After its decision to go digital-only last month, is iconic magazine Newsweek missing an opportunity to activate its audience? Evan Rudowski, co-founder and CEO of the membership website company SubHub will discuss the fate of NewsWeek given the future of digital only magazines.
Newsweek will not be the last publisher to close the doors on its print edition. Like Martha Stewart Omnimedia it has been suffering from a decline in those essential advertising dollars for years. A decline in advertising support is merely window dressing for the cost inefficiency of print compared with the efficiency of digital.
Digital is not a panacea and opting for a digital magazine format delivered via e-readers is a strange choice for this renowned international news magazine in an age where news is only distinguishable by the quality of its analysis and the speed of delivery.
The jury is still out on whether publishers should try to replicate their print world online in the form of digital magazines.
The latest ABC figures highlight a decline in digital magazine subscriptions. They are failing to gain traction even though digital e-readers and tablets proliferate and continue to grow – Apple’s new smaller format iPad mini tablet and the Nook, launched recently by US publisher Barnes and Noble, are the latest additions to this thriving market.
But ebooks are a different proposition entirely than digital magazines. It would be foolish to take their success as a predictor of the future for digital magazines, which are, according to research from magazine industry body FIPP, annoying for readers not in the least because they take too long to download.
People buy books to read but magazines to fulfil a need or solve a problem. In Newsweek’s case its concise analysis of the news remains valuable, even if it has been living in Time’s shadow for years. The real question is about how people want to receive that analysis. This requires more careful consideration. Once a publisher has moved its content online how else might it use this investment or change to drive value? Online provides publishers with many more opportunities to find revenue than they had in the print world.
They need no longer be restricted to advertising only support and should be looking at how they engage with their audiences to find new ideas for revenue generation. It is the audience rather than the content that drives value these days. Even with Tina Brown at the helm of Newsweek, and its sister online magazine offer The Daily Beast, the days of content being king are almost over.
While the demise of Newsweek is sad for those of us who still love print, there’s no question that, in this case, killing the print issue was the right move. But publishers must look beyond digital versions of their old print issues and relying on advertising as a way to monetize the value that they are providing to their audience if they are to survive in tomorrow’s magazine world.
Evan Rudowski is co-founder and CEO of the membership website company SubHub
