Saturday, June 06, 2009

An open letter to CT at the Movies

You note in the latest CT at the Movies:
"Christianity Today International has been slammed too. In the last few years, we've lost more than a few key magazines—Ignite Your Faith (formerly Campus Life), Today's Christian Woman, Christian Parenting Today, Marriage Partnership, Christian History, and Today's Christian. And we've lost a lot of good people to layoffs—including 25 percent of our company just a couple of weeks ago."

You say these were key magazines....but the magazine world is full of this kind of thing: niche upon niche until the magazine stands are overflowing with 'something for everyone' and nothing for all. It seems crazy to me, in these days of increasing use of the Internet, that magazine proprietors should be going all out to promote endless magazine reading when this isn't what a huge number of people are reading. Worse, the content between the advertising, even in 'Christian' magazines, is often trivial and banal, mere filler.

I remember an editor I worked with years ago saying that the text was only there to fill up the spaces between the ads, and I think many magazine owners still think this is what magazines are about. But as the internet proves again and again: content is king, not advertising. Content first, advertising a very distant second.

Yet what
(to take one example) are newspaper publishers doing? Here in my (relatively small) city, we now have two free papers coming out each week. The content is almost nil in one, and while the other has upped its game, it's still half full of advertising disguised as reporting.

I understand your regret at losing so many colleagues, and I sympathise with you in this. Work relationships are often very precious. But magazines in my country, both national ones and imported ones, have become very expensive to buy week after week, and anyway most of the content turns up on the websites not long after. And while I prefer to read from print, my pocket just doesn't allow me to. And here's the good news: on the Net I don't have to turn over page after page of advertising just to read something worthwhile.

This is a time of huge change in the publishing industry. Print is by no means dead - and I don't think is likely to become dead - but we're all having to get used to a different way of reading stuff that has a degree of the ephemeral about it: newspapers, magazines, bulletins, pamphlets.

Just a few thoughts on a rainy Saturday morning.

4 comments:

bethyada said...

Astute observation.

The nature of information distribution is changing. This need not be for better or worse. Though the ability for all and sundry to publish an opinion I think will be for the better. Not for the majority of junk that people will opine, but for the questioning of the "journalistic authority" that occurs.

Mike Crowl said...

Yup, there's change on every front: publishing, distribution, retail - and of course, the weather!

Tim Jones said...

Interesting thoughts, Mike, and very much in line with other recent posts I've seen on the future of poetry and fiction publishing. But, if I were the author of the article you are commenting on, my question to you would be: "What should I [and what should my magazine/newspaper] do in this situation, other than fold up our tents and steal away?"

How would you answer such a question?

Mike Crowl said...

Hmmm...well....poetry (!)
I think poetry's got a great future, but perhaps not in book form. You'll know as well as I do, that an immense amount of poetry actually gets published, but an immense amount of it doesn't get read as well. Poetry, I suspect, is going to have to find its real home on the Net in due course, but how well it will be read and remembered is another issue. For myself, it usually takes several readings of a good poem to get to grips with it, and the Net isn't a good place for coming back and re-reading. Not easy, but certainly not yet a time for tent-folding either! On the other hand, with the rise of instant reprints, it's possible that poetry will continue to work well in book form by being published as required rather than in hundreds of copies that go unsold.
As for newspapers, well I wrote a post on the 1st June relating to an article by Umair Haque in which he, as many have done before him, derides the way in which newspapers can't seem to get up with the play. http://mikecrowlsscribblepad.blogspot.com/2009/06/different-approach-to-op-ed-pages.html
It took our own Otago Daily Times a couple of years or more to realise that people weren't going to read it online (happily, at least) when they had to pay for archival content, and had to read what was, in effect, merely the computer layout that would be used for printing the thing, rather than a 'proper' webpage. They're much better now, having adopted the format of some of the other NZ newspapers online, but they still don't archive everything, which is a bit odd.