When ValleyWag reported last month that Salon, a pioneer of online-magazine publishing, had laid off six editorial employees, CEO Richard Gingras explained that Salon had to become “more of a true Web publication.”
He was talking about the production model, not the editorial model. But the insinuation was clear: Salon had to stop acting like a print magazine on the Web.
Putting long nonfiction articles and other magazine-style content online was a novel idea back in 1995 when founder David Talbot launched Salon. Now it’s expensive, impractical and, for Salon, not profitable.
Unique monthly visitors are up to 5 million, but net revenues decreased 48 percent to $1 million, resulting in a net loss of $1.3 million for the three months ending June 30, according to a Salon story by David Weir. That doubled the loss of $582,000 that Salon ran up during the same period of 2008. The company’s latest 10-Q also reports a decline in ad revenues and Salon Premium subscriptions.
Salon is expected to launch a redesigned site in a few weeks against that bleak financial backdrop.
“It was a mistake to think of ourselves as a magazine,” Gingras said in a phone interview. ” ‘Magazine’ suggests a periodicity that to me does not relate to who Salon is in a news environment on the Web that is increasingly real-time.”
The site’s great tradition of original reporting and careful editing still draws loyal readers, but advertising dollars have dispersed. News is much harder to monetize than softer fare. Plenty of newer, more nimble, more business-driven sites compete. Salon has found it difficult to turn reader loyalty into revenue.
“From an advertiser perspective, they don’t say you have loyal readers and the only way we can get to those readers is through you,” said Gingras, a former adviser to Google who became Salon’s CEO in May. “They know they can get to them elsewhere.”
The changes in Web sites are outpacing our ability to classify them. Increasingly, sites are whatever they call themselves. “Community” is a popular description these days, as is “magazine.”
Throw “online-only magazine” or “Web-only magazine” in any search engine and you’ll have a buffet of targeted Web sites to sample. Magazine scholars such as Samir Husni (aka Mr. Magazine) scoff.
Magazines are “ink on paper,” he reminded attendees at a panel I moderated earlier this month at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. Others in the industry, however, including the Magazine Publishers of America, no longer require that criterion.
MediaFinder, the online database of Oxbridge Communications’ “Standard Periodical Directory,” puts the number of online-only magazines at 753, up from 124 just five years ago. It counts sites that meet its magazine definition: “a collection of articles, and/or essays, poetry, fiction, etc. original or ‘reprinted,’ selected or commissioned by an editor and may include photography, artwork, and advertising.”
Web publications may put “magazine” in the title because there’s a belief it will help attract users and advertisers.
“The consumers know what the word means and have an expectation of quality content if they hear that term,’ said Perianne Grignon, senior vice president of marketing for the Online Publishers Association.
In reality, what happens at many Web sites bears little resemblance to the publishing process of print magazines, at which editors spend huge chunks of time — days and weeks even — just coming up with the cover. They obsess over each title and teaser. An editor at Cosmopolitan once told me the magazine’s tantalizing cover lines resulted from the efforts of multiple editors over two weeks each month.
This does not, and cannot, happen at true Web publications. Salon’s redesign will result in editors spending fewer hours processing each piece of content, which will flow more quickly to the front page and to mobile devices. It will also mean that readers can expect more seamless social networking and a new presentation of content in the context of larger topics. For instance, if you want to see the photos of Abu Ghraib that Salon was the first to publish, you’ll be able to find them under a specific heading, “Torture.”
“We’re not changing our editorial philosophy or our editorial mission,” said Gingras. “We’re still an independent publication looking to challenge and inform people’s thinking.”
Gingras added that he hopes to make Salon “as it was in the beginning: a cutting-edge, driving force in the evolution of journalism online.”
Interestingly, the other Web-magazine pioneer, Slate, continues to brand itself and its expanding family of sites, including The Root, The Big Money and DoubleX, as magazines. Chairman and Editor-in-Chief Jacob Weisberg recently shared some thoughts on Slate’s profitability with The Economist.
“I think Web-only journalism is fundamentally viable because it doesn’t have the huge fixed costs of print — ink, paper, binding, postage, etc,” he said. “The marginal cost of distribution is zero. Most of what we spend at The Slate Group goes into creating original content.”
But content isn’t enough to usurp the term “magazine,” said Bob Sacks, president of Precision Media Group, in a phone interview.
He told a recent meeting of the Independent Magazine Advisory Group that magazines can be “platform-neutral” as long as they look like print magazines online. According to Sacks, magazines must be paginated, edited, designed, date-stamped, permanent and periodic.
He wants to preserve, at least in structure, the print-centric magazine identity — the one Gingras can’t wait to shed.
“I’m trying to protect our industry,” Sacks said. “If we go to aggregation as our formula, as our business model, we won’t be publishers as we were. … We’ll lose our revenue stream. We’ll be another funnel to Google.”
