I’ve never believed that print is dead. I’ve always believed that there are two problems with print journalism today. One is lack of advertising, some parts of which will come back, and two, when nobody is buying your magazine or your newspaper, it’s because you’re not writing what people want to read.

Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York and media magnate quoted in The New York Times following his company’s acquisition of Businessweek magazine.

I’d add a third point to Bloomberg’s list. Print started on the path to unsustainability twenty years ago when corporate spivs started buying media companies and pumping them dry in order to squeeze unrealistic profits from them.

It’s been said before, but you can’t run a media operation like a grocery store.

There’s no question the Internet is hurting print publications, but the technology is simply speeding up a process that was already well under way long before anyone Googled anything.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Bloomberg buys BusinessWeek (latimesblogs.latimes.com)
• Bloomberg plans to take over BusinessWeek magazine (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Bloomberg acquires BusinessWeek (news.bbc.co.uk)

Hugh Hefner's Trump magazine Image via Wikipedia

This morning the grimly fascinating magazine death pool site noted the demise of Trump – a quarterly glossy magazine for affluent Americans. It carried advertising for overpriced luxury items. No doubt the magazine folded because there aren’t so many affluent Americans these days. Nor are there so many companies selling the yachts and limousines that featured in the ads. Its, er, successful launch was covered in Trump’s Luxury Magazine Off To A Good Start.

Although it carries his name, Trump isn’t the magazine devoted to all things Donald. There was such a monstrosity, but it closed years ago. By all accounts it was a horrible journal.

While it could be argued there’s a satirical aspect to the recently departed publication, Trump magazine is not the same as the Hugh Hefner magazine with the same name that only survived two issues in the 1950s.

Magazine Death Pool: Trump Magazine: RIP May 2009.

Rupert Murdoch’s The Australian has a Media section which is often a cracking read for those of us who work in and around newspaper and magazine publishing. The newspaper’s media pages don’t shirk from running stories that debunk common myths (often self-perpetuated myths) about the internal workings of the media and the challenges the industry faces.

A good example is The winter of journalism’s content which points out that online publishing, which is widely expected to supplant newspapers and magazines, will only go so far in replacing them and leave a gaping hole. This has huge implications and is something I’ve worried about for some time now.

The economics of online publishing mean there simply isn’t enough money to pay for the in-depth news investigations and searching features on politics, crime and other social issues that are so important to modern democracies.

As we all know, advertisers are bailing out of print publications. They are drawn to the web because they see it as a more cost-effective and accountable medium (that’s a disputable assumption we’ll leave for another day).

In particular, online advertisers like to place their messages next to niche interest stories to more closely target interested readers. For example car makers prefer to buy banner ads on pages featuring lightweight stories about driving.

Even if a publisher could find the money to produce hard news stories, advertisers wouldn’t want them. The obvious answer is to publish fewer hard news stories and more of the marketable lightweight fluff. However, it’s traditionally been those difficult, hard news stories that have sold printed newspapers that dragged in readers in the first place.

But this vicious economic cycle is nothing compared to what can happen in a society that no longer has a viable mechanism for scrutinising governments and out-of-control corporations.

Any fool can write a good press release that hits its target audience and creates an impact. Writing one that fails to make an impression requires more work. Fortunately there are people who have mastered the art. As an editor I’ve seen some great performance over the years and I’d like to share this expertise with you.

Here are my top ten tips for ensuring your press release gets minimum attention:

1. Cripple its chances of reaching editors and journalists

Everyone can read plain text messages contained in the body of an email. The message will almost certainly get through to any kind of desktop email clients, all flavours of web mail, as well as Blackberries, iPhones and Palm Pilots. To reach less than 100 percent of your potential audience, try putting some of the following clever barriers in the way.

Attachments are an effective way of cutting down the reach of your press release. People reading email on mobile devices often have trouble reading them. Spam filters can treat them with suspicion and if you’re lucky the recipient may use Lotus Notes as a client and have difficulty decoding the attachment.

Another advantage of attachments is that you can trim your audience further by using difficult-to-open file formats: such as the new .docx file format used by Word 2007 – many journalists will struggle to read them.

Attachments are great for bulking up the size of your release so it won’t squeeze through email gateways. If you’re  clever you can put high resolution logos in, say, your Word attachments.  These add  nothing to the press release but can swiftly push the file size over the email gateway threshold.

A further reason for a sending press release as an attachment is its invisibility to email search. So, when a journalist decides to look for your press release among the hundreds and thousands in their email in-box, it will be extremely difficult to find.

2. Minimize relevance

One of the best ways to make sure your press release fails is to make sure it has no relevance to any sane audience. For example, if you are a technology company and you buy a new fleet of cars you can squander your PR budget and make sure any future release goes directly to an editor’s recycle bin by sending the story to the technology press.

3. Send it out whenever

Timeliness is everything. So by sending out releases when you feel like it, you can boost your chances of failure. Better still, for print publications try waiting until five minutes after the final deadline. For online publications wait until the story has already broken elsewhere.

4. Organize schedules so contacts are unavailable for interview

Good journalists are such annoying creatures. Rather than simply printing your press release verbatim and passing the contact details over to their advertising departments, they may want to speak to the people mentioned in your releases. A tried and tested technique for avoiding these complications is to send the people overseas shortly after dispatching the release. International communications are good these days, so just packing them off to a partner conference in Atlanta isn’t good enough, you need to make sure they are on an 18 hour trans-pacific flight or, better still, holidaying on a remote island.

5. Use poor writing skills

Obvious when you think about it. If your writing is poor and confused so that editors and journalists can’t understand your message you’ll kill two birds with one stone.

First, you’ll make sure the first message gets spiked in the too hard basket.

But second, as a bonus, you can establish your reputation as an illiterate idiot that isn’t worth bothering with under any circumstances. That way, your future releases will go straight to the junk pile without even being read.

6. Try bullying

Sadly this powerful technique is often underused. By threatening to talk to a journalist’s editor, or an editor’s boss about their poor response to your press release you can permanently undermine your relationship with scores of people (remember journalists talk to each other so this is an efficient way of burning lots of bridges).

Another approach is to tell the journalist the company in question is advertising thus triggering their professional editorial independence.

7. Don’t bother with photographs

Journalists and editors like photographs. They love good photographs. By making sure they are no photographs of any description you’ll increase the chances that your press release is regarded as totally useless. If you think that’s taking things too far, try sending out crappy, unusable photos. Photos with dozens of un-named people work well in this respect. Getting people to hold champagne glasses, stand in front of company logos, gather around a totally unreadable normal-size bank cheque or impersonate public enemy number one mug shots are all effective techniques for creating instantly ignorable press release photographs.

8. Send it to everyone regardless

This is a great way to upset journalists and degrade both your personal and company reputation. At the same time if you work for a PR agency you can bill the client heaps for having a, er, comprehensive, mailing list and then bill them for time as you and your staff spend all day on the phone dealing with angry editors.

9. Keep things as dull as possible

Journalists prefer interesting stories. Public relations professionals recognise this and use clever tricks like passive sentences, boring ideas, irrelevant background facts, tired clichéd adjectives and implausible anodyne quotes to turn them off and help speed their press releases on their way to the great recycle bin in the sky.

In house and government public relations people are usually better at delivering boring releases than agency staff – if you’re worried your writing sparkles too much, they have much to teach you.

10. Make sure the subject line obscures the message

Even experienced public relations operatives can slip up by giving an email release an interesting subject line. The danger is that after putting in all the hard work required to guarantee nobody takes the slightest notice of their press release they use active language to put a relevant timely subject line message that tempts editors and journalists to open the document and read more.

The good news is there are fail-safe subject lines that are certain to turn off editors and journalists so they can just skip past your release. A classic subject line like press release will probably work, if that’s too simple try important press release or important press release from Company Name.

A neat by-product of badly written subject lines is they can often fool spam detection engines into rejecting a message altogether; phrases like important announcement from Company Name or message for Clark Kent can come in handy here.

New Zealand’s technology press may already be well past its ‘peak oil‘ moment but there’s still plenty of life left in the sector. At one time there were more than 20 active locally-published print titles covering various aspects of the computer business and related technologies. I estimate that at the top of the market, the collective circulation of these titles would have run to more than 400,000, today the total circulation of local technology titles would be under 100,000. Some titles have gone to the great recycle bin in the sky. Others, particularly those serving smaller niches, have now switched to online-only publication. Others may follow.

We’ll look at the online titles in a separate post later, but for now here’s a master list of the main specialist technology publications currently published in New Zealand:

ComputerWorld New Zealand: A weekly information technology newspaper, it frequently breaks local news stories ahead of mainstream newspapers. The print edition is in tabloid format. ComputerWorld is mainly read by senior technical executives and other people who work with IT. The title has been printed in New Zealand for more than 20 years.

These days ComputerWorld is clearly the dominant specialist IT news publication in New Zealand.

New Zealand PC World: A monthly A4 magazine mainly sold on bookstands, in supermarkets and petrol stations. It’s read by technical types who get to choose or heavily influence the products they use at work and home. Contains reviews and how to features. Coverage is largely focused on personal aspects of computing. Includes some games and consumer electronics material. The August edition featured the recently introduced 3G iPhone on the cover — an indication that PC World had moved way beyond just covering conventional desktop computers.

For more information see: A quick guide to New Zealand’s specialist tech publications: PC World

New Zealand Reseller News: Fortnightly tabloid newspaper for people who sell and otherwise work in the IT channel. Has strong news focus with emphasis on business and people stories long with regular advice features and commentary. Now more than ten years old. New Zealand Reseller News is only sent to qualified readers (i.e. people who work in the IT channel)  who have requested the publication. In recent months Reseller has broadened its coverage to include more product related stories.

CIO New Zealand: Influential monthly A4 magazine focusing on the business and strategic aspects of large scale IT. Mainly feature based. Read by the people who make corporate buying decisions in large organisations. Published since 1999. Has a strong, active community with a comprehensive events program.

Gear Guide: PC World spin off now on its second edition, essentially a buyers’ guide for home computer products and consumer electronics. A4 magazine format, sold on bookstands.

Tone: Good-looking monthly A4 bookstand magazine covering home entertainment, technology and hi-fi. Heavy product focus, i.e. mainly contains product reviews and product-related features. Technology content is relatively minor compared to Tone’s consumer electronics coverage.

The Channel: Monthly A4 magazine for the IT channel. Feature driven, lots of guides and “how to” stories. Now two years old.  Distributed to people working in ‘the IT channel’. Much of the content is paid ‘advertorial’. Tends to run pages of photographs from events without identifying the people.

iStart: Quarterly A4 magazine for “business and IT managers needing to improve their business with web based technology.” Mainly contains paid-for case studies. Has appeared on bookstands in the past, but the print edition doesn’t appear to be on sale any more (can anyone confirm this?).

New Zealand Netguide: Monthly A5 bookstand magazine aimed at less-technical readers. As the name suggests the publication largely covers Internet related stories, but it also has product reviews and some games coverage. Recently sold by ACP Media to Action Media.

Telecommunications Review: According to the web site’s subscription’s page the print edition of Telecommunications Review will return in May or June 2008. At the time of writing this hasn’t happened. When Telecommunications Review was previously published it was a monthly, glossy trade newspaper for people working in the industry and their more technically sophisticated customers — in practice this meant pages of stories about Telecom New Zealand the dominant player in this market.

IT Brief: A monthly A4 magazine of “peer reviewed industry comment” (although some of the content appears to be written by public relations companies) aimed at senior business and IT executives within corporate, government and (sic) enterprise businesses.  Disclosure: I’ve only seen a photocopied version of this so far.

Interface: Published eight times a year (twice each school term), Interface is an A4 magazine aimed at school teachers responsible for using computers and information technology in the classroom. There’s a fuller description of Interface in a separate post here.

Actv8: A quarterly free magazine for school students. Distributed via schools and supported by the Ministry of Education. Actv8 promotes careers and higher education courses in technology related areas. The stories tend to be short and written for teenagers, the design is colourful and loose.

MyMobile: A monthly mobile phone buyers guide with reviews and articles on how to get the most from mobile phones. Sold on bookstands. A5 size.

If there’s anything missing from this list, please add a link in the comments below.

If you have a product or service to sell, it’s important that as many potential customers as possible get to hear about it. Word-of-mouth marketing is a great jumping off point when you’re starting out but eventually you’ll almost certainly need to reach a wider audience. This usually means engaging with newspapers, magazines, the Internet through web sites and blogs or broadcast media.

There are two basic ways a business can use media to get attention; advertising and publicity. Newcomers sometimes confuse the two. That’s a big mistake as they are radically different and operate in parallel universes.

Advertising is always a strictly commercial matter. Generally you buy a fixed amount of space in a printed publication or air time from a radio or TV broadcaster. Online is more complicated, but it generally comes down to display advertising like banners and boom boxes or text ads. These can appear on web sites, in electronic newsletters or even as part of an application like Gmail. When you buy advertising you provide the advertising content, or what people in the business call copy, at your expense.

If you’ve got enough budget you can hire a creative team to prepare the copy on your behalf. This costs money, in some cases a lot of money, but it can be worth it if you’re running a major campaign: clued-up advertising specialists know how to press the right buttons and get results. They can be brilliant, but this isn’t always the case.

With advertising you get to say where, when and how often the copy will run. More importantly you have complete control over the message and the way it is delivered. (Well up to a point; some publishers will refuse certain ads and there are laws about what you can and can’t say in an advertisement). Advertising prices are loosely-based on the number of readers, listeners or viewers the media delivers. Experienced buyers of advertising often think in terms of CPM or the cost of reaching one thousand people.

In contrast with advertising, you have almost no control over publicity; all the important decisions are made by editors, journalists, photographers and other media professionals. They may choose to listen to you or read your material, but they might equally ignore your input.

In principal it all depends on the newsworthiness of your message. If your story strikes a chord, they’ll take notice. If it’s boring, they’ll ignore it.

Surprising though it may sometimes seem, professional journalists have a strict ethical code. They are not for sale. Their job is to keep their readers informed about important events in their own area regardless of any external commercial considerations.

This is why you should avoid applying any kind of commercial pressure when seeking publicity. For example, don’t imply that you will place advertising with their media property in return for favourable treatment.

At best you will insult them or offend their professional pride. At worst you will create a situation where ethical considerations mean they either can’t touch your story or they choose to take a more hostile approach just to sheet home their independence.

If they take notice of your publicity, the best media operators will attempt to get behind the message you want to send. Their over-riding loyalty is to their readers. Professional journalists don’t regard aiding your sales as any part of their job. Nor should they.

This might seem confusing to some people, after media companies are usually commercial business. You might think editors and journalist would jump at the chance of making money. However, taking a longer term view makes good business sense. A media property with a strong ethical code will be held in high regard by its readers, listeners or viewers.

This not only means that more people get to consume the property’s editorial; it also means they get to see the advertising material. Significantly, a product with strong editorial will usually deliver the better, i.e. more involved or wealthier, kind of customer. At the same time, research shows advertising works best when the editorial is credible.

Even when a journalist does respond to your publicity in a largely favourable way, they still get to choose what is said, where it is said and when the story runs. They choose the angle. They also get to decide how many words to devote to your message and they can choose whether your rivals get to comment or not. An editor might choose to use your supplied photographs or other graphic material, they may not. A journalist – usually a sub-editor, will write the headline and captions.

You wouldn’t normally expect to pay money to a publisher when they use your publicity. However, there are some media properties that will ask for a payment in return for running it.

Alternatively some properties might agree to run your vetted publicity material in return for you buying advertising. In fact there’s a whole spectrum of arrangements from total separation of editorial and advertising all the way to properties that are, in effect, nothing but paid advertising.

At the extreme end of the scale you are dealing with vanity publishers – people who will take your money and make you look good. Your mother may like the result, but you won’t sell much this way.

As a general rule of thumb, publications that sell their editorial integrity are not well-regarded by their readers – that’s your prospective customers. Experienced publicity people often discount the value of these publications.

Apart from anything else, readers tend to know when they are looking at paid-for editorial and learn to trust it less than truly independent content. In particular, younger, media literate, people are especially cynical about this kind of material.

One commonly used measure is that four of their readers would be worth one reader of a more prestigious, editorially independent title. That also applies to advertising in these publications – you can expect to pay considerably less for your space in a publication that isn’t fully independent.

While many businesses organise their own publicity, others hire specialists to do it for them. The most common arrangement involves hiring a public relations or PR consultant. Amongst other things it’s their job to know which media properties and individual media professionals are receptive to which message.

A good PR company can save you a huge amount of time and trouble. They’ll help you prepare your message and train you in the art of handling the inevitable follow-up questions. They’ll make sure the message gets to the right people at the right time.

Some public relations companies have a considerable amount of intellectual property tied up with publication and journalist databases. Other operators keep all this information in their heads, Palm Pilots or Filofaxes. They cultivate contacts and learn the best way to approach each potential outlet.

Be warned that public relations companies rarely guarantee results. In fact, you should go out of your way to avoid any PR operator who makes that kind of promise.

One misconception is that publicity is all about issuing press releases or holding press conferences. Both can have an important role to play, but they are only the tip of the iceberg; most important PR takes place out of sight. We’ll look more at this later.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Future PR Skills 2008: Create a “New Media Relations” Program
• Internet Ad Spend To Pass Broadcast By 2011, Despite Slowing Economy: VSS
• Get Noticed (and Other PR Blog Jots)
• TV Decoder: Traditional Media Not Dead Yet

Few technology publications are as specialist as Interface; a computer magazine for New Zealand school teachers.

Interface is now one year old and published eight times a year – a strange schedule until you realise that it means two editions each school term. The glossy A4 magazine typically runs to 40 pages, 36 printed on gloss art paper and the cover on heavier stock.

While the nominal cover price is $8, and you can buy copies, Interface doesn’t appear on bookstands. Most readers are subscribers and there are deals for multiple subscriptions going to a single school. The circulation is not audited, but according to the publisher it sits at around 8,000.

About 30 percent of the pages are advertising – there’s solid support from educational specialists as well as top technology brands such as Toshiba and Hewlett-Packard.

Interface is published by G Media, in effect, the editor Greg Adams. Editorially it contains a mixture of news and case studies along with how-to stories. It feels more like a teaching resource than a conventional computer magazine or newspaper, though it typically leads with news stories on the front cover.

Most, if not all, content is locally written – sometimes by practicing teachers. The writing style is mainly journalistic, even chatty and shows Adams’ newspaper pedigree.

Starting in July, Interface will also be published in Malaysia, inserted into Just English, a monthly teacher’s magazine with a circulation of 10,000.

The first in a series of posts looking at New Zealand’s tech publishing market and the key players.

PC World’s audited ABC circulation of 15,565 and Nielsen readership figure of 148,000, makes it New Zealand’s most-read specialist technology publication by a country mile. It’s a monthly magazine, which in New Zealand means 11 issues a year with a combined December and January edition.

In August 2006 Fairfax Business Media bought the New Zealand licence for PC World from IDG. In that year Fairfax acquired the bulk of IDG’s NZ business picking up four titles – two titles, Unlimited and Actv8, went to Infego under a separate agreement and one title, Fast Forward closed.

Before August 2006 IDG published PC World in New Zealand by IDG since 1989 when it was a tabloid supplement in ComputerWorld.

At the time of writing PC World is typically 112 A4 colour pages printed on gloss art paper, plus a cover on heavier stock. Advertising makes up about a quarter to a third of the pages. It’s perfect bound with a DVD disc which is inserted rather than cover mounted.

The magazine is mainly sold on bookstands with a cover price of NZ$8.90 – this is competitive with larger, overseas published titles. The magazine can also be found in larger petrol stations and supermarkets. A significant percentage of readers are subscribers.

PC World’s readers are predominately highly-educated, well-heeled men. It occupies the much same market niche as Australian Personal Computer, PC User and PC Authority. There are new product reviews, group tests, news features and plenty of how-to advice stories.

Typically well over half the editorial content is locally written and the overseas material is often given a local slant and boosted with local boxes and other material. PC World’s New Zealand staff and freelances are highly regarded.

Strictly speaking New Zealand PC World doesn’t have any direct print competitors, it’s nearest local rival for readers and advertising revenue would be ACP’s New Zealand NetGuide, but that title sells to less sophisticated users.

Disclosure: I worked for Fairfax Business Media, the publisher of PC World.