In the midst of the tidal surge of Deep Throat (the Woodward/Bernstein source, not the movie) coverage, more than a few noticed that Conde Nast dropped the ball when it came to properly promoting their big Vanity Fair expose via the Web. Although the news went public on Tuesday morning, no reference to the longform VF story appeared on vanityfair.com until late that afternoon. Two trenchant analyses of this gap and its implications can be found in All The News That’s Fit For Print by Robert MacMillan at the Washington Post, and also on searchviews.com. As we watched and debated this issue ourselves, we just couldn’t escape the conclusion that many major monthly magazine companies still see risk where, by now, they ought to seek opportunity.

As business-oriented usability consultants, we try to remain agnostic when it comes to some of the ideologies that surround the Internet. We debate, for instance, the true economic implications of tag clouds; we’re really not sure how useful they are, yet, for most businesses vs. more top-down taxonomies - even though that runs counter to some more populist, web-culture-oriented points of view. By the same token, we’ve learned that when it comes to magazines, there is an extremely high degree of corporate caution at messing with a large-scale business model. I.e., newstand sales, print advertising and subscriptions to paper magazines.

So more than most web professionals and bloggers, we sympathize with David Friend when he talks crazy and says “Getting the magazine out is what’s important. …I was more interested in getting the magazine out than [getting] the Web out.” He’s articulating a surprisingly common print-medium/monthly magazine viewpoint: that prioritizing the web would undercut or cannibalize proven ways of making a lot of money. It’s not exactly fair for MacMillan to compare VF with People, for instance. One emerges once a month, the other 52 times per year. The weekly frequency of People (and its breaking-news subject matter) is easier to mesh with the realtime expectations of the web.

Monthlies, on the other hand, are reluctant to balance aggressive web strategies with offline brands. Troublesome questions, after all, await them: who is a subscriber vs. an online reader? Vs. a newstand buyer? What’s the value of online traffic to a free-content site, vs. lower traffic to a site that’s walled off to subscribers? Where does online advertising fit in? Print advertising? How do you showcase fresh content without rendering the magazine irrelevant? How do you staff a web edition of a magazine relative to a print edition? Etc.

But when we see situations like that at VF, even we have to shake our heads. There ARE answers to all of these questions, after all; we’ve spent long hours debating them ourselves and with clients. But persistently ingoring the potential of the internet to drive subscriptions and newsstand sales should not be among them. We do grasp that the much-vaunted logic of, e.g, the AOL-Time Warner merger has been discredited. And that some hard strategic decisions await the monthlies that aren’t yet doing very much with their sites besides archiving content from old issues (it’s hilarious to me that National Geographic does a better job integrating its web presence and magazine than Vanity Fair). That doesn’t mean that RM is wrong when she asks Friend “Do the words cross-promotion mean anything to you?” Quite the contrary. If dailies and weeklies are figuring it out and making money with tighter online integration, so can monthlies. Especially when they’ve got ahold of a 30-year-old cultural mystery like Deep Throat.

JF

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 2nd, 2005 at 2:17 pm and is filed under Media, Interaction Strategy.