Following fast on the heels of the demise of Converting Magazine (Webhandlingblog 4/20/2010) and Paper Film Foil magazine (Webhandlingblog 8/27/2011), we now have the Penton owned American Printer shutting down after 128 years of publication. Both the paper and website versions of the magazine are affected. American Printer is somewhat larger in both paper monthly subscriptions (47,000) and website hits (40,000) as is not unexpected given that the printing industry is much bigger than the sum total of the rest of the converting industry is.
Just after writing the blog post about 10 days ago, I got a tip (many leads come from readers) that American Printer rises from the dead like a zombie. It has been purchased from OutputLinks Communications Group. Specifically from their press release. OutputLinks Communications Group announced today that it acquired American Printer from Penton Media, including the printed magazine, website, special editorial reports, e-newsletters, online postings and online archives… Terms were not disclosed. It is also not clear in what form this IP will take in the near future. (ed)
What are we to make of this Hail Mary pass to save the magazine in the last few seconds of the game? I have heard a number of armchair quarterbacks (putative pundits) offer a wide variety of mostly wrong reasoning for these magazine failures.
I have heard a number of armchair quarterbacks (putative pundits) offer a wide variety of mostly wrong reasoning for these failures. It is not that digital is superior to paper (though it is in many ways). It is not due to competition, foreign or otherwise. It is not due to a crop of exceptionally poor or stodgy managers. It is much simpler. There is no profit model for either paper or digital for almost all of the (web) industry tech journalism. Even simpler, the lack of advertising dollars (which account for the great majority of the revenue) are inadequate to pay the salaries of the staff, much less than the writers (who mostly write free in exchange for advertising) much less generating a reasonable profit expected by any investor or owner. These advertising dollars come mostly from a mix of machine builder and component/material suppliers. Why don’t our machine builders and material suppliers support print and digital media? One reason is the Great Recession. Another is that marketing studies have shown conventional advertisement techniques (both paper and digital) are ineffective. We are inured; we simply gloss over ads and do not see them. There may be more reasons.
So where do we sit for the near future? First, technical information will be essentially frozen at what currently exists as there is little new R&D. Second, technology transfer (of even existing technology) will be made more difficult as journalism to get the word out (print or website) decreases as one magazine and website and author after another goes dark with few new ones to take their place.