Magazines: On a comeback trail?

As a genre, magazine brands may have been given up for dead. Yet the chances of a revival aren't exactly far-fetched

Last week, I got back from a media conference in the capital where I was invited to speak about whether legacy media firms and new digital brands are allies or adversaries. The visit also offered an opportunity to catch up with some of my former colleagues from Forbes India. They were a part of a dream team that, as founding editor, I was privileged to lead.

Yet, since the launch of Forbes India more than 13 years ago, there’s a lot that’s changed. Very few still believe in the power of magazine journalism. Most of the titles —be it global or local—are struggling to make ends meet. If you asked a bright, young college graduate considering a career in journalism where he or she would like to work, it is unlikely that they would name any of the existing magazine brands.

The magazine as an important cultural icon of our times has considerably diminished. Most magazine brands have struggled to make the transition to the digital world. The excitement that my colleagues and I experienced in building Forbes India is now a thing of the past.

However, over the last five decades, magazines in India have had their share of highs. India Today, Illustrated Weekly, Sunday, Business India and for a short period more recently, The Caravan, captured the public imagination, and many of their in-depth feature articles have remained firmly etched in our memories.

I was fortunate to be part of two such phases of rejuvenation: One, the remarkable turnaround of Businessworld under maverick editor Tony Joseph. BW was then an also-ran. And it was a last ditch effort to save the magazine. And it turned out to be a miraculous success story. Its reinvention as the magazine of the new economy, the elevated quality of ideas and story-telling were part of the secret sauce. A rival editor later confided that the ideas that BW put on its cover didn’t even come up for discussion at their edit meetings. In 2008, when I started up Forbes India, the business magazine space was almost dead. Publishers were more excited about investing in newspapers and magazines had lost their mojo.

Yet the brief was simple: Create a world-class magazine out of India. Our attempts to breathe new life into the somnolent magazine space revolved around a key insight: A magazine’s raison d'etre was to actually slow things down for readers on the most important developments of our times. Instead, magazines began to compete with newspapers in delivering immediate news, here and now. It was futile —a race that magazines could almost never win. At best, it would be an incremental news agenda. And not a radical, agenda setting approach that promised new, deeper and wider perspectives for its readers. (That’s the reason why The Economist remains the reference brand in the global magazine industry, even though it prefers to call itself a newspaper.)

Yet even The Economist has struggled to make the shift to digital. Over the years, people are reading less and less. Most leading magazine brands have responded by widening their repertoire to offer not just a reading experience, but also watching and listening. But it hasn’t always been a seamless transition.

But by far, the biggest threat with the increased digital thrust is about unbundling. Back then, we spent hours packaging the next edition of the magazine and offering readers a carefully curated experience. The front of the book was pacy, the well of the magazine was in-depth and packed a punch and the back of the book offered a distinct change of pace.

Today, however, people curate their own experience by picking and choosing stories they want to read, watch and listen to. Much of that experience is driven by serendipity on social media.

In such an environment, is there any hope for a magazine brand? Here’s the irony: The raison d’etre hasn’t changed. As the world becomes more and more complex, there is greater need for a news media brand to offer clarity and understanding. The best news brands have chosen to embed more magazine-like qualities, instead of reporting yesterday’s news the next morning, as almost all print editions of daily newspapers once did.

There’s a reason why magazines might make a comeback. Technology and new kinds of story-telling tools could help create a better, curated digital experience. Also, could magazines in a new print avatar gain traction, especially given the rising screen time, just as vinyl did with music?

There’s another big shift that’s playing out. As digital transformation agendas take centre stage, the newsrooms in large incumbent news brands have succumbed to pressures of building traffic, in a bid to chivvy up digital advertising. The reliance on technology tools like Chartbeat to take “data-driven” editorial decisions are rapidly replacing human curation of the past. Journalists in such integrated newsrooms are now given traffic targets. Yet this reckless obsession with page views can be self-defeating, as a major news publisher recently admitted in a closed door session. He said his biggest challenge was retaining loyalty and driving usage. Despite publishing more than 300 stories a day, nearly 95 per cent of his readers read only two stories—and drifted off to other sites.

Going forward, my belief is that this dilution of news agendas could create new niches where digitally-led magazine brands could play a big role. The focus will be on building strong communities. Rather than pedestrian, run-of-the-mill events, more engaging formats for live and asynchronous engagement will emerge. Monthly or quarterly print editions could offer a more immersive experience. And new forms of digital story-telling, adeptly curated by editors, will provide the understanding and clarity that data-driven news agenda can seldom guarantee.

The writer is co-founder at Founding Fuel