Social web & social media, consultancy, training and advice from a flâneur of the internets. Blogger, writer, broadcaster and runner of Birmingham: It's Not Shit. I also do the odd bit of art.
August 24th, 2010

The future of publishing

If there’s one thing that fills the web more than cat pictures it’s ruminations on the state, past or future of newspapers and magazines. The truth is old models are failing and no-one really knows. Rupert Murdoch is trying paywalls, which is a possibility for publications with existing audiences and strong brands, but what can a start-up publication do?

In my own small way I’m experimenting — this week sees the launch of a—yes—paper-based magazine that Danny Smith and I have been working on for the best part of six months. This is what it looks like:

Pile of Dirty Bristow magazines

Things we’ve worked out so far:

  • Print is really expensive at small scale, but it’s still much easier to get people excited to work for and to sell than web content.
  • Brand is all important: we’ve gone for wilfully obtuse and arty—we think that’s a sector we can sell to.
  • A clean break between web and print means that you need to create lots of reasons for, and a fair amount of, ‘related but not similar’ content. Content that reaches the same audience, but isn’t seen as either a free or a second-rate version of what you’re asking payment for in print.
  • A new thing needs its networks—we’ve tried to make sure that everyone that can feel ownership of the magazine finds it easy to talk about and share stuff about it with their networks.
  • If you’ve got a brand, related events can make a fair bit of money—but they’re an additional risk. We’re operating at small scale, but publishers have tried this — Wrox Press when I worked for it’s web design offshoot was trying to maximise return on brand by conferences, it didn’t bring in enough money to save the company. It seems easier, however, to sell a specific happening via the social web than it does an ongoing concept.
  • No-one’s going to pay to get past the paywall on a Twitter account—well only about ten people in my experience.

As well as being exhausting and a great hobby, there’s been a fair few opportunities to try out different promotional web-tricks that I’m going to use again. Issue two shouldn’t take so long.

February 27th, 2010

Dead Trees

As if I didn’t have enough to do I’m working towards launching a magazine. Not just me, my good friend Danny Smith is my partner in this foolhardy enterprise.

We’re both of the opinion that there are a lot of good writers that don’t have the opportunity to stretch themselves — and that commercial magazines don’t afford that chance at all, driven as they are ‘backwards’. ‘Backwards’ in the sense that writing exists to fill gaps of a certain size: 50 words for a joke sidebar, 1,000 for a short article  — and that those gaps are defined by the sensibilities of advertising.

If we’re going to try, we’re going to try to do this the right way round:

  • Find good writers and give them the freedom to write — a piece should be a long or as short as it needs, in whatever style the writer wants.
  • We’ll edit as minimally as possible — if we think it needs much more than that the author will get a chance to re-write.
  • We’ll match each piece with an illustrator and give them equal freedom.
  • The whole package gets made into a magazine as beautiful as is possible.
  • It’ll have as many pages as it needs, and no adverts, filler or regular features to distract from the good writing and drawing.

Given that when handed completely free reign to choose what to do, most writers, and creative people in general, seize up. We’ve decided to theme each issue. The first issue theme, appropriately enough, is ‘Birth’. We’re open to offers of work now.

This is hard, it’s unlikely to make any money — and it’s unlikely that to start with it’ll sell enough copies to make the cover price able to pay for everything. To that end we’re planning on financing printing through a series of events — of which more soon.

What makes it even more interesting is that we’ve decided that it should have only the most minimal internet presence, there’s not going to be online issues, or content available on the web — so how to use the web to promote a thing that only exists in the real world?

Not sure yet.

At the moment it’s called Dirty Bristow, and we’re planning to release end of April. And, yes of course we both get to have an article in every issue.

by Jon Bounds | Posted in my projects | Tags: , ,













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