• TechCrunch, Friday, May 8, 2009 11:30 AM

For the likes of Forbes, Fortune and BusinessWeek, cutting staff and frequency look like near certainties. But does this mean that these magazines can no longer afford to produce the long-form investigative stories that are their hallmark? Not necessarily, says TechCrunch's Sarah Lacy. Here's how these publications can maintain their roots while still competing with blogs and Web pubs: "ruthlessly collapse" the print and online versions into one unit, churn out one or two cover-length pieces per print issue while filling the rest with the best stories and user comments from the Web. Then, Lacy says, they should cut the money spent on courting new subscribers, and shift the entire marketing budget to promoting the Web product or real-life conferences and branded events. "Voila! One publication, not two pretending to be one. And guess what? One publication is a hell of a lot cheaper, even if it's printed on dead trees."

Under such a system, 99% of your staff's focus is on the online product, with the other 1% devoted to writing lengthy features for the print pub, which will continue to attract a separate audience. Yes, your pub will operate more like a blog, but it won't sacrifice the print ad revenue stream, either. As Lacy points out, for many people, there is value in the "nice paper with glossy, glitzy photo shoots and painstaking graphic design...People in them like putting them on their coffee table-or better yet, framing them." And don't underestimate the lure of the cover, which can give an otherwise reluctant CEO the impetus to give a reporter an exclusive. "It may be one of the few advantages [magazines have] over increasingly influential blogs."

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