But what does that actually mean for magazine editors and content managers? Well the biggest thing is you need to become “platform agnostic”. While print is definitely not dead, it is now just part of your brand’s publishing mix alongside digital magazines, websites, newsletters and mobile content.

Like the perfect parent, you are no longer allowed to have any favourites – you never know which one will be best able to look after you in years to come. You do, however, need to care deeply about putting the right sort of content on to the right platform.

The most common example I can give of inappropriate content management is digital magazines that replicate print editions. I know there are a million reasons why people do this, mostly to do with money and resources. Unfortunately there is a better reason for not doing it – people just can’t read them.

Unless we want the magazine as a designed, curated format to disappear online, our industry needs to make digital magazines attractive to readers. This is partly about layout, partly about content. Double-page portrait layouts with tiny type don’t work; big type on landscape does. Lengthy articles don’t work; short reads do. Intelligent linking and rich media make the best of the format.

Just like there is an appropriate way to approach digtial magazine content and layout, there is an appropriate way to approach content on all the other platforms that we need to become agnostic about. What is appropriate? If the conversations at FIPP 09 are anything to go by, we’re all still trying to work it out. But one thing is for sure, firing analog content into digital recepticals and forgetting about it is just not good enough.

The good news first. Gabriel Sherman, a contributing editor at New York magazine, says that the magazine isn’t dying. Citing the growing list of magazines that have ceased publication, Sherman acknowledges that the closure count might suggest the magazine industry is locked in the same “death spiral” as the newspaper industry. But he argues that it’s more complex, and more hopeful, in the magazine sector.

Sherman believes that there are too many mediocre magazines created simply as weapons in the battle for market share and with little reference to real reader need. Line extensions and me-too titles shoe-horned into former growth areas like property are imploding under the weight of the credit crunch.

Sherman says the publishers of these titles put advertising first and editorial excellence second, and they are paying the price:

Magazines still retain emotional capital, and publishers need to remember that they’re not in the advertising-delivery business. If a magazine can speak directly to the reader, advertising dollars will follow. Titles launched to capitalize on a booming market segment will never  survive.

In the online context, but echoing Sherman’s call for quality content, interactive marketing man Seth Godin says media execs choosing between the high road and the low road  need to realise that readers have a choice. The low road of “manipulative media” substitutes audience grabbing tricks for real value and only works when the audience continues to show up.  Godin contrasts all-too familiar attempts at get-rich-quick gimmickry with useful content that delivers traffic, click-throughs and, ultimately, sustainable revenue. He sumarises simply:

If you need to be manipulative or non-transparent to make a buck, time to rethink the plan.

That’s all good then. Content is still King. Editorial excellence is back at the top of the agenda… except, if you believe Mark Newman writing in Folio, where he blames editors for the implosion in the magazine market, not the greedy commercial types that Sherman and Godin take to task.

According to Newman, for too many senior editors, the notion of editorial excellence is frozen in the amber of  ”this is how we’ve always done it”. He says he is “baffled” by editors that settle for the status quo:

I’ve seen that time and time again, especially at some of my past publications, many of which have died painful, pitiful deaths—usually because the top editor was fine with things just the way they always were when they first started at the magazine 20 years ago!

Veteran editor Newman, currently at Southern Breeze, runs through a list of things that editors should be doing to improve their titles. He focuses on design and fresh editorial topics and ideas; I would add serious attention to new digital formats. The specifics depend on the title involved, but the point is to keep your magazine relevant to readers. 

Considering these three blog posts together I’m left with one pretty clear thought. Quality content is a valuable commodity, but only if we deliver it. We know this instinctively as magazine professionals, the problem is when the word doesn’t match the deed and we get stuck in the past, ignoring contemporary reader needs.

We all need to keep our magazines, online or off, relevant and the only way that is going to happen is if we…  well I’ll let Mark Newman tell you:

Get off your hands, pull your head out of the dirt, and remember what it was that made you get into this field in the first place. Otherwise, learn the difference between “large” and “super-size” because you’re deadweight in the magazine industry’s future.

Recently in Publishing Executive magazine, e-media Strategist Eric Shanfelt chronicled the many short-comings of the digital magazine. Clunky, slow to load and with type so small that you’re constantly zooming in and out. Faults all too familiar in what Shanfelt calls, “digital replicas”.

But this isn’t just another hatchet job; the e-Media Strategist points out that the problem is not with the technology, but with how publishers mangle the technology to try and recreate print products online. His recipe for success? Format so that reading on the computer screen is easy and make good use of interactivity within content. He gives examples: Organic Style, Viv and Military Electronics. I would add one more example of my own, a weekly Pharmaceutical magazine that I helped to transition to a screen- friendly format recently.

Although they don’t have to, the majority of digital magazines do suck, mainly because publishers don’t invest the time needed to produce stand-alone digital products. This is short-sighted. How can everyone acknowledge that the magazine world is moving to digital and not see that the only way to survive is to do it properly?

In the good old days we published magazines. Ink on paper, they hit the desks monthly and people rolled them up and sneaked off to the toilet with them. These days, magazine people still do the ink on paper thing, but we also do websites with blogs and podcasts; weekly newsletters and daily updates by email; and now we even Twitter.

What was once a very singular discipline has become a multi-faceted franchise operation built around a name established in print, but now extended far into the uncharted waters of new media.

I have no issue with this, commercial publishing is all about keeping the audience engaged long enough to see advertising messages. If we capture that attention online or offline, in print or in pixels, we win.

What I find worrying is the tendency to ditch the tricks of the magazine trade learned and perfected by generations of publishers. The medium may be the message, but that message will go undelivered without strong content that meets real information needs; focused advertising offerings that solve real promotional needs; and targeted circulation development that brings the right audience to the table.

How many times have you seen all of these get lost in the excitement of a new media project? Too often it’s so important to jump on the bandwagon that we forget to ask where it’s taking us and what we are going to do when we get there. Twitter has raised millions of dollars in VC funding without ever making a cent. The average magazine is struggling to keep its doors open, and will disappear unless it delivers on the basics. 

By all means, treat magazines as brands; cross platform integration can only be a good thing. But if we want the new media to be anywhere near as successful as the old,  let’s not forget what makes a magazine a magazine.

Part of the plan is to place links to partner sites alongside relevant content. Excellent. Wonderful. Fantastic… Oh no wait a minute, isn’t that affiliate linking and haven’t we all been doing that forever?

On the face of it, these plans seem so very last century; but, maybe the Telegraph’s management are on to something.

In the past, the problem with affiliate programmes was that they demanded huge traffic and a strong content offering, too often scarce in B2B web publishing. The problem here, though, is with the implementation not the thinking. If you’ve grabbed a reader’s attention long enough to have them read an article online, maybe, just maybe you can leverage that attention on to a relevant advertisement, placed cleverly in context by your ad-serving software.

Digital genius? No, B2B magazine publishers have been doing that for decades in print. It’s the whole point of what used to be called trade publishing. Get the readers attention with an article that discusses a problem or an opportunity. Then place an ad near it to promote a product or service that helps the reader solve the problem or take advantage of the opportunity. B2B publishing 101.

The difficulty for Magazine publishers has been in moving this concept online and applying a simple real-world algorithm to the complex technical algorithms that shroud online publishing. But in this Brave New Broadband world, where traffic has increased significantly and content offerings are more sophisticated, engineering relevance in to ad placement is much easier than it used to be .

Contextual linking might not be revolutionary, but the concept works in print magazines and it can work online. As print and online display revenues dip, B2B publishers have to look at new ways to generate cash from reader attention… even if they are actually old ways.

From a commercial standpoint, each medium is just another way to engage a community or market that your advertisers’ are interested in reaching. Broad success comes from identifying the strengths of each medium for your audience, and playing to those strengths. This is where a clever content strategy comes into play, the two most important elements being:

1. Differentiation – the content package on each platform has to be seen to be distinct

2. Positioning – it has to be clear that, regardless of platform, you are delivering up the audience that your advertisers want.

With a well executed content strategy in place across your publishing platforms, you can start cross selling, showing people that each medium is a distinct route to market and part of a greater whole.

The opportunity is to get advertisers to see the value in using two, three, four or more of your channels. The challenge is to deliver value through each channel.

Only the most rabid pixel-head would try to argue that digital magazines do not annoy some of their readers some of the time. They can be slow, difficult to read and difficult to navigate, they disappear into your spam folder and you can’t sneak them into the toilet with you.

All that said, there are clear benefits to digital magazines, and not just lower distribution costs for publishers. The digital platform can deliver a rich mix of media beyond the flat text and graphics of print, readers have the opportunity to interact and no trees get killed in process.

Publishers have to start playing to these advantages if they want their audience to get over their annoyance and deliver digital magazines that readers love.

This may simply be an indication of tough economic times. It could, however, be symptomatic of a bigger shift away from print advertising to other media.

Figures from American Business Media show B2B pages down more than 8 per cent during the first half of 2008. ABM President Gordon T. Hughes II, doesn’t think the figures are a reason to panic. “Considering the current state of the economy, b2b media has held up well,” he said. However he highlights the fact that, “B2b media information companies continue to broaden their portfolios to satisfy market needs such as digital products, custom media and data.”

More evidence that print on its own might just not be enough. What do you think?