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- Wednesday 15th November: No, print magazines are not like vinyl
Wednesday 15th November: No, print magazines are not like vinyl
Good morning! Today's newsletter is brought to you by Peter. Esther and I are at Newsrewired today. We’d love you to say hello if you’re there.
I wish someone would buy a copy of The Grub Street Journal every time I heard someone say, ‘magazines are making a vinyl-style comeback’. I love vinyl and I love print, but I hate the comparison. I hate it so much, I actually sat down and wrote a slightly ragey explanation of why.
It basically comes down to two things. The first is that I see vinyl as a fundamentally flawed medium for delivering recorded music. Album art and liner notes are brilliant, scratches not so much. Print, on the other hand, is the perfect delivery vehicle for words and pictures. Digital has speed on its side, but for reading experience, print is just better.
Probably more important than my anti-audiophile views on vinyl, is how the music industry and the magazine industry see their legacy formats. There has been real investment in re-establishing vinyl as a significant revenue stream, seen in 15+ years of growth. Meanwhile, magazine publishers are, mostly, focused on managing decline. Coincidence? I think not.
Do you get as irritated as I do by the print-vinyl comparison? Do you actually think it makes sense. Try to convince me over on our community forum.
The end-of-year cost-cutting thread that runs through this story is truly depressing, as are the numbers being reported. According to a recent report, the media industry had announced over 19,000 job cuts through the end of October 2023; there were 3,000 announced in the same period last year. As usual the bean counters are shedding staff and using the slow ad market as a ‘chance to reset the cost bar’. FFS!
This is an interesting reality check for newsletter evangelists. Matt Karolian highlights flat usage data for email as a news vehicle, discoverability problems and incleasingly crowded inboxes among the reasons newsletters are not the silver bullet some might hope for. His solution is to distribute newsletter content through apps and on web pages, untethering the message from the medium. Eminently sensible.
Possibly at a different stage in the hype cycle, news podcasts are having a bit of a moment. Reuters Digital News Report’s Nic Newman credits the initial growth in the sector to the Daily from The New York Times. “Now we're into a very different world. A lot of innovation around formats, a lot of extended chat podcasts, a lot of political podcasts, a huge number of niche podcasts… really finding an audience.”
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