We’re seeing it at my university. And I’ll bet other universities are cutting loose of big-budget printed items as well. But let’s say you cancel the printing of a magazine. Does that mean the magazine must die? The way I see it, the writers and communicators under the university advancement umbrella aren’t in the business of printing things. They are in the business of telling stories. The shift to focus energies ONLINE is the obvious no-brainer, although to some the concept is difficult to grasp.
This snippit from Jason Santa Maria’s post has many applications to higher ed:
Without the print edition to serve as the flagship product, the website will no longer be a second class citizen or a quaint add-on to a business model; it will become the business model. Companies will need to rethink their strategies and goals for the web, and ways to distinguish themselves. If a publication or a few happen to break out of the current mold and start innovating, this may cause other publications, whether still maintaining print editions or not, to become competitive online as well. Once a publication forms a real connection with readers by giving them a reason to care about their website, other publications will be forced to do the same.
The medium of print will not die, but its spot atop the mountain of mainstream content distribution is in its final days. This could bring about a rebirth of design innovation online. We can help bring about change and find new ways to connect with audiences. This is an exciting time to be a designer, assuming we can all hang onto our jobs long enough to see what happens.
December 22nd, 2008 at 12:15 am
Yep, magazines and budget cuts seemed to be going hand in hand for some time now. I know of one non-profit org that scaled back publishing their magazine from quarterly to once a year. If the publication completely goes online, they risk alienating older alums and parents. Its up to each college/department to figure out what is the right balance between the two mediums.
December 23rd, 2008 at 11:22 am
We’re seeing a ton of print projects being migrated online (eg. 90% of orientation materials will solely live online now). But this is leading to staffing issues such as retraining graphics staff, project managers cross platform etc.
January 5th, 2009 at 5:17 pm
That’s assuming that killing a print publication in favor of a digital magazine would be a cost-saving measure–that’s a dubious assumption, if you ask me.
In the case of the magazine I edit, we’d save on printing and postage cost, but we’d lose all ad revenue. And we’d still have to pay for contributors–our ad revenue has covered this in our current model–and our creative fees would increase since we would need a lot more content for a fluid, digital magazine that seeks to be relevant. And then there are the inherent design costs at start-up, which would be significant, as well. So in the first few years, you’d be looking at cost INCREASES–not something easy to stomach in these economic times.
And this doesn’t even begin to touch on the effectiveness of a print publication versus a digital one. People turn to digital media when they want immediate news. They turn to their magazines for more intimate engagement. They do so in the comfort of their home, free of distractions. Or on their subway commute. Or while waiting for an appointment in a doctor’s office.
At our institution, 90 percent of our readers (we have a circ of 44,000) say that the magazine strengthens their connection to the College. Few would say that about a digital publication that they had to go searching for rather than one that comes into their home. In fact, survey after survey show that readers love, even demand their printed magazine; comments specifically–and pointedly–caution us about completely abandoning print in favor of digital. To tap into this loyalty, we plan on launching a voluntary subscription program that will add to budget relief. (Again, something we couldn’t do with a digital mag, as they would already be getting it for free.)
Digital media has a HUGE role to play in college/university communications, but not at the expense of established, proven media. And as I say above, if you’re being short-sighted and looking strictly at “cost to produce,” you wouldn’t be saving money, anyway.
January 5th, 2009 at 6:06 pm
Matt,
You make some good points. Dependency on ad revenue casts an entirely new shadow on a print-to-digital switch. However I’d argue that less than 10% of university magazines depend on ad revenue.
As to startup costs, yes I can see how trading printing costs for the labor costs of web developers could be a negative. But that depends. There’s enormous time spent laying out, proofing, troubleshooting with printed media. Things have changed alot in the last 3 years with web publishing and content management. Any web team worth their salt could setup an open source cms and then pick an appropriate theme or template off the shelf as a starting point for a great online publication.
Sure, print media is established, and proven. But if I were a print designer, I’d start honing my web skills. Times they are a changing.
January 6th, 2009 at 9:49 am
Yeah, I agree that using a Wordpress template would be a great starting point for a digital mag–we’re exploring that very option to complement our print mag, in fact. However, if an institution was to jettison, entirely, its print publication in exchange for digital, then they better be prepared to have the very best digital magazine possible, and that will cost some coin. (My wife is the director of biz development at one of the leading web/communications consultancies in the country, and she backs me up here.)
As you can probably tell, I’m a far bigger proponent of cross-platform publishing, in which institutions produce dynamic print AND digital magazines that complement rather than duplicate. I’ve lined up Gerry Marzorati, the editor of the New York Times Magazine, to speak on this very subject at the next CASE Editors’ Forum.
For some good examples of this, check out http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm .
And on a much leaner budget: http://www.stopsmilingonline.com/
The editor of Stop Smiling, JC Gabel, will also be leading workshops and discussions on cross-platform publishing at the Editors’ Forum in March.
January 6th, 2009 at 10:34 am
You’re right. A publication being forced to trade print for web entirely, ..it’s a challenging situation. I’d like to see web producers and developers as a whole, step up our collective game to meet that challenge and salvage as much readership as possible.
That Case Editors Forum looks interesting. I’m curious about best practices for creating magazine’ish experiences for an online audience, and methods of adapting/editing/condensing/presenting printed articles for the web.
I’ve also been reading the comments from the “Death of Print” post I linked to above. Some interesting thoughts there.
like:
“More print publications need to reexamine their approach to online vehicles instead of attempting to regurgitate all of their content into some cramped frankenstein of a CMS and banner rotater.
They’re not taking into account the difference between how people flip through a news paper versus how people digest information over the web.”
AND
“Print magazines without editorial design, or with content just carelessly dropped on a page, would be a mess and likely wouldn’t last very long. This mentality wouldn’t fly in the print publications, and it won’t fly online. If they are publishing in a specific medium, they need to understand the strengths of that medium in order to succeed.”
January 6th, 2009 at 11:15 am
I couldn’t agree with those excerpted comments more. They are 100 percent dead-on, as far as I’m concerned.
Digital and print are two different mediums–what works well for print, doesn’t work on the web and vice versa. That’s why I get so agitated at these new “digital” magazines that try to replicate the process of “flipping” through pages. People turn pages because they like the tactile sensation of TURNING PAGES (he shouts); clicking a mouse to “turn” a page isn’t the same thing.
For the same reason, people gravitate to digital media for what it can do–it’s immediate, it’s interactive, it’s fluid. My philosophy is to give readers more, not the same. A Q&A with the author or subject of a printed piece. Audio narration. A behind-the-scenes “how I did it” account of reporting a story.
Soon, we’ll be launching an Editors’ Forum blog in which we’ll be talking about these ideas in advance of the conference, and then we’ll be live-blogging the conference, itself.
As far as best practices goes, hopefully we’ll have a lot of good discussion about that. In addition to the Marzorati keynote, we’ll have cross-platform sessions featuring Gabel (as I mentioned), the art director of The Atlantic, some folks from mStoner, and the editor from Stanford, who will be launching a new digital magazine in the coming year.
I’ll ping you when our blog is launched.