Yesterday, bearing Huffington Post press tags (thus the first HuffPo contributor to be so adorned?), I attended the World Magazine Congress at New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. I hung around with 900 or so magazine nuts, saw some old friends and colleagues, roamed the corridors in search of celebs, picked up dozens of freebie foreign mags, and drank a bit too much wine at lunch, where Conde Nast's Jonathan Newhouse spoke about the importance of branding.
All in all, a damn fine day. Too much wine, though. Did I mention that?
Given the somewhat diminishing influence of mags in the U.S., I thought it was worth sharing a few of the highlights from the sessions I attended. This is strictly my personal take, and others who were at the Congress (sponsored by the International Federation of the Periodical Press) may well have a different view, perhaps a more sober view. Which is why we all scribble our own notes. Only mine end up here, online.
New terms to describe who and what we are:
Generation Shuffle
The Attention Economy
Point is, tech-savvy youth in countries across the globe are restless; they want information now, here, this minute, on whatever platform is nearest. In this brave, very cool world, the connected laptop equals the city library -- and so too, in some ways, does the iPod and the mobile phone.
Someday soon, all accessible info will converge on your mobile handset. Deliverers of news and advertising will lust after whatever device you carry in the palm of your hand.
The devaluation of celebrity: Reality TV in particular has put celebrity within the reach of too many ordinary blokes. Craig Marks, editor of Blender, the music magazine, said, "The fact that the bar [to attaining fame] has been lowered so much is good for magazines, if not for humankind." But he went on to advise his fellow editors, "Don't hold your nose at 'nobody' instant celebs." They may be disposable in a week's time, but for that week, at least, their image on a cover may help to sell magazines.
Germany has the most vibrant magazine industry in the world: According to my lunchmate, Wolfgang Stock, CEO of Germany's Spotlight Verlag, his country is facing a bleak economic future, owing to an overpaid and greedy workforce. "Old Europe," especially France and Germany, will soon be overtaken by economic powerhouses in Asia, Verlag said. But when it comes to magazines, the highly educated Germans (plus their Deutsch-speaking neighbors in Belgium and Switzerland) win the worldwide smackdown. So asserts Herr Stock. The country publishes 8000 individual titles. Two or three hundred go dark every year, but 500 or so are launched.
What are monthly magazines good for these days? Someone posed that question to a panel of editors, none of whom had a convincing answer. For someone like me, who loves magazines of every kind, including monthlies (have you noticed how terrific The Atlantic has gotten in the last several years?), it hurts to admit that their influence, if not their excellence, has faded since the advent of broadband. Anyway, the editors came up with but a single response to the question: Monthlies can be "thought leaders."
One more area in which the U.S. is beginning to lose its dominance.: The distribution of global information. Harold McGraw III, CEO of the McGraw-Hill Companies, said India, China, Russia, and Brazil are coming on strong.
Heard more than once from speakers and panelists: "If content is king, search is queen." The Internet search biz, which is quickly becoming a major venue for advertisers, is going to be Action Central for a while. Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and others will slug it out for the billions that will eventually be on the table. But then this isn't exactly new news.
Conde Nast's Jonathan Newhouse on the one magazine that, by virtue of its unfortunate title, is least likely to find international franchise opportunities: Germany's Der Feinschmecker (loosely, The Fine Diner).
I couldn't find any note in the literature about where next year's international mag confab will be held. Anyway, unless it's in North America, I doubt I'll attend. But the New York event was interesting, and the wine both good and plentiful.
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