The Web Effect

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Nov, 2000 by Mike Patrick

THE INTERNET DIDN'T KILL MAGAZINES, BUT IT CERTAINLY CHANGED THEM

Golf Magazine used to be the place to turn for the sport's latest statistics. Not anymore.

That's not to say the Times-Mirror publication isn't still on top of the most up-to-date numbers in the game--it just found a better way to report them.

That better way? The Internet.

"The magazine is changing how it approaches publishing statistics," says Julie Hansen, general manager of golfonline.com, Golf Magazine's Web site, where statistics are kept more up to date than they ever could have been in a monthly print publication. "It's better to do an analytical package [in the magazine] than just run the numbers."

There's a transformation going on in the magazine industry--a divine marriage of ink and plates with bits and bytes that's creating more readers and more revenues, just a few years after some doomsayers predicted the Internet might even mean the end of print publishing altogether.

But a handful of visionaries, like the folks at Times-Mirror, foresaw that print and online publications could take advantage of their own unique characteristics to complement each other.

"It was sheer belief in the immortality of the medium and the importance of being there early. There were pioneers within Times-Mirror," says Hansen, noting golfonline.com went live early in 1996, when many other magazines looked at the Internet with a combination of curiosity, confusion and dread.

That has changed markedly. Since then, the majority of magazines have built, bought or partnered their way onto the Web, expanding existing brands and creating new titles to cover the developing "new" media. At the same time, the Internet has come to recognize the power of print: In 1999, dot-coms pumped $383 million in advertising into consumer magazines, and even began to move to print themselves, as pure-play Web sites began replicating themselves in offline print titles.

But there have been other, more subtle ways in which the Web has cast its influence over the printed page.

"Beyond the billions of dollars in print advertising and the dozens of magazines that the Web has generated and spawned, the print business has and will be impacted by the Internet in significant cultural ways," says Bill Slapin, vice chairman and founder of the Chatsworth, Calif.-based 101 Communications, a publisher of information technology and b-to-b niche publications.

There was, for instance, the so-called "brain drain." Print veterans and newly minted graduates alike abandoned the paper press for virtual publications and their promises of free-reign creativity and fat stock options, only to return like prodigal sons and daughters when the freedom and stock options dried up.

"When you offer the world to someone, it's kind of hard to turn that down," says Diane Cremin, director of professional development at Magazine Publishers of America. "The dream in most cases doesn't come true in the end and many are coming back. I just think that's a wonderful thing. It just proves the power of magazines.

Slapin also says the pendulum is swinging back from the Web.

"While the future of any dot-com company [seemed golden], after April of this year many dot-com companies not only don't look golden, they don't look like they have a future at all," Slapin says. "I anticipate over the next six months you'll see many people from dot-com companies go back to print."

Yet others say they haven't seen much of that yet, and what does exist is more a product of a terrific economy and 4 percent unemployment than something that can be blamed specifically on the lure of the Internet.

"I know that we've had, in our four-and-a-half years, two people leave the Web site to go to the magazine and two leave the magazine to go to the Web site," Hansen says. "It's been healthy for everyone; it leads to a certain level of cross-pollination that is healthy. We don't see people fleeing print for the Web."

That cross-pollination is transforming the print magazine workplace. Everything from how you dress (casually), to when you work, to where you write to has taken its cue from the information technology field.

At 101 Communications, there are very few private offices. Everyone works in cubicles, and when a private meeting is necessary, they move to a conference room.

"That allows for openness and open communications, easy access to everybody," Slapin says. "It gives us an element of not only openness but speed. We can and do get things done more quickly."

And quicker is better. The fast-paced world of the Internet and its ability to provide literal up-to-the-minute news updates has prompted its print counterparts to follow suit.

"Nimbleness is a virtue," Hansen says. "It's definitely pushed the magazine to stretch themselves to do timelier reportage when there's a breaking story or championship on deadline. They've probably made greater efforts to be timely."

And it's not just that the content has to be as timely as the Web--it has to be unique. The most successful magazines and Web sites complement each other, rather than replicate each other's subject matter.