I was in my New York office this week (that's the place where I can't wear my usual sweatpants and motley San Diego Zoo T-shirt) and I noticed a direct snail mail offer from
TIME magazine. With
just a hint of desperation, the offer was a year and a half subscription (and some laser tool I am certain was on one of the last ships to leave China before they stopped taking dollars or treasury
notes) for $20.
Now, math has never been one of my strengths (and if you read my copy before Phyllis and Tanya get a hold of it, you might also argue "...neither is spelling, pal,")
but I am pretty sure it costs Time Warner more than $20 to send me 84 weeks of their magazine (however thin it has gotten). I expect postage alone would eat up most of my check, were I not already a
subscriber and inclined to send in yet another payment. And I am sure that laser thing set the sub folks (oops, sorry "consumer marketing department") back at least another 50 cents.
The game
plan is to renew me at a much higher rate with that tiresome effort to start in the same confirmation letter with a pitch along the lines of "extend your subscription now for...." In the coming year,
fifteen or twenty more solicitations will attempt to persuade me that I will be smarter, more informed and well, just a better person in general if I continue to read TIME. But like everyone
else, I will let the subscription lapse and wait for another desperately low ball offer and reup then. It is an odd quirk of the magazine business that they highly incent new subscribers and stiff
loyal readers who end up paying higher renewal rates.
Meanwhile in a poll conducted earlier this month, 67% of respondents said they feel "traditional journalism is out of touch with what
Americans want from their news." Nearly as many (64%) said they're dissatisfied with the quality of journalism. But I am not one of them. I think traditional media does a pretty damned good job of
covering the news (most of the time) even if increasingly somebody with a Twitter account beats them in breaking big stories.
My problem is with waiting a week for a magazine with either "time"
or "news" as part of its title. Even the daily newspapers can't keep up with the 24-hour news cycle of the internet, much less the news magazines. Consequently they become less and less of a "must
read." And not just for me, all of the news magazines have been shedding rate base like a wolfhound in 95 degree humidity.
Traditional media sellers like to toss around the term "banner
blindness" to suggest that online advertising doesn't work. And magazines will claim its readers are "more engaged" because it takes a while to tear out all of those annoying sub cards and heavy stock
ads which adds minutes to your "time spent" with the publication. But unless you are reading a special interest magazine with ads for the newest cool equipment for your hobbies or sports or a women's
book where you can't afford to miss the occasional topless ad, you are just as blind to magazine ads as you are to banners. Trust me, when I tell you that I haven't been influenced by a magazine ad on
a major purchase in 15 years or more.
Before the internet, magazines were a primary resource for researching ideas when you remodeled your kitchen or bought a new car. No more. I can spend 10
minute online and get 500 times more useful information about potential purchases (including those always important user opinions.)
The MPA canceled its annual conference-in-the-sun this year.
One wonders if they will ever have another one.