Are niche publications the future of print?
It’s no secret that print magazines have been hurtin’ recently. Circulations of consumer magazines are consistently among the fastest falling types of publication, and increasing cover prices will only go so far to ameliorate that for their publishers.
There are even suggestions that some consumer magazines have essentially become parasites, unable to survive without the boost from the celebrities who appear on their covers. Last year Beyoncé appeared on the cover of Vogue despite not actually having sat down to talk to anybody from the magazine.
And it’s not just Queen Bey who commands such rapt attention, as Fashionista explains in an article entitled “Do magazines need the Kardashians more than the Kardashians need magazines?”, saying:
“But since newsstand sales are always in decline anyway, media brands looking for digital traffic, clicks, impressions and brand-building buzz can still find value featuring the family. For example, a representative for Hearst confirmed that a Cosmopolitan anniversary party (at which all the Kardashians were in attendance) in October garnered 9 million views of a Snapchat live story and 9 billion media impressions.”
Nor are those print magazines transferring well to the internet. While the apps and attendant sites of magazine brands might be successful, porting the print product directly across has never been especially successful.
It was the case with newspapers like Murdoch’s The Daily, and it’s the case with magazines too. Professor Aileen Gallagher of Syracuse University writes, in a post on Medium titled “2016: When tablet magazines get to die”:
“The magazine industry, desperate to bolster flagging circulation, utilized this exciting new platform by … offering mostly replica versions of the print magazines. Innovation, costly to begin with, was bad for business.
The failure of those replicas to work well on digital platforms is frequently blamed on publishers’ obsession with skeuomorphism, that the user experience on tablets is fundamentally different to on print, so to try to emulate it was a mistake.
So if print magazines are losing readers and attempts to port them to digital haven’t been successful, does that signal the end of print products entirely? Are the bells tolling for the print magazine?
Well, possibly not. There’s still the possibility for viable print products — it just requires a rethinking of their purpose, and an understanding that the values of content and the medium through which that content is delivered aren’t one and the same.
Iasiah Thomas said “Print… is the preservation of all art”.
And one area that’s been borne out is in the niche print magazine marketplace. The rise of crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter have enabled enthusiasts and amateurs access to capital to launch niche print products in a way that wouldn’t have been possible before, with the added bonus of demonstrating there’s a pre-built audience for the product. As a result, there’s a growing niche print marketplace.
And, by and large, the enthusiasm for the subjects they cover mean the magazines are themselves minor works of art.
Samir Husni, who has the moniker of ‘Mr. Magazine’, argues that what makes a print product work is a sense of quality:
“To me, the role of print today has to be a combination of creation and curation, plus credibility and an authority that says ‘if it’s in print, it’s authentic, it’s there to stay, it’s documented’. It cannot have the feel of or even a sniff of being a disposable item.
“Print must have a collectability factor built into it, which means its production values have to be different, which means the paper quality has to be good and that the type of content that demonstrates ‘what’s in it for me”.
But quality of material isn’t the only factor in what makes a niche magazine successful. Jeremy Leslie is the founder of magCulture, a site and newly-opened brick and mortar store dedicated to high quality print magazines. He argues that a well-done magazine is a sort of time capsule, a reflection of the design schools and cultural mores that helped produce it:
“When it comes to deciding what you’re going to put into print it has to be good enough, because it’s not disappearing down a blogroll, it’s still going to be there in a year’s time.
“That, to me, is a clear definition between digital and print. In magazine land the default position tends to be more considered, longer-form, more edited, just more thought put into it.”
It would be easy enough in the age of crowdfunding for a group of like-minded enthusiasts to get a single issue of a magazine out. The difficulty for the people behind niche magazines, says Leslie, comes from sustaining interest past the second and third issues:
“Issue one… is almost like a band making their first album. They’ve been together for ten years and they’ve put everything into that first issue and then… a couple of weeks later you’ve got to pull yourself together and put together issue two.
“But if you can get to issue three then the whole financial situation, the cashflow is make or break then, whether you have enough money to fund issue three.”
Ultimately, then, explaining the growing success of niche print products comes down to understanding that both print products and the content they’ve traditionally covered both have value in their own right.
But in an age where print is no longer the primary medium on which people consume time-sensitive information, both values are diminished if combined into one product. That’s why some magazine publishers are seeing audience growth on their websites and social channels — because that’s where news content is now consumed.
And by focusing on creating print products that eschew immediate gratification to focus on quality of product, niche print products are increasingly finding an audience.
As of March last year there were just shy of 2,000 funding campaigns for journalistic products on Kickstarter. And though not all have been successfully funded — a quick look at the current crop of campaigns reveals more than a few that are unlikely to get funded — there are enough successes to demonstrate that crowdfunding is a credible option for people trying to start a niche print product.
Though it’s not certain that any of that current crop will sustain the interest of an audience in the future to become a long-running magazine brand, there are many that have done just that.
David Ziggy Greene is the editor and publisher of Save Our Souls, a new magazine featuring articles and comic strips side by side. Its first issue was initially put up for crowdfunding on Indiegogo. Greene says:
“I’d wanted to start publishing a mag of some sort for about 3 years but never had the funds to do it. Other projects always got in the way.
“And I never intended to publish something that relied on the work being supplied for free by the creators. One point of doing this would be to create somewhere people could get published and get paid something. That is possible with crowdfunding which is a good way of getting pre-orders.”
That’s a sentiment echoed by Jeremy Leslie, founder of magCulture, whose brick-and-mortar store specialising in niche print products we featured in the first part of this series. He believes that a successful Kickstarter is more than just a proof of concept; it’s also a proof that the potential audience is there.
Featured in this FIPP round-up of successfully crowdfunded magazines is the science and art journal HOLO. Its editor-in-chief Greg J. Smith said this of the ability to find an audience on crowdfunding sites:
“While we certainly did not expect to receive 200 per cent of what we asked for, we did know we have an audience in place before our campaign began. Our publication is tightly connected to CreativeApplications.net, we’ve been writing about art and technology there for years and have a sizeable readership there. So we knew some of those readers would be game to support our foray into print, but apparently quite a lot of them were!”
And research published by the Pew Research Centre showed that it was more likely to be smaller publishers, down to the level of individuals, who are the primary beneficiaries on Kickstarter, with 43 percent of all journalism projects funded being from individuals and another 29 percent from small groups, compared to the quarter comprised of larger media outlets.
But setting the funding goal for crowdfunding can itself be a challenge. As Kai Brach, editor and publisher of Offscreen Magazine, puts it:
“I thought I could use the success of my Kickstarter project to — at the very least — measure the popularity of my idea, but it’s not as simple as that. If 30 backers love your idea enough to throw $1000 at you each, you might have reached your funding goal (and need to deliver!), but 30 backers don’t make a sustainable readership.”
As a result, he suggests that even if your campaign is successfully funded you should expect to have to use some of your own cash to fund it — and not even expect a profit on the first issue at all.
Marketing maladies
Even with a successfully funded campaign, the costs of printing and distributing a magazine are steep enough that there’s unlikely to be too much left over to market it. Delayed Gratification, the quarterly ‘slow journalism’ magazine and one of the early success stories of the niche print renaissance, didn’t have a dedicated marketing budget for the first five years of its life.
And even then, its success relied in part on its five founders — already established in the publishing game, being in the right place at the right time. Its co-founder and editorial director Rob Orchard told TheMediaBriefing:
“The best business day of my life to date was in February 2011, we’d launched the third issue and it had sort of sunk without a trace. I thought we were going to go bust because there just weren’t enough new subscriptions coming in. My co-editor managed to get a spot on The Today Programme. He was on for the last five minutes before 9 o’clock in the morning, and I was listening to him on internet radio and I was watching our subscription feed. That day we sold hundreds and hundreds of subscriptions.”
Despite those headwinds — which many niche print products are likely to face — Orchard believes crowdfunding is a huge opportunity for new publishers in part because the more established magazine brands have slowed their production of new titles:
“The internet, having completely ruined the entire industry as it was before, has now opened up these unbelievable new avenues. If you’ve got a really good idea for a magazine you can generate global support for it through Kickstarter, you can have hundreds and hundreds of subscribers cued up in advance who already bought into it.
“I also think a huge amount of the reason for this recent uptick in independent magazines is because the big media groups that used to launch tons of new magazines haven’t; they’ve just stopped, basically.”
But the hard reality of a print product — the physical artefact you can actually hold — is likely to be one of the key reasons so many smaller publishers without the necessary capital to go a huge launch opt for a crowdfunding. As Greene explains:
“Working in print is also an easier way to generate funds. I’m not a fan of producing in digital because it is a format which can be shared more easily. And when people share work they lose the thought of paying for it and it flows around without
any financial reward to the creator.
“And as a publisher of many creators, it a kind of responsibility to help protect their work and help them make a little money from it as much as you can.”
So while it’s possible to lauch a niche print magazine off the back of a successful Kickstarter campaign, it’s vital to think about how you’ll continue beyond the second and third issues.
It should go without saying, but in order for niche products to be the future of the print industry, first they need to prove they themselves have a future. The catalogue of niche print products is littered with magazines that never got beyond a third issue, for reasons of financial troubles, lack of audience or even sudden creator apathy.
Jeremy Leslie is the founder of magCulture and proprietor of a brick-and-mortar shop specialising in niche print magazines. He says that the third issue is a flashpoint for all the problems that are likely to beset a new print title:
“The really hard bump for anybody making a magazine is around issue three. Issue one, and I usually resist these types of comparisons, but it’s like a band making a first album. They’ve had three, four years of being together and they’ve put everything into that first issue.
“Then a couple of weeks later you’ve got to pull yourselves together and start thinking ‘OK, issue two,’ and it’s much more hurried. If you can get through that then issue three, the whole financial situation with cash flow is make-or-break, whether you have enough money to fund issue three. If you can get through that then there’s light.”
That’s a sentiment echoed by Rob Orchard, the editorial director of Delayed Gratification:
“It is a really great time for the independent sector, though saying that a fair few of those new indie titles will go as it is fundamentally such a hard balancing act. Part of the trick is to keep turning up and power through, a lot of new titles get to maybe issue 3 and disappear.”
Part of the problem is that by time of production of the third issue, whatever startup capital an indie magazine is likely to have raised will have run out. At that point, the high production costs incurred by a print product need to be matched by the revenue it generates.
And attracting advertisers to a niche print product is far from easy — only a handful of niche print magazines are likely to do so in their first few issues, and fewer still will be able to dedicate a full-time staff member to seeking out advertising opportunities. Instead, much of that revenue is likely to have to come from circulation or subscription revenue.
Take a third option
As a result, even seasoned magazine creatives have to find workarounds. Brandie Gilliam is founder of Thoughtful magazine. She notes:
“Some of the big differences obviously, coming from a corporate background; you’re used to a big, big budget. And Thoughtfully, of course, doesn’t have that luxury. When you’re starting new, you don’t always have it, especially when you’re doing it and it’s not backed by some type of corporation. So doing more with less has been a big lesson that I’ve learned.”
But a print product doesn’t necessarily have to last indefinitely to be counted as a success. As Leslie notes, magazines are a product of their time. They’re time capsules, luxury items that act as snapshots of a community at a given moment. And sometimes their mission is completed, and the natural lifespin of a product is reached.
Philip Diprose co-founded and was editor of The Ride journal, a high-quality periodical dedicated to cycling. He explains why, though the print sales continued to rise, it was the correct decision to end the magazine after its tenth issue, which is currently still available:
“So much has changed since we printed issue 1. The world of cycling has become far bigger, there are lots more cycling magazines out there (independent and more mainstream) some of which may have been inspired by what we have done. Issue 10 seemed a good time to take a break and take stock.
“We’ve long known that we would never have huge sales it has always remained a passion that we do out of love rather than need, but our situations have changed as well. We would never want to drop the quality of the journal so it seemed better to go out on a high with what I think is the best, most diverse issue we have made.”
Despite that, The Ride had to content with the headwinds outlined by Leslie and Orchard — the initial rush of enthusiasm and then the hard work of thinking about the follow-up issues. He explains:
“The original plan was only ever to print one issue, to see if it could be done. We even doubled our original page count so we could include everything good that we had in one issue. At the launch we proudly looked at what we had achieved and then a friend asked when issue two was coming out.”
Niche print magazines, then, could well be the future of the print magazine — with a few caveats.
The larger, more mainstream consumer magazines are seeing their print circulations shrink rapidly, and in the case of a few sectors are seeing entire swathes of publications close shop entirely. That’s usually attributed to an increase in people choosing to consume digitally, and the narrative is often that the internet is killing the print magazine.
Meanwhile, there’s a groundswell of independent magazines that have launched over the past few years, whose viability is based in part on the online communities that cluster around them both pre- and post-launch. So the narrative isn’t as clear cut as you’d imagine.
And although many of the independent print magazines will never be huge money-spinners, often financial gain isn’t the point for those magazines’ founders. Instead, they’re passion projects, celebrations of a hobby or idea or community. In that sense, they might never be anything more than a luxury product. But they’ll have succeeded in their aims all the same.