Magazine Editing

In Print and Online

John Morrish, Paul Bradshaw

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136642067
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Including comprehensive coverage on both print and online, consumer and free magazines, Magazine Editing looks at how magazines work and explains the dual role of the magazine editor. John Morrish and Paul Bradshaw consider the editor both as a journalist, having to provide information and entertainment for readers, and as a manager, expected to lead and supervise successfully the development of a magazine or periodical.

Looking at the current state of the magazine market in the twenty-first century, the third edition explains how this has developed and changed in recent years, with specific attention paid to the explosion of apps, e-zines, online communities and magazine websites. Featuring case studies, interviews with successful editors, examples of covers and spreads, and useful tables and graphs, this book discusses the editor's many roles and details the skills needed to run a publication.

Magazine Editing offers practical guidance on:

• how to create an editorial strategy
• how to lead and manage an editorial team
• researching a market and finding new readers
• dealing with budgets and finance
• working with designers and production staff
• legal, technological and ethical dilemmas
• online distribution, social media and search engine optimisation
• managing information overload
• how to become an editor.

1 How magazines work

It is hard to talk of a ‘magazine industry’. In truth, there are several magazine industries: magazines are incredibly diverse, in the business models that underpin them, the size of their publishers and the media they use. Combined, these industries are significant. Every year in the UK, 1.5 billion magazines are sold, making it one of the hungriest markets in the world for publishing. The total value of the sector is estimated at £4.88bn – over 60 per cent of which is generated by the consumer sector. This makes it bigger than either the music or film industries.

Like all parts of the media, magazines are having to change to adapt to changing consumer behaviour and the demands of advertisers. While circulation revenue declined by around 5 per cent between 2006 and 2010, print advertising revenue has dropped by around 33 per cent over the same period, and digital advertising increased by 75 per cent. Magazines have moved from high street outlets such as WHSmith to supermarket chains, to websites, mobile phones and tablet devices.

But it remains a massive employer: magazines and journals employ around 114,000 people – not just in editorial, but in advertising, design, web development, finance, marketing, distribution, legal and production. It is a complex business requiring a diverse range of skills.

Willings – the directory of magazines and their publishers – has over 400 pages of business-to-business publications listed, and over 300 pages of consumer magazines. Each of those magazines will have an editor, or will share that editor with a sister title. Few magazines have two editors, for reasons that will become clear: but they do exist. Attempts have occasionally been made to let editors ‘job-share’: they are usually short-lived. A magazine requires an individual vision, and it needs someone who will take responsibility – the blame, when things go wrong– and two people can't share that. Some magazines, though, have both an editor and an ‘editor-in-chief’. This is a tricky situation. If their roles are clearly defined, it can be helpful to both parties. More often, it speaks of a nervousness or an unwillingness to delegate.

If you've never done this, go to a reference library and look at Willings, or British Rate & Data, universally known as BRAD. This is a monthly publication that lists every magazine and newspaper in the UK that accepts advertising (there are many more that don't, of course). You will quickly discover that not only are there a lot of titles needing editors, but also they are extraordinarily varied. And it's not simply a matter of subject matter. They also work in different ways, because they represent business strategies. One way of finding your way through them is to take the advice given to journalists Carl Woodward and Bob Bernstein when they were investigating Watergate: ‘follow the money’.

• some magazines depend primarily on money from their readers or users;

• some depend primarily on money from advertisers;

• some depend on money from an outside party with something to promote.

What is interesting is that these strategies developed over time, one after the other. Now, though, they are in operation simultaneously, sometimes on the same magazine.

Reader-funded publishing

The obvious way of publishing a magazine is to get the readers to pay its whole cost. That's how books are published, as well as some scientific periodicals, business newsletters and specialised publications. It is also the way magazines began, as a type of publication that was not a newspaper but which nonetheless appeared regularly.

The first magazine is generally considered to be the German Erbauliche Monaths-Unterredungen of 1663, whose title (‘Edifying Monthly Discussions’) summed up its appeal. It was effectively a literary and philosophical correspondence conducted in public. Similar scholarly periodicals appeared elsewhere in Europe in the following years, but they were usually aimed at the intellectual elite, written by one or two authors at a time, and dedicated to a narrow range of subjects.

The variety in subject matter and authorship that we expect in modern magazines didn't appear until 1672, when the French writer Jean Donneau de Vizé created Le Mercure Galant. It was the first miscellany, combining accounts of court life, theatre and books with pieces of verse, and it was widely copied throughout Europe, not least in London. By 1693, London even boasted its first women's magazine, Ladies’ Mercury.

These publications were not called magazines, of course. That name only arrived with the Gentleman's Magazine of 1731. Previously the word, a version of the Arabic term for a storehouse, had been used to describe actual and metaphorical hoards of treasure and, in a literary sense, books containing lots of useful information for sailors, travellers and so on. Edward Cave, creator of the publication, was trying to express the richness, variety and bounty of the new periodicals. The description has never been bettered, but his early issues do little to live up to it. Assembled by pillaging other publications, books and pamphlets, they slightly resemble modern ‘press reviews’ such as This Week, without their scrupulous concern for copyright. Later, though, Cave introduced original writing and began to justify his title.

Cave's recipe was much copied, and magazines benefited from increasing literacy, especially among women, throughout the eighteenth century. But they remained a costly item. In the middle years of the nineteenth century, the first ‘family’ magazines began to appear, including Dickens's Household Words. The formula now included lengthy pieces of serial fiction as well as improving material. Attempts were made to keep prices low. Household Words cost 2d, equivalent to about 45p now, and people bought it. Advertising existed, but it was only seen as a modest subsidy to the publishing operation, not least because until 1853 it was subject to a special tax. Even after the tax had been repealed, most respectable publishers recoiled from taking advertisers’ money, at least for a while. Elsewhere, the opposition was more trenchant: Reader's Digest in the USA did not take advertising until 1955.

Reader-supported magazines continue to thrive. Much academic and scientific publishing operates in this way, the costs of production mostly being borne by libraries. Everyone who joins a club, a society or a campaign and pays a membership fee will probably be paying a significant proportion of the cost of the magazine that the organisation produces, and there are a small number of online communities which support a magazine with a regular fee, or by buying goods and services through the site. Some of these will take advertising, but it is often problematical for them, and it is never the reason for their existence.

Newsletters

Newsletters are basic print publications, usually without advertising, pictures or elaborate graphics. Their editorial proposition is that the unadorned information within is worth the whole cost of production (plus the publisher's profit). This is an extremely difficult act to sustain. In the past, industry newsletters did well by simply presenting a ‘digest’ of information available from other sources. Readers who considered their time valuable paid for the convenience of having someone else make a selection. All the information was available elsewhere, probably for nothing or on a normal magazine subscription.

But the point of newsletters is that their ‘unprofessional’ production and appearance provides an aura of authenticity, of ‘unvarnished truth’, that is attractive to some readers. There is a stigma attached to slickness. Sometimes the editorial skills we cherish – selecting, shaping, projecting, dramatising – are not valued. If we are honest, we will also recognise that there are times when they are not appropriate.

But a newsletter cannot succeed if its content does not convince. A specialist industry newsletter will only justify its price, often wildly beyond its perceived value, if it offers insights gleaned from those working in the field every day. They may need trained and experienced journalists to help them, but they should know their subject matter.

Newsletter publishing is a natural for online treatment, and there are many mailing lists and blogs that do similar jobs. The concept of a regular ‘digest’ , for example, translates particularly well to a medium based on links: ‘linkblogs’ perform a similar function, linking to interesting material elsewhere, often accompanied with a key quote, summary, or both. Social bookmarking tools (where you store and share interesting links) such as Delicious and Digg can do this too – and you can cross-publish these to a blog, Twitter account or mailing list through tools such as Twitterfeed and Feedburner.

Advertiser-funded publishing

Frank Munsey contributed to the journalism of his day the talent of a meat packer, the morals of a money changer and the manner of an undertaker.

(Obituary by William Allen White)¹

Munsey was a pioneer of American magazine publishing. All he had done to bring down the wrath of White, a fellow editor and publisher, was ruthlessly to exploit an important discovery. He realised at the end of the nineteenth century that magazine publishers could raise so much money from advertisers that they could sell their publications for much less than they cost to produce. It remains the basis of most commercial magazine publishing.

He wasn't the first to come up with the idea, although he may have carried it through most effectively. A fascinating thesis written by David Phillips for his Yale University PhD tells the story.² The pioneer was Cyrus Curtis, publisher of the Ladies’ Home Journal, skilfully edited by his wife Louisa. A spin-off from a local farming paper, the Journal was launched in 1883. Full of practical information, with a sprinkling of fashion, it found a readership among ordinary woman at a subscription of 50 cents per year. By the end of its first year, it had 25,000 subscribers; by 1885, 100,000; by 1886, 270,000.

This didn't happen by accident. The Curtises expanded vigorously, using methods that more conventional publishers considered suicidal. They cut the subscription price to drive up circulation, and used that circulation to justify increasing the price of advertising. At the same time, they increased the number of pages, from 8 to 16 and then 32, to accommodate more lucrative advertisements and to give the readers more to read. That, in turn, gave them the justification for raising the price of a subscription.

By 1893, the Ladies’ Home Journal had become the biggest and most profitable magazine in the USA. It had grown from an eight-page, 25,000-subscriber magazine costing 50 cents a year to a 32-page publication with 700,000 subscribers paying $1 a year each. They were getting twice as much magazine for their money. But the real winners were the Curtises. A page of advertising that had cost $200 in 1883 was now bringing in $4,000.

Frank Munsey, meanwhile, had been publishing, editing and largely writing a fiction magazine for teenagers. Its usual method was to take the stories from British boys’ magazines and adapt them with American settings and names. In 1889, he launched a comic weekly, and then in 1891 converted it to a general interest monthly, called Munsey's Magazine. Its distinguishing characteristic was that, uniquely, all its illustrations were photographs. But it did not make money until Munsey broke from the established pattern of monthly magazine publishing, which was to sell a modest number of expensive magazines to a wealthy market. He saw the success of the Curtises, and decided to aim squarely at the mass market.

In 1893, he took two radical steps. He slashed the price of a copy from 25 to 10 cents, and he increased both the amount of editorial space and the number of photographs. The fact that these photographs would increasingly feature semi-clothed female statues and paintings from the great museums did him no harm either. His circulation income dropped and his costs rose – but circulation soared. In October 1893, Munsey was selling 20,000 copies. By February 1894, circulation had reached 200,000. By the end of the century, Munsey was able to claim the biggest magazine sales in the world, double that of the combined sales of his three erstwhile rivals, Harper's, Scribners and Century.

With increased sales came increased volumes of advertising sold at higher rates. As Munsey and his rivals moved into the new century, they had come to expect that advertising would account for 80 per cent of their income. (In the UK today, business magazines still expect to earn the majority of their income from advertising.³ The figure is much lower for consumer magazines, for whom sales to readers are still a dominant concern.)

The new dominance of advertisers had a number of consequences. Publishers had to be able to prove to advertisers that they were distributing as many copies as they claimed, and, after much acrimony, the Audit Bureau of Circulation was created in the USA and UK to do this job. Furthermore, publishers now had to demonstrate that their magazines would work for advertisers, using hard figures. They began to invest heavily in research into their readers’ likes, dislikes and spending power. Again, this began earlier than you might think. In 1911, Cyrus Curtis created the first commercial research department to find out what his readers were buying so he could use that information to target advertisers.

The consequences of advertiser-dominated publishing

Beyond all that, there were implications that remain with us today. Magazine publishing became a punishingly expensive business to enter. On the face of it, magazine publishing is a kind of manufacturing operation, producing bundles of paper for sale. But in order to establish a new magazine, publishers must expect to make a loss during the whole period in which circulation is being built. To create bigger, more attractive issues, and print more copies of them, takes more and more money. It only becomes justified when a high circulation is reached and advertising prices can be set high. This has had the effect both of discouraging new entrants to the business and of discouraging innovation.

Without the advertising subsidy, new magazines would theoretically be profitable almost from the start – but readers would expect to pay the full cost of what they read. One of the attractions of the Internet for publishers was that readership could increase all the time without additional production costs. But the Internet presented no significant barrier to new entrants into the market: the expense of creating new print publications is what guarantees the profitability of those that already exist.

In addition, advertisers were unsure what measurement of readers to look for – or how to trust it. This situation improved when the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) expanded into measuring the online ‘reach’ of some newspapers and magazines – an issue which became particularly important when circulations across print media started to decline. Now an increasing number of publishers present advertisers with ‘cross-platform’ statistics that compensate for lower print circulations with the invariably rising online ones.

Even so, the situation is more complex for advertisers than it ever was. The metrics (forms of measurement) used by the ABC include:

• How many – the ‘audience reach’ metric = unique browsers

• How busy – the ‘volume’ metric = page impressions

• How often – the ‘frequency’ metric = visits

• What see – the ‘opportunity to see’ metric = ad impressions

• What they do – the ‘response’ metric = ad clicks

A further complication is advertising formats, an issue the Internet Advertising Bureau UK (IAB) sought to address when it introduced standardised formats to simplify things for advertisers. The body also produces a range of research and case studies on effective online advertising.

Finally, online advertising is complicated in terms of what advertisers pay for. At first this was simple: the cost of an advert was based on the number of people who saw it. This is often referred to as CPM, or cost per thousand, and is still a major form of advertising online. What has overtaken it, however, is CPC, or cost per click – advertising where advertisers only pay if someone clicks on the advert. This model has been popularised by Google, which utterly dominates online advertising. But you also need to be aware of CPA – cost per action. This is advertising where the advertiser only pays if the user completes a particular action as a result: orders a brochure, books a holiday, registers with a site, and so on. Measurability, it turns out, is not only the biggest selling point of online advertising, but also the biggest point of competition.

Back in print, there's a curious paradox: that the most profitable time for a magazine is when circulation is declining. Advertisements are sold at a price reflecting the previous high sale, but print and production costs are now reduced. Of course, this is a short-term windfall. As soon as the falling circulation figures are revealed, wise advertisers will expect a reduction in the price of advertising.

Meanwhile, there's an important philosophical consequence of the new advertising-led mode of magazine production. It depends on combining commerce and journalism, which is something editors have to learn to appreciate. This, too, emerged very early on. Cyrus Curtis once addressed an audience of advertisers:

Do you know why we publish the Ladies’ Home Journal? The editor thinks it is for the benefit of American women. That is an illusion, but a very proper one for him to have. But I will tell you the real reason, the publisher's reason, is to give you people who manufacture things that American women want and buy a chance to tell them about your products.⁴

Here is the first recognition of the chasm between the publishing and editorial outlooks. ...