• by July 27, 2004

PUBLISHERS, IF YOU'RE NOT ONLINE, YOU MAY PERISH - As astronomical as that may seem to some media planners, it appears to be what the interplanetary prognosticators at Jupiter Research think is poised to happen. At least that's the way the Wall Street Journal spun new Jupiter estimates, when they were leaked to the paper today. The estimates, which will be officially released Wednesday during the company's online advertising forum in New York, indicate that online advertising sales will surpass magazine advertising sales by 2008.

"The report could certainly stoke the continuing debate about how attractive the print medium is to advertisers," stoked the Wall Street publication, which is both a print medium and an online journal, but is still known more for its ink and paper, than its digits. How and why the Journal zeroed in on the Internet's threat to magazines, we're not sure. Perhaps it is the central thesis of the soon-to-be-released Jupiter report? But we think the paper missed a bigger story: that the Internet isn't necessarily growing at the expense of other media, but because of qualities of its own. And as far as we can tell, it's greatest qualities are ease of access and immediacy, two things that are more likely to impact another print medium - newspapers like the Journal, than magazines per se.

Sure the Web ultimately will displace magazines that are rapid, information-focused in nature; ones whose value depends on the immediacy and ubiquitous access of their information, but it's not likely to displace or supplant the vast majority of magazines that are based on not-so-time-sensitive information. The kind that are more about the presentation of information - both textual and graphical. The kind of pubs that embody what the MPA mystically refers to as the "reader experience." We get that. In fact, we were lunching with a magazine industry executive last week when we got into an energetic discussion about the impact that digital media ultimately would have on magazines. Our point was that it's already happened, if the Riff's reading habits are any indication. We no longer read print editions of things that have a time-sensitive information component, including the Journal, it's far less alarming business news counterpart, The New York Times, or virtually any other newspaper, with the exception of the local community papers that don't currently publish online. We also gave up our print edition subscription to things like Consumer Reports a long time ago. It didn't make any sense when we were doing comparison-shopping for a new car on Edmonds.com to rummage through several magazines, when we could simply access the information much more quickly and efficiently online.

But as much as the Internet has changed our print media reading habits, it has not displaced some key ones. And they just happen to be the kind that might fall under the reader experience umbrella. We don't read The New Yorker or National Geographic online. We don't read digital editions of Martha Stewart Living or People magazine. And our kids don't read Nickelodeon magazine online. Those are inherently print media experiences and to take them online becomes something else. That's not to say there's not room for something else. And the reality is that magazine and even newspaper publishers seem to realize this, and have begun adapting, extending, and reinventing some of their content for presentation online. It's frequently good, occasionally better, but it is a different experience.

Ordinarily, at this point we'd start spewing McLuhlan-isms, but today we'd prefer to spout a Dutka-ism. You may never have heard of him, but like Marshall McLuhlan, Sol Dutka was a certifiable genius that had a profound impact on the way the Riff thinks about media.

A one-time collaborator on the Manhattan Project, Dutka was one of those brilliant statisticians who, like Art Nielsen, got into the marketing research business after World War II. And while his Audits & Surveys never attained the recognition of Nielsen's numbers shop, the research Dutka did for major marketers like Coca-Cola had a profound influence on their marketing strategies through the second half of the 20th century.

A few years before he died, we got to hear him speak at an industry conference. Dutka did a presentation on the history of new media adoption rates and their impact on existing media. It was fascinating. It went back to the beginning of modern media and it showed that with the exception of one arguably fluke medium - the telegraph - no medium ever supplanted another medium. They may impact how they are used, how consumers relate to them, the kinds of information that flow from them, but they don't actually destroy them. This was evident, he said, from radio's and then television's impact on cinema. And from TV's impact on radio. Dutka's presentation happened before the Internet was much of a factor, but we suspect that if he were to update it again today, it would show that online media are having a profound impact on existing media, but that it is not destroying them. It's helping them to evolve, changing their form and the way consumers and advertisers use them.

In fact, we don't really think the biggest impact is on magazines, at least not the kind of consumer magazines that the MPA is talking about. Business magazines, sure. Newsweeklies, perhaps. The big impact of online publishing is on time-sensitive information like newspapers, newsletters financial data, and stuff like that, where traditional print publishers like the Journal are migrating to the Web. The other big print medium where this is beginning to occur is among Yellow Pages and telephone directories, where local search and navigation services are, in some cases, displacing local directory listings. More often than not, they are aligning with them and evolving a new kind of local information marketplace.

Okay, so we realize that many of you already understand this. Why else would you be subscribing to MediaPost, a publisher - possibly the first - to start by publishing time-sensitive news and information online, and then creating a print edition for less time-sensitive, more thought-provoking stories and ideas that benefit from a print presentation. We're talking about MEDIA magazine, of course. And despite the success of our online publications like MediaDailyNews, Research Brief, Online Spin, Online Minute, our new e-mail and search Insider series, our soon-to-be-launched TVWatch, and of course, Real Media Riffs. Even as we expand our online publishing well, we're not backing off of MEDIA magazine. If anything, we'll be expanding it and adding other new magazines under the supervision of our new magazine editor, Tobi Elkin, who this week makes the transition from executive editor.