As the world kept him thinking in turns so would the blank, empty, undiluted space in the upper right corner of his unimaginative American blog. It left itself for last - as if it knew it was much too smart for him - as if the search bar that had once been there was an overture to another space in time - as if that corner meant more than it really did.
Finally something for you magazine people out there to think about.
While I hate to sound like chicken little – and though the print is dead meme is way overplayed – I had to post this quote from Steve Frye. In a sidebar in the current issue of Publishing Executive titled The State of the Printing Industry Frye drops this bomb:
I think we need to change our philosophy of what a magazine is. We are no longer a cheap means of dispensing information, and that’s what we were until the Internet came along. Now we are an inefficient and expensive means of distributing information. … We need to reinvent ourselves as a luxury item that people want and are willing to pay for. And until we change our own image of who we are, we’re going to find out that our vendors are gong to change it for us. Because, right now, postage is a premium. Paper is a premium. Soon printing will be a premium. How long can we buy at a premium and sell at a discount? We can’t.
Damn straight. I’ve been singing this song for a while now and it’s refreshing to finally see these kinds of blunt words in the pages of an old school cheerleader like Publishing Executive (I couldn’t find them on the PubExec site that’s why there is no link for the quote – had to transcribe it myself).
Hopefully this marks a turning point in the direction of not only Publishing Executive’s reporting, but in the reporting of all the media that cover the magazine and printing industry. Hopefully they’ll awaken from the coma that has produced little more than a sleepy rhetoric of change management and stir the pot a bit. They need to give publishers a sense of urgency. They need to stop rewriting and regurgitating vendor press releases and start doing some hard, studied thinking.
Ultimately – when you get right down to it – the road ahead is uncharted and there isn’t a vendor alive today that has anything close to a solution for the kinds of questions we face. To answer those questions we need journalists, not marketing contacts.
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[...] Via, Michael Turro (here). [...]
Michael,
Thanks for your comments. I have further expanded on this subject in my column in the next issue of PubExec. I really put our industry on notice about the inefficiencies of our (conventional) industry that can no longer be justified…financially and especially environmentally. yet, I point out where where and how some magazines are not only thriving, but exploding.
Best regards,
Steve
Excellent…. can’t wait to read it!
[...] point in the evolution of the digital magazine. Despite the fact that people like Peter Meirs and Michael Turro are insisting that digital magazine don’t work, more than 13,000,000 readers are enjoying [...]
This is sort of a cross-comment from the blog I first saw your article on. Anyway, as someone who has witnessed the internet revolution from the point of view of a graphic designer, and jumped on the bandwagon into web design and usability and all that, I have to say that the printed magazine (or any printed product for that matter) cannot be what it once was. It has to be an event, something more than an information source for other products and services or news. It has to BE a product. A product with a molded and guided experience. Look at magazines like Visionaire and McSweeney’s and GUM (R.I.P.???). And remember Nest? Each issue is a unique and special creation, a culmination of various creative industries… fabrics with card and paper stock, illustration on different media, all mixed together. Die cuts, plastics, etc. In some ways, these examples show us that print may actually return from whence it once came. Books used to be artisinal creations, with only a few copies. Even with the printing press, they were still prized possessions. Some of these magazines come at a premium themselves… over $100 an issue for Visionaire. And yet Nest was only $7.99 when it came out (maybe that’s why’re gone now?). The creative groups who understand and promulgate this concept, that printed publications have to be something precious and desired, will be the life blood of modern publications in this Internet Era we are living in now, and into the future.
This article I so true, keep on writing like this, enjoyment to read
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Sent via mobile (so please excuse the brevity and any typos)
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Sent via mobile (so please excuse the brevity and any typos)