We have to try anything to make publishing pay – except putting the bean counters in charge, argues Ed Owen, editor of the Global Academy of Digital Marketing.
Accountants are generally very good at running businesses, which would probably account for the recent promotion of Zillah Byng-Maddick from CFO to CEO of Future Publishing on 1 April.
Future is one of the smaller magazine publishers, with titles covering tech, computing, cycling, gaming, automotive and, er, knitting. A rather mixed bag. Unusually, it has headquarters in Bath. The biggest brands are Total Film, Gizmodo and T3.
Unfortunately, Future is not a happy ship. This is the way of publishing – over the past few years, most publishers have had the kind of awakening a child might have when he or she discovers that they will one day die.
They are not the only one. IPC remains for sale as it closed one of its biggest titles, Nuts, and iconic brands like NME continue to flounder. Future’s future is uncertain and there are some worrying signs about where it might be going.
Firstly, it’s taken rather longer for Future to have its moment of mortality compared to most of its competitors. Never a good idea to put off the inevitable.
Second, the staff will go through a round of redundancies touching every part of the business. Working ‘on consultation’ is a dispiriting and painful experience, and not just for those suffering it, but their friends and colleagues too.
Most worrying is the notion that the content and marketing teams will be “streamlined” and work as a single unit, rather than for specific titles.
Oh dear.
Titles thrive when their journalists, designers and editors achieve something significant and have a common purpose. Putting some or all of them on consultation will sap morale, while merging content teams will dilute the expertise that titles have spent decades building. It’s a lose-lose scenario.
Now, exactly how this merged content team will work remains to be seen, but could it be that a journalist will write about knitting a Prince George cushion in the morning, cover Apple’s acquisition of Beats by Dr Dre in the afternoon, and finally discuss the gearing on the latest Cannondale before nipping home?
If this is the approach, this will surely fail. Journalists need to dedicate their time and effort to learning an industry well enough to talk to heads of business or whoever and actually know, or at the least appear to know, what they are talking about.
Sabotaging the editorial is not the way to protect a title. I could see some value in sharing around the sub-editing team a little, but even that has limitations as subs need to know their field as well as the reporters to find those little errors that creep in.
I was unfortunate enough to work at a large publisher when it had its own moment of mortality a few years ago. One-third of the staff were put ‘on consultation’, and a team of consultant bean-counters were brought in to work out what could be done.
It turns out that, incredibly, these consultants were morons. Who could have foreseen that?
Their conclusion was to get rid of this thing ‘news’, which takes up too much time and doesn’t even cover many pages. Features were more cost-efficient. Even better, why not sell editorial pages?
On paper, this looked like a good idea – cut expensive and invest in cheap. It’s all just words anyway, isn’t it? Knowing the costs, but not the value of things is dangerous – particularly so in creative industries.
Of course, it’s been a race to the bottom for the publishing sector since they decided to give away content for nothing on the internet, and few publishers can turn this around, although News International deserves full marks for at least trying. Monocle’s Tyler Brule is one of the few who seems to have nothing but contempt for the internet and what it’s done to this industry.
We’ll hear more from Bing-Maddick soon enough though: “We’re starting the conversation about how to apply [new business models] with our people now. We’ll update our external stakeholders at our Interims at the end of the month.”
But please don’t flush Future down the toilet.
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