Print Empire Strikes Back

Nice campaign – but is it too late?

I'm all for an ad campaign launched a few months ago by the Magazine Publishers of America called “Magazines: The Power of Print.” The campaign’s content strikes a correct balance between rightful wariness of the growing power of online media and a confident assertion of print’s unique characteristics.

But as a former magazine editor now tending an emedia incubator that’s being financed largely with print dollars, I nonetheless have to wonder: How much bigger of an impact could this campaign have had 10 or 15 years ago when prognostications of print’s pending demise were first voiced? We may have been able to blunt the oversimplified question of whether print was going to (a) die, or (b) continue sailing along on its merry way. The correct answer of course is (c) neither. As the MPA ad correctly notes, “a new medium doesn’t necessarily displace an existing one.” This is a historically proven fact; but for a decade or more we dithered on a polarized and ultimately unanswerable question when we could have been asking how print was going to evolve. And to be honest: we as magazine publishers still haven't answered that question.

Kudos to MPA for humbly beseeching their audiences to allow online media to peacefully coexist with their print products. But one statistic cited in the ad may be a bit misleading: “The appeal of magazines is growing…During the 12-year life of Google, magazine readership actually increased 11%.” Unspoken is the fact that the U.S. population actually increased by 14% over the same period, suggesting that even with an all-time-high ratio of college-educated Americans, print's historic demographic sweet spot, magazines actually are losing ground, or are at best treading water.

But that’s okay. I’ve held for some time that print content will grow the premium route. And when you go the premium route, quality of your audience matters more than quantity.