Frankenstein’s Monster

What amazes me is that people still get all dewy eyed and soft when it comes to launching a magazine. I’ve spoken to three friends in the past three weeks who are ‘launching’ magazines and who have tried to either hire me at half my current salary, because ‘I’m Good’ or getting me to write for them pro bono. I had to politely explain to them that they’re not only kooks to believe that they can afford me, but I genuinely like ‘being in the machine’, because it helps with content creation because it gets me access. Anyway, enough about me and my complete lack of philanthropy and adventure, because I still genuinely feel that a printed product without a distribution strategy in place, no matter how ‘niche’ (read: elite) the audience, is one bound to fail. ‘Elite’ twats don’t pay for anything, you just have to start mailing them the magazine and then go to advertisers and say “this is our mailing list, can we now become your catalogue?”
I’m sorry in I sound cynical, but the machine is a highly evolved life-form and thee amniotic goo it surrounds you in feels really nice and warm. Just as long as you know you’re in goo. I’m sorry, it has been ten years since The Matrix, which I saw an advance screening of with my best friend Doc at the Russian Cultural Centre and still remember that both of us barely made a peep during the movie. Here is the thing, there are more and more magazines out there and many of them fill needs – such as porno magazines – believe me, despite the advent of online porn and dedicated torrent sites where you can download all of Sasha Grey’s movies there is a particular joy you have when you see titties in print. A joy that future generations of horny 15-year old boys will never know!
Magazines are great and the racks at Khan Market with thousands of titles show that there is hope, but I don’t know for how much longer for a bulk of the products. Trade magazines won’t go away anytime soon, and PR agencies will tell you that clients still have a bout of auto-eroticism when they see their thumbnail in a business magazine, a cover… well you don’t want o know. But that said, there are far too magazines that come and drop out too quickly and worse still several of the smaller magazines read like the Internet paraphrased, with only the occasional guy who understands a modicum of English. Most content is crap, with little genuine research or writing.
Personally, I don’t know how much longer the format will survive in its current form. As I said, porn has moved primarily online and so will the magazine, perhaps they will survive till the advent of colour e-book readers . But believe me; I’ll miss them when they’re gone. But despite the misplaced optimism of my friends, it is great that people still believe in the format. I just hope that the quality of magazines coming out was better. Just look at GQ India, a genuinely disappointing product, there is the occasional sign of sheer brilliance (and excellent photo-shoots) admittedly – but then again compared to the high-standards of GQ UK, you kind of expected this.
On another note, I’ve been accused of baiting Business Standard. Honestly, I’m not a fan of the product anymore (other than ‘Chinese Whispers’). It was and remains a decent product, but over the past few years, you can sense it isn’t the same. It was a great foil to ET, and had far superior policy coverage. But you need money to survive, and well, I don’t think Uday Kotak (guess who wrote about him recently) is putting any into BS, and I don’t think anyone is buying. Fact of life, deal with it. Money and funds are important for survival as is brand-building, no matter how passionate readers are, a brand on the down slope, need money to survive. Particularly, when the brands at the top of the game are losing money.
Hopefully, Baru might take it somewhere new. I don’t know. But honestly, it is losing the ‘top of mind’ battle. As I’ve said before, to each their own, we have a fantastic choice of newspapers, magazines and television channels, and you are free to consume what you want. Some you might feel are worse than others and some are genuinely bad – many of the Indic channels for example – I watched how they explained the ‘Loch Ness’ monster the other day – bizarre.
Anyway, over the next few weeks I will be travelling a fair bit, so I become irregular all over again, don’t start sending ‘hate mail’. Take care and be careful of what you read on the interwebs!

Conversations

Yesterday, I spent some time with the publisher of a small-circulation newspaper and we were discussing the internet, distribution and content. Earlier, that day I had spent some time with a consultant talking of future media trends and we spent a long time talking of the Kindle ‘distribution’ model, and the aftermath of that in the light of Amazon’s draconian DRM policies (ironically with Orwell).
Anyway, even though there were some heated discussions with some other people in the room – particularly about journalism and bylines getting devalued, I argued that journalism and bylines got devalued the instant newspapers started to play the ‘price game’ and consumers fell for it. Now, they fall for free shoes and what not, even though newspapers are drastically cutting back on circulation. There is a feeling that the English language press, no make that, the English language media has seen its short golden age ~ 2006-2008.
So what is the new business model that we spoke about, that I also feel might just work? Low-circulation, but free. Sounds crazy, but guess what most lifestyle magazines do, exactly that. Fewer and fewer copies make it onto general stands other than the giant stands – in Delhi these would be in Khan Market, Connaught Place and Def Col. News-stand sales drop down even further as companies don’t want raddi. It also works from an advertising perspective – tell people that these are our 25,000 readers nationwide. New readers are occasionally added by a process of selection. Surrender the bulk of the market to ToI and differentiate. If magazines can pull it off, FHM India has an incredibly small print-run and I believe that Media Trans-Asia is trying to emulate that with Maxim and their other publications as well.
No matter how hard ToI tries, and they are trying, they will always be a mass-market middle-class product and the middle-classes can never be high-brow. Sorry, if this sounds snobbish, and believe me when I say that I read ToI first every morning but that is essentially trying to figure out what on earth is going on in the country and the city. The problem is that being mass has mass costs and increasingly, as mass papers are discovering in the West, those costs will become unsustainable. Especially since, the ‘cover price’ never did cover costs in India, and the ET Now ads are free right?
TV is free already, the problem with TV is slightly different, the only channel that has any sense of gravitas is Undie 24x7, even with the tear-jerking. I’m sorry that RajdeepTV doesn’t but with the wife on air, it never will. But UndieTV is in such financial turmoil, the accounts make for painful reading even for journalists and executives in other media companies. But, I still feel that ubiquitous camera-equipped personal devices coupled with 3G and Wireless Broadband is going to lead to utter chaos in television. Even though, I more skeptical of ‘citizen journalism’ than most.
Yet, while I feel all of this, and believe me this will all play out in my lifetime as a journalist, I still feel that the byline will have some value. I have no clue how much value, but it will still retain something. As The Admiral told me, not everyone can fly every major fighter jet, only air force officers and journalists can.
EDIT: Four years since I stalled the Statcounter code, I've crossed 500,000 page views, not bad. Should monetize but too lazy...

Open

I just read the first issue of Open, and first impressions - and like I said when I saw the dummy is that in terms of sheer design it blows the pants off all the other newsmagazines in the country. As far as content, I was a bit iffy about the cover story but some of the other stories were excellent.
I will not take a call on long-term viability, as these are tough times for the media and even more established and richer brands are up shit creek, but I do feel that Open will force a hell of a lot of other products to get their design acts together.
Mint aside, most Indian newspapers are horribly laid out, in fact what surprises me about Mint is that its mother-publication despite so many changes is still 'confused' in terms of layout, but no non-lifestyle magazine has a layout that can currently touch Open. I hope thay can maintain design integrity (with ad-sales schmucks always ready to sacrifice editorial at the altar of money), in fact this is a sincere hope.
Give it a look-see, I may not agree with everything inside but I repeat it is very agreeable on the eyes.
PS: Maxim just shut down their UK edition.

Concept toh interesting hai...

In my other role, the one as a journalist that is, I cover a lot of things but somehow and I guess this happened by accident rather than anything else - "You're the youngest, you MUST know about all these gadgets", I cover technology. Now, I'm no geek but I meet some pretty cool people along the way and one of them, last year was the head of Hewlett-Packard's printing division Vyomesh Joshi and he spoke about 'Print 2.0' which frankly was a very interesting concept.
But how, you must be asking, does all of this fit in with the media? Well, one aspect of Print 2.0 as articulated by Joshi was 'printing on demand' and the creation of technologies and systems that will allow you to take an incredibly small run of books or magazines. And according to this NYT article that system has begun in the US. basically, the idea is that anyone can start a small magazine, and then pay the company that does the printing just 20 cents a page. Now, that might still seem like far too much in India, a 10 page magazine would cost Rs 100.
But prices, historically, have always gone down right? And what is the biggest barrier towards starting your own newspaper or glossy magazine? The cost of printing, small runs were never possible and a small run of even a ten page glossy magazine on a traditional press would be extremely expensive, much more so than this MagCloud service. I doubt that MagCloud will ever replace the massive printing presses for high-circulation magazines but it could give the little guy a forum, and if costs come down, even if they get halved, a lot of people will be able to produce their own magazines. I wrote about the concept for a 'best of the web' self-printed paper that is doing the rounds in the US earlier, but these are all intriguing concepts.
The old medium isn't dead just yet, but it is evolving in strange ways.
PS: And I'm sure Pakistan is on his mind, but...

Are the Indian editions of Forbes and Fortune still on?

Forbes and Fortune decided to launch Indian editions a few years ago, and after years of waffling they got their acts together. At least Forbes even went ahead and hired IG to head up the thing. But, after IG's unfortunateheart problems, it appears that some people who were about to join him got cold feet, and the launch of what would have been TV18's first foray in print seems to have been 'delayed', we just don't know if the term 'indefinately' can be added here. As for Fortune, it was supposed to have been launched by now, but we believe is still on track but it was supposed to have been launched months ago.
Now, I also believe there is another negative element here - a declining economic scenario and thus, since everything in the media boils down to space selling. Now, this has impacted the potential launch of several TV channels from a shady real-estate operator (who gave tax-free joining bonuses in cash, which is another story) but according to some friends in the ad circuit, the rates being quoted are rather 'high' particularly for the current economic scenario. Would these magazines, which might be thin on local content be viable in such an enviroment?
I'm not being negative about the 'India Story', I still believe there is a great deal of potential in the market, and a softening of the unabashed exuberance of the past three-odd years is not a bad thing. Well, it might be a bad thing for the Congress, but that is about it.
Plus, with newsprint prices going up, expect some more fun on the ad-edit ratio front!

Steve Ballmer

I've interviewed a fair few Fortune 100 CEO's over the past half-decade with my current employers, but my most entertaining interviewee has to Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, not including the time when thanks to over-reliance on technology I discovered to my horror that my office's digital transcriber was full (and thus learnt never to trust office equipment, unless they were in your own possession) . However, I will hark back to my first interview with the man that Fake Steve Jobs politely refers to as Monkey Boy back in November 2004.
I will try and find the transcript in the archives, but I remember asking him about Google and he dismissed the threat of the Mountain View company, calling them just the 'current hot thing' of the internet (this made for an interesting second interview two and a bit years later). Anyway, since I am generally feeling unemployed today and was surfing all over the interwebs, I came across this interesting conversation that Ballmer has with the editors of the Washington Post.
"...there will be no media consumption left in 10 years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form..."
Now, while this obviously means the US and other developed economies, this is an interesting statement and unlike his rather crazy dismissal of Google back in 2004, this is rather more serious. I do believe that things will not be so dramatic in India, but lets be honest, I am very sure that over 99 per cent of the readers of my publication have access to the internet, and sooner or later will find consuming information from the internet a far easier proposition than spending money and buying the 'offline' magazine.
I have said time and again, the main reason I hopped onto the blogging bandwagon, what some 300,000 pageviews and 700 posts ago was because I had to be online. I realise that the future is not in paper. Ballmer is right, you know, he might have no clue how Microsoft will leverage this paperless world, and the newspaper may take longer than 10 years to die out in India, but we're in for interesting times over the next few years.
Oh, and if you want to know why fake Steve calls ballmer 'Money Boy', you have never seen this YouTube classic.


EDIT: Microsoft India seems to be in serious crisis.

Publications I miss.

One of Dhirubhai Ambani's nicer experiments, or well rather one the times he let his younger son have his way with the loose change was The Sunday Observer. Now, I don't lament the passing of the Sunday Observer as a journalist, I was far too young to have worked there during the good days, but the paper, whatever you say about it - even call it the Ambani's propaganda rag - much like a certain television channel is today was usually - particularly during the time of the first two editors, very good Sunday reading. And for me, as a pre-teen kid those days, despite going through a fairly troubled part of life (my pre and early teen years were more screwed up than most peoples, thanks to my parents' marriage going haywire) was fairly good reading for children in the 12-16 age group in a regular newspaper. And that is something I do not see in ANY Sunday newspaper today.
None whatsoever, because they try to outcompete each other in being cerebral and lifting ideas from GQ. Talking about lifting from GQ, this month's UK edition has an article called 'Absolute Insanity' about chillies and 'hotness' (of the chillies not of the models in the Kingfisher Calendar), a few days after I read the article in my bosses cubicle, the country's self-proclaimed 'best' food writer does an article on chilles. Now, this gentleman is a great writer (no doubt about that) and no part of the aforementioned GQ piece was 'copied' per se, but information was copiously used. I was not the only person to notice the timing, at least three other people I know who read the UK edition of GQ mentioned this me, just finding the timing a bit ironic. Anyway, inspiration can come from anywhere and I am not making an accusation of plagarism - that is exclusively the terrain of two-bit and half-wit movie reviewers.
You might argue that DNA makes an attempt - but DNA is going after the Cartoon Network crowd, not 'TweenAgers'. A year or so ago, maybe less, a former colleague had done a story on this market in India and how it is booming, but somehow, despite the massive explosion in the media, there seems to be almost no reading material - rather daily or even weekly reading material targeting the 8-18 market, and that seems to baffle me.
I'm fairly sure that I am not alone when I say that the early years of India Today's Target magazine were brilliant. Of course, the magazine did lose it towards its later years and its second avataar as 'Teens Today' was one of the Group's more colossal publishing disasters - because it tried to go after both the early-teen and late-teen market. As any marketer with half a brain will tell you, the 13-14-15 age group is quite a different proposition from the 16-17 age group and the 18-19 age group is a different kettle of fish altogether. target actually had value propositions that appealed - thanks in no small part to Ajit Ninan's great cartoons and I hope that Times of India asks him to restart some of his strips - or maybe start something new altogether - to a wider variety of readers. However, in a fragmented market like today, such a scenario is not possible.
Now, the reason many magazines and newspapers don't start publications for this segment of the market is because they feel that the market is either too small or that they will not get advertising. The latter reason is more crucial - publishers will tell you that they're competing in the age of TV and the internet and people don't read. They don't? That is news to me, I read when I was young, and by the time I got to middle school, cable TV was in India in all its glory - I mean I had MTV with VJ Nonie and 24x7 of Rock n'Roll.
Yet, by the time I got to that stage I had finished most of Gerald Durrell and started out on Wodehouse and I was still buying Hardy Boys Casefiles books (I discovered much to my surprise I still have a lot of my Hardy Boys books along with their impossible and improbable plots - but they were fun, and in a cupboard in Calcutta I still have some old Target and Indrajaal comics lying about). Those were good days!
But young people read, maybe less nowadays because of blogs and the internet, but I've said this before, a well-produced and well-written newspaper or magazine will give you in half an hour what most people take half a day to find on the internet. I mean, the printed word or page, whichever way you look at it still has the ability to surprise. After all, I plonk down a significant amount of money to read GQ, even though I can find a lot of the content online, because I want to. I like Nerve, but Nerve would be cooler if I could hold it. And no matter what you say, a Playmate in a three-fold foldout in Playboy, looks a lot nicer than scrolling down on a monitor, even if you have a 19-inch LCD. Maybe I'm old-fashioned or maybe I'm like this because I get my genes from a journalist on one side and a publisher on the other, or maybe I'm environmentally callous and like the feel of paper.
Maybe I'm just growing too old! I have to drive a car at 200 ticks to put a smile on my face nowadays! But thats just me!

Don’t trust readership surveys.

Whenever someone from within journalism writes on readership surveys the first response is to accuse the writer of having an ‘interest’ in the piece. Your result was very good or very bad, otherwise you won’t write. But, I am not because our results are bad but because surveys are extremely flawed, and I will use the example not of the publication I work for but for the publication which claims to be our ‘biggest’ rival.
Let us call this magazine W. Now, in the first survey that came out a couple of months ago, W had a readership of around 650K. They promptly proclaimed themselves #1 in their space (albeit by a very small margin) and didn’t give a damn that deeper digging into the results showed that almost three-quarters of their readers didn’t ‘own’ their copies. Anyway, it has to be said that their product is better than what it was earlier, and they had made significant gains. That said, the organizers of the first survey claim that there might have been a sampling error regarding us.
But, the surprise came in the second survey. My publication, which we will call T saw readership quite similar to the first survey, in fact more or less the same, which kinda works. W on the other hand saw the second survey give it a readership of 240K and a third magazine, which I will call I saw readership go from 300K in one survey to 500K in another. Now, these two results made me become very skeptical of surveys, not that I wasn’t earlier. But a 400,000 variation is a bit weird for anyone.
I mean, there are broad trends can be sensed from reading survey numbers – magazines are steady (slightly down), ET is declining even more (which says a lot about the product) and at least one business daily claims to have a circulation higher than its readership in BOTH surveys – now that as someone described was akin to someone shutting their eyes, buying the papers and then cleaning their bums after a shit. Even though, I can pretty much testify from personal experience that newsprint is a very bad substitute for TP.
Anyway, the problem therefore is what can you trust? Which survey can you trust? I mean in Delhi, one survey says ToI leads by 100K another gives HT a similar lead. The problem is that surveys tend to be conducted by a bunch of idiots, who put up logos and ask you if you have read that particular publication at all in the previous XX months. While that works for a magazine, even if I happened to read a particular paper once in three months, and that too not out of choice, I will be counted as a reader, I don’t think that is very accurate, would you?
Anyway, at the end of the day, my publication pulls in two-thirds of all the ad-revenue in the segment, so really readership surveys or not, we make a ton of money and as someone said, that is what really matters right now. But, honestly, there needs to be a significant overhul in the way readership surveys are conducted in India, firstly I believe that we should have one independent survey rather than two 'competing' surveys and there also needs to be a major overhaul of the methodology, so that large widespread marketing and advertising campaigns which are timed to coincide with surveys get negated. Anyway, these are just my two little itsy-bitsy paise on the topic.
On another note, traffic has collapsed all over Delhi today, I'm still sitting in office too scared to face the traffic.