Business Magazines Need to Find their Purpose for Being in Business

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 00:00:12 -0500

As 2009 mercifully marches toward its long-awaited end, the magazine field is littered with battered, bruised, bleeding and sometimes even deceased bodies of America’s business magazines. In a turnaround of almost Biblical proportions, the business category, which enjoyed seven or so of the fattest years in magazine history in the 1990s now is suffering through seven or more of the leanest.

Some of this pain and suffering is purely cyclical, of course, on several dimensions. What goes up must come down, and business magazines in the 1990s were so far up that it was almost inevitable that they’d fall to earth with a thud in the 2000s. You can chalk some of it up to category fatigue and even more to the bad behavior, malfeasance and criminal undertakings of many of the poster children whose faces graced America’s business magazines as heroes, shortly before they graced the cells of America’s prisons as inmates.

And then, of course, in a recession with the depth and breadth of our current economic meltdown, business magazines—which traditionally depend on business-to-business advertising more than business-to-consumer magazines—find themselves hit harder than other categories. Business which themselves aren’t buying anything are hardly likely to spend money advertising to other businesses which also aren’t buying anything. It’s a perfect non-revenue producing feedback loop.

Rules of Engagement Have Shifted

But there’s also a structural problem that business magazines have been slow to respond to: business and the world of work have been changing at a rapid and dramatic pace. The rules of engagement seem to have shifted; how to play the game, how to win, what winning even means—all are undergoing massive and uncharted changes.

Now, you’d think that this new and dramatic narrative would provide business magazines with exactly the kind of once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to explain the new world of business to baffled, scared, and fear-frozen readers. The problem is, of course, that the magazines are themselves so baffled, scared and fear-frozen, they are as more a part of the scene than they are seasoned observers helping make sense of it. Add to that the burden of reinventing old and tired brands that no longer seem relevant to a world of transforming technology, global competition, economic recalibration and career recalculation, and it’s not hard to see why most business magazines are concentrating on surviving rather than self-reinvention.

Staying in Business vs. Having a Purpose for Being in Business

Still, as 2009 drags to a weary and welcome close, there’s reason for hope that 2010 will promise new life. There’s the acquisition by Bloomberg of BusinessWeek for a song—a huge upside opportunity if it means leveraging Bloombergs multi-platform approach to business journalism and financial analysis to BusinessWeek’s historic capacity for smart essays and clever idea packaging. But that’s only one title. Every business magazine has the same opportunity—a chance to grab on to the fascinating and dramatic “story line” that is shaping up in the new, emerging world of business. If the surviving business magazines each finds its own distinctive voice to educate readers to the huge changes under way in the economy and in the world of work, and they commit to a publishing world where the job of the magazine is to start a useful, colorful, dynamic conversation with a community of readers who need help making new and valuable connections, then 2010 can be a great year of re-invention and re-commitment to the real purpose of business magazines. (On the other hand, if they keep doing what they’ve been doing, they may survive, but it won’t really matter; they’ll gradually become less and less relevant.)

This isn’t just idle speculation on my part; for the last year I’ve been traveling and speaking extensively on the changing face and shape of business, and everywhere I go, both in the United States and abroad, I find eager, hungry, actively involved audiences—people who care deeply about what happens next in the world of business. These are business executives, but also political and non-profit leaders. They are dissatisfied with the current explanation of the role of the corporation in society and they are disgusted with a public conversation that seems stuck on matters of superficiality and celebrity. They want authenticity, integrity, and real dialog—and instead they feel they’ve been getting a steady diet of status-quo thinking, round-up-the-usual-suspects journalism, and convenient excuses for why things can’t change.

The exciting truth is we are at the threshold of a new era in business. All over the world we’re witnessing massive discontinuities in how work gets done, who does it, how value is created, where it gets created—one epoch is ending, another is just being born. What business magazines need to do is to embrace the changes and challenges that are rocking the world of business—get in front of the evolving story line; engage readers in a conversation; challenge the status quo instead of offering bland reassurances that the status quo will prevail; generate useful, provocative debate; discover new voices who champion new ideas and unconventional practices.

It’s not just a matter of finding a way to stay in business; it’s a matter of having a purpose for being in business in the first place. Entrepreneurship is the answer to the companies business magazines cover; it’s also the answer to the future of the magazines themselves. It’s not even a question of returning to profitability. It’s a question of returning to relevancy.

Folio RSS: Feed sponsored exclusively by NXTbook Media - offering RSS feeds for Digital Editions Call 866-268-1219 for more information.

It’s 10PM: Do You Know What Business You’re In?

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 11:13:25 -0400

Imagine that you’re part of an industry where the business model which served you so well for so long is failing.

Imagine that practices that in the past provided predictable remedies for economic problems today simply don’t work.

Imagine, in other words, that you are in the magazine business—or any other part of the media landscape.

Making sense of change isn’t always easy. One thing to keep in mind, according to Rule #6 from “Rules of Thumb: 52 Truths for Winning at Business Without Losing Yourself”: If you want to see with fresh eyes, reframe the picture.

One of the problems that plagues newspapers and magazines today is their inability to see their business with fresh eyes. It’s a problem that has afflicted other industries in other times. The executives who ran the railroad industry, for example, suffered huge losses as long as they thought they were in the railroad business. What they couldn’t see as long as they looked through old and tired eyes, was that they were in the transportation business, which meant their competitors weren’t other railroads; they were up against planes, cars, boats—anything that moved people, goods and, today, information.

What business are magazine companies in today? If you answer, “the magazine business” chances are good you’re about to go out of business. “The magazine” is a commodity, and commodities, by definition, lack distinction, uniqueness, and brand equity. The only way to survive today is to reframe your self, to offer a singular product or service (or combination of the two) in a way that adds value and attracts particular customers.

For example, when I co-founded Fast Company magazine in 1995, one of the first questions we asked ourselves was, what business are we in? The market for business magazines was already crowded with established contenders. What was our new frame? We decided that we were in the “edu-tainment” business: we’d compete against Fortune by being more educational, offering readers management and career lessons they could use, and we’d compete against the Harvard Business Review by being more entertaining, with livelier graphics, hipper design, and better writing.

Take the news business for example. News is the ultimate commodity today. It’s available 24/7 on the Web in all flavors, languages and ideologies. But in this vast undifferentiated zone, there are some versions of the news that actually stick out. Jon Stewart, for instance, has emerged as one of the country’s most trusted newscasters—that’s right, newscaster—despite the fact (or because of it) that his show is a self-described comedy show: comedy news that is. At the other end of the spectrum, Keith Olberman, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and others of that ilk capture significant audiences by offering, not news, but their views on the news: opinion as news.

Just being in the news business today is a prescription for being out of business tomorrow—a fact realized by both Time and Newsweek, as they desperately try to morph into publications that more resemble The Economist, which figured this out a long time ago.

One last example: last week I ventured into a hip clothing shop in Los Angeles. A batch of very cool T-shirts caught my eye: each one featured a replica of an old Rolling Stone cover. The shirts weren’t cheap—each one cost something like $40—so I knew I was dealing with high fashion. But here’s the kicker. If I bought a T-shirt, I got a free one-year subscription to the magazine!

So, what business is Rolling Stone in? In the old days, you’d buy a magazine and get a T-shirt. Today, with design and fashion trumping the old magazine business, if you buy a T-shirt, Rolling Stone throws in the subscription. Give them credit: at least they’re giving Rule #6 a try!

[Editor’s note: Click here for a look at Webber’s book, “Rules of Thumb: 52 Truths for Winning at Business Without Losing Your Self.”]

Folio RSS: Feed sponsored exclusively by NXTbook Media - offering RSS feeds for Digital Editions Call 866-268-1219 for more information.

FOLIO: BLOGS Alan Webber

Business Magazines Need to Find their Purpose for Being in Business

It’s 10PM: Do You Know What Business You’re In?