Innovations in Magazine Publishing

Simon Das, David Stam, Andrew Blake, Simon Das, David Stam, Andrew Blake

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000367737
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Biographies de journalistes

This book examines the key developments in the UK magazine industry since 2014 and explains in detail how the business has innovated to survive.

Innovations in Magazine Publishing explores the key issues that publishers and editors have had to grapple with in recent years and demonstrates how they have changed their business models and encouraged innovation and creativity. Written in an engaging and accessible style, the authors and contributors have drawn on years of industry expertise and contacts to examine the massive changes that have taken place in the areas of content creation and advertising in the last decade. Beginning with a highly useful summary of UK magazine publishing history, the book then provides a detailed focus on how magazines have had to adapt to a declining revenue picture in both copy and advertisement sales. This discussion considers changes in ownership and the supply chain, mutual dependency on social media, the rapid growth of the independent sector, investing in brand and product extensions, and how media companies themselves have changed to meet the demands of the new era. The important issue of ethnic diversity within the UK publishing industry is addressed and the introduction also includes a discussion of the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on the industry, and how the magazine business will need to respond to whatever the future may bring.

This comprehensive overview of the current state of the industry is a vital resource for students, researchers and professionals in magazine journalism, as well as for those studying media and journalism studies more generally.

1

Magazine publishing innovation

The ‘drivers’ and implications of technology

Simon Das

This opening chapter examines the underlying factors behind what is discussed as the magazine industry’s battle for relevance in the twenty-first century. While the examination of the magazine business today and its history (discussed in Chapters 2 and 3) provides examples of publishing innovation, the aim of this chapter is to reveal the external ‘drivers’ behind innovation in the digital era at an industry level and the business and strategic implications for dealing with them.

In an attempt at explaining the way publishers have, and need to further, innovate, the focus on digital ‘disruption’ is analysed by discussing innovation theory, the magazine business over the eras and its recent socioeconomic and technological context. Estimating the drivers of innovation in the digital era, a detailed PEST analysis (an analysis of the political, economic, sociological and technological environment) is provided for the magazine industry, before examining a current innovation publishing case study in TI Media’s Decanter magazine.

As the industry-wide discussion and case study shows, publishers adopting both ‘sustaining’ and ‘disruptive’ innovations provide ways forward in the context of where media and ‘tech’ are inseparable, but legacy business remains crucial and relevant. Innovation in areas such as online platforms, business-to-business services and premium subscriptions are therefore proffered as strategic implications for a ‘mixed mode’ future for a media business in the twenty-first century.

Innovation theory

Innovation is not just about improving turnover or profit in a company. Although the economic imperative of aiding a company’s fortune’s is undoubtedly part of the picture, innovation is also about a growth in knowledge; an improvement in human experience, improvements in efficiency and quality and creativity of what companies do and how they do it. According to innovation management theorists such as David O’Sullivan, innovation is the “process of making changes to something established by introducing something new” (O’Sullivan & Dooley, 2009a, p. 3). As we shall discuss, these changes in the magazine world can be to the products a publisher provides (print products, digital content), the processes they employ (such as how magazines reach audiences or how they are edited) and in the services delivered (such as business-to-customer events or business-to-business advertisers and branded content clients).

Why innovate? The drivers of innovation

External factors are said to drive innovation. Nothing can remain static in the dynamic climate and markets that any company operates in. It is therefore untrue that innovation is created in a vacuum and produced for its own sake, despite the often quoted intrinsic need to be ‘an innovator’ or to be ‘disruptive’ – there are always extrinsic factors driving this. Changes in the market and the wider technological environment often dictate the need for innovation. According to O’Sullivan & Dooley (2009a, p. 12), the drivers of innovation are specifically: emerging technologies, competition, new ideas from customers and partners and changes in the external environment. Such external factors are sometimes called ‘socioeconomic factors’ and in many business studies analyses since Aguilar’s Scanning the Business Environment (Aguilar, 1967) are often assessed by a form of PEST analysis: one specifically examining, political, economic, sociological and technological factors driving change.

Disruptive innovation theory

Product innovations can be incremental, slow or more radical and even ‘game-changing’ in nature. Many digital innovations of the last decade are said to be in this radical bracket, so much so that they are often called ‘disruptive innovations’. In the business lexicon of the present era, this term is often synonymous with the word ‘tech’, disruption is seen perhaps increasingly as a form of pure tech innovation. In the digital era, ‘disruption’, has become more than just a widely cited objective, it has become something of a business mantra. Part of a David and Goliath narrative, it inspires pitches in boardrooms, VC (venture capital) offices and press releases, where start-up companies espouse being disruptors in the vein of Apple’s Steve Jobs, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg or Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. According to the most widely cited originator of disruptive innovation theory, Clayton Christensen, the term ‘disruptive’, however, is perhaps too loosely applied to “any situation in which an industry is shaken up and successful incumbents stumble” (Christensen et al., 2015, p. 45). Being disruptive is seen as a tech business imperative – a way to be technologically smart in a period where innovations have arrived in established marketplaces, eliminating established industries at an unforeseen rate.

Long before the rise of the tech giants, disruptive innovation theory was developed as a strategic warning tool for established businesses to avoid what was empirically shown by Clayton Christensen as a form of pathology in business success. Asking why innovators are often displaced by entirely inexperienced companies, disruptive innovation was framed by Christensen as a type of ‘innovator’s dilemma’ – the name used to entitle his following book (Christensen, 1997). A warning of ‘sticking to what you know at your peril’, DI theory shows us a recurring pattern of industrial decline caused by new entrants in markets offering very different, often unknown and ‘low-end’ products in established markets. By gaining small traction at lower ends of markets, unknown innovators improve what Christensen terms product ‘performance’, and end up accessing more lucrative and higher end markets. Left unchecked, predicts the theory, new entrants’ performance can escalate, before disrupting existing companies, markets and even entire industries: a pattern seen by a number of different business scholars across sectors, industries and markets.

The explanation of why disruptive innovation happens in this way might be summed up by a customer view: ‘you didn’t know you even wanted a specific innovation, until you realised you couldn’t live without it’. It was, according to Allworth (2011), the guiding business philosophy of Apple’s founder and former CEO Steve Jobs – defining a 20-year period where each new class of electronic product launched entered fields that Apple had no business competency in when launching. An exemplar of Christensen’s disruptors’ model, Apple launched the iPod into the portable hi-fi market when Sony and others had 30 years of market leadership; they launched iPhone into mobile telephony when a duopoly of Nokia and Ericsson dominated smartphones globally; and even took on the entire music retail and streaming industry when they were known only for home computing and creative desktop publishing (iTunes and Apple Music).

Although some extremely successful tech innovations in the last decade, for example Uber, are said by Christensen to not be disruptive innovation (Uber has not changed the field of taxis to an alternative type of transport), disruption has changed our landscape. Some clear examples that do fit Christensen’s model are the social media ‘aggregation’ platforms of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram disrupting newspaper and magazine publishing. In media, Netflix has been seen as the end to a 30-year-strong global video rental business and in leisure, Airbnb today threatens an entire strata of the hotel industry, with its endless supply of user generated low-cost rentals. In rapidly changing times, the big innovations of the last decade all started as low end or marginal concepts (Airbnb was originally a student ‘sofa sharing’ service), but all employed digital technology to radically reinvent the established order of things and thus provide a level of Christensen’s product (or service) ‘performance’ that customers could not have imagined before they existed. They often did this by offering something initially free, low cost and often less high-end than established rivals.

A century of magazine innovation: scale to specialisation

Adaption and adoption since the last century

Forms of disruptive technology have always guided the hand of business innovation in magazine publishing. New and innovative products, ways of reaching audiences and new business models is not something new to magazine publishing – it is part of a story in publishing revealing them as adaptors and disruptors in the twentieth century, and even before – in the early nineteenth century, magazines themselves were disruptive to the traditional press, newspapers and even book publishers (see Chapter 2). An examination of this industrial history of “adoption and adaptation” of technology by magazine publishers (in Das, 2016, Cox & Mowatt, 2014 and Stam & Scott 2014) shows us that magazines have seldom sat still as a media ‘product’. The varying of form, features, distribution, advertising and content is testament to so many magazine titles being the most enduring and long-running media brands today. As discussed in Chapter 2, titles or brands such as The Lady, Tatler and Vanity Fair all date back to the mid-nineteenth century – and The Spectator even further, being in continuous business since 1828.

Photo 1.1Three hundred years of The Spectator magazine. Richard Steele and Joseph Addison’s original version of 1711 and a recent cover from the modern publication (2011).

Over this period of time, publishers have therefore had to change what they do, how they do it and who they do it for, driven fundamentally by technological change, cultural shifts (in work, leisure and domestic roles) and the growth of literacy and consumerism as part of it. Magazine publishing, like other industries after the Industrial Revolution, was underpinned by the technological affordances of the era: technology and socioeconomics going hand-in-hand. As far back as the beginning of the last century, the technologies of moveable fixed type printing, colour reprographics of photography, gravure and offset lithographic printing – all afforded the production of colour printed periodicals for the masses. Such changes defined the industrial structure of magazine publishing but did not emerge in isolation. These technologies merely served the growing demand for news and specialist media, one fuelled by Britain’s industrial expansion of rail infrastructure, and a growing middle-class of readers with new pastimes. In terms of industrial structure, publishing magazines meant bigger and bigger magazine companies: and the later nineteenth century becoming a time of amalgamation, investment and vertical integration of presses, and the swallowing-up of smaller publishers and newspaper publishers into ever larger entities.

Early twentieth century: new magazines for new tastes

Referring to this era, magazine-industry historians Cox and Mowatt describe how Amalgamated Press, Newnes and Odhams were all acquired by Daily Mirror Newspapers, creating a “virtual monopoly of Britain’s consumer magazines” (Cox & Mowatt, 2014, p. 13) in the formation of the International Publishing Company (or IPC). Fuelled by post-war lifestyle changes and birth of mainstream consumerism, without competition from the geographically distant US corporations or European publishers (who did not enter the UK market until the 1980s), IPC is referred to by Cox & Mowatt as being Britain’s mid-century ‘Ministry of Magazines’ (Cox & Mowatt, 2014, p. 91) – an organisation that by 1960 was bigger than the BBC.

Throughout the mid-twentieth century, this picture of industrial growth continued, but began to look different and more fragmented as broadcast media became the disruptive technology of the time, in the form of radio and then television. This was a time for more new ideas in magazines, from publishers that faced new competition from more media channels, and larger state-owned mass media broadcasters (such as the BBC). With the drivers of innovation identified from a growing Post-War boom in consumerism, news and current affairs, leisure pursuits and hobbies became the magazine industry’s focus as they mined diverse, and even esoteric tastes from more varied audiences. Innovation through the process of ‘segmentation’ (the search for more subgenres in specialist audiences) also capitalised on specialist advertising revenues, allowing magazines a different way to compete with the mass media ‘reach’ of radio and television.

The 1980s and 1990s: segmentation and new audiences

By the 1980s, the new drivers of innovation furthered this process of discovering new and specialist readerships. Eased by liberalised labour markets (the major theme of the Thatcher-Reagan era), the laissez faire economic ideology of the period broke the traditional newspaper unionised print and typesetting strangleholds. The resultant growing Anglo-American magazine sector (by publishers such as Hearst, Condé Nast and the National Magazine Company), however all neglected a new social change – and with it an opportunity to connect with a demographic of working women....