The future of magazines is probably among the wacky stuff

The ABC’s CEO is correct to believe that the auditor cannot waste time responding to every flash-in-the-pan and wacky fad coming out of Silicon Valley, but it is still vital someone is watching out for the Next Big Thing, says Flipping Pages Media’s Peter Houston.

Last month on Newsline I wrote about the ABC’s introduction of the ‘Combined Total Circulation Certificate’. I made the point that it was progress, but it was no new dawn. Of course I wasn’t the only one to arrive at that conclusion. More than one commentator passed judgement on the length of time it had taken the ABC to bring digital and print numbers together in one report, and on the fact that it didn’t really report on total circulation.

This week, ABC CEO Jerry Wright responded to the criticism in an interview with TheMediaBriefing’s Henry Taylor. The headline on the piece encapsulates the ABC’s position perfectly – “It’s not our job to sit in Silicon Valley and look at all the wacky stuff coming out.”

Of course he is absolutely right. The ABC’s job is to report numbers that people can use as a benchmark across the entire publishing industry. Circulation audits only work because they allow ad buyers to compare apples with apples and place decisions in some type of context.

So, no, it’s not the ABC’s job to look at the wacky stuff. Looking at much of the magazine market, mainstream publishers don’t seem to think it’s their job either. The problem is, magazine readers are signing up for the ‘wacky stuff’ every single day.

Earlier this month BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti wrote an open letter to ‘Buzzfeeders’ explaining how he sees the future for his upstart media brand. In it, he draws a comparison between historic newsbrand Time Magazine and BuzzFeed.

He points out that Time began as a clipping service with a group of writers subscribing to newspapers, searching out the most interesting stories, and summarising them into an easily digestible format. Rather than subscribing to newspapers, BuzzFeed’s writers started out surfing the web, but the initial MO is otherwise very similar.

Before it became established, Time also endured the sort of dismissive scorn that is levelled at Buzzfeed today. But as Mathew Ingram says in his coverage of the Peretti memo, it’s anyone’s guess if BuzzFeed will become the next Time Inc., “but the idea shouldn’t be dismissed simply because it started with aggregation and cat GIFs.”

So while serious publishing people can’t spend all their time looking at flash-in-the-pan fads, they do need to make sure that someone in their teams is watching out for the next big thing.

Smaller publishers are leading the way in digital publishing because they aren’t hamstrung by a commercial context that demands profit before innovation. Mainstream publishers are dealing with different drivers, primarily the need to keep paying the bills.

Organisations like the ABC are duty-bound to play it somewhat safe. As Wright says, “If we don’t take a broad consensus, then we end up doing something that looks knee-jerk that we may end up having to unpick.” He correctly throws the onus back on the industry, publishers and ad buyers to tell the ABC what they need.

This is complicated, because the market is moving so fast it is not always clear what’s needed. That said, publishers are obligated to give their audiences what they want and ultimately it will be audience behaviours across all platforms that drive ad spend.

If publishers don’t grasp that nettle and work together and with the ABC to develop a truly integrated, multi-platform circulation certificate, smaller publishers, like Time Inc. in 1923, will leapfrog the old order and start playing by their own rules.

I could be wrong, but I doubt if anyone at BuzzFeed or Vice has ever considered changing the way they do things to fit in with any industry standards.

Peter Houston is a media consultant and founder of Flipping Pages Media.

Twitter: @Flipping_Pages