‘Print is dead’ was a phrase uttered only a couple of years
ago when online versions of magazines began to gain popularity and it was
feared that technological innovations could be about to change magazines
forever.
The availability of computers, smartphones and tablet
computers has made the online versions of magazines just as easy to access as
the print copies. It seems as if the days of waiting for the new edition of a
magazine to go on sale are over for some readers, as a magazine’s content is
now only a few clicks of a mouse or touches of a screen away.
The content that magazines release online isn’t just easier
to access; it is also more up-to-date than in the print copies. In the latest
edition of TopGear Magazine, the main feature focused on Ferrari’s brand new
high performance car, called ‘LaFerrari’, but the headline piece on the website
changes on a regular basis, sometimes reflecting what is in the new edition of
the print magazine, but more often than not, the headline piece on the website
is the latest feature produced by the team or a review of a new car. This
doesn’t just show how behind the times print magazines are, but all of print
media.
If a magazine has a website that is regularly updated, then
it could be argued that the printed version is out of date almost as soon as it
goes on sale. Articles that appeared in the printed magazine and on the website
can be updated and/or reworked, with writers and editors able to add new
information and photos, but this new content can obviously only be added to the
website. An example of this comes from TopGear. The May edition of the magazine
has a feature on ‘LaFerrari’, but the website has a different version of the
feature. The feature in the magazine details the reviewer’s experience of
driving the car, as well as giving the reader important information about it,
but the article on the website is far more basic and information about the car
in the print magazine article is spread across a few separate pages of the site
as well as a more interactive look at it. The website also had a feature on a
new version of the car, called ‘LaFerrari XX’, but there was nothing in the
magazine about it.
Although technological innovations have somewhat taken over
the magazine industry and have allowed for a surge in popularity of online
versions of magazines, it wasn’t long ago that the print magazine industry was
experiencing an innovation of its own, as Charlie Turner, Editor-In-Chief of
TopGear Magazine, explains, “When I started, the last photo-shoot we could do
would tend to be about a week before our deadline because you had to process
the film, then you had to edit it, then you had to scan it, then you had to lay
it out, then you had to send it off for high-res scanning, then you had to get
it back, the process took forever. These days we’re shooting, we shoot stuff
occasionally on deadline day so we can be in the middle of nowhere, take
pictures of a car, send it back to the office, design it and send it to the
printers, the speed has totally changed, so in terms of innovation, magazine
industry has changed fundamentally in the last five, 10 years with the sort of
birth of digital photography, but beyond that the utilisation of the content
that you are generating, so you’re looking at assets, whether it be photography
or writing being delivered across a platform”.
It is the utilisation of content that Turner mentions that
will surely be of the utmost importance to the magazine industry in the next
few years. The content produced for the print version of a magazine is just as
important for the online version as the technology that allows it to exist.
It could be argued that the popularity of smartphones has
also changed the way that magazines are now read. A replica version of the latest
edition of TopGear Magazine is available to download on smartphones at the same
time as the printed version goes on sale. This shows a clear cross-platform
strategy being used by TopGear, with content being published in the magazine,
on the website and on smartphones.
Charlie Turner describes how smartphones are changing the
industry, “I think mobile is going to be clearly the way that people consume
media will drive the innovation in the business and if you look at the way
magazines are produced, they are incredibly old school, they are printed on
presses that have been there 60 years, on huge great reams of paper, we are
getting much better at the sustainability, if you look at the way that people
globally consuming media, the internet, mobile consumption are all going
through the roof, so interesting and interactive ways of delivering content on
mobile is going to be fundamental”.
He also explains how TopGear Magazine has adjusted to the
demand for content to be available on smartphones, “Most people have a
smartphone in the UK, there’s a huge proportion of smartphones in the UK and
therefore that’s how people are grazing content and coming up with a way of
making them engaged with that content in a meaningful way or just give them
something to distract them from the daily grind is what we’re sort of looking
at and different ways of delivering our content”.
He adds, “We’ve got a back catalogue of the most amazing
photography of cars ever, so how we deliver that into that market and apps are
going to be really fundamental to how we do that and just different ways of
engaging with that audience, but it’ll be really interesting”.
It is not just smartphones that have changed the magazine
industry in the last couple of years, but also the rise in popularity of tablet
computers. Figures from CCS Insight show that for users of tablet computers,
60% of web browsing takes place on their tablet devices. A 2013 YouGov report
into Media, Technology and Telecoms said that by the end of 2014, almost half of
UK households will own a tablet computer.
While this may not be good news for print magazines, it does
open up a whole new market for the magazine industry as a whole, as Charlie
Turner explains, “The tablets are going to be huge there’s no two ways about that,
where you, how you publish on a tablet”.
He adds, “What we tend to do is the magazine is the magazine
but then in the tablet it’s much more interactive so it’s got more video
content, more sound files. There is motion and there’s sort of emotion of
seeing them in action and all of those things and that’s where it’s getting
really interesting and that’s sort of interactivity is fundamental to what
we’re doing”.
This new interactive content is contained within the
magazine’s digital edition - an iPad app that allows users to buy individual
issues for £2.99 and a yearly subscription for £24.99, which represents a
significant saving compared to buying individual issues of the print magazine
or on a subscription.
It is not just TopGear Magazine that has exploited the popularity
of tablets computers. Future Publishing, the team behind Total Film and Official
Xbox 360 Magazine, reported sales figures on all of their digital editions of
$1 billion a week. Despite high sales, 2013 figures show that only 21.8% of the
circulation of Total Film came from its digital edition. The printed magazine may
not be as dead as first thought.
Everything has to evolve at some point and the same goes for
the magazine industry. Publishers have realised that for their magazines to be
successful, they have to be in a different form that just print and it seems as
if the more platforms a magazine publishes content on, the more successful it
will be. TopGear Magazine is just one of many that has moved into a new phase -
embracing new technology and is using it to its full potential despite the
market conditions. Editor-in-Chief, Charlie Turner: “I think it’s really easy
for people to get quite down on magazines, because inherently in the UK, it’s a
tough market, but the reality is that what that’s done is opened up so many
more opportunities in the whole sort of publishing sphere that it’s actually a
really exciting time to be involved in.”
So it seems that if the magazine industry wants to survive,
it will need to tap into new technology, literally.
