Dennis Publishing Chairman Sees Magazine Industry Crumbling In The Electronic Age
Felix Dennis, chairman of the business and consumer magazine company Dennis Publishing, has warned that the golden age of magazine publishing is over and that its already shaky foundations are crumbling fast in the face of the electronic age.
Quoting Bob Dylan at the PPA Magazines ’99 conference yesterday, Dennis said that ‘it is a hard rain that is going to fall’ on the magazine publishing industry. He said that his outlook, which he admitted was in a minority of one, is so gloomy that he has seriously considered selling Dennis Publishing in its entirety.
Dennis believes that there are four forces currently converging which together seriously threaten the future of print publishing. He refers to these forces as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Dramatic, but serious, warns Dennis.
His grim intimation comes at a time when Dennis Publishing is looking very healthy. Its Maxim magazine is performing strongly both over here and in the US; in the latest ABC audit the UK Maxim recorded an increase in circulation of just under 30% year on year and now sells 322,000 copies per month. The US Maxim shifts around 1.3 million copies per issue and is apparently “groaning under the weight of blue-chip advertisers.” Nevertheless, Dennis argues that until now, magazine publishers having been living off the fat of the land and have been relatively unscathed by the emergence of radio, television, video and other technological advances.
This is all about to change as the tide is turning, says Dennis. Less magazines are being sold than 10 years ago and even less than three years ago on US newsstands. New titles are more and more often targeted at niche vertical markets and many more fail than 10 years ago. Also Dennis says that consumer magazines in the UK are not a growth industry in any meaningful sense of the word growth – despite claims to the contrary. Magazine gimmicks now abound in order to maintain sales – Dennis admits guilt on this front.
He likened the magazine industry to pier; a pier with five shaky pillars as foundations. These are portability, browsability, value for money, high definition and habit. Swirling around these pillars, and evermore seriously eroding them, is an electronic sea. For the first time, the sea is winning, says Dennis dramatically.
The great threat to print publishing comes from the combined force of Dennis’ Four Horsemen: interactive media, including the internet and digital television; environmental pressure; growing illiteracy; and constriction, corruption and an increased cost in selling mags on the newsstand.
In terms of newsstand sales, Dennis warns that retailers like supermarkets are increasingly treating magazines as they would groceries and demand a certain return for stocking them. This makes it more and more difficult for smaller or new publishers to get their titles out there in the shops. This is an issue which was also raised at the PPA conference by Cathleen Black, head of Cosmopolitan publisher Hearst Magazines.
Illiteracy is on the increase and this will impact on magazine sales, he says. The UK is currently way down at the bottom end of Europe’s literacy table and a quarter of 19 year olds have below ‘acceptable’ standards of literacy. For magazine publishers this is worrying.
Dennis also believes there is about to be a significant backlash on the magazine industry from environmentalists who have so far remained fairly quiet. The volume of paper magazines use and the amount that is wasted through unsold copies is enormous, says Dennis, and publishers are not willing to foot the extra cost of using recycled paper sources.
However, there is an alternative to ‘killing trees’, as Dennis puts it, and it also solves all the distribution problems at the same time: the internet – “the killer of tree killers”. Whilst magazine publishing has survived radio and television, the internet is altogether more deadly a rival, says Dennis. Controlled circulation titles, used in business publishing for example, are even more threatened by the internet than consumer mags, he says. Whilst Dennis has decided to fight for magazines tooth and nail, as well as embrace the internet, he claims it is a defence of the indefensible.
As a grim prognosis, he argues that magazines will not die, but rather wither as more and more advertisers and readers alike move into the electronic scene. Within ten or twenty years magazine publishers as we know them now may be referred to as merely content providers for the wider electronic network – the world wide web.