The shift from print to digital is getting stronger

 

Two articles in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, taken together, suggest that the transition from print to digital journalism is gathering steam.

 

The first, “The Vanishing Everyman’s Art Gallery,” actually is a bit of nostalgia for the old days when newsstands were on every street corner of every city in America, and their publishers hired artists to paint pictures for the covers. (The classic example is Norman Rockwell’s relationship with the Saturday Evening Post.) The writer asserts that millions of American thus gained exposure to, and an appreciation of, good (if sentimental) art—thus the “Everyman’s Art Gallery” heading. He laments the passing of those days (and also the passing of LP album covers, replaced by not-so-interesting CD covers).

But his real point is to underline the continuing weakness of print magazines, which are rapidly moving online. There’s nothing particularly new in that—we’ve been talking about the migration from the printed page to digital for years—but what’s different now is that advertising dollars may finally be finding their way to these digital websites.

The challenge in the past for magazines that wanted to move online was that advertisers—who account for the great majority of a magazine’s income, as opposed to paid subscriptions—weren’t willing to spend anywhere near the big bucks they would pay for on a printed page. For example, let’s say a quarter-page ad in a print publication cost $25,000. On a digital version of the magazine, the advertiser would have to be content with a little button or banner, at a cost of, say, $750. That was a big hit for publishers to absorb, and nobody quite knew how to get around that dilemma.

But now, according to that second WSJ article, “At long last, TV money flows to web.” Granted, this movement of money is starting with online movie outlets, not general or specialized magazines. But it’s a start, a crack in the dike that previously kept big money from migrating online. As one ad buyer remarked, “For us, it’s really about shifting to where audiences are.” And, as audiences increasingly glue their eyeballs onto computers and portable devices, advertisers have no choice but to go there.

It’s still unclear, though, if advertising for smaller web sites—like those of wine magazines–will reach the stupendous levels currently flowing to print and television ads and commercials. “How much these [digital] outlets can draw [in ad revenues] in the near term will be determined in part” by future negotiations, the WSJ says. Smaller online digital outlets don’t draw anywhere near the number of views of major TV programs, like the Super Bowl, and so digital ad revenues aren’t going to reach those levels anytime soon.

But “Younger consumers are consuming less TV as a portion of their total media consumption,” pointed out one analyst, meaning that in eventually, the playing field could level out, as big network and cable TV attracts fewer and fewer viewers.

What this means for magazines is that they have to negotiate a delicate transition from reliance on the printed page to crossing the digital doorstep. You can’t go from the former to the latter in one quick move; if you do, you’d be out of business. Instead, publishers must seek to attract new, younger viewers and readers who prefer their mobile devices, while avoiding alienating older viewers who like their magazines the way they’ve always been. Wine magazines are in an especially vulnerable place, because the divisions have never been starker between older, Baby Boomer readers (who made today’s wine magazines famous and successful) and younger, less tradition-bound consumers. Millennials don’t drink their grandfather’s wines, their grandfathers don’t drink their grandkid’s wines, and a publication that wants to appeal to everyone might just fall between two stools.

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Finally, R.I.P. Bob Sessions. Great job at Hanzell.

 

http://www.winespectator.com/webfeature/show/id/49997