Back to the future - Part 2 - Celebrating 250 Years of Magazine Publishing: 1741-1991

A look back is one of the best ways I know of to get a perspective on where we can go from here. We all care about our beginnings, we are curious about how we got to where we are today, and we wonder what will happen to magazines in the next decade or century.

Much of the discussion about the future growth of magazines revolves around electronic publishing. I remember listening to a college professor, 25 years ago, who specialized in communications. He was addressing an audience of magazine, book and newspaper publishers, and advising us all to look for other careers. It was his forecast at that point that we would all be replaced by microfiche. Well, apparently very few people thought it was a good idea to curl up in bed with a microfiche, and you don't seem to see many on planes, trains or buses, either.

It was also about that time that other pundits were suggesting that magazines would be economically displaced-first by radio, then by TV. They also said that movie theaters would go out of business because of the availability of entertainment on television. And, of course, no one would go out to a ball park if they could see the games on TV. Don't hold me to the exact figures, but I suspect that attendance today at movies and ball parks has never been higher-which leads me to my conclusion that each new medium really supports and strengthens the need for the medium that preceded it. For example, magazines about tennis and golf owe much of their success to TV broadcasts of tennis and golf events, which develop a consumer need for information that can best be delivered in magazine format.

There will be changes in our products, however. I believe, for example, that circulation revenues will continue to grow in importance, and will substantially overshadow ad revenue growth in the years to come. In that context, I am reminded of recent news reports about automatic renewals of subscriptions and increased use of credit cards to pay for subscriptions. And I believe that newsstand distribution will become much more efficient, leading to much better sales percentage figures at the newsstand.

More about utilizing technology: The opportunity for publishers to customize magazines to match the individual interests of their readers will, I believe, lead to substantially increased circulation revenues. Here I am referring to the opportunity for mass magazines to sell, at an incremental price to their subscribers, additional information focusing specifically on the interests of those individual subscribers. Until now, most such custom sections (as limited as they have been) have been directed toward developing additional advertising revenue.

What I am talking about is the opportunity for a music magazine to offer a special additional section on classical music or audiotechnology, for example, or a tropical fish magazine to offer separate, additional sections for readers interested in salt water, as opposed to fresh water, fish.

What impact is all this going to have on the reader and our business? The additional revenue opportunities have to be good. But there's another advantage: Because these revenues will be coming from the subscriber rather than the advertiser, the role of the editorial department will be substantially strengthened.

It's the rare publisher today who doesn't recognize that his primary customer is the reader, and that if he fails to serve the reader, he won't have anything to sell his advertisers. Yet the temptation remains to cut back on service to the reader and be more protective of advertising to accommodate profit objectives. A publisher who gets 10 percent of his revenues from cigarette ads, for example, is not likely to run much editorial enumerating the evils of smoking. But as subscription revenue increases as a share of total publishing revenues, that temptation, along with the potential for pressure from advertisers for support, will change dramatically.

The publisher who gets the bulk of his revenue and his profitability from the reader will recognize without any difficulty that he must serve the reader and must serve the reader as his first obligation. The publisher who gets the bulk of his revenue from the reader will by definition be on the receiving end of less pressure from advertisers, who will represent a diminishing portion of his revenues and profitability. That has to work well for our business.

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