Conserving Jet and Ebony in The Digital Era

March 9, 2009

Like many media companies, Johnson Publishing Company, the publisher of Ebony and Jet magazines, is rumored to be dangerously close to wiping out under the waves of the crashing economy. And everybody seems to have an opinion as to why Johnson Publishing and the readers of both marquee brands should do whatever it takes to keep both magazines afloat.

William Read and Eric Easter both gave their two cents on the greater impact of the magazine publisher and the industry at large in articles published in EURweb.com and ebonyjet.com. While both bring up some valid points, neither seems to appreciate the magnitude of digital media’s role in Johnson Publishing’s struggles.

Read’s perspective correctly emphasizes the cultural importance of keeping Johnson Publishing, but completely ignores economic realities and only briefly addresses why the habits of younger generations matter so much. It’s Johnson Publishing that needs to adjust to changing times, not readers who need adjust to the struggling publisher. They have too many other options and, in the middle of a current recession, may have to little money offer anyway. It has little to do with ethnic versus mainstream media. People who suddenly lost their jobs and income are canceling their subscriptions to Ebony probably won’t be looking to pay for Vogue either. If they do continue to pay for a magazine, they will likely pay for what is most relevant and necessary to them given their current condition. Still, I buy Read’s argument because it makes a point of emphasizing community over dollars and sense.

As the Chief of Digital Strategy for Johnson Publishing, Easter should have learned a couple things from the media newspaper execs that suffered the most fatalities under media’s recent mini-armageddon; namely, that hiding your head in the sand won’t change what’s happening in the world around you. The internet itself is powerful enough to make a seismic shift in the media landscape on its own, and will continue to make a huge impact on how people consume information.

Johnson Publishing cannot afford to give up all of its print business even if it wanted, so much greater are revenues generated from print publications than websites. But Johnson Publishing ought to consider cutting the printed version of Jet altogether and retaining the brand online for now.

In a digital era where information can be posted in seconds at little cost to the reader, Jet will continue to struggle under the pressure it’s frequency and redundancy puts on Johnson Publishing’s bottom line. The fact that Jet has to be printed, published, and mailed four to five times per month instead of once makes it a necessarily labor intensive and often redundant product. Much of the timely news Jet has to offer has likely been published on blackvoices.com, EURweb.com, or a string of other African-American news websites and blogs one or two weeks prior to when the printed version of Jet reaches its readers. As a monthly publication, Ebony’s model depends more on lengthier, insightful, and timeless pieces, and does not necessarily have to compete with the web for the latest scoop. The amount of time between issues also makes it relatively easier to run Ebony as a bare bones operation until the economy picks up again. It’s likely part of the reason why Jet’s revenue has decreased by 41% year-on-year, while Ebony’s revenue has only decreased 19%.

Johnson Publishing would be better off making cuts at Jet and continuing to produce whatever editorial it can online. This would allow Jet to actually keep up with its more newsworthy online competitors and bring the distribution costs down to nearly zero for the time being. If Johnson Publishing really wants to be bold, it can give paying subscribers of Jet full access to the brand’s content online via ebonyjet.com or a newsletter (Ebonyjet.com already offers a weekly newsletter), give non-paying visitors of the website partial or no access to the information, invite advertisers to market to their paying subscribers, and use online metrics (which are infinitely better than print circulation metrics) to track the results.

Such a strategy would give Johnson Publishing more control over the fate of its publication, rather than leave it to the mercy of the beast that is the current economy. Depending on what they find after a few months or a year or so, the publisher could decide to continue to offer Jet as a paid online subscription, offer it as free ad-based supported content, scrap the publication altogether, or reintroduce the print magazine under healthier market conditions in the future.

Category: Digital Media, Diversity, Strategy, Trends, web 2.0 | Tags: ebony, ebonyjet.com, economy, Ethnic Media, Jet, media, Online Magazine

Nokware Knight

Not to beat a dead horse, but I found a pretty relevant post on Racialicious.com. I hope that all this is taken as an opportunity to adjust to the real needs and desires of Johnson Publishing's readers and the advertisers who want to reach them, not an attack on the magazine itself.

http://www.racialicious.com/2009/03/27/should-b...

Bob Davis

Actuall the answer is simple. If they want bto remain as viable entities then they should by the indy Black owned entities that long ago "took their space" on the internet (some of whom have been mentioned in this thread) and re-invent the Jet/Ebony brand with those internet entities creating/delivering the content. And then taking the best of that content and republishing it on a quarterly basis for the print audience.

This should have been done long ago, so the costs involved in doing so now will be expensive, however if they want to stay in the game, that is their most sucessful path.

(dat's my $0.02)

Nokware Knight

And to be clear... I am not on the "print is dead" bandwagon. I am actually a fan of the monthly print channel because content is often better written, more thought out, and less redundant than what is offered on the web. Also, when a person is reading a magazine that is all he/she is reading at one time, and so advertisers have more of their attention for longer. Advertisers on the web have to compete with shorter attention spans of readers who can click through pages and websites at lightning pace.

Where print cannot beat the web is speed and frequency, again which is partly what Jet has depended on to separate itself. It is only dailies with enormous resources like the NY Times, Wall Street Journal, or USA Today that can compete with the internet in that respect, because they are of somewhat similar speed but of much better quality. And even those businesses are having tough times.

Okay, I think I'm done rambling for now... I hope your answer is somewhere in there.

Nokware Knight

And Ebony is a whole other story. If managed right, I expect magazines like Ebony, Essence, Giant, Vibe, etc to flourish once the economy picks up. But they will be different publications than the media boom times in the 90s and still somewhat sane business in the earlier 2000s. Instead of depending on more short articles, you'll need more features and lengthy, but still entertaining reportage to separate these print magazine. Think more Conde Nast than Maxim. So I will say I dont see why Ebony shouldnt still do well in the future. It's just Jet that really needs re-evaluate its purpose (and entire print existence) in the context of the online world we lived in.

Nokware Knight

I think Markus pretty much hit on my point.

I have always known Jet as an information source more than anything else, something that I used to catch up on things that was not being covered by other media outlets. Aside from its content and target audience, newsworthiness, timeliness, and frequency were always at the cornerstone of what made Jet different and unique.

The question I was looking to raise it now that much of what Jet offered is available on the internet on demand, is it even relevant in its weekly form? I don't think things like the cost of mailing has nearly has much to do with the publications difficulties as the internet does. Even if mailing cost half of what it was now, how does that make a weekly version of Jet more relevant to the reader who not only can get information for free online, but more importantly, nearly as fast as it happens?

Think about it. It's the print sources that depend upon frequency and being the first to deliver news with no true differentiation in terms of content that has suffered the most. It has been the tabloid magazines and the newspapers that have have gone down first for that reason.

I don't know any other way to say that oftentimes what I read in Jet is old news by the time I see it. I'm not sure how its a viable business offline as a weekly magazine. And the information delivered does not seem to be altogether different than what's available on other websites. Jet can counter this by reducing the delivery time of content down to a day (which would require the internet) or delivering much more focused content to a more specific audience, which would in turn still reduce its circulation numbers anyway, so you are back at square one.

Also, as you have more generations accustomed to getting their news online by the second, the less relevant a weekly information source like Jet will be in its current form. It's not just about the cost, but how long the content takes to get delivered when we are talking about news. Even local papers will struggle unless they are of good quality, cover the same and more content than what is available on the internet (as relevant to their audience), and/or are daily. Keeping up when you are talking about frequency and newsworthiness being what separates you from your peers becomes a game of who is the best reporter, who can get the best and most relevant information out there the fastest. And that takes resources and a lightning fast response. As I see it, it's nearly impossible for Jet to offer the information as quickly as can be done on the web. That again, is less about cost and more about time. If a time-dependent print publication like Jet could deliver quality news faster than it's peers on the internet, then this would be a different conversation altogether. I am just not sure it can be done.

I agree that the solution requires a multi-channel effort that includes web, services, print, etc. Where I disagree with your article is that the internet really is a top, if not the, deciding source and factor of why a magazine like Jet is falling.

Andre Holmes

I concur on about every solution that the Eric made. My 6yrs on the Photo News desk at the Washington Post gave me the first viable look in to the demise of print media and how News deliver is forever changing. My good friend and former associate Dudley Brooks is the photo editor at both magazines and I am very concerned on how this Black editorial gem of news transitions into this new media and information matrix we now communicate in.

I'm sure were there is a will the will be a way!

Good stuff Blackweb2.0

Andre Holmes
http://www.urbanthinking.net/

bobino

Odd article. Not sure how you read my article to say anything different than yours. Might want to read it again.

It wasn't an article about Ebony or Jet or the web. It was simply about whether companies who only do print - like some magazine and newspaper companies still do (not Ebony and Jet) by the way) - could ever survive. Some smaller, nimbler publications for whom less profit is more than enough will be fine, but the big guys in print only - no, most likely not.

But it also doesn't do what so many writers do, which is to say the web is responsible for print's demise. One of the nails in the coffin, but not the only one. There's an array of factors from time management to other things, but the web is one symptom and not the disease itself. Print's been dying a rapid death for the last 30 years. More people are just talking about it now. And how people get their news has not been the biggest problem for newspapers, but how people get their classifieds. Craigslist killed more papers than,say, Huffington Post. 40% of most newspapers' money came from classifieds.

Actually anyone thinking that the web is THE solution is equally wrong. It is one of them, but media companies will have to move away from ad-based models and develop diverse business models [consumer goods, research, audience intelligence, selling databases] to help fund their digital strategies since it will be a good 5 years or more before digital money makes up for print revenue 1:1.

Eric Easter

markusrobinson

Lets not forget the old adage that content is king, because the print industry has been printing and shipping crap for quite a while now. The web helped accelerate prints demise, by pointing out the fact that most papers were simply re-printing Reuters and AP articles. In a web savvy world that just wont cut it.

Nokware wisely pointed out that people need a more compelling content in order to pay for a monthly magazine. If a blog delivers for free the same content daily that it takes a magazine months to compile, then why would I pay and wait for it?

So you're right about print dying for quite sometime, but the web was more than just a symptom, it delivered the death blow.

ybpguide

The problem with Ebony/Jet, and all newspapers/mags on the old medium, is that they've failed to become an online service and content distributor. A lot of these companies are trying to hard to hold onto content, that they are missing the boat (and revenue model) that the internet provides for them

Let's think outside of ad revenue, because that is a crowded market.

What does Ebony/Jet provide, content-wise, that is unique and valuable? High quality content.

I would say, don't make the average reader pay for that content because the internet model of 'free content' has already been established. What you need is a micro model for other clients. Ebony/Jet can become a distributor.

Some ideas:
- Create a subscription, exclusive blogging network.
- W/in that network, outline an ad revenue sharing model.
- License their content, on a yearly, annual subscription fee, to blogs and other sites that want to use their pictures and articles.
- Provide a subscription fee for bloggers to get their exclusive, protected Twitter updates for breaking news (since print can run behind a breaking story)
- Create an API so other blogs, programmers, and services can create applications that use their content (photo galleries, archives, interaction tools)

These mediums need to get more creative and engage their audience while they still have it.