Our friend Brian Stelter at The New York Times has a post about Reed Elsevier's plans to put Broadcasting & Cable, Multichannel news and a number of its other trade publications up for sale. It plans to keep the vaunted Variety.
Brian doesn't write it, and I fear it's a topic that might hit too close to home for him, but basically Reed Elsevier is saying "We don't want to be in the business of publishing commodity info that is commonly available unless it has a huge brand behind it like Variety!" It's hardly surprising that Reed Elsevier isn't spinning it that way, it's not much of a sales pitch.
Predictions of the Internet killing television are overhyped and perhaps at least 25 years too early. But it is killing some of the trade publications.
The truth is the Internet has been the great in terms of increasing media and coverage of the TV business --from Zap2it, to Ausiello, to IMDB and Wikipedia, there's more media than ever available. Minor brands saddled with a print product have struggled though. TV Week went online only recently, but it looks like it also has pretty much lost most of its reporters, columnists, and usefulness and so far isn't shaping up to be a great example of how to migrate a good offline brand to an online only brand.
I'm hopeful that someone buys Broadcasting & Cable and Multichannel News -- they're among my favorite sources for info. The problem is, most of the info they write about isn't exclusive and is available in a variety of other places. By the time the print publication is out, it's all old news. The info on the web sites is great, but the reason it's great is that those publications are staffed based on a print model that doesn't really work anymore. They too could convert to online only, but if it's with significant staff reductions that make the online sites less useful...
There probably needs to be a lot of consolidation within the trade pubs to make a cost effective structure. In a world that competes for eyeballs on the internet, I'd expect to see an increase in both controversial stories that attract eyeballs and rumor sites and continued decline in trade style reporting. It's unfortunate, but seems inevitable.
I’m really sad the print industry is dying, I love the Internet though but I hope there could be a way for both to co-exist
Visit your local library, public or college, and you can check out almost anything wotth reading for a week, photocopy it… that’s the way the cookie crumbles. Ever since People became Time/Life’s flagship and the tail started wagging the dog, they doomed themselves to irrelevancy way before the Internet. Information junkies abhor a vacuum. Also, writing angry letters to TV Guide ( I actually did that once) or USA Today is futile – the Internet lets you talk back immediately,almost withoutcensorship. Good media web sites will survive and probably thrive. As for the LCD organs and thinly disguised celebrity publicity rags, they should have been aborted, if this was the best of all possible worlds,and never even allowed to get to the birth canal. (Personally, I only visited B and C once, because it was lined to TVbyTN. I thought,hmm,not great,butnot bad either …)
I starting visiting these websites back in 1998 (TV.zap2it.com, which was once called… I can’t remember). The websites back then weren’t great, but we’ve come to the point where, if you know 5 or 6 different sites, you can get all of the entertainment information you’d ever want or need. After this website came out, I stopped following Mediaweek altogether because you guys offer all of that, and more.
Point is, why bother to spend money on a magazine?
Some appear to be shooting themselves. My favorite magazine overall is The Economist, which is very, very pricey. $6 an issue, and few discounts available for subsscriptions. But you know what? in 2005, TE starting putting all of its content online. First some of the articles were coded “premium,” meaning you had to have either a subscription or watch an ad. Now they don’t even bother with that. Every Thursday, I spend around 3 hours on their website reading the entire magazine. How do they expect to make money?
Economist is also a favorite of mine. Their online content is great. I used to subscribe to it, for one year, and then checked it out of the public library. Guess what? The Economist is one of the very very few mags of any kind with increasing subscribers in the last two recession years. Some people don’t have three hours to absorb online content. They ‘ll sample the Economist online, and maybe buy it off a newstand or even subscribe for a year. Give us good free content comparable to the print edition, and if you are info-oriented not photo andmultipage photo ad oriented ( like say a Conde Nast or Hearst fashion mag) you don’t necesarily have to lose subscribers.
I suppose TE also benefits from the caliber of it’s readers – I read on Wiki that 70% of its readers make more than $100,000/yr.
Come on guys, newspapers replaced smoke signals and the net replaces newsprint..
Its called evolution
Evolution also has pockets of atavism. It’s called the built-in-resistence to change which can be a very potent force, and not one always to be taken lightly. Thirty years ago, AM radio was pronounced dead as a doornail … and TV was going to kill movies. ” Wired” – style enthusiasm amuses me. Where’s my jet-pack, my hovercraft, and my zero-point energy-perpetual motion machine? And our cities on the moon … You couln’t go into a kids’ bookstore when i was six or seven and not see all that stuff ” just around the corner …” Money talks, and many specialty mags, and local newspapers with deep-pocket advertisers, are still doing just fine.