Is online the solution for magazines?

David Reich

Newspapers are bleeding red ink, and many magazines are following in their footsteps.  Magazine ad pages are down by 9.5 percent so far this year, according to the Publishers Information Bureau, and 3Q ad pages were down almost 13 percent.

Like newspapers, should magazines be looking more closely at online as a source of readership and, eventually, revenue?  If expenses can be trimmed sharply by cutting down on costly printing and distribution costs, perhaps publishers can get some financial breathing room.

I'm not advocating dropping print for the Web.  I'm old school – I like to thumb through a paper or a magazine.  But my preferences aside, the printed pages of magazines continue to make sense for some product categories.   Selling the smooth lines of a new car or the beauty and sexiness of fashion items?  It's hard to beat the rich color of a glossy magazine page.  And the Web experts haven't yet figured out how to sample fragrance online the way scratch & sniff pages in a magazine can.

So there's still a place for printed magazines.

Yet online content can draw – and engage – readers that many magazine advertisers crave.  Magazines, though, need to do a better online job than most are now doing, where their landing pages are little more than ads for the print editions.  Even if the online edition contains all or most of what's in print, publishers have to give readers a reason to visit frequently, rather than only when the new print edition ships.  

Newspapers have the advantage of a new edition every day, which can point readers to what's online in a topical and timely way. The challenge for magazines is to reach out to readers more than once a month, using methods other than links in the monthly print edition.  E-mails are a quick and relatively inexpensive way to reach out.  Tie-ins with other media – newspapers, TV and radio, and their Websites – can also bring readers to a magazine site more often.  Even advertising unique Web content in other media can work.

Building a real online presence will take time and it will require a financial commitment.  But magazine publishers must think long-term so they'll have more to sell once we get through these tough times.

David Reich
DAVID REICH, president of New York public relations boutique Reich Communications, Inc., is a 30+ year p.r. veteran. He has won national awards for his work, including a Marketing Excellence Award for his work representing McDonald’s, and a National Safety Council Award and The Administrator’s Award for traffic safety programs for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the New York Automobile Show. Before forming his own agency in 1990, David was a senior vp at Manning, Selvage & Lee, where he headed the corporate-financial department, and at Saatchi's The Rowland Company, he managed large consumer accounts that included McDonald's and Bacardi. His background includes work for Jaguar Cars, Phillips Petroleum, RJR Foods, Gulf Oil, Ryder System and Westinghouse. He led the p.r. team for the launch of L’eggs Pantyhose, which became a Harvard B-School marketing case history. David's "my 2 cents" blog ( http://reichcomm.typepad.com )on media and marketing was recently named among the Top 20 marketing blogs by Junta42. He is a contributing writer for MarketingProfs Daily Fix online.