Greg Grimmer – Magazines in the departure lounge?

In his second monthly column for Newsline Greg Grimmer, partner, Hurrell Moseley Dawson & Grimmer, starts his family holiday considering his excess baggage… and the future of magazines.

Sat on my sun lounger on the Grimmer family holiday, I am turning my mind and indeed iPhone thumbs to the thought of the death of magazines. Are they like Mark Twain still in their prime or is their death this time not greatly exaggerated?

Well, lets look at the evidence around me currently. The excess baggage paid by yours truly was for a corpocona of electronic goods and their respective paraphernalia. Between the four of us, we have bought on our “getaway from it all” holiday five mp3 devices, four mobile phones, four gaming boxes, most of which can access the internet in at least 3G, and of course with them we have multiple chargers and accoutrements.

So, if the tennis courts or the windsurfers wont get much of a look in, surely the humble magazine has no chance against such a concerted effort by the digital massive?

Well dear reader how wrong could we both be? The excessive weight in both the hold and the hand baggage was caused by the sum total of about twenty periodicals. Teenage football magazines, Disney one shots, the obligatory celebrity weekly and of course my own selection of the world’s finest written press.

So, how has this happened? How in a world where there are fantastic writers blogging constantly for free, high quality publishing websites and a plethora of other interesting free digital content out there ? How come we still want to pay for something Thomas Caxton would recognise?

Well, maybe one of the answers can be supplied by a professor of neuroscience at one of Google’s many illustrious conferences, who told us it takes about two minutes to scan a copy of the Metro yet twenty minutes to scan an equivalent amount of text from a computer screen.

Not only that, the recall from print is much higher. At my agency we have been fortunate to launch and relaunch a number of media brands from Autotrader to Wired, right through to Reveal. From technology aristocrats to digital savvy e-commerce traders to celeb lovers, they all seem to love the tactile nature of the printed product. Maybe of course it isn’t just neuroscience – it is the feel of the paper quality, the immediate ability to self edit – powerful reasons for the magazine world to survive long into the future.

And as the moon appears in the Aegean night sky maybe another key to longevity of magazines in our lives – ‘no battery required’. Another digital device is about to meet its maker (or at least its charger) … now where has that copy of Wired gone?