Don't try to reinvent the web
Magazines can use the internet more effectively if they observe a couple of golden rules: there's no use trying to control it and don't expect giant leaps, says David Hepworth
* The Guardian,
* Monday November 19 2007
The man from the financial institution held a glossy magazine in one hand and an extremely small laptop computer in the other. He leaned across the desk. "Surely it can't be long," he said, "before somebody finds a way to put all of this on one of these. Then you can just read it all off the screen."
You have to be careful in conversations like these. It doesn't do to sound like you're denying the inevitable march of technology. You must resist the temptation to sandblast him with scorn. You stop, breathe, count and then, in as level a voice as you can summon, say: before we can understand new media we must first understand old media. The interface between hand, eye and paper at the core of the traditional magazine-reading experience is the most highly evolved means of negotiating material yet devised. Were you to take the content of that magazine and put it into any other format it would take weeks to read off the screen and, more importantly, the experience would be deeply tiresome.
You continue: of course the web is just as exciting and useful a tool to magazine publishers as it is to those selling mail-order underwear, but it's not simply another conduit down which to pour your so-called "content". The web provides you with a way to keep in daily, even hourly contact with the more committed part of your readership, but it's done using an entirely new language and playing to a different set of habits. The extent to which magazine people are actually advantaged in this new sphere is not as self-evident as people like to think.
Magazine people spend most of their time deciding what to leave out of their magazines. They are trying to fashion a balanced package to slot into a very particular context, the newsstand. The web, on the other hand, is about bottomless inventory. It's also about the users and not editors. The former group are always stranger and more diverse than the latter group ever give them credit for. The most you can do on the web is provide a place where they like to gather. You're the hosts and it's your place but you don't really make the rules. You seek to steer the behaviour but in the end this will actually be decided by the people. If you've developed a site where your staff are providing more than 5% of the material then that's not a site at all. It's advertising. And it's probably unsustainable.
If there's one thing we should all have learned over the last 10 years, it's this: all attempts to inhibit the flow of information and make it work exclusively for the benefit of an organisation, whether it's the government of China or Universal Records, are doomed. The genie is out of the bottle for good. Media owners talk wistfully of "owning" particular ideas or activities on the internet. They should stop. This is a mirage, glimpsed most often by those who spend little time on the web.
And what else have we learned about the web? It's not about grand plans. It's about nutters in bedrooms taking tiny steps. Witness Facebook, which began in 2004 as a way for one guy to keep in touch with his friends at one university. It didn't start with anyone seeking to "own the social networking space".
You begin from where you are. You have readers, you have advertisers, you have staff and you have a paper magazine. You want to engage more time of the first group, get more revenue from the second group, broaden the skill set of the third group and sell more subscriptions of the last thing. How do you do all that? You do it in lots of ways but primarily you do it by going where people already are, doing what comes naturally and respecting the lore of the web.
Starting off small
There's no point kidding yourself you're going to build your own social networking site when there are some perfectly good ones already there. Our dance magazine MixMag has a thriving MySpace page which engages with those people who use this as a permanent resource. I have spent hours at weekends stitching together little promotional films to put on YouTube in order to announce the latest Word cover mounted CD. If you tag such a thing with the names of the artists then a handful of people will find both it and the magazine who wouldn't otherwise have done so. It's not a TV campaign but it works.
Tiny steps.
Every Monday afternoon Mark Ellen and I gather with a couple of contributors in a spare room at our office to record the Word podcast, a 40-minute bull session in which we chew over a bunch of rockular topics in the most haphazard fashion. We happen to have among the team a disproportionate number of people with extensive broadcasting experience. Or just experience of talking. In the podcast medium they're free to do something that they can't do anywhere else, which is dilate on their favourite topics for an audience prepared to give them any amount of slack. It's an inch away from a complete shambles. It's also one of the most liberating things I've ever done.
Among its devoted listeners are the head of news at the BBC, the boss of EMI records, regular readers, many ex-pats, long-lost relations and a bunch of people who would never actually buy the magazine but will happily take it in this form. Then, of course, there's a Facebook group for people who listen to the podcast. This also grows ever week. Tiny steps.
But there's a price. All this kind of market gardening activity needs to be tended seven days a week. You can't turn off a community at five on Friday and say "hold that thought until Monday". You need staff who are passionate and you also need to engage hard-core readers who wish to be part of the team. It's hard, different work. It's the diametric opposite of what publishers and advertisers are tempted to do - which is, no matter how you dress it up, spam.
On the web there is an essential mis-alignment between the inclinations of all commercial organisations and the requirements of individuals. It's something in the math. As soon as a message is broad enough to be communicated to a lot of people, it's no longer of any interest to any individual in particular. All that "sign up to be kept informed of updates" business is hooey.
With very rare exceptions, email newsletters go straight into the trash, just as all those millions of "announcements" from PRs do. Advertisers may be dazzled by numbers at the moment but ultimately, as the value of a click continues to head south, even they won't be. When they realise they've been using the web for lots of the wrong reasons they'll be harder to persuade to use it for the right ones.
In the end we need the advertisers to make this new media compact work. We need them to recognise and appreciate the immediacy offered by fast-moving sites, the sense of intimacy provided by podcasts and the genuine community engendered within social networks, and to learn to work with the grain of it and not against it. Here magazine companies, with their historical undertanding of editorial environment and their experience of selling the virtues of that environment to advertisers, should be uniquely advantaged. It's time to prove it.
David Hepworth is editorial director of Development Hell Ltd mail@davidhepworth.com
