A magazine beyond print
The prospects of magazine journalism need not be tied up with the future of print
It is daunting to contemplate the future of magazines at a time when so many of them are closing. In May came the news that Interview was ending, after 50 years of documenting Manhattan cool; this announcement was preceded by more lay-offs at Conde Nast’s New York headquarters from big titles including GQ and Vogue.
Yet there are shoots of green, too. Earlier this year, in a deal for an undisclosed amount, Apple announced it would be acquiring Texture, a subscription service which allows users to consume more than 200 magazines on their tablet devices for a flat monthly fee. I love Texture. Started by a consortium of big publishers in 2012, it re-creates the excitement of visiting the newsstand a decade ago and has, for me, made reading magazines feel fun and even vital again. That Apple agrees is good news for the industry.
Another sign of life is the way in which certain magazines have leveraged loyalty to begin turning a profit. They’ve done this by converting “readers” into “fans”, a group characterised by their willingness to spend money. I saw this process at The New Yorker, where I worked on the website until 2016. By November of that year, the site drew 30.3 million unique visitors a month — this was up from 4 million in 2012 — and represented a 155 per cent increase on the previous year. Many of these visitors decided they liked what they saw enough to pay for it and, as a result, the magazine sold a record number of subscriptions over that period.
A lot of elements contributed to this success story — which, by the way, continues to this day under new management. Notably, we wanted to make visiting the website a habit for as many people as possible. (Habit-forming is of course especially important if you’re going to have a paywall, which The New Yorker does after readers access articles in a month.) We did this through popular regular video series, as well as ramping up our email newsletter offering to seven days a week and boosting the magazine’s presence on social media.
We also expanded The New Yorker’s stable of writers. Rather than see the website as “second best”, as has traditionally been the case at legacy titles, many of the new additions were more excited about writing for an online audience than for the print magazine. They liked the speed of it; the ability to wander more freely in different rhetorical directions; the chance to connect directly with readers. (Observing from outside the office nowadays, it seems like the process of blurring lines between print and web writing has continued to the point of convergence, which I think is unequivocally a Good Thing.)
Our research showed there were two things that made a visitor to the website more likely to pay for a subscription. The first was if they consumed a variety of content on different topics. With this in mind, we hired writers with wide-reaching interests to cover gaps in our coverage, especially in areas such as technology and pop culture. As always with magazines, whether in print or on the internet, the mix of high and low is paramount.
The second was that the longer they spent on the site, the more likely they were to “commit”. What this meant was even as we increased the volume of stories published — by the time I left, the count was about 15 original stories a day — we had to be sure all of them met our editorial standards. If someone clicked on a promising headline and then felt let down by what followed, they left, taking their credit card with them. Who knew when they’d be back? This is why websites which rely on clickbait will probably find it difficult to monetise over the long term, especially as internet advertising revenue continues to decline. It is also why we became interested in engagement, rather than visitor numbers, as a meaningful metric of performance.
I had a different brief taking over the editorship of Good Weekend in 2017. Good Weekend is not a stand-alone magazine but part of a package of Saturday reading in the Sydney Morning Herald and Age newspapers. As at The New Yorker, newsstand readers were less and less important to the business model, and subscribers more. However, at Good Weekend I was tasked not with forming habits online, but rather with emphasising the value of the print product to those customers already paying for a subscription. In thinking about how to do this, a very basic question arose in my mind: what is magazine journalism, anyway? And then, others: how does magazine journalism differ from, say, feature writing in a newspaper? And what makes it special? What makes it worth paying for?
It seemed to me there are three main ways to define magazine journalism, or at least magazine journalism as it should be. For a start, it’s writerly. The person who wrote the story is present in it. That doesn’t mean necessarily the presence of an “I” — just that there isn’t the expectation, as there is with news reporting, that the story should read as though penned by an invisible hand. Second, panache and elegance need not happen at the expense of rigour. Just because a story is long doesn’t mean it gets to be flabby. In fact, one of the things that is most appealing about magazine writing in our sped-up news cycle is that there is an in-built opportunity to step back from the events of the day, a pruning of the superfluous to make way for careful analysis. Third, magazine journalism must be, above all, absorbing. With the help of stunning layout and art, a magazine story should take you into a world — even if for a few minutes — which is different to your own.
In the context of Good Weekend, what all this boiled down to was telling Australian stories — our comparative advantage — and telling them well. I hired a team of staff writers, all versed in how to write at length, and then tried to give them the space their stories required. Pairing their meticulous reporting with lavish photography and illustration made for an immersive experience, hopefully one that readers felt was not easily re-created elsewhere.
That was a very particular recipe. And it’s tempting when talking about the future of magazines to prognosticate on the viability of print. But it’s the concept of magazine journalism, and its continued health, that I think has broader relevance.
While there have been closures, and while many magazines are thinner in print than they’ve ever been, the last year has been — by any measure — an extraordinary one for magazine journalism. Even better news is that magazine journalism is truly platform agnostic.
Just how agnostic? Let me count the ways. There are the print titles extending online: think of Ronan Farrow’s three Pulitzer Prize-winning pieces for The New Yorker exposing Harvey Weinstein — and then consider that two of the three were published only online. There are the online-only magazines beginning to resemble old-school print journals: a Damn Joan or Topic deploys visual tools alongside writing in exactly the way a print magazine does. Websites like The Cut increasingly present themselves as “magazines” in the sense that the reader is encouraged to consume them in their totality, rather than in the bitsy way to which web surfers have become accustomed.
And finally, there’s an emerging trend of companies extending themselves via magazines, suggesting a yearning for print’s inherent escapism and authority: the women’s-only co-working space The Wing has launched the magazine No Man’s Land, and last year Gwyneth Paltrow announced a collaboration with Condé Nast on a quarterly print Goop magazine. (That’s not to mention the ongoing success of Net-A-Porter’s Porter, or Destinations for American Express.)
Once you start to think of magazine journalism as a particular way of looking at the world, rather than print-specific storytelling, it’s easy to imagine possibilities beyond the page.
Events, for instance. I saw this first-hand when I recently led a tour of extremely engaged Herald readers in Tokyo. There’s also audio, as with The New Yorker’s “Out Loud” podcast, which I found to be a useful opportunity to explore stories in a way that couldn’t be done in writing. (Vanity Fair contributor Michael Lewis’s recent announcement that his next work will be released exclusively on Audible is a wake-up call for anyone doubting audio’s increasing clout.) All of a sudden, when you take this broader approach, the notion of a magazine as a “brand” becomes more palatable.
With more content available than ever before, and most of it free, the question for individual titles becomes: what makes our brand unique? It’s no longer enough to trumpet a nip-and-tuck redesign. Editors must instead construct an ecosystem which embraces the tenets of magazine journalism across platforms. At the same time, that ecosystem must be highly specific.
At Good Weekend, we prioritised Australian stories. But that didn’t always mean serious, high-brow investigations. I was equally interested in putting a fashion story on the cover as I was a political profile. And, likewise, in thinking about what made a New Yorker story, and how to extend that notion online, we decided that anything went, subject-wise — as long as it was examined with the thoughtfulness and care readers had come to expect. Then, as you extend the brand, come questions like: what makes a video New Yorker-y? Or a panel discussion? Or as actually happened, an hour-long weekly radio show produced in collaboration with the local public radio station?
Once you’ve defined your magazine’s ecosystem, the challenge is how to create individual “stories”, in the broadest sense, that break through the noise, that draw readers, and that create that habit of returning again and again.
There’s a fourth element to magazine journalism, which is that it should have a point of view. Not an agenda, and not a bias, but a framing logic or argument. I’m not only talking about stories which get shared on social media. These often tend to confirm a reader’s pre-existing beliefs, rather than challenging them. Instead, the stories we should be publishing are those which move forward the conversation.
Editors, therefore, need to be bolder than before in the way they assign. They also need to permit their writers the luxury of time — to get facts right, to understand their subjects, to consider multiple approaches before settling on the one they feel is fairest and most representative. In the news media, brands are more important than they were before because they are a signal to readers of who they can trust. Merely aggregating stories does not advance trust, it erodes it. Publishing something that says something new, and which is accurate to boot? That will penetrate the noise.
I am aware that the future of magazines, as outlined here, sounds costly. That’s because it is. But striving for distinctiveness is the only way we can ensure that brands survive. In adhering to the principles of what makes for great magazine journalism, they have the opportunity even to thrive in the process.
Amelia Lester was managing editor and later executive online editor of The New Yorker, and a former editor-in-chief of Good Weekend. She is now a freelance writer based in Japan.
John Tiedemann is an illustrator and cartoonist for News Corp Australia, illustrating the op-ed page for The Daily Telegraph.
This reporting was supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund through the Walkley Journalism Explored Essay Series.
