MPA Digital Conference: 50 Percent of Attendees' Mags Projected To Still Be In Print In A Decade

After several years worth of events warning magazine professionals about the advent of digital and the need to get their content online in various ways, it's safe to say the future is here for Magazine Publishers of America. At very least, it was on full display at today's MPA's Fifth Digital 24/7 Conference, "Navigating the New Reality," a daylong event focused on digital strategies for keeping magazines above water in a tanking economy. Perhaps the most bracing blow of the day was delivered by panel moderator Jacob Weisberg (relative to the 100+ magazine pros in attendance, more safely esconced at all-online Slate as its chairman and editor-in-chief), when he asked panelists in his talk, "Print vs. Web: The Editorial Challenge," how many of the magazine titles represented in the room would still be in print in a decade. The question itself elicited audible gasps, but the grimmer response probably precipitated more than a few muttered curses. To his credit, Newsweek Digital general manager Geoff Weiss dared to respond: "More than half the folks here won't be in print" in a decade, he predicted, which his co-panelists, Forbes editor Paul Maidement and Gail Glickman Horwood, SVP of programming and strategy at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, more or less agreed to, without responding as explicitly. Other key points came from morning keynoter Avinash Kauahik, Google analytics evangelist, who discussed "Rethinking Decision-Making in a 2.0 World." As he sees it, "most Web sites suck" since they're a product of "the highest-paid person's opinion." He called assuming "people who read your magazine online are the same ones who read your magazine offline" a "fatally flawed assumption," advocating relentless testing to gauge what did and didn't work -- garner ad clicks, drive traffic -- in magazines' online approaches. A positive to emerge from the torpor currently plaguing the magazine industry was a bracing dose of straight talk from today's speakers. Perhaps sensing their own urgent need for transparency (or possibly just coming to grips with the futility of obfuscation at a time when even ad dollar and subscription growth don't augur survival), speakers didn't punt when it came to discussing what kind of revenue they were seeing from online and print areas within their organizations. In a panel dubbed "Raising the Digital Bar in a Down Economy," moderator Cyndi Stivers, managing editor at EW.com asked participants about the proportion of revenues their companies currently drew from print, versus online. Knot editor-in-chief Carley Roney went on-record with 50 percent, attributing her organization's higher proportion of online revenue to the "relatively recession-proof" wedding industry. BusinessWeek.com SVP and general manager Roger Neal allowed that his site's digital revenues constituted 20 percent of the company's overall, while Hearst Magazines' ever-upfront EVP and general manager John Loughlin specified that digital revenues amounted to 8-10 percent at Hearst and were "still modest in the totality." For even more insights, courtesy of the FishbowlNY Twitter feed, go here.

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MPA Digital Conference: 50 Percent of Attendees' Mags Projected To Still Be In Print In A Decade

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