• by Erik Sass , January 17, 2008

Magazines are well-positioned to compete in today's media landscape, but must adapt quickly or face losing ground to new types of content publishers--be it the Internet or elsewhere. That's according to John Griffin, the president of the National Geographic Group and the new chairman of the Magazine Publishers of America.

Speaking at the University Club in New York, Griffin said one of the keys to success in the Internet era is more precise measurement of the audience's size, characteristics, and engagement with specific magazines. This will help level the playing field with the Internet, where digital technology allows a variety of measurements seen as more precise by media planners.

Specifically, Griffin called for a reliable way to measure the accumulation of audience for each issue of a magazine over time. Some work has already been done by Mediamark Research and Intelligence, which last year introduced its issue-specific Readership Study, based on single-source surveys of its panel of about 200,000 magazine readers.

The data, collected as a supplement to MRI's "Survey of the American Consumer" through online questionnaires, documents the accumulation of audiences for specific issues of magazines over time, giving publishers and media buyers a view of issue-to-issue changes in magazine readership.

The Audit Bureau of Circulations has also introduced a new "Rapid Report" feature that allows magazine publishers to deliver circulation data to media planners and advertisers within weeks, rather than months, as previously.

The Internet itself is key to magazine strategy, with Griffin outlining a model for magazines as multi-platform content purveyors, delivering to desktops and mobile devices. However, he cautioned against any strategy based on online subscriptions, noting that the overall trend is toward free content. For example, in the newspaper industry, one of the last bastions of paid content--The Wall Street Journal Online--may lower the subscription barriers in the next year, according to its new owner Rupert Murdoch.