… so it’s become very difficult to browse.”
One solution to retaining retail shelf space in recent years has been for magazine publishers to reshape their offerings from fast moving consumer goods products, into something that may look more at home in the bookstore.
Krifka Steffey, who is Director for Merchandise – Newsstand and Media departments, for Barnes & Noble, told us that these sorts of products are ideally placed in their stores.
“Our magazines in particular are the perfect complement to books,” says Steffey, “because they have become so high quality and even specialised. Our stores carry an incredibly varied mix of products, and this also plays into the profitability of the company as we have some standard everyday items (and of course books!) but we bring in seasonal items as well, so each visit to B&N will have something new.”
So in other words, the periodical print products of the future may look increasingly like the specialist quarterly journals of the past, as opposed to a salacious celebrity headline snaffled up at the supermarket checkout. Higher quality, lower frequency, and something perhaps to adorn the coffee table.
Indies are the new Rock & Roll
This transition in itself goes some way to accounting for more recent moves away from high frequency printing of titles, and the rise of the indie scene. Magazines have always been viewed by readers as a doorway to more niche, specialist, and vertical-driven forms of content, and that role is now being supercharged by the growth of indies.
Take CREEM for example, an independent music publication that returned to print in 2022, after a 33yr absence. Subscribers can pay $5 per month ($60 per year) to access the magazine’s digital only archives, or an extra $19 ($79 per year) to have four pristine 10” x 14” quarterly issues added into the bargain – a no brainer for those who want to see something tangible in exchange for parting with their cash.
CREEM provides the quintessential embodiment of indie magazines as the new rock & roll in the media zeitgeist, and it’s a trend that MagCulture’s Jeremy Leslie elaborated on further for us at Congress:
“The wonderful thing about the indie scene is its camaraderie and its sort of mutual support systems. People ask, how are creatives going to make businesses out of what they do in the indies… and for a lot of people that’s not the issue. It’s not about being a business, it’s an activity for the sake of itself. Some of the more esoteric and experimental magazine projects can be compared to experimental filmmaking or music. People are pushing the edge of the envelope in terms of what can be done with a magazine, and that’s what so exciting about it.”
Subscriptions vs Advertising
Of course, as inspiring an interpretation of the burgeoning indie scene as this is, creative endeavour cannot run without commercial viability forever. Sooner or later, for content to get made – and certainly get made at scale – it needs to be funded.
There is much debate throughout the wider magazine sector right now, and indeed the industry at large, as to how best to go about this. Where subscriptions where once the talk of the media town, advertising once again appears to be coming back into fashion, as exemplified by the launch of Netflix’s ad-supported model this month.
For publishers in particular, ad-revenue is re-emerging as an alluring prospect, particularly with the impending ‘Cookiepocalypse’ and likely return to prominence of first-party data.
Managing Director of Ra & Olly, James Laffar, who we spoke to alongside Newsstand’s David Atkins at Congress, says that more can be done to help emerging magazine titles, if they are prepared to embrace ad-models.
“I think we always look at the mainstream markets through the eyes of some of the independent magazines, and how they can be suitable for that kind of route. Advertising and brand collaborations are the perfect way for them to scale up – it’s an ongoing conversation and a conversation that needs to be had.”
“Obviously, a lot of indie publishers want to try and avoid that and purely base their model on sales revenue. But I think going forward this will become increasingly important, and there seems to be a lot more talk about this more generally from the brands and media agencies we’ve been speaking to. When we talk about engagement, and time spent on print, specialist publications are perfect for that. If you have a thousand copies of something really specialist, then for every thousand copies that are sold, every single page is going to be really engaged with by the readers.”
The potential for new publications to grow through advertising in today’s marketplace was also emphasised by Nina Prada, Artist, Writer, and Curator of this year’s Indiecon festival. She says that even the most niche of titles often still have one eye on larger audiences.
“A lot of independent publications have direct subscriptions, but a lot of them are also interested in figuring out how to distribute on a larger scale. It’s not one size fits all though necessarily, different magazines have different needs and different visions, they’re set up very differently, and it’s a case of figuring out what works for them.”
Rising print prices
At the other end of the scale are large multinational publishers, like a Conde Nast, or a Hearst. Such organisations have managed to maintain healthy print readerships over the years, despite diversifying into digital offerings.
But at a time when print prices are soaring, printing and distributing magazines at scale is not an easy game to play, and it’s a talking point in today’s industry that Werner Zirlik, Managing Director of Media Distribution for Melo Group, explained to us transparently.
“If you have a declining market in terms of sales numbers, you have to increase your prices,” he says. “My experience is, if the quality of the product is good and you keep it high, the market is open for rising those prices.”
“I mean, if you rise it twenty cents for a good selling magazine, it’s a lot of money at scale… but for a consumer paying an extra twenty cents to have that quality maintained is usually acceptable. Versus if the quality of the publication drops, then they may decide not to buy it anymore. We have generally had good experiences with increasing print prices, and it is fair to say that with increasing paper and now also energy costs for publishers, we are likely to see an increase in copy prices over the next year.”
Sustainability factors
Energy is an interesting variable to bring into the mix, because as alluded to at the top of this article, sustainable business practices now have a big part to play in the profitability of publishing houses.
From reducing the base outgoings necessary to administer print and distribution runs, to complying with national government legislation on CO2 emissions, and beyond to ingratiating themselves to an increasingly sustainability-minded audience and advertisers base, it pays for publishing to be energy efficient. Axel Springer, the largest publishing house in Europe, is one of the companies leading the charge in this area.
It’s also true that print, when managed correctly, can be a hugely sustainable medium, because paper is a renewable resource.
Roularta is a Belgian media group divided primarily into two divisions. The publisher produces around 60 of its own titles, while 50% of its print runs are carried out on behalf of commercial customers. For Steven Renders, General Manager for the printing side of the business, there are two main reasons why print prices have gone up so significantly in recent months and years.
“First of all, the paper prices have doubled in the last twelve to eighteen months. And now since unfortunately the war in Ukraine started, we have seen that also energy costs are picking up very quickly as well. So these issues are significant and we’re working with our customers on how to limit costs.”
For him, adopting more sustainable business practices is becoming a way for publishers to increase margins, rather than lose them.
“We have very clear sustainability ambitions for the Roularta Group at large, and we see this more and more in the briefs that other publishers give to us as well. When we talk about reducing the carbon footprint of our customers, we can now say that with certainty because we are able to measure the carbon footprint of every print run we do. We have a software that can do that and we can help our customers to make things CO2 neutral.”
From the forest to the warehouse, and then (hopefully) onto the coffee table
Finally, we also spoke to TWI at DistriPress Congress, one of the world’s leading providers of warehouse logistics systems. It’s an area of the industry that often gets overlooked, in the same way for example that today as consumers, we tend to think a lot less about how food gets from the farm to our plates.
But the logistical side of distribution in print media has evolved significantly in recent years, and joint Managing Director of TWI, Nils Buck, gave us an introduction to some of these changes.
“We help automate a lot of the warehouse process, especially where people are involved,” he tells us. “We can make sorting more accurate, and help people be more productive in doing so, and our technology is implemented all over the world from warehouses with 1-2 workers in them, to billion dollar businesses.”
“What’s quite interesting is that we started with operating systems that are no longer on the market, e.g. MS-DOS, and we still have customers running on that system today! So while we can still maintain software and hardware from many years ago, warehouse technology has evolved significantly and today we are doing much work in advancing systems. The key is to create solutions that are able to fulfil current needs, while being updatable for future requirements.”
In a world where the amount of physical ‘things’ we surround ourselves with is diminishing by the day – from CDs, to DVDs, computer games, and beyond – magazines represent an area of media where the tangibility of the product remains important. While paper’s role in the wider industry is evolving, it’s clear that that evolution is what’s allowing it to stay relevant today.