Print is Dead

Last year The Mennonite, the magazine of the Mennonite Church in the USA, published a press release about the resignation of its editor, Everett Thomas.

In the press release, board chair Barth Hague recognized Thomas’ contributions and added, “During [his] tenure as editor, The Mennonite has grown from a print magazine to a content distribution system for Mennonite Church USA.”

“Content Distribution System.” That was the first time I had heard that phrase. So I called Hauge, vice president for university relations and chief marketing officer at Wichita State University in Kansas.

“We’re transitioning from being a magazine to a content distribution system,” he said of how The Mennonite offers a traditional print magazine, website, blogs, podcasts, video and a weekly information e – mail called T – Mail.

“The traditional methods of sharing content are waning—it’s rapidly becoming digital now,” he said. “The media are being transformed.”

And it’s not just the media, he continued. “The audience is also being transformed. The way they access content, participate with content providers. They are moving away from buying content to accessing it and interacting with it.”

On one level, it seems to be working for The Mennonite. Visits to the website are growing, as is the circulation of T – Mail.
On another level, however, things are still challenging.

Like many publications, The Mennonite can’t get people to pay for online content. And advertisers don’t want to pay top dollar for ads on websites—or even buy any advertising at all.

Despite the challenges, Hague says change is unavoidable. Circulation for print magazines is aging and declining.

“The number one reason for losing readers is death,” he stated of the publication’s declining circulation. Those print readers “are not being replaced.”

I found a similar message on The Guardian’s media blog. “You’re not, in any traditional sense, editing the news,” wrote veteran journalist Peter Preston about the role of editors today. “You’re an intermediary – cum – overseer, manipulating it to best effect, steering rather than decision – making.”

According to Preston, journalism today, “via web or app, can still be fine and probing, but it cannot be edited in any strict sense, any more than TV cable news churning day and night. The digital age, he went on to say “is making editors redundant.”

According to Cindy Royal, a professor of journalism at Texas State University, all editors are techies now. “If you are a journalism educator or media professional, I have news for you,” she says. “We work in tech.”

That’s not what editors and reporters signed up for when they entered the profession of journalism 20, 10, or even five years ago, she went on to say. But things have changed.

“While some of the tenets of the profession we formerly knew as journalism have remained, workflows, business practices, participants, and competitors are all very different,” she says. 

“Internet and web technologies don’t just represent a new medium where print and multimedia can live in harmony. The ways we communicate both personally and professionally have been profoundly altered.

Communication is technology, and technology is communication. That’s the true convergence.”

This is not the first time the world has experienced a communications revolution. As Elizabeth Eisenstein noted in her book, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, people 500 years ago struggled to understand and come to terms with the unsettling changes wrought by Gutenberg and his invention.

It took about 100 years for the full impact of the printing press to be felt, she concluded. During that time, jobs were lost, whole new jobs and industries were created, and institutions and belief systems were challenged and changed.

It was, she wrote, a chaotic and uncertain time—a time much like today. The big difference between then and now, though, is the speed at which the change is occurring. This time it won’t take 100 years. But the uncertainty is the same; nobody really knows what is coming next.

Clay Shirky is one of the leading experts on the effects of the Internet today. Reflecting on the changes happening in the world of communications, he says: “During revolutions, the old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.”

One thing is for sure: Print is no longer going to be the main way people share information. The respected Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California predicts that, due to falling circulation and advertising revenues, most print newspapers in North America will not exist in five years.

Closer to home, editors of church publications are a bit more optimistic. Over 40 per cent of members of the Canadian Church Press say their print publications will not exist in 10 years—so there’s a bit more time to hold a paper magazine in your hands.

The Presbyterian Record doesn’t see itself disappearing anytime soon, but it is facing the same challenges. Subscriptions are declining through attrition; advertising revenues are also falling. Costs, however, keep increasing. What can the board and editors do for this new digital future?

1.Remember what business it is in: Church newspapers and magazines are not in the publishing business. They’re in the information sharing and community connection business. Publishing just happens to be the most effective and economical format since the birth of the printing press.

Web sites and social media are a way to share information, certainly. But that can’t be all. Instead of publishing content, in paper or online, magazines could itinerate speakers, set up neighbourhood salons, hold symposiums and conferences, make videos or do podcasts. All of these things involve communication, and none of them involve printing.

2. Ask the right question. The need to share and communicate information will always exist, but the need for physical books, magazines or newspapers may not.

Figuring out how people in the church will communicate in the future is the key for the newspaper, magazine and book industries. But finding the answer starts with asking the right question.

3. Stop thinking about publishing schedules. Publishing schedules were set up for the convenience of the publication and the publishers and editors—not the readers. The Internet has flipped that on its head.

Today, if an article is finished, it can be released to the public immediately. The idea of making people wait a month to hear what happened at a conference or convention is now completely archaic. It’s a sure path to a different kind of ruin—the ruin of irrelevance.

Today, when people can tweet about events in real time, nobody wants to wait days or weeks or longer to read a summary of what happened.

4. Use social media to find solutions. Quirky is the name of a new company that builds products dreamed up by amateur inventors. From its office in New York City, it invites all sorts of slap – dash doodlers from around the world to send ideas for overcoming challenges and problems—no matter how strange, weird or fantastic. Quirky then takes the best ideas, giving them to skilled engineers who take them through the design, manufacturing and distribution process.

This new way of solving problems is called “combinatorial innovation”—taking the idea of crowd – sourcing beyond its traditional use of raising money and using it to create new products. As one of Quirky’s founders put it: “There are tons of creative ideas out there. The greatest thing about digital technology is that it’s easier than ever to get lots of eyeballs looking about our biggest problems.”
What if publications acted like Quirky? Opening up the conversation about sharing information could be a game – changer—not just because there would be more shots on goal, but also because they would come from surprising angles and from people no one expected.

5. Finally, make sure the church is part of the conversation. This isn’t about the future of the Record; it’s about the future of communication and information sharing in the Presbyterian Church in Canada. The fate of both are inextricably linked—the health of one impacts the other. How does the church want to build community? How does it want to hear from its members? How does it want to be a witness to the world? How can a healthy Presbyterian Record help that happen?

Looking ahead, the situation that publications like the Record find themselves in today reminds me of the old joke about the traveller who is lost in rural Ireland. He stops a farmer and asks: “How do I get to Dublin?” Replies the farmer: “Well, if that’s where you want to go, I wouldn’t start from here.”
But here is where we are. Where we go next is anyone’s guess.