8 Media Trends You May Have Missed in 2013

The mainstream press has had its fill of articles recapping 2013, but it missed some important trends and lessons that emerged during the year:

Newspaper reaches for a new high

1) New hope for newspapers: The Denver Post has hit upon a promising market for beaten-down daily newspapers: weed. When publishers from other states see how the Post is trying to cash in on legal pot with its new web site The Cannabist, they may be tempted to start publishing a lot of pro-legalization editorials. I suggest a companion print product -- a special section printed on hemp, with an invitation to “Read it, then smoke it.”

2) Why cell phones have a “vibrate” option: A major magazine company revealed the startling results of an in-depth investigation via a news release: “Meredith's Parents Network, the leading parenthood media portfolio which includes Parents, American Baby, FamilyFun and Ser Padres, today announced exclusive new findings that phones and tablets have improved moms' sex lives and texting has replaced talking in their romantic relationships.”

3) The Postal Service is still solvent: For several years now, a lot of us have been saying that the U.S. Postal Service was months away from running out of cash unless Congress did something. Congress, of course, did nothing during 2013 – unless you count the naming of post offices. Still, with downsizing, increased volumes of parcels and “junk mail,” and its refusal to “prepay” retiree health benefits, the Postal Service keeps delivering six days a week and still has a few pennies in its piggybank -- even though it’s billions of dollars in the red. Now if it could just be allowed to deliver legalized marijuana . . .

4) Magazines are not newspapers: For several years, pundits have predicted that traditional magazine publishers would soon go the way of newspapers, shriveling up from massive losses of advertising, circulation, and profitability. But 2013 proved them wrong. Magazines – or, rather, “magazine media” – are adapting better to the web and are finding growth in such fields as events and services. Some had banner years for their print products, with increased ad pages and even some expanded ratebases. Meanwhile, one of the nation’s most storied newspapers was so diminished in value that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was able to buy it with some spare change he had lying around.

5) Print is hot: It wasn’t just that web-only brands like Newsweek, AllRecipes, and Politico decided in 2013 to publish printed magazines. Print is now so in that a TV ad for Viagra featured the owner or manager of a printing company.Print is hot: It wasn’t just that web-only brands like Newsweek, AllRecipes, and Politico decided in 2013 to publish printed magazines. Print is now so in that a TV ad for Viagra featured the owner or manager of a printing company.

By the way, Viagra in a Printing Plant? What’s Up with That?, had a larger audience and stirred up far more discussions than any previous Dead Tree Edition article about printing. Which tells you something about what printers and us print geeks have on our minds.

6) The digital divide is a myth: We’ve been told for several years that, once people got e-readers or tablets, they would mostly abandon printed publications. Several studies released in 2013 told us otherwise: Tablet owners overwhelmingly prefer printed magazines to digital ones; only 22% read tablet-based magazines on a weekly basis.  iPad owners read more printed books than does the average consumer. And most magazine publishers will tell you they have far more tablet owners reading their print editions than their apps.

7) A business model for iPad magazines emerges: Many publishers had viewed the iPad as a great medium for their publications and apps. But Apple has recently thumbed its nose at traditional magazines, allowing its Newsstand app to fall into disrepair and making it nearly impossible to find all but a few e-magazines.

A magazine that is getting promotional love from Apple's Newsstand

Recent quotations helped me understand, however, that there are at least two paths to publishing success on the iPad: The first is ad agencies: “The target market for iPad magazines is 22-year-old media buyers," a publishing colleague told me. "Selling iPad subscriptions to anyone but your print subscribers has become well-nigh impossible. But having an iPad version really helps you with the ad agencies, regardless how meager its circulation is."

And the other path? Porn: “It is apparently easier to get porn magazines from Russia into the App Store today than it is a bug fix update for a major consumer title,” D.B. Hebbard wrote last month for Talking New Media.

8) The wheels are coming loose on the content marketing bandwagon: 2013 was the year we publishers realized that every Fortune 500 company, and a lot of smaller ones as well, seemed to be copying our every move under the moniker of content marketing. Chanting mantras about “owned media” and “brand journalism,” practitioners sound like devotees of some Koolaid-drinking cult as they espouse the virtues of bypassing publishers to go direct to the consumer.

But the honest content marketers are starting to acknowledge the bandwagon is hitting some bumps. Having the junior member of your PR department do the writing is a cheap way to create articles no one wants to read; there’s a reason that kid couldn’t get a job as a real journalist. Even for good articles, finding an audience is challenging regardless of how many tweets, posts, and pins a brand uses to publicize it. Consumers, it turns out, aren't especially interested in connecting with brands.

Lately, more brands are turning to professional journalism – either by using qualified freelancers or by licensing content from publishing companies – to boost the quality and credibility of their content. And some are also turning to those bypassed publishers for help in promoting their content. It’s a hot new concept known as “advertising.”

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Funeral of Print Media

Web publishers launching print magazines, e-book sales plateauing, slow adoption of tablet magazines, and now a profitable U.S. Postal Service: Whatever happened to the death of print?

I recall a magazine editor parading around the office in 2009 and announcing, “Print is dead.” Sure, I recognized it as the exaggeration of a middle-aged journalist trying desperately to prove he was hip to the digital age.

Still, it looked as if he had the basic trend nailed. Although I’m a print guy, I had to admit that within a few years – say, 2013 – print would probably be well along the road to Buggy Whip Lane.

A CueCat, from the author's personal collection of Magazine Failures

But 2013 is turning out to be the year that print media didn’t die. Let’s take a look at some recent events:

Postal profits
The U.S. Postal Service revealed Friday that it was profitable in the year that ended on Sept. 30. OK, the official news release says USPS lost $5 billion, but that included a $5.6 billion payment for pre-funded retiree health benefits that it skipped.

Such payments are in reality low-interest loans to the federal government that mask some of the federal deficit. They're a vestige of the era when USPS was the government’s cash cow.

The $5.6 billion is not truly an expense, and the retiree-benefits shenanigans are so politically controversial that the missed payment will probably be written off. USPS's cash position is still precarious, but better than it was.

The return of junk mail
It wasn’t just downsizing that led to a successful year for the Postal Service. The volume of Standard mail – such as direct mail, catalogs, and promotional flyers – increased 1.8%. Wasn’t everything supposed to have shifted to email promotions and online ordering by now?

Web to print
This month has already seen the launch of two significant print magazines, Allrecipes and Politico, from brands that were previously web-only. That’s the perfect rebuttal to Michael Wolff’s recent analysis for The Guardian, in which he asked, “What is the business basis for print? In fact, is there any reason print should exist?”

If Michael put a bit more effort into looking at actual data and less effort puking up vitriol all over Time Inc., he would know the answer: For most magazine publishers, print is still where the money is.

E-gads
When I headlined an article early last year Are E-Book Sales Reaching a Plateau?, many laughed off the article as wishful thinking from a print dinosaur even though it was based on an objective study.

But three weeks ago, Digital Book World wrote, “Once thought destined to reach 50% or 80% of all book buying and reading in the U.S., ebooks have stalled out on their way up to higher altitude.”

And more recently Mike Shatzkin, one of the leading commentators on the digital transformation of the book industry, actually used the P-word: “Recent evidence suggests that ebooks have hit either a point of serious resistance or a temporary plateau.”

App-oplexy
I got similar blowback for this year’s article A Troubling Sign for Tablet Magazines?, which pointed out a study showing that three-fourths of U.S. tablet owners prefer print magazines to digital editions.

Many articles have subsequently come out about the surprisingly slow adoption of tablet magazines and the struggles publishers are having with selling digital subscriptions.

“Apple is a fickle partner,” Jasper Jackson recently wrote, citing various challenges for magazine publishers. "Until these issues are dealt with, or a genuinely credible competing platform emerges, digital magazine marketers will be working with one hand tied behind their back.”

Print still struggles
Don’t get me wrong: Not all is well in the world of print media. The Web is driving most daily newspapers to the point of extinction. (I’m not naïve enough to think Jeff Bezos’ purchase of The Washington Post is a vote for print. Methinks his long-term vision for that hallowed journal doesn’t have much to do with putting ink on paper.)

With the continuing decline of profitable First Class mail and a Congress that can’t pass any meaningful reform, the U.S. Postal Service is still on the ropes.

Newsstand sales are still declining at about 10% annually. Retail chains keep reducing the space devoted to magazines even though it’s their most profitable category. Dysfunctional sales channels, you see, are not Apple’s invention.

So don’t expect people to ditch their laptops and smartphones, dig their typewriters out of the attic, or revert to sending handwritten letters instead of texts and emails.

Digital substitution of print will continue, but it won’t always be at the steady or exponential rates the pundits predict. An unsustainable trend cannot be sustained, and inevitable changes often turn out to be quite evitable.

A few digital innovations are immediate game changers. Some need years of refinement to catch on. (Perhaps digital magazines are in this category.) And others burst onto the scene with much buzz but soon go the way of Friendster, PDAs, and the CueCat.

As for that editor who proclaimed four years ago that print is dead? He was recently heard proposing the creation of a new print product.