Tuesday, March 15, 2005
I'm so relieved
Trades roll along
Trade magazines aren't dead yet. Yay!
Sean Callahan's piece in BtoB (a trade magazine) notes that "these dinosaurs marked for extinction still roam the earth."
But: the venerable print medium is suffering something of an identity crisis. The crisis can be boiled down to this: Should print magazines emphasize their strengths or should they try to become more interactive, emulating the Internet? Or to put it in a more Zen form: Should magazines become more, or less, magazinelike?
While it's nice to have an article (in a trade magazine!) supporting the continued viability (sort of) of trade magazines, the whole thing kinda misses the point. I know of very few 'pure' trade magazine publishers. Most b2b companies have been 'integrated' media companies for some time, offering far more than ad pages to marketers and printed editorial pages to audiences.
The more I read this piece, the more I wonder about its true point. If you can figure it out, let me know.
Some additional grabs:
"You have to be a hell of a salesman to have someone commit to a 12-time, four-color spread in a trade magazine," said Dick Ryan, president-CEO of Zweig White Information Services. "We're trying to anticipate demands from the advertising and marketing community, who have voted against run-of-the-mill, ROP pages. They still want to use us to reach an audience, and they still want to do it through a magazine. But you can't hold your nose about working with a marketer on content anymore."
Bruce Morris, exec VP at Source Media, said his company is "media agnostic." The company offers print, online, events and subscription information products. It offers all of these products because an audience exists for them. "When the readers don't want print anymore," he said, "that's when we'll stop offering it."
Comments
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Trade magazines aren't dead yet. Yay!
Sean Callahan's piece in BtoB (a trade magazine) notes that "these dinosaurs marked for extinction still roam the earth."But: the venerable print medium is suffering something of an identity crisis. The crisis can be boiled down to this: Should print magazines emphasize their strengths or should they try to become more interactive, emulating the Internet? Or to put it in a more Zen form: Should magazines become more, or less, magazinelike?
While it's nice to have an article (in a trade magazine!) supporting the continued viability (sort of) of trade magazines, the whole thing kinda misses the point. I know of very few 'pure' trade magazine publishers. Most b2b companies have been 'integrated' media companies for some time, offering far more than ad pages to marketers and printed editorial pages to audiences.
The more I read this piece, the more I wonder about its true point. If you can figure it out, let me know.
Some additional grabs:
"You have to be a hell of a salesman to have someone commit to a 12-time, four-color spread in a trade magazine," said Dick Ryan, president-CEO of Zweig White Information Services. "We're trying to anticipate demands from the advertising and marketing community, who have voted against run-of-the-mill, ROP pages. They still want to use us to reach an audience, and they still want to do it through a magazine. But you can't hold your nose about working with a marketer on content anymore."
Bruce Morris, exec VP at Source Media, said his company is "media agnostic." The company offers print, online, events and subscription information products. It offers all of these products because an audience exists for them. "When the readers don't want print anymore," he said, "that's when we'll stop offering it."
