If print is really dead, why are people still launching magazines?

Print is dead. It’s a refrain we’ve heard so often over the past few years that it has to be true, right? When it comes to ad revenue that statement might well be true. In the US, print revenue has been in free-fall, going from US$47.41-billion in 2005 to just US$17.3-billion today. Things aren’t about to get any better either. Both the New York Times and Time have forecast further cuts in their own print ad revenue. So why, in the midst of all that, are publishers still launching print magazines?

Sure, you could laugh off the decision by the new owners of Newsweek to relaunch the magazine in print — at a much higher cover price — as pure folly, but even people who made their name online are starting to get into print. Just this month, online technology site CNET launched a print magazine. In doing so, it joins the likes of medical advice website WebMD, which also has a print magazine.

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Also called CNET, the magazine has a US$5.99 cover price and, according to the New York Times, is winning praise from users as “portable, accessible and affordable”.

The magazine, which runs to 128 pages in the first edition, is a quarterly, with CNET printing around 200 000 copies. That might not seem like a particularly high number for a magazine selling in a country with as large a population as the US — according to Wikipedia, WIRED has an 850 000 plus strong monthly circulation — but it’s actually a pretty good test sample (South Africa’s best selling magazine Huis Genoot only shifts a few thousand more copies every month).

That does nothing to explain why CNET decided to launch the magazine, but according to Jim Lanzone, the president and chief executive of CBS Interactive, it’s mostly about not putting all its eggs in one basket.

“The future for this brand is multiplatform,” he told the New York Times because, “we know the audience wants to experience CNET in multiple ways.”

“This is a project we talked about for a number of years, and it got momentum in 2013, the best year in the history of CNET,” he added.

“One thing we saw was that the brand had a lot more potential than we thought it did.”

The magazine, which publishes original content rather than recycling from the website, should therefore be viewed as just another bow in its armory — which also includes mobile apps, a Spanish-language version of the website and YouTube channels covering a variety of topics — rather than an anachronism.

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It’s the same reason ecommerce giants like eBay have dabbled with brick-and-mortar stores: the more opportunities you give people to interact with your brand the more likely they are to do so.

Grabbing your attention

And when it comes to opportunities for interaction, print has some distinct advantages over online and even apps. As Memeburn publisher Matthew Buckland pointed out earlier this year, print does a much better job at grabbing your attention than online or app-driven content:

“Print magazines exist in the same physical space as us human beings,” he writes, “digital magazines don’t. Digital magazines are behind an “on” button on your tablet, or behind an app or a browser… they are not just there. Print magazines are dedicated devices, digital magazines share their devices with a thousand other digital magazines and tools”.

As he goes on to point out, a print magazine can “cut through the digital noise, actually trumping the endless deluge of digital media” stuffed into our tablets, mobile phones and desktops.

Read more: Print actually trumps digital in the attention economy: here’s how

The ability to grab, and hold, your attention is why magazines are still around and why they’re not about to disappear anytime soon either. It’s also something that’s as, if not more, important to advertisers as it is to everyday readers.

Print advertising is interruptive and in-your-face. Sure, you can skip past it, but it would be hard to argue that there’s a print equivalent of Banner Blindness, especially when you can’t help but interact with all the ads in a publication. The very physical act of having to turn a page ensures that.

If magazines are to survive, however, they need to provide the kind of content people can’t get online. That’s why it’s so significant that CNET won’t contain any content found on the website. It gives people a reason to buy the magazine, or if they see it in a doctor’s waiting room, to put their phones down and read it.

Yes magazine sales are, broadly speaking, down alongside advertising revenue but there are clearly still opportunities in the space. Film and radio suffered with the introduction of television but both are still around because there were experiences they could offer and spaces they could reach that TV simply couldn’t.

The magazines that survive will therefore be the ones that offer the right kind of experience — analogous to experiencing one of Beethoven’s symphonies performed by a full symphony orchestra versus playing snippets of it on your iPhone — and reaches people in the places they want to be reached.

Why are people still starting magazines? Because they’re smart.