BoSacks Speaks Out: Presumptions of the New Normal

By BoSacks

Tue, Apr 28, 2020

BoSacks Speaks Out: Presumptions of the New Normal

In psychology, cognitive dissonance is the mental stress or discomfort experienced by an inpidual who holds two or more contradictory beliefs or ideas at the same time. In 1936 F. Scott Fitzgerald said, "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."

I'm not saying I have a first-rate intelligence, but I do have two thoughts that are rolling around in my head. They are that the publishing industry isn't in peril, but many of its employees may be. Let me see if I can explain without my head exploding.

First, the magazine industry was under stress before the rise of COVID-19. Each year advertising was down double digits, and so were magazine newsstand sales. There are, of course, many success stories out there, and that is important to recognize. You may be one of them. But when viewed as a whole, the charts and statistics were not pretty. I guess you can say there were many inpidual victories, but the war wasn't going well.

If you were struggling before February 6th, the day of the first reported death in the United States, there is no reason to think your chances are going to get any better. If you were doing well before, there is no reason you can't figure out a plan in the new developing normal.

Now is the time I point out that we don't know what normal is, and we haven't had our old normal since 2007. But the traditional methodologies and business plans that were in place in January 2020 are now mostly irrelevant. It also seems we have proved that our offices are quaint and irrelevant, too.

Presumptions of the new normal

To me, it seems apparent that we are in a time machine. A machine that accelerates whatever was happening before. If your business was in decline, that decline is now accelerated. If your business was doing well, the methodologies and the technology you used six weeks ago have taken a fast and technological leap. You have taken the entire process and launched it into the cloud. Sure we all worked in the cloud before, but not like this. Instead of taking years for the jump, you did it in days. One day you worked in an office, and the next day you stayed at home and worked, and you didn’t miss a beat. The cloud is your new best friend. You do everything but eat there. And for many of us, we are getting our food from the cloud.

Perhaps the toughest part for us to face is pulling the plug on the existing advertising model. It's fair to say that plug may have been removed for you.

Retraining Our Readers

We and the time machine we are in are also retraining our readers to get information from the cloud more than ever before.

One of my sponsors, the company Issuu, has 40 million publishers they work with if you can imagine that. The only way to have that many is for most to be hyper-local, but they have the middle and biggies, too. Issuu has 100 million reads per month. It isn't the only company having platforms like this, but since I have a relationship with them, I am aware of some of the details. Issuu said last week in the Publisher's Pandemic Round Table that readership is up 10-15% and climbing.

One of Issuu's clients said to me, "Basically we're looking at moving our magazines away from print to digital-only, largely as a result of the enforced lockdown making it harder to print and distribute." Multiply that comment by the thousands. Publishers are in the process of inventing the new normal.

Now here is the part when you ask me if printed magazines are dead? No, of course not. There will always be print magazines, and people who love the printed product. Mr. Magazine, Samir Husni, tells me his students prefer print. I believe him. But the majority of readership is moving to digital and we are diligently training them to do so. There will be printed magazines, but they will be expensive and extremely high quality. That is the only formula where print will work in the future.

Omar Khayyám once wrote:

"The Moving Finger writes;

and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

Nor all thy Tears wash out a word of it.

The world is moving on and our industry with it. People are increasingly reading magazines, newspapers, and books online. It is a fact. The new normal happens when we have a vaccine. Until then, which is probably a year away, we will be working hard and participating in the training of generations young and old to read online.



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