This is a word-for-word copy of an advert from Magazine Publishers Australia* which ran in the November 2011 edition of Top Gear Australia Magazine:
Will the Internet kill magazines?
Did instant coffee kill coffee?
New technologies change many things. But not everything. You may surf, search, shop and blog online, but you still read magazines. And you're far from alone.
Readership has actually increased year on year over the past four readership releases and Australia has one of the highest consumption levels of magazines per capita in the world.
Rather than being displaced by "instant" media, it would seem that magazines are the ideal complement.
The explanation, while sometimes drowned out by the Internet drumbeat, is fairly obvious. Magazines do what the Internet doesn't. Neither obsessed with immediacy nor trapped by the daily news cycle, magazines promote deeper connections. They create relationships. They engage us in ways distinct from digital media.
In fact, the immersive power of magazines even extends to the advertising. And that's essential in every product category.
Including coffee.
They then go on to cite their source as Roy Morgan Readership surveys.
However a report in the Sydney Morning Herald from last week seems to tell a slightly different story:
http://www.smh.com.au/business/the-age-leads-way-with-circulation-rise-20111110-1n9gy.html
The figures underscore a difficult national environment as printed newspapers and magazines continue to struggle on both the standard measures - circulation of copies sold and surveys of people who read them - as the industry waits for a combined readership measure for both print and digital editions.
Before I present my opinions, I'm going to present my inherent bias about trusting the source of the information. Firstly the advert in Top Gear magazine is presented in a magazine with the express purpose of selling advertising space in magazines. It makes sense for ACP Magazines to publish such an advert in their magazine because they have a vested interest in it, not that there's anything wrong with that; in fact it's good business sense.
The Sydney Morning Herald (and the Age) on the other hand, more closely approaches the idea of a Newspaper of Record. That is, one which is typically authoritative and neutral (despite the SMH being a broadly centre-right newspaper).
When I view an advert like this, I instantly question what the intent is and its purpose. Despite all of this however, I still think that this advert draws the wrong conclusion.
It asks two leading questions namely:
Will the Internet kill magazines? and
Did instant coffee kill coffee? It then presumes that because of the answer of the second question, that their conclusion which follows in the rest of the ad must be true. I don't think that this is the case though.
Are magazines and coffee remotely comparable?
Coffee is a physical product, which requires physical storage and distribution chains. Magazines on the other hand although they are in their current format a physical product which requires physical storage, could be delivered digitally quite easily.
We saw it with recorded music. As little as four years ago there were still quite a lot of record stores and even HMV and Sanity had big multi-story flagship stores on either side of the Pitt Street mall. Recorded Music didn't die but whole outlet and distribution chains have disappeared and even smaller record stores which used to exist in the suburbs also closed their doors.
To compare magazines and coffee as the advert does, assumes that magazines and coffee are like products. However, I would think it incredibly difficult to download coffee over the internet. Whereas e-books, digital newspapers and digital magazines can very easily be delivered and downloaded.
The second line of attack that the advert tries is that Magazines
"create relationships" and
"engage us in ways distinct from digital media". The same could be said for books but there are no end of digital reading devices such as Amazon's Kindle, the Sony Reader, Kobo and even the iPad will easily do the job.
Even for books, the network of stores and distribution chains is on the wane. Borders, Angus & Robertson, Collins Bookseller and A&R Whitcoulls in NZ have all gone into administration over the past few years.
The big problem that magazines have which the internet poses isn't to do with the format of the product, but rather the information which they present. Newspapers found themselves under attack when the internet could deliver news even more quickly than television and radio could in some circumstances. Magazines are almost always specialist publications (and yes that does include gossipy magazines) and the truth is that the internet can pretty well much deliver the information that magazines present faster than they can.
A magazine requires physical printing and distribution, and even I've proven in this very blog that I can deliver information on certain subjects faster than magazines can. For instance, I'd already reported second-hand information about the Holden Malibu several months before it appeared in either Wheels or Motor magazine.
I'll readily admit that
The Motor Report Jalopnik and
Autoblog are faster than magazines at reporting spy shots, and press releases than any print magazine can, which usually only come out once a month.
That's not to say that there isn't a place for magazines. Actual test reporting and data can only be collected in the real world and there's always a place for good journalism.
Maybe the major reason why the internet is killing off print sales actually has to do with the general public.
In Victorian England people could read a 700 page novel; by the late Victorian period, people were reading serials and short stories in magazines; by the late 1980s journalism was measured in column inches; now with the rise of MyFace TwitBook and BeboSpace people are reading things no longer than a couple of paragraphs. By mid-2007 the idea of blog writing was obsolete and long-form journalism generally is seen as old-fashioned.
I suspect that one reason why magazines in particular and print media generally is that people's functional literacy is on the slide.
Personally I do like to be able to sit down with a book or a magazine but I suspect I'm in a nerdy minority. From what I've seen, most people on the train prefer to look at movies of cats on their iDevices and eMachines than read anything.
Will the Internet kill magazines? Yes, but far more worrying is that the Internet will and has killed reading.
* I think I read a similar ad ("Will the Internet kill magazines? Did instant coffee kill coffee?") in the New Yorker in April 2010. I did the research and found that Condé Nast Publications ran this campaign in America starting 1 Mar 2010. It's a little disheartening to see that Australia can't even produce its own advert campaign.
