Magazine Campaign Hits the Streets

I was nudged over the weekend to take a look at the ad in the issue of Entertainment Weekly I recently plugged. The ad is from a group of large magazine publishers, and it is part of a campaign to combat the knee-jerk assumptions -- very wrong assumptions, as it turns out -- that the rise of social media and the maturing of the internet means the death of print periodicals.

It's got all the great info that's been missing from so many of the online comments who keep posting remarks about why-don't-they-just-shut-up-and-die on various magazine sites. Magazine readership isn't dropping; in fact, it's increased in past decade. Best of all, the internet and print are not locked in a zero-sum game, in which one side's gain is the other side's loss. Both types of media are growing.

Gotta help get that word out.

If Print Is Dead, Why Did MLB Launch a Magazine?

I received an e-mail from Major League Baseball with an offer (pictured) for their new publication, MLB Insiders Club Magazine.

Though I'm a White Sox fan, I don't plan to subscribe (far too many magazines already clogging up my mailbox). But I find it interesting that MLB, which specializes in delivering a live, in-person experience or in delivering a streaming or archived video and audio experience (TV, online streaming, etc.), is putting out a print product.

I think it's great. It might be an example of print not being dead, or it might be an example of the print sports world being so moribund that MLB has to create its own print media properties to promote itself. Or, of course, it might be a mixture of the two: MLB has to pay for the production of the magazine, but it gets all of the revenue from it, so it shows that print is still an effective revenue medium and it helps the organization get its message out without relying on Sports Illustrated, The Sporting News, and ESPN.

(See also my July 2002 Internet World cover story interview with Bob Bowman, who headed up MLB Advanced Media. Bowman's work was on the flip side of this equation: Building MLB's ahead-of-the-curve online strategy for disseminating content.)

Hugh Hefner on Print Magazines' Uniqueness

In an interview on CNN with John Roberts, Playboy founder/editor Hugh Hefner made some interesting comments (and by "interesting," I mean that I agree with him) about the role of print magazines in this supposedly post-print world. He takes the view that yes, some people don't want to read magazines and – more important – you can't force them to do so. Here's an excerpt from the interview:

Roberts: Now in 1953, when you first launched Playboy magazine, you seemed to be the right publication for the right time. I know that you were very heavily influenced by the Kinsey Report, which had come out not too long prior to that. But 55 years later, is Playboy magazine still relevant? And if it is, how do you keep it relevant?

Hefner: Well, I don't think obviously it will ever play the same kind of role that it played back in the 1950s and '60s. But I do think that a magazine of quality always has a place. Increasingly, obviously fewer people are reading magazines and fewer people are reading newspapers and books, but I think that part of that is a change that Playboy is always, is also embracing. We're very much involved with the Internet. We were the first magazine to use [the] Internet and have our own Web site. So I think that we'll continue to ... publish both the magazine and then publish through electronics.

Roberts: The new Steven Watts biography [of Hefner] is a fascinating, very fascinating look at your entire career, from your roots all the way up until the present. And he says, looking back over it, that "the key to his approach was that he edited Playboy for himself. Aiming it at his own tastes and values." Was that also a key to your success as well that you approached this with such a personal passion?

Hefner: I think so, but I think that is one of the things that makes magazines unique. They do speak with a personal voice. And I think it is one of the things that makes magazines special.

You can read the transcript of the entire interview here, where you'll also find a link to the video.

I made some similar comments in response to some recent statements by Esquire's editor, David Granger. The pool of total print readership may drop (might not, though; might shift to different people, though; for example, recent reports about thriving newspapers in Germany and India), but there's a role for quality magazines that it would be foolish to ignore.

Mr. Hefner has always had a clear-eyed view of magazines, unlike many of his competitors and unlike many of his critics. When Playboy was coming down from the highs of its 1970s circulation spike, he did not panic or overreact; his reaction was reportedly (I believe this was in a tale told by his daughter, Christie Hefner; if I've got that attribution wrong, my apologies) that Playboy's circulation will be whatever it naturally is; if one million people want to buy the magazine, it'll be one million; but there's no reason to pretend that it was supposed to be what the circulation was in the 1970s when it was arguably the most important cultural publication in the country.