Ziff and the art of magazine maintenance

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Sept 1, 1991 by William Ziff

New publishers have an opportunity-let alone the ability-to build a publishing empire. In his nearly 35-year career, William Ziff bas created not one, but two empires. A philosophy major in college, he surprised his family in the mid fifties when be agreed to take over the company his recently deceased father founded. By the 1980s he bad built it into one of the world's major special-interest magazine publishers. Then, in 1985, due to a combination of factors, among them the need for a fresh challenge, prescience, and a personal brush with cancer, Ziff sold his 24 maturing properties for over $700 million. With his cancer in remission and his energy renewed, Ziff began to concentrate on his two remaining computer titles. Today there are seven, along with a comprehensive range of on-line information services, databases, newsletters and trade shows. According to Forbes magazine, Ziff Communications now earns an estimated $50 million in annual operating profit.

Bill Ziff bas always been a private, introspective man who prefers to let his executives take the limelight in representing the company's interests. But earlier this year, in a series of wide-ranging discussions with FOLIO:, Ziff shared his thoughts about the fundamentals of the art and science of magazine publishing and what it will take to survive in the next decade.

What follows are the central principles of magazine publishing as Ziff sees them; his views on more specific disciplines, like circulation management and direct marketing, will follow in subsequent issues of FOLIO:. HOW MEDIA COMPANIES SHOULD BE RUN An important principle in publishing is that editorial, advertising and circulation should be three separate sovereignties. They need to be coordinated, but the wishes of the advertising revenue stream should not dominate the policies of the other two. This time-honored precept is now seldom observed. It's important to have balance in all three areas. Otherwise, though you may think you're doing a good job fostering circulation's and editorial's own goals, you probably aren't.

Circulation, for example, functions best when it has a mandate to pursue its own departmental long-term profit aims. Then it will inevitably produce quality circulation. Properly empowered and instructed, circulation will confine itself to sources and methods that tend to produce renewals. If your circulators are looking for people who really need a publication and therefore will renew, you will get, as a by-product, circulation that benefits advertisers-but only as a by-product.

If a circulation department can be dragooned into going up to arbitrary levels set by the advertising department's self-interest then you are gradually going to drift toward an atrophied circulation file. To be cost effectively achieved, planned circulation levels have to be conservative, and have to assume the probability of a surplus beyond rate base. Circulation forecasting can never be all that precise. You must accept that some efforts are apt to fall short. If, in a company where he is expected just to follow orders about what level to generate, a circulator has made the mistake of overreaching himself, he will begin to manufacture quick circulation from whatever sources are cheap and available. Often it becomes an irreversible situation; the bad circulation doesn't renew well; the resultant churn stimulates the need for still more poor quality circulation as a replacement. When your targets are above your natural circulation level, you sell too hard.

There's no getting around the fact that a media company has to be based on a continuous flow of viable ideas. We're in an idea business. The editorial and advertising fundaments rest on "positioning" ideas. Positioning requires a constant consensual precision about who will need to read what sort of information and what sort of role these readers really play in current and future markets. If the underlying concepts for publications, new and old, are flawed, then few other things can be made to work well.

There is a tendency for executive management to be regarded as the source of idea generation. But in a good company, every thoughtful member of the operational departments will participate in the generation and fermentation of ideas. If someone asks, "How did you or your company happen to do this?" I'm normally able to recall an infinitely long string of seminal contributors. As always, it's an intense culture of innovation involving a large cluster of key people, rather than one or two dominant individuals, who are responsible for a company making consistently good positioning decisions.

I think we all know what sort of business culture we want to live in. It's a culture that everyone can describe but few actually enjoy, one that is open, democratic, principled and professional, where it's fun to work and where a heterogeneous variety of individuals are supported and respected. Functional companies are like functional families. We all understand the way it should be but not many of us can honestly claim to be in their midst.