The Magazine Industry on the Verge

These quotes are from today’s editorial breakout sessions from the MPA’s first-ever “Innovation Summit” here in New York, where tonight it is raining quite hard.

John Micklethwait, Editor-in-Chief, The Economist: “What is the new ‘normal’ going to be for magazine publishers? The old ‘publisher model,’ where we bundled readers and sold them to advertisers is not coming back. It is being walloped.”

Marian Salzman, an executive with RSCG Worldwide PR: “The old model of marketing magazines is broken. Age is not a very important thing now. I would argue that parents of six-year-olds have much more in common than do 35-year-olds, who may be at very different stages of life from each other.”

Mark Jannot, Editorial Director, PopSci Media Grp: “Long ago in our industry we made a Faustian bargain with advertisers, under which we essentially gave away our content for close to free, in order to sell eyeballs to those advertisers. When the Internet came along, we doubled down. We placed all of our chips on ad revenue.”

Rafat Ali, Founder, ContentNextMedia: “It is highly unlikely that any mainstream newspapers will be able to charge for their general news content. News has to be ad supported.”

Gary Hoenig, GM and Editorial Director, ESPN: “We are seeing an exponential increase in content. Advertising cannot possibly support it all.”

Bill Werde, Editorial Director, Billboard: “This is the age of personal re-aggregation.” (Then, as he drew out the lessons from the music industry): “Record labels weren’t listening to their customers. The Genie was out of the bottle and the record lables started studying bottle caps rather than studying Genies, when what they really needed to know was all about Genies.”

Need I connect these dots?