Quote, unquote: Getting more eyeballs, but losing your audience

The mainstream food press, funded by advertising, benefits from constantly broadening its market. You get more eyeballs by writing stuff that appeals to a wider audience. If putting in celebrities and dumbing down the features alienates a couple of crusty old foodies it gains hundreds with only a marginal interest. That’s why the enthusiasts are turning first to the internet and then to independent mags as they appear, to service their tiny specialist community.

Truth is, I’m not sure there will be a profitable business model in specialist magazine publishing ever again – if indeed there ever was – but with a natural concentration on profitability, mainstream magazines have lost, forever, their ability to appeal to that audience.

-- Tim Hayward of Fire & Knives, a British quarterly food  magazine, from a Q & A in the Stack magazines blog