Is this really the ‘biggest disruption in publishing history’?

Really? The first magazine I worked on was set in hot metal.

Since then, jobs that surrounded the print industry; compositors, photo headline-setting, b/w photographic labs, cow gum, typesetting, repro-houses, the four-pint lunch hour… (I could go on) have largely disappeared. The editorial designer has had to take up most of these professions.

Now we have ‘digital’ or ‘multi-platform delivery systems’. There’s no difference. Quality words and good pictures still need to be displayed in a relatively pleasing manner.

Just recognise that fact and pay us properly. It’s all we ask.

Shem Law | Art Director, Radio Times

Magazine brands used to define who you were. They created tribes. They made the world smaller.

The web has made that relevancy largely redundant – the trust now lies in the peer group rather than the publisher.

The real problem magazine brands face now is one of irrelevance, which is due – purely – to a lack of innovation and empathy with user behaviour. The solution to this seems to be to embrace technology, but all this does is change the delivery method.

In reality, magazine brands need to redefine their value proposition, understand their users and find a definitive reason to exist.

Rob Boynes | Creative Consultant and Founder, F&W

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What excites me most about magazine publishing is where digital can be taken by publishers. What annoys me most about magazine publishing is where publishers are being taken by digital.

The problem is the industry’s identikit tools and services, which operate on bluster, bravado and high bills. Print magazine replicas work, but never well. Interactive extravaganzas promise much, but they’re basically all mouth and no trousers.

Worst of all, nobody’s tackled making a digital magazine truly social. And that, in my rarely-humble opinion, is the biggest failing of all, because without social connections a digital magazine is only barely alive.

Keith Martin | Senior Lecturer, London College of Communication

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