Requiem for an Online Publication
Part I: Overture
I pressed the Publish button on my last editorial as Managing Editor of the New RC Soaring Digest¹ (New RCSD) and it was done. After two-and-a-half years, 30 issues and 3,427.7 hours of time invested, I had met my last deadline. As I wrote in that ultimate piece it was with “a mixture of regret and relief”.² Regret because it was actually a really good publication enjoyed by thousands of readers in 121 countries around the world. Relief because publishing a monthly turned out to be just so damn hard.
To put a punctuation mark on this chapter of my professional life I decided to write this cautionary tale. Note I did not call it a postmortem. That would have implied something clinical and precise, where the cause of death would be analysed and reported. I’m not sure that’s possible. Requiem seemed like a more fitting framing — a somewhat fond look back on what went right, what might have gone wrong, what did go wrong and what I might do differently if I were to ever undertake something similar again in the future.
It is also my hope this series might be instructive for those contemplating something similar. In addition, the footnotes contain lots of additional information which may also prove helpful in this latter regard.
The Story So Far
The legacy RC Soaring Digest (RCSD) published its first issue in January of 1984 and ran continuously right up until 2018 when its editor at the time understandably wanted to retire. So the doors were shut with readers going through a suitable period of mourning I assume. I’m not actually sure given I wasn’t a regular reader back then.
However, as an avid participant in the hobby which was the core subject matter of RCSD, I was an occasional reader in those years. Mostly when a particular subject for which I was searching led me to an article in one of the back numbers. When I stumbled on one of the articles I was always impressed with the extremely high signal-to-noise ratio: great articles packed with useful information on a wide variety of subjects — and, amazingly, virtually no advertising.
A couple of years after the fact when I learned RCSD had shuttered, I approached the editor and custodian of the brand to see if a ‘digital-first’ re-launch — using up-to-date, web publishing technologies — would be something he would contemplate and eventually support. After some discussion and negotiation an agreement was reached and the first issue of the New RCSD with me as Managing Editor was scheduled for January of 2021.
All Systems Go — Kinda
There were no more than a few weeks between making the decision to re-launch and the end of January 2021. I felt it important to get started at the beginning of a newly minted year. However, it left me painfully short of time to pull together the articles and get the issue ready before the clock struck midnight on the last day of the month in the last timezone on Earth. To miss this admittedly arbitrary deadline would mean having to call it the February issue which didn’t seem anywhere near as neat and tidy as January.
The most fundamental, important decision to be made as part of the initial, panicky launch was to choose Medium as the publication platform. This was almost an entirely subjective decision based mostly on my personal familiarity with the platform. Generally speaking I liked Medium and had published on it since 2016. In particular I had previously used its Publication³ feature and found it to be reasonably capable for the requirements as I understood them at the time. Underpinning the decision to move ahead with Medium for the New RCSD, this is what I knew for sure:
- Medium could take text and pictures and make them relatively presentable and at least consistent with relatively little effort and
- a group of articles could be combined into a greater whole — what I visualised as an ‘issue’ in the new, digital-first version of the publication.
That was it. I thought I was ready to go.
Almost Running Out of Toes To Stub
There were a number of things I did not specifically consider when selecting the publishing platform for the New RCSD. Regretfully I learned about these quickly after the first couple of issues —although, alas, when it was effectively too late:
- Even with Medium’s ‘quick-n-easy’ formatting features, turning reader-written articles into something suitable for publication and their subsequent marketing required much more effort than I had ever imagined: over the course of 400 articles published in 30 issues, there was an average of 6.7 (± 1.4)⁴ hours of time dedicated to each article. A modest 15 or 20 articles for a given issue was a full-time job all its own.
- Within the concept of a ‘publication’ as Medium defines it, there is no support for periodicals—where a batch of articles are regularly published as a group on a weekly, monthly, quarterly or whatever basis. There are workarounds but they added a ton more work to the regular monthly publishing cycle as well.
- While ‘advertising’ on the platform is narrowly permitted — “you can promote goods or services provided by your company”⁵ it is specifically forbidden — “may not advertise or promote third-party products, services” — for scenarios which might have proven helpful to make the New RCSD financially viable. In fact, I would go so far as to say they could have been lifesaving.
- The current Medium revenue mechanism in place to compensate authors— called the Partner Program⁶ — is utterly inadequate for the needs of a ‘nano-economy’⁷ publication like the New RCSD.
- Medium analytics are fair-to-poor with little ability to determine how many unique human beings constitute the audience. Demographics of same? You must be kidding. As above, there are hacks and workarounds to help figure it out — sort of — but they are both imprecise and time-consuming.
- For PDF equivalents of Medium articles (and therein lies a tale for a future article in this series) you are left to the mercy of what your browser can do in terms of ‘reader mode’ and the ‘print to PDF’ functions. Spoiler alert: it isn’t much and probably not enough.
- It’s not possible to attribute a given article to more than one author. A small but significant number of stories published in the New RCSD had multiple authors. Again, there are hacks to get around this but they are inelegant and, yet again, time-consuming.
All of these — and more — will be dealt with in more detail in future articles of this series. That said, for those who can’t wait for these to be published, the legacy RCSD was billed as ‘a reader-written publication’ which connotes there is little underlying cost to produce it. Hence the ability to give the final product away for free and yet keep it uncluttered with commercial concerns, if not entirely free of them.
If, when I went into this publishing venture, it was possible to be more wrong about something, I can’t think of what that might be.
This fundamental misapprehension along with the other specific weaknesses of the chosen platform became a chronic wasting disease for the publication over time. Sadly, I did not take the steps to understand or mitigate these in advance. However — and while it was by no means the only reason the New RCSD couldn’t carry on — at least some of the seeds of its future failure were effectively sown with the one foundational decision to run with Medium.
In the Operatic Sense of the Word
An opera’s overture is the music played before the cantante di opera take the stage. It’s intended to provide a ‘sneak peek’ at what’s to follow to whet the audience’s musical appetite. Hence the choice of Overture as the name for this first part of the Requiem for an Online Publication series. It’s intended to provide a similar sneak peek at what the rest of the series promises to deliver. The working titles for upcoming parts include Audience, Analytics, Social Media, Platform, Reader Engagement and Revenue. There will likely be additional topics included as the series evolves, so please stay tuned. Better yet, sign up for the free email newsletter to know when new parts of this series are available.
If you have any questions about any part of this series — or on the subject of online publishing in general — please consider leaving them in the Responses section below so that all readers can benefit from both your question and my answer. You can find it by clicking the little 💬 below.
Thank you so much for reading and see you next time.
©2023 Terence C. Gannon
Footnotes
¹ It’s beyond the scope of this series to discuss in detail the subject matter covered of the New RC Soaring Digest. Readers with an interest should simply visit the publication’s website.
² In The Air: All (good?) things must come to an end — This is my wrap up article in the final issue of the New RCSD: “It is with a mixture of regret and relief that after 30 issues … I announce this will be my last …”
³ Getting Started with a Medium Publication — “This guide will tell you more about Medium publications and will walk you through the process of creating your own publication …”
⁴ All ± (that is, plus or minus) values are the standard deviation for the associated metric to which the ± value appears.
⁵ Ad-Free Medium — “we’ll be restricting some kinds of commercial activity … such as sponsorships and links that are mainly promotional. Medium’s business has been ad-free …”
⁶ Getting Started with the Partner Program — “allows writers to earn money for the content they publish on Medium based on engagement from Medium members, as well as users they convert to become Medium members. Here’s how it works …”
⁷ Dear Mr. Stubblebine — “An entirely new revenue model is required and it must reflect the characteristics of the ‘nano-economy’ of the special interest group a given specialty publication serves …”
Do you want to launch an online publication and feel you may be able to benefit from some of my hard won experience? If so, please do not hesitate to contact me to discuss whether I might be of assistance.
Read Part II: Audience of the Requiem series. Subscribe to the series mailing list to be notified when new parts are available and other updates. A PDF version of this article is available upon request.
