While planning for the launch of our own new small press, I came across hundreds of articles, endless columns of data, and countless friends (and enemies) that told us the same simple thing: DON’T!
Books don’t sell. Magazines rot on the racks. I mean, Teen People closed up shop. Teen People! And newspapers…exactly. The consensus says that this is simply a reflection of our society, of people who no longer read. Even Steve Jobs pointed to that not-quite-fact in assessing why Amazon’s Kindle will be a failure.
So all in all, not a great time to be publishing actual print magazines, right?
Well, maybe, unless you are 8020 Publishing, who puts out one of my favorite photo magazines, JPG, according to a new article in Newsweek.
Funded by CNET.com founder Halsey Minor, the company, which was started in June 2006, is pinning its future on actual newsstand sales of content that originates online. “Magazines are great at inspiration, whereas the Web is really good at data. But people tend to think only in terms of the Web versus print magazines,” says Paul Cloutier, chief executive of 8020. “We say they can come together to become an even better magazine.”
8020 publishes user-generated or community-created magazines. Along with JPG, which features user-sumitted and user-voted photographs, Everywhere features articles about various places around the world that is submitted and voted on in the same manner. And this is not only about some new method of creating higher quality magazines, either. There is a bottom line.
With few salaries to pay—it takes only about 14 paid staffers to put out both magazines—and content that comes virtually for free, it’s a business model that any magazine industry bean counter might envy.
Yet, sadly, a business model most magazine industry bean counters have a hard time convincing their bosses to adopt.