I feel like the author either has an enormous blind spot or is intentionally failing to observe the fact that magazines exist in a completely different landscape today than they did even a decade ago, much less nearly 100 years ago (in the example cited from "It's a Wonderful Life").
The cycle didn't start with publishers shrinking page count and cutting back on long-form content - publishers started shrinking page count and cutting back on content after they started losing money (at least in many cases).
Print publishers were/are competing for attention as much as dollars, and there's so many other things that grab people's attention. There's so many other sources of information. Advertisers have many, many more venues and -- sadly -- they tend to choose the venues that they can track over the ones they can't.
I used to write for several print magazines in the tech space -- and I watched their ad budgets get hollowed out by online options because (generally) buying ad space in a magazine is an act of faith vs. "we ran this online campaign and we see we have this conversion rate and can track that 1,023 people downloaded our ebook and that this marketing 'touched' 75 accounts that closed or renewed deals for more than $1m."
I love print. Love it. But I also have realized that, honestly, I have very little time for reading the print magazines I subscribe to. I subscribe to a few sci-fi print publications and they just gather dust. I have a Mother Jones print/online subscription. Usually the print version goes into recycling without ever looking at it.
What is lacking here is any suggestion of a solution. He gestures at the problem being cutting content, but then closes with a "we need to work on building something else" without actually describing the something else worth a damn.
>publishers started shrinking page count and cutting back on content after they started losing money (at least in many cases)
I thought this was quite well understood which is why the article says something like "you cannot fix sales problems by decreasing the quality of your product" (too lazy to go find actual quote)
That's overly simplistic, in this case. You're not going to sell more buggies by making the quality of your buggy worse, true. But you're _also_ not going to sell more buggies, period, if everybody is preferring cars.
Likewise - publishers know that cuts aren't going to make their magazines more compelling - but it's 1) cut somewhere or 2) go out of business faster. You might manage to survive by maintaining quality and even adding things if the audience is large enough and you can pull from competing publications. (Although, in some cases, the cuts are things readers don't see -- e.g., allowing advertisers to place contributed content, or ensuring you don't publish anything that upsets the remaining advertisers...)
I think that's fair. To the degree that someone, somehow, is willing and able to foot the bills, lots of people are willing and able to work hard to put out a quality product. Yes, some have an agenda to push that you may or may not agree with, but a lot of the issue is money at the end of the day.
Advertisers were good at figurinr out print ads. While online gives immeadiat conversion results they dont give the much more important gave a feeling oi discomfort resulting in a buy in a year
The cycle didn't start with publishers shrinking page count and cutting back on long-form content - publishers started shrinking page count and cutting back on content after they started losing money (at least in many cases).
Print publishers were/are competing for attention as much as dollars, and there's so many other things that grab people's attention. There's so many other sources of information. Advertisers have many, many more venues and -- sadly -- they tend to choose the venues that they can track over the ones they can't.
I used to write for several print magazines in the tech space -- and I watched their ad budgets get hollowed out by online options because (generally) buying ad space in a magazine is an act of faith vs. "we ran this online campaign and we see we have this conversion rate and can track that 1,023 people downloaded our ebook and that this marketing 'touched' 75 accounts that closed or renewed deals for more than $1m."
I love print. Love it. But I also have realized that, honestly, I have very little time for reading the print magazines I subscribe to. I subscribe to a few sci-fi print publications and they just gather dust. I have a Mother Jones print/online subscription. Usually the print version goes into recycling without ever looking at it.
What is lacking here is any suggestion of a solution. He gestures at the problem being cutting content, but then closes with a "we need to work on building something else" without actually describing the something else worth a damn.