The great and the good of magazine publishing are descending on London this week for the 37th FIPP World Magazine Conference.
Taking the collective pulse of the globe's publishing top brass should be revealing. While there's plenty of life in the sector - including some notable launches such as the new UK edition of Wired - some publishers are suffering palpitations and a number of titles have already flatlined. Topics under discussion include the global economy and media trends, innovating in a downturn, and, of course, the shift in adspend to digital channels and the likely future desires of advertisers.
The environment figures prominently, too, which is good news. It's incredibly tiresome that the phrase "environmentally-friendly" is routinely trotted out every time a publisher cans a print edition to go online only, so I'm keen to learn more about things like Sun Chemical's project with Gruner + Jahr, which has measured the carbon footprint of a weekly French news title from conception to newsstand. The more concrete information there is available to hit back at these regular spoutings of e-tosh, the better. I shall be taking notes using my new corn-based pen, which is 66% biodegradable.
While things are nowhere near as bleak in magazines as they are in newspapers, a magazine printer told me recently that paginations were down by approximately 15-25%, run lengths by circa 10-15%, while insert volumes had collapsed by 70% year-on-year. Extrapolating that sort of reduction in print volumes across all the printers and suppliers involved in the magazine sector results in some pretty worrying knock-on impacts for the supply chain.
