Re-Experiencing Magazines with Abe Peck

Ellen Blum Barish, former editor of the Medill magazine, recently spoke with Professor Abe Peck, who is Chair of Journalism and Cross-Media Story-Telling and the Gurley Brown Professor at Medill.

EBB: We are here to talk about how magazines are changing and competing in the digital age. So we know that Teen People and Elle Girl, among two of many, have gone completely online and many other consumer publications have followed suit. So what does this mean that a magazine is?

AP: The word magazine comes from the Arabic word "makhazin" which means "a storehouse." It doesn't mean staples or paper. I'm not trying to be facile about this but it means some kind of compendium of knowledge that comes out in a periodic way. In that sense, magazines are quite adapted to a digital format as long as they can keep their voice and tone and at the same time adapt their brand essence to the new digital age.

EBB: The magazines you named are facing some particular issues. Teen People wants to keep the brand going online. The teen category is a very tough category for a bunch of reasons. One there are a lot of magazines in it. Two, Teen People uses the internal metrics of Time (http://www.time.com/time/), which has very particular profit margins. It was a magazine that you or I might have made a pretty penny on but it wasn't worth it for them to do it the way they did it. A lot of teens are online. Teen girls live online. The former editor of Seventeen is doing an online webzine. So that category really lends itself to going online. There are still other magazines like Seventeen that are very strong as print magazines.

AP: I think it comes down to serving the audience. Where does the audience want it and when do they want it? What does it do for them? And that's a very different thing.

Moving over to the trade side for example, you take a magazine like Cadalyst . Cadalyst covers the CAD technology that car and airplane builders use to model three-dimensional products. The thing that those readers want more than anything else is code. If I can give you a code online in an open-source community that you can just lift that's great, as opposed to having to clack it in on your keyboard in the magazine. So they have gone Web first. They still do a print magazine but the Web builds that community of imagers and basement boys who want that kind of information. So it really depends on what that reader/user wants.

EBB: What about the way print and online versions of magazines can complement or cannibalize one another?

AP: There are different stages here. In the beginning, people just posted their content online. That was just regurgitation. I think magazine publishers are beginning to come to terms with the idea that it's not how we get there.

Now there are some real issues there. How do you monetize these sites? Just because you save money by not doing print doesn't mean you make money by doing the Web. So what's unique that you can offer? Not just on a Web site but on other digital platforms: Cell phones. Ringtones. Digital conferences. Surgical procedures that you can show online. Webinars. If you go to the Seventeen Web site, it's very community-driven. It's a lot of you this and they have to compete with so many other teen sites.

It's very smart not to do the same thing that you do in print. In fact, that particular magazine has expanded its audience because it had a more vigorous Web site than it had before and they made some money on it. And it has other versions of Seventeen like Prom that comes to the reader with an aperture -- a particular opening for readers thinking about the prom. Town and Country Travel [for luxury travel] does that. So you are trying to surround the reader with products that she or he needs at one particular time. Just posting stuff doesn't do much for people.

EBB: What about those of us, like myself, who were trained for the print magazine world? How can Medill graduates adapt their skills to the changing magazine landscape?

In some ways it's not a choice. The first step is really opening your mind that these are really important formats. While we may love print because that's how we came up - I'd certainly rather read The Economist in print than online - and you can take it to the bathroom, it's more advantageous to have my laptop in the business center. So there are particular times when I want to read stuff.

The other thing is to really try to think of the formatting that is going to allow each story to maximize its content. It may be that a print story may have a breathtaking photo next to some legs of type whereas online I may want that story chunked in a very different way. If I want that story to be searched I want to use certain keywords or in the headline somewhere that it will be meta-tagged so that the search engine can pick that up. So we have to know the lexicon and the operating principles for these magazines. This is where we are going with our curriculum - how readers want their information.

EBB: Can you speak a little bit about this applies to the voice and the sound of a publication?

I think magazines have had an advantage because they have a voice. If you are talking about actual sound bites, well then you can hear the voice of the readers or the expert columnist and the voice of people on location. If you are doing National Geographic Adventure you can have people out in the national parks or an author telling about a harrowing experience. So there is all of that to bring to it.

At the same time the print product is very valuable - it is where most of the money is in most categories and still where most of the readers are in most categories. So the architecture and pacing of a well-crafted magazine is wonderful and people can get lost in the page turning. That's why you see a lot of transition technology on web sites such as Zino and Nxtbook, which replicate the page-turning experience.

EBB: Which magazines are doing this very well?

AP: You have to answer that at different levels. If you are talking in terms of business -to -business, there's a company I worked for in Asia called Global Sources, which had 800-page magalogs full of information, which was very valuable to buyers of particular products. As the web built, it became in some cases more valuable
for them to have instant transactions - not Paypal - but they could find companies they could reach and [Global Sources] did a very strong job of doing what we call "re-earning it's right to be in the middle." In the business-to-business aspect that's very successful.

A magazine like Maxim has an interesting site because it doesn't replicate the magazine but it takes the pillars of the magazine and major coverage areas and puts them out in a very peppy and energetic way. It replicates the essence of the magazine.

Then you see things that are just kind of blowing up. There's just been the announcement that Life will cease publishing. Life is kind of the vampire of magazines because it keeps coming back in different ways after it's killed off. It lost the newspaper insert war - they are blaming it on newspaper circulation. Whatever the reasons are, it lost that war. They are going to put it up as a photo archive with advertising - well that's a very creative thing. Life is known for its photos and they may be able to make a business out of that. And it's very valuable to the reader that wants to choose a 1936 archival photo.

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Is Print Dead?

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What do you think about the future of print vs. other types of media? Add a comment and join the conversation!