Magazine Launching? What Works?

Runner's World magazine, published by Rodale since 1971 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

From Entrepreneur Magazine 2006

Funding is arguably the toughest hurdle to jump. Jane Goldman, 51, was an editor for The Industry Standard, a magazine covering the dotcom industry, when it folded in August 2001. Goldman then launched her own magazine, Chow, a fun, casual food publication. Chow was named the best new magazine of 2005 by Amazon.com and received a favorable response from advertisers. Nevertheless, due to insufficient funding, Goldman decided to cease publication of her magazine after the November/December 2005 issue and focus exclusively on her website for the time being.

Robertson: So what happened to it? Good things! But how?

Still looking to get his first issue to print is Brett Garfinkel, founder ofJAQK , a magazine catering to the "no risk, no reward" mind-set of young, affluent men. Garfinkel, 34, who formed his business at the end of 2002, has developed a prototype and received verbal commitments from advertisers, but he's still hunting for the $7 million he calculates it will take to launch JAQK and bring it to profitability.

Garfinkel plans to launch nationally with an estimated paid circulation of 300,000. Such high targets require a lot of money, but Garfinkel believes it will come. When approaching investors, "you can't be shy," he says. "You can't be afraid to hear no."

Robertson: Google JAQK Magazine and all you get is stories from before 2006, including this:

"He was a great schmoozer," said Stuart Zakim, chief communication officer for Wenner Media, which publishes Rolling Stone, US Magazine and Men's Journal, who knew Garfinkel from Men's Journal. "He walked into the room and lit up the room. He had incredible charisma. He definitely was a very effective salesperson. He forged very strong relationships with his clients. Inside the company, he was well-liked and well-respected."

 He may be working for Gannett. Following this trail of crumbs, we get this.

Back to the article: 

So where do you look for funding? Well, in another chicken-and-egg scenario, getting funding is a lot easier with a prototype (we'll get to that in a moment), but of course, a prototype requires money. To get started, it's best if you tap your own piggy bank. Husni stresses the three F's: family, friends and fools. "Are you willing to take the gamble of borrowing money from your grandma?" asks Husni.

Robert Jeffrey Jr. and his wife, Minty, founded ColorsNW, a Northwest regional magazine covering multiculturalism, in April 2001. They were able to raise roughly $170,000 through a personal investment of $90,000, a $50,000 loan and $30,000 from friends and family. None of them turned out to be fools, as ColorsNW is profitable with sales of just under $1 million in 2005 and projected sales of $1.2 million in 2006.

Robertson: And what happened to it? It did exist. From a local Seattle business story 2008:

Meanwhile, ColorsNW magazine, which ceased printing in July, re-emerged in mid-October as a web-only publication. Robert Jeffrey Jr., CEO and publisher of the 8-year-old Seattle magazine covering issues related to diversity, said the online business model made the most sense for the magazine and its staff of six.

“We felt that we needed to move where our readers are going,” Jeffrey said.

Where he is now. But he does seem to have left a legacy.

Regional magazines can be launched for about $100,000, while national magazines require closer to $1 million to make it through a year of publishing. These figures, of course, depend on the publication frequency and circulation. Traditionally, the largest expenses are printing, paper and postage.

When deciding on the amount of funding you'll need, cash flow is key. Once a magazine hits newsstands, Husni warns it may take six months to a year before the publisher sees any cash returns. New magazine publishers often fail because they haven't anticipated how long it will take to put money in the bank.

Put Together a Prototype 
Creating your prototype--a mock-up of how the actual magazine will look--helps express your brainchild to potential advertisers and investors. It doesn't have to be elaborate, but it should convey the design, structure and substance of your magazine.

A prototype, like a business plan, conveys a level of commitment. For many ad agencies, prototypes are essential. Garfinkel received verbal pledges from advertisers based on his prototype.

Cynthia Good, 46, and Genevieve Bos, 41, founded Pink , an Atlanta-based magazine for professional women, and give credit to their prototype for helping secure their national distribution deal with Kable News Co. "We showed them a prototype, gave them our resumes and talked to them about our vision," says Bos. Pink, which launched in June 2005, now boasts a national circulation of 110,000 and projects 2006 sales in the seven figures.

Robertson: Seems to be out there still in some form. Here's when.

Attracting Advertisers 
The bread and butter of most publications is advertising. In 2004, industry ad revenues totaled over $18 billion in the top 12 advertising categories, according to the Publishers Information Bureau. But getting advertising isn't always as easy as it should be.

Woodward tells a classic industry story of an infant Runner's World having to wait several years before Nike committed to buying ads in the magazine. The founders must have thought this would be a no-brainer for Nike, an endemic advertiser. Endemic advertisers are those whose products or services directly address your audience, like running shoes in a runner's magazine. Non endemic advertisers seek a broad demographic, like a car company targeting affluent males.

Finally, an idea the implications of which I don't fully get for journalism. Fail fast.

Class Assignment for Today

English: Advertisement for Yarrow Shipbuilders in Brassey's Naval Annual 1923, mentioning the S class destroyer HMS Tyrian, Tigris gunboats and shallow draft steamers, built by Yarrow. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

First exercise: First half hour. Last class ended thinking about doing a pitch to would-be advertisers. Talk about that, gradually sketching out your ideas. (Since this is a draft, acknowledge areas in which you disagree.) Make sure at the end of your draft you point out how your publication will be unlike the competition.  Then, when that is done, each of you take a piece of paper and head it, “The (name of pub) reader is….” Describe your ideal reader.  Pass them around and read and discuss and tweak as necessary.  Appoint someone to write these on board.

Second exercise: Second half hour: Each of you play assignment editor. Conceive of a story to be assigned to a talented freelancer for your prototype. I want basic idea and basic approach. Include instructions on how you want the story written. That is, give your writer guidelines so she/he won’t be wasting anyone’s time. Pass around and discuss. Turn in.

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Brief Q&A with Editor at Nautilus

Berger's bio where he works now I want the first two sentences to tell me why this is important and original and why it belongs in Nautilus. Which means they've read the magazine and know how we operate. I also want a clear and firm sense of how they're going to tell the story, which means telling me who they're going to interview, and why they're important, and what studies they are going to use. Importance, direction, sources. Gimme those three in one or two paragraphs. If you want to add an exemplary paragraph, go for it. But it better be good. And specific. No fluff! do  you look at over-the-transom stories? Not really. That is, not from somebody we don't know. Because we operate by monthly themes, we tailor our stories to them. But I can't say I never look at completed stories. Rarely, though. We do look at over-the-transom pitches, which are often quite long. do you like to get follow-up phone calls? No. Almost all editors avoid phone calls from people pitching stories. do you assign stories on spec? Indeed. Especially with first-timers. ? do you always pay kill fees? Yes, if the story is contracted. 25 percent what's the ratio of queries to actual assignments? Oh, man, gigantic. 50 to 1, maybe.  how often do you initiate contact with writers rather than the other way round? I would say 70 percent initiate, 30 percent they do. how much do you pay? $1 to $2, depending on experience

PR Predators

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/TopStories/Features/Beware-of-PRedators-


According to Lloyd, who is also a contributing editor to the Financial Times, the PR industry has been able to take hold of the digital revolution and make it work for them. Thanks to social media, business corporations have turned into media corporations.

He added trust in media is seen as very fragile right now. Businesses are taking advantage of that opportunity as they try to gain the public’s trust through clever PR. The PR industry is well aware of that fact, so they want to become the public’s “trusted source.”

Just take a look at a recent PR News webinar titled “How to Build a Brand Newsroom from the Ground Up.” According to the course’s description, “Our trainers will also demonstrate how to create and distribute polished content and how to become a trusted source of information for your customers and your industry. You need an operation that generates journalist-quality content in a timely fashion that is flexible and can stay on message. You need a newsroom.” Journalists reading that should certainly raise their brows.

Here we have a PR webinar offering lessons on how to become a trusted source of information and how to turn an operation into a newsroom. We already have trusted sources of information (they’re called journalists); we already have newsrooms (it’s called the media), so the PR industry needs to get off our turf. 

State of the News 2015 & Magazines

Mr. Magazine is happy happy



He points us at Raw Bike

He points us at Old Port

He points us at Reserved Magazine

He point us at Hoop-la

He points us at All Things Sports

He points us at Peppa Pig

He points us at Art on Cuba

He points us at No Tofu

He points us at Lei

He points us at Mantra

If you want more more more, try his launchmonitor blog

The sober Guardian chimes in on "beautiful magazines"

* no ads
* tiny print runs
* "partly as personal passion, partly as calling cards for young designers and would-be          journalists, keeping production costs low"

A dose of reality. Here's the link

But there's oh-so-much online that calls itself a magazine

plus a 360 audience report 

And a final word from Felix Salmon

Similarly, there’s no particular reason to believe that the advice I’d give five or six years ago, which was basically “start a blog and get discovered” still works. With the death of RSS, blogs are quaint artifacts at this point, and I can’t remember the last time I discovered a really good new one.

I have every faith that great journalism will continue to appear online, and reach a large and grateful audience. For news consumers, that’s fantastic news. But I have no faith that the individuals creating that great journalism are going to end up getting paid anything near what they deserve — or even that most of them will be able to build a career out of it.

If all you care about is the great journalism, then, well, go out and find great stories to tell, and tell those stories in a compelling manner. You’ll always be able to find somewhere willing to publish them, even if they pay little or nothing for the privilege of doing so.

On the other hand, if you’re more career-oriented, and want a good chance at a well-paid middle-class lifestyle down the road, I don’t really know what to tell you. Except that the chances of getting there, if you enter the journalism profession today, have probably never been lower.

SHARETWEET

Build a Magazine

English: Neuttro Page (not online) from the Magazine (not in circulatrion anymore) Frecuenciarock (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In-class exercise/Build a Magazine

You have been divided into two teams by a group of deep-pockets entrepreneurs who wants to create an online product for college students, age 18-24. They believe in group competition, group intelligence and in brain storming, that is, in tossing ideas around in an uncritical environment before forcing a decision. Your aim is to come up with a concept for an online magazine that has both news and entertainment value.

 Near the end of this process, you will choose among the stories the class has written this semester to illustrate in a concrete way what the content of your publication will look like. It may also be useful in explaining the nature of your publication to point out why something written this semester – even though written by someone in your target demo – is not suitable for your publication.

One possible way to begin is by Thinking Big, coming up with what you think is a fresh concept, and only then looking about you to compare it to existing products. What you may discover, of course, is that you have reinvented the wheel, that such a publication already exists and that your ‘fresh’ idea adds no nuance, no value to an existing product already in the market. Happily, often our new ideas are not identical to old ones; there are, in fact, differences. The question is whether or not these differences are significant enough to provide the wedge that will enable us to compete.

 It is not meaningless to assert that we want to do the same thing but do it better. However, some supposed distinctions do not foretell competitive success, as in the case of “Seven-Minute Abs.”

A second way to come up with a product is at once to look at existing publications you find useful and appealing, but all of which fall short in some way. That is, you conclude that an existing concept can be tweaked or altered or reimagined in such a way that your variation on an existing product will steal eyes away from the existing product – though keep in mind the lesson of Seven-Minute Abs. Take the historical perspective. When does variation become failed imitation? Worst movie remakes are an amusing example.

Or you may choose to start small, with small questions rather than large assumptions. At some point in this process – whether you start large or small - you will ask these questions. (The advantage you have is that - more or less – you are your audience.)

1.    What does your potential audience care about?

2.    What are they reading/watching/listening/doing?

3.    What are their problems/issues/challenges?

4.    What are your potential audience’s/demographic/psychographic/geographic characteristics?

5.    How many people are in your target group or groups?

6.    How much do they spend on a news/entertainment product of the kind you have imagined?

7.    How much time do they spend online enjoying products of the kind you are proposing?

The answers to NONE of these questions are matters of opinion. All can be explored through consumer research. But for this brief exercise, we will proceed on the basis of ‘best guess.’

At some point in this process - possibly early on - you will identify your ‘key competitors,’ your rivals in the media marketplace. You will ask:

1)   What are they doing well?

2)   What are they missing?

3)   What elements of what others are doing can you use as a model or models? What elements can you learn from?

Later in the process, you will begin to build content,

1.    Preparing such basic elements as a mission statement, an ‘about’ page, a series of initial blog posts heralding your arrival on the scene.

2.    Developing key multimedia assets – a set of photos, a short video trailer, a slideshow.

3.    Developing pitch materials for potential partners/investors/advertisers. Such materials will be short, one pagers and ‘elevator’ pitches.

4.    Reaching out to your potential audience by building a social media presences on key networks relevant to your ‘community.’

5.    Listening to and learning from your community.

6.    Developing a rapport with key community members/influencers.

Now things get serious, as you begin the tough task of balancing costs with potential revenues,

1.    Considering six proven revenue approaches – ads, memberships/subscriptions, expertise/services, events, products, donations.

2.    Identifying revenue approaches that seem to be working for competitors, particularly those in related coverage areas.

3.    Testing the water with potential paying customers/audience members.

4.    Working with ‘first customers,’ perhaps on a trial or ‘alpha’ basis.

5.    Working up hard numbers for production and build a preliminary budget.

Creative is fun, but now you must begin to think like a manager,

1.    Assessing your own strengths and weaknesses with the help of friends, colleagues and mentors to determine what gaps you need to fill and what gaps you should focus your immediate energies on, while never forgetting your big picture and your long-term goals.

2.    Finding colleagues to work with, and developing community collaborators.

Finally, you are ready to begin, but from the beginning you will be measuring your progress,

1.    Having determined what your key indicators are, what metrics you need to track and how you will define success. (External metrics)

2.    Having put in place a system to measure progress regularly toward internal project goals. (Internal metrics)

3.    Already thinking about what you may need to change, what to do even more of and how best to pivot and what to fix at each stage of your progress.

We do not have the time to work through to the end of this process. However, we should be able to get far enough for each team will submit to me the answers to these questions:

·      Generally speaking, you are going after the 18-24 demo. Specifically, who inside that group is going to be your audience?

·      To the best of your knowledge, who is your competition? Where are the ‘eyes’ of your intended audience now directed?

·      What are you going to do that is not currently being done?

·      Express that intention as a 50-word mission statement.

·      Brainstorm some possible names for this new publication.

·      Choose, or reject, for publication stories the class has written this semester.

As you get into this, you can “play.” That is, you may assign tasks, one group member thinking about overall design, one about art, one about the big stories that anchor each issue, one about the smaller stories in continuing divisions of the magazine like People or Music or Dining – or far more inventive and focused divisions than that.

These comments are based in part on the ideas of Dr. Ed Lenert, USF adjunct professor, and on a presentation by Jeremy Caplan, professor of interactive and entrepreneurial journalism at the City University of New York, “7 Steps to Success: Entrepreneurial Journalism” (2011).