I don’t think the print magazine is dead – its role will just change

Meant Businessoffashion.net (they are .com now) Founder and Fashion Industry Expert Imran Amed at the Interview with Maria from Stylekingdom. Amed will also attend at the go international Talks – FASHION 2.0 – Fashion Blogger Day in Vienna on June 6th.
Images by businessoffashion.net

You are the Editor of the highly successful website The Business of Fashion, you connect brands and financial investors as an adviser and you are entrepreneur as well as an associate lecturer at the Central St. Martin´s College in London. From this point of view you experience the effects of the global financial crisis on the fashion industry from different angles. Part of this industry are magazines which face challenging times. Which changes will the print media have to go through?
It’s true that fashion magazines, and the publishing industry more broadly, are experiencing a moment of truth–the consequence of rapid technological change brought on by the internet and plummeting advertising revenues. Up until now, major fashion magazines have provided free content online that was only made possible by advertising generated by their offline publications, which in itself was spurred by a rapidly expanding luxury fashion market, growing at 10-15% per year. All of this has changed. The luxury market is shrinking and ad sales have dropped dramatically. Going forward, publishers will have to figure out how to better monetise their content online in addition to delivering a physical publication that is still worth buying, delivering an integrated experience between the two. Good content is expensive to produce, regardless of whether it is distributed online or offline, and so these costs must be recouped somehow. Creating online experiences that engage the reader, taking advantage of the web’s interactive technology, that build a relationships between reader and publication, is a good place to start. Needless to say, for those print magazines that have not yet embraced the Internet, the time is now.

For the record, I don’t think the print magazine is dead — it’s role will just change. My favourite fashion magazine is Fantastic Man. From the signature texture of the paper to the ability to slip it into my bag to read while I’m on the go, FM delivers an experience my laptop and iMac could never replicate. That said, the FM website is basic and simple, and could benefit from engaging its loyal readership online…especially since the magazine only comes out twice a year. It would give us something to do in the intervening 6 months between issues!

The number of fashion blogs on the internet is rapidly growing and publishing houses as well as brands have discovered advertising on blogs as a future market. Do you think
this will endanger the freedom of speech like we have seen it in the past with print media?

We are certainly likely to see more and more independent publishers aim to monetise their blogs and turn them in to bonafide businesses by seeking out advertising and sponsorship revenue. This is only natural as they will need to earn money somehow to dedicate themselves full-time to their writing. As long as bloggers maintain their integrity and honest voices, and this condition is made clear to advertisers who want to reach their audiences, I don’t see a problem. Bloggers who pander to their advertisers will lose their audiences…and where will they be left then?

What do you think about the future of blogs in general? Will they substitute print media or complement them?

Fashion magazines and mainstream publications still have a role to play, as do blogs which, as you say, provide a natural complement to the major houses. That said, I think it may be harder and harder to tell these entities apart as the big magazines use more and more tools associated with blogging and bloggers up their game and evolve their publications into full online magazines and multi-media websites. The competition for readers will be fierce.

The interaction between blog and reader is, compared to the history of media, a completely new aspect which makes the internet – according to Diane Pernet – a democratic tool. Everyone has the possibility to share thoughts and start a blog. In this flood of blogs, where information is secondary to personal notes and `what I wore today´ photos, will the basic idea of blogging to share opinions independently still succeed and be able to end up as an acknowledged form of media?

Diane’s absolutely right in saying that the Internet has democratised media, and the millions of blogs that have popped up are proof of this. But democracy doesn’t always mean quality and there is a lot of noise online. What’s more, everyday, we are inundated with information to process, with emails and SMS, Twitter and Facebook, blogs and magazines, newspapers and video screens in the back of taxis — we can’t escape. It’s all a bit much at times. All the more reason that people will turn to content providers that they can trust, who clear the clutter and shut out the noise, providing independent opinions and a bit of personality, using the latest technology which enables readers to consume content via their medium of choice. I think the future for blogging is very promising indeed.