Yes, We Are Still Having This Discussion. In 2008

Thursday, October 30 2008

Yes, We Are Still Having This Discussion. In 2008

lilyb:

doree:

spiers:

Even dumber: most of Portfolio’s cuts are on the *web* side. Hedging against the decline of print is not a priority, I guess.

Totally. This is sort of wild (from All Things D):

“Portfolio.com staffers have been told they have been meeting their revenue goals for 2008 while the magazine has not. According to a person who attended the meeting, one of the staff’s braver souls asked Carey why the Website was being punished more severely than the magazine.

“He gave a sort of corporatespeak answer, and what it appeared to boil down to is, is ‘This is a magazine company’,” says a person who attended the meeting. “And it left the impression that the website was sacrificed to save the magazine.”

This response is not just nutty, it’s downright predictable. In a contracting market people look for the safe decision. To the people making the decision at Conde Nast, the magazines are what they are familiar with - and to them a magazine is a product printed on paper driven by advertising sold to subscribers.

I really don’t understand this desperate clawing to hold on to print at all costs. I don’t think print is dead, but anything that can be consumed via the web just as easily—and is cheaper to produce online—eventually will be. (Sorry Marshall; The medium is not always the message. Sometimes the message is the message.)

I’m trying to imagine this sort of resistance to shifts in consumer preferences happening in any other industry and I can’t think of any comparables. Even the music industry isn’t this bad. But maybe there was a meeting circa 1985 wherein music executives, faced with the increasing popularity of compact discs, refused to switch on the basis that “we’re a cassette tape company.”

But I don’t think that happened.

So unless Conde Nast’s forte is really printing (which I’m pretty sure they outsource), they’re not a magazine company. They’re a content company. And they better learn how to produce that content online in the long run, or they’re going to have to shrink to fit the market.

It’s not that ES doesn’t make a fine point here; she does, and well. It’s just that this is a point that has been obvious to everyone for at least the past five years (It’s been that long since the days when I was having many depressing conversations making this same point to Time Inc. execs who clearly thought I was crazy and wished I would just go away) and it’s more than a little depressing to see that it’s still valid today.

But it’s not just that this is the comfortable decision. It’s that a lot of these companies are run by people who have been doing things one way their whole lives, are afraid of changing, and only have a few years to go before they cash in and retire. Why would they ever risk a new strategy that will certainly mean short-term loss (most importantly, loss to their bonuses) when they know they can just keep hitting their numbers by firing other people until they’re ready to hang it up?