Mr. Magazine on why print has a future

Mark Glaser writes a blog for PBS called Media Shift and currently he has a long Q & A with Samir Husni (right), self-styled "Mr. Magazine", the chair of the department of journalism at the University of Mississippi.

Husni, who tracks the starts and stops of magazines and is never short of an opinion, unloads a lot of them, particularly on where the business is going and how and why magazines can adapt. The piece, (plus a rebuttal from blogger Rex Hammock and comments from readers) is well worth reading and quite thought-provoking. Some examples:

The biggest mistake we’ve made in this industry is that we send people to the web, and we’ve left them there. We offered them something that’s free, that’s like a blizzard that surrounds them with information. But at no website do they ever say, ‘By the way, you need to go back to the paper to read page 20 where we have this article that you’ll only find on page 20 today.’ There’s no two-way street, we’ve created a one-way street and people get lost in the jungle [online].

You pick up National Geographic or Conde Nast Traveler magazine and read a marvelous 20-page article about Italy with gorgeous photography. At the end of the article, you [could] say, ‘Interested in going to Italy? Check our website and see all the hotels and museums.’ All the service aspects. Of if you go to the website you see all these services, and then it says, ‘Interested in going to Italy? Pick up the magazine for this article.’

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I am not the anti-technology person. I am the one who tells people who want to dive into technology, ‘Why start something online under a totally different business model?’ I have someone who comes to me and says he is going to start a magazine. And you ask for a business plan, what the costs will be, what’s the exit strategy. And someone comes to you talking about launching a website and that’s the whole business plan, and nobody questions that! It’s so frustrating because it’s so cheap. If you have a laptop, you are a publisher…Everybody now can own their own press. But imagine reaching an audience of one for every publication we have.

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As long as we have human beings, we are going to continue to have ink on paper. I’m not an ostrich who puts his head in the sand because I know there are some things that print cannot compete with the new technologies. But there are also ways that the new technology cannot compete with print. There will be room for everything. As long as we remember that we as journalists are not the readers, are not the users, we will continue to be in good shape, if we provide relevant content in the relevant medium to the relevant audience.