Bauer Media NZ Announces Closure — Is This The End Of Magazines?
Anyone in the journalism industry can straightforwardly identify that print has been a challenging medium to work in for the past couple of years.
From walking to the corner shop to purchase the daily newspaper to opening the News app on an iPad, new media is now the rising star as readers are lured by the internet to receive the latest and hottest information.
Just like many others, I’m upset and disappointed to learn the news of Bauer Media New Zealand shutting down, effective immediately.
“This must be just temporarily,” I thought to myself. No, it isn’t.
New Zealand’s largest magazine publisher, Bauer Media, is closing down for good. That means all their publishing titles — New Zealand Listener, Woman’s Day, New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, North and South, and Next — will no longer be found on newsstands anymore.
Over the past 12 hours, I’ve read numerous articles criticizing the New Zealand government for not including magazines alongside newspapers as an essential service during this COVID-19 crisis lockdown. But on the other hand, there were also reports stating that the government had offered wage subsidy to Bauer in which the company rejected, and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said that the decision doesn’t seem to have stemmed out due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Regardless, it was shocking to learn of what happened and the news certainly got many of us pondering about the future of magazines.
As a magazine journalist myself, I can’t deny that the magazine industry has been tightening its belt for the past few years. For decades (or even generations), magazines have been playing the role of an older sibling as a platform to educate and guide many readers out there — much like a life mentor — as well as for readers to keep up with the current headlines.
Even without subscribing or intentionally heading to the newsstand, everyone would still have come across copies of magazines, be it at the hair salon, doctor’s office or on your neighbor’s coffee table. But gone were magazines’ glory days, with some major magazines have had to shut down due to the decrease in readership in the past few years.
You see, magazines depend heavily on advertising. Those pages and pages of advertisements at the beginning and end of a magazine are what sustaining a magazine’s publication.
However, times have changed. Billions of people are now relying on the internet to get free and instant content, and that my dear, eliminates the need for people to purchase printed publications. As a result, advertisers are also moving along with the crowd and targeting digital platforms.
Even though it’s saddening and concerning to see print journalism dying away, I too understand from a consumer’s point of view on why print is no longer feasible. Why would I want to pay for a print magazine with a limited amount of content (e.g. only 100 pages of content in an issue) only to read articles I’m not interested in, when I can browse the internet and consume all the media I’m searching for, for free?
The good news is, plenty of print titles were quick to jump onto the digital bandwagon and started producing content for the web. In fact, some titles even abandoned print altogether to go fully digital.
Kudos to them who had realized the strength and importance of digital media early on. But what about others who arrived at the party late?
The thing with new media is that there’s so much space to unleash all the creativity in mind but at the end of the day, there is still a tough competition against hundreds of thousands of websites trying to lure readers in with their unique content.
Today, millennials and Gen-Z are heavily consuming soft news which blurs the line between information and entertainment, leading to an increase in churnalism. Try searching for a lifestyle/ beauty/ fashion topic on Google and take a look at how many other websites offer a similar, if not, exactly similar content to its competitors.
The problem with magazines going digital is that content needs to be produced quickly or you risk losing your readers (In fact, this rule applies to almost everything that is going digital). Additionally, you need to keep your head in the game by pushing out content every single day to keep readers interested and your numbers (readership, followers, etc.) high in order to make your platform more appealing to advertisers. This inevitably puts pressure on journalists to literally churn out news and proposed content they received from PR representatives which are blasted out to hundreds of other media outlets as well.
The end result? Repeated content across multiple platforms.
Here’s the thing — I don’t see magazines losing their ground in journalism because their content is still highly relevant and sought after by readers, be it food, living, travel, beauty, fashion or tech topics. However, there’s a need for print magazines which have yet established a presence on the internet to go digital, and for the digitalized magazines to step up their game and curate high-quality content that will enrich the readers’ minds and lives.
