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By Steven McIntosh Print sales have been declining for several years as readers find their content online - but now, something unusual is happening. When was the last time you bought a magazine? The answer is likely to depend on whether you prefer reading about Theresa May or Taylor Swift. Magazine sales have generally been falling since the day the inventor of the internet said: "Hey, why don't I invent the internet?" But the latest ABC figures, released this week, show that sales of certain titles are actually going up. News and current affairs magazines are becoming more popular - but celebrity, gossip and fashion publications are still struggling. It's a trend that Sarah Penny, editor of Fashion Monitor, puts down to the news agenda. "I think that we can all agree that the past 18 months have been pretty tumultuous within current affairs," she says. "With the likes of Brexit and Trump's election, the unsettled nature of society drives readers to seek out factual news and understand the effects on the economy for themselves from reputable titles that have an authoritative voice." The titles that seem to be benefiting from this Trump bump include The Economist and The Spectator. Between January and June this year both sold more per issue than they did in the same period in 2016. Take a look at some celebrity, gossip and fashion titles, and the opposite is true. Look - weekly sales down 35% year on year to 59,390 Now - down 20.8% to 86,838 Closer - down 19.8% to 196,126 Heat - down 16.6% to 120,175 Grazia - down 13.4% to 110,031 Also losing sales: Star (down 14.3%) Vanity Fair (10%), Marie Claire (6%), OK! (3.5%) and Vogue (3%). Going up Prospect - up 37.2% to 44,545 The Spectator - up 11.3% to 85,429 Private Eye - up 8.6% year on year to 249,927 per issue The Economist - up 5% to 248,196 In the early nineties Heat magazine was an absolute bible for showbiz news junkies looking for their fix of Big Brother and Britney Spears. But these days it's more about Kylie and Kendall - and they tend to use Instagram rather than ink to connect with their fans. "Gossip and celebrity tittle-tattle is rarely something that requires detailed analysis - so it's best suited to bite-sized content that zips around on social media," says Ian Burrell, media columnist for the i paper and The Drum. "Once it's out there, it's quickly shared and readers move on to the next morsel. No-one wants to wait a week to read about it in a print magazine." Penny adds: "With the competition from digital media, vlogs, blogs and podcasts, readers are finding that their thirst for the content covered in the celebrity weeklies can be satisfied elsewhere for free and with ease online." The way some quality newspapers and magazines have been able to survive in recent years is by introducing paywalls on their online content. Fraser Nelson, editor of The Spectator, wrote: "A big change is taking place in the market. There's now too much writing online, and in an era of fake news, where you get your analysis from has never been more important. As newspapers and magazines are finding out, if you can publish writing that is consistently and significantly better than what can be found online, people will pay." But many editors are struggling to strike the right balance between physical and digital content. They are faced with the choice of either posting all their articles online for free so the magazine stays relevant, or charging readers money to protect the financial future of the brand. Sounds like a good read, right? But the whole interview was also posted online by the magazine, removing any incentive for a fan to buy a paper copy. "When you have major free news sites - such as Mail Online, The Sun and the Daily Mirror - pumping out celebrity and entertainment words, video and entire photo shoots around the clock, it's hard to see how a magazine is going to find it easy to charge readers for something that's likely to be offering stale news and limited pictures," Burrell says. "At best, a celeb mag will be bought as a treat for the reader, which makes it a dispensable purchase in comparison to the high-quality news analysis publication providing information that its readers regard as valuable and essential." Both Private Eye and The Spectator are seeing their circulation levels reach record highs - although The Spectator has been aided by the way subscribers of both formats are counted twice - a trend they probably didn't predict when they launched their websites. But as Burrell points out: "Many readers are hungry for a deeper understanding of the fast-moving changes in global news and politics rather than seeking to escape from it by burying their heads in celebrity gossip and entertainment stories." Serious times call for serious journalism, and an extraordinarily frantic news agenda over the past year - with Brexit, Trump, a snap election, terror attacks and Grenfell Tower - has driven sales boosts for upmarket titles. This is because their intelligent take on events is a unique selling point. Whereas general-interest daily news has been turned into an almost universally available commodity by the internet, specialist journalism - from the unforgiving wit of Private Eye to the proud wonkery of Prospect - is still a service people value and think they can't get elsewhere. The internet is full of celebrity drivel, so print magazines who focus on the rich and famous will need to find something unique if they are to retain paying audiences. That something is what editors are paid to conjure up.

By Izzy Lyons The Big Issue magazine has launched “augmented reality” technology to bring their vendors’ stories to life because the public are failing to understand the scale of homelessness in the UK. The street magazine, which was founded in 1991, believes technology will allow them to “hammer home the message” of Britain’s unprecedented homelessness issue which people need to “better understand”. The innovative new approach, which launches today, includes augmented reality (AR) interactions throughout the publication. Readers can download an app onto their mobile phones, scan it over AR icons in the magazine and watch traditional print articles come to life in video. This includes the cover story of vendor Ann Warke, 53, who turned to The Big Issue when she couldn’t afford to pay her rent due to losing her job. Ben Sullivan, digital editor at The Big Issue, told the Telegraph: “We are doing this mainly for the vendors. “We just want to let people know we have so many stories to tell. Homelessness is at its highest in the UK at the moment and our vendors are getting permanently beaten by the system, which is not working. We need to shed light on that. “Whereas people would have traditionally just read Ann’s story, they can now understand it further through the use of video and audio. “You see and hear about homelessness on the news every day but so many people don’t realize that living on the streets is just a few steps away from experiencing a housing crisis. It can happen to anyone.” Mr Sullivan added: “Augmented reality will definitely help people better understand the homelessness issue in the UK. We are going to be able to put so many more stories out there and hammer home our message.” The Big Issue will be utilizing AR on a bi-monthly basis, which will also offer readers entertaining content. In this week’s issue, former Doctor Who actor David Tennant will read an audio extract from Cressida Cowell's new 'Wizards of Once' book, and ex-Razorlight drummer Andy Burrows will appear in exclusive video content.

What it takes to launch a print magazine is targeting a clearly defined niche and, above all, a willingness to be scrappy and innovative By Kate Galbraith In 2011, as the Arab Spring dawned, young Lebanese journalist Ibrahim Nehme yearned to play a role in the changes sweeping the Middle East. The region’s print media, he believed, didn’t measure up to the hopes of the demonstrators, who demanded democracy and fresh ideas. So Nehme resolved to start his own magazine as an outlet for the voices of the younger generation. He drained his savings, took out a loan, and asked family and friends for help. The first issue of The Outpost, a quarterly English-language print publication featuring long-form articles on the choices facing the Arab world, appeared in September 2012. “I felt there’s an opportunity to say and make something different, make something that would become part of the revolution,” says Nehme, now 28. The idea was to create a “media voice that can capture our imagination, provide us with a space to dream, speak up, think freely, be who we are as Arab youth.” Launching a print magazine today is courageous; some would say foolhardy. Indeed, two years in, Nehme has slowed his publishing pace from quarterly to semi-annual as he faces a constant struggle to make ends meet. But The Outpost, with a print run of about 3,000 per issue, is hardly flying solo. Worldwide, new print titles have been popping up to cover a breathtaking array of topics, from new-age agriculture (Modern Farmer) to handyman ingenuity (Makeshift) to Californian culture (The California Sunday Magazine). And some of these publications are highlighting long-form narrative as a key selling point. Take Lucky Peach, a food magazine launched in 2011, with its award-winning features on Manhattan chef and restaurateur Wylie Dufresne and canning Southern fruits, or The Caravan, a venerable monthly that Delhi Press relaunched in 2010 after a long hiatus, with its essays on anti-Sikh violence, Hindi literature, and the full spectrum of politics and culture in between. For these publications, print still offers a powerful brand flagship as well as a source of revenue that digital platforms can supplement but not yet supplant. Those launching print titles today are generally independent publishers, driven by passion, with little expectation of big profits. “When was the last time you heard of a [new] magazine coming from Time Inc.?” asks Samir Husni, director of the Magazine Innovation Center at the University of Mississippi. The number of launches has fallen over the years, as has magazines’ collective circulation, yet new titles keep coming. What it takes to survive, according to magazine entrepreneurs like Nehme, is targeting a clearly defined niche, finding committed backers and creative fundraising methods and, above all, a willingness to be scrappy and innovative. Of all the types of magazines to consider starting during the digital age, travel seems among the least likely to succeed, though Airbnb plans to launch a travel magazine called Pineapple. Digital travel tips have practically obviated the need for guidebooks, making Lonely Planet (my first writing job out of college) look almost like Baedekers. The graveyard of recently shuttered magazines includes Executive Travel, National Geographic Adventure, and Everywhere. And yet the circulation of Afar, started by Greg Sullivan and Joseph Diaz in 2009, in the teeth of the Great Recession, has grown to 250,000, a five-fold increase from its launch, and advertising—the saving grace of the travel market—has become the core financial pillar. Plus, the business is now profitable, says Sullivan. Afar’s genius is targeting a different sort of journey, which the editors have dubbed “experiential” travel, in which the visitor interacts with a place as the locals do and sees it through their eyes. It’s not, says San Francisco-based editor in chief Julia Cosgrove, about a “vacation built around escapist fantasies of going to the beach.” Local markets, local dress, local cuisine—all are featured, often in long, narrative formats. A popular feature is Spin the Globe, in which writers are sent to random destinations; one that captured particular attention was a 2011 trip by Ryan Knighton, who is blind, to Cairo, a city rich with history but difficult to navigate. The magazine avoids “homogenizing” its writers’ voices, says Cosgrove, keeping “the stories as personal and fresh as possible, because I think that has more staying power than that sort of uni-voice that you find so often in magazines.” Cosgrove says Afar keeps a lean staff, with just nine editors, yet puts original content on its website, largely by encouraging readers to volunteer their work. “In Paris, if you discover this really great coffee shop, you can take a photo, upload to afar.com, and describe the experience,” says Cosgrove. “People are willing and then wanting to share this information with other travelers.” Afar’s success reflects the importance of targeting a highly specific audience. “You just have to find your audience much more explicitly now than you’ve had to,” says Dana Chinn, a media analytics strategist at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Such strategies are behind magazines like Yoga Digest, a Dallas online community that launched a national magazine in November; Good, a newly re-launched magazine focusing on people making a positive impact in the world; and Makeshift, which features acts of ingenuity from around the world. Knowing your audience can pay off in revenue beyond subscriptions and advertising, the traditional pillars of print profit. “You’re building a community,” says Chinn, “an audience who wants to be associated with each other.” Afar derives revenue from excursions it organizes each year to destinations like Cairo, Johannesburg, and Montreal. The journeys, which cost $1,800 to $4,500, offer readers a chance to meet locals, including politicians and activists, as well as like-minded Afar readers. The trips “bring the pages of the magazine to life in a very literal way,” Cosgrove says. The narrative niche itself can sometimes be the source of a title’s appeal, as readers seek out longer reads and deeper analysis. That’s why newsweeklies are losing relevance, according to Anant Nath, editor of The Caravan, which claims to be the first magazine in India devoted to long-form narrative. “Weekly journalism is increasingly a regurgitation of the past week’s news, which is of little relevance,” he says. “An 8,000-word profile of a politician, wherein the reporter has done some 30 to 40 interviews, presents a lot of new information,” and thus presents greater appeal to readers. Even subjects like food, normally more associated with recipes than long-form, can lend themselves to narrative. “Twitter is awesome, but you don’t disconnect from the stress of your daily life and sink into your couch with your iPhone,” says Lucky Peach co-founder Peter Meehan. “You maintain the paranoia.” Lucky Peach, which prints about 100,000 copies of each issue, happily publishes long pieces on trends like Malaysian street food and Christian culinary traditions in India. The magazine won five James Beard awards this year for articles on, among other topics, gay influences on cooking and the tale of a Long Island chef who blended cuisines long before it was cool, like roasted lobster flavored with soy sauce. “For us, it was like, Where are our strengths? What can we do that Bon Appétit can’t do?” Meehan says, recalling the thought process that went into starting the company. “Literature is nourishing.” Technology has brought down printing costs, but launching a magazine remains extremely expensive. For The California Sunday Magazine, which debuted this fall with a print run of more than 400,000, the magic number was $2 million. Douglas McGray, one of the co-founders, says he and his colleagues raised that amount from a mix of individual investors, some from Hollywood, publishing, and the technology world. With its emphasis on artfulness and narrative style, California Sunday carries echoes of The New Yorker, but with features on virtual reality and Blue Bottle Coffee instead of opera and Manhattan traffic. Perhaps inevitably for a publication born in the spirit of Silicon Valley, McGray doesn’t see it as a print launch. The same content that reaches readers at their homes the first Sunday of each month also appears on apps and the Web. McGray, a longtime feature journalist, and publisher Chas Edwards got the idea for California Sunday from Pop-Up Magazine, their live “magazine” of on-stage storytelling whose performances up and down the West Coast sell out in minutes. Pop-Up performs at night, a time when even people in tech-frenzied California relax and open their minds to stories. A Sunday magazine could pleasurably fill non-working hours, he reasoned, especially if people could read it however they wanted—on tablets, on phones, in print. And California had no answer to The New York Times Magazine or The New Yorker, though Pacific Standard fills some of that role. “It started to strike me as strange that with all the people in California and the West, and all the cultural, political, and business influence, that when we read big national features about [life and ideas in the West], it tends to be made in New York,” McGray says. His backers’ money allows McGray to pay well for quality freelance work. The magazine currently has no staff writers. “We’re trying to be as lean as possible everywhere except for stories and art and the things that bring readers stories,” he says. The November issue included a long tale about the dangers and opportunities of deep-sea mining, with reporting from Papua, New Guinea. A photo essay told the story of the U.S.-Mexico border fence: one image showed a scattering of shotgun shells, another a battered soccer ball, a third the high, rust-colored border fence extending down a sandy beach. Print has emerged as a core part of California Sunday’s business model. Rather than laboriously building a subscriber base by itself, California Sunday piggybacked on the distribution of existing newspapers. The magazine currently arrives as an insert in certain home-delivered editions of the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times and The Sacramento Bee, as well as San Francisco-area copies of The New York Times. Paying newspapers to distribute a magazine is far cheaper than mailing them out individually, of course, and the big initial circulation numbers also allowed California Sunday to attract high-dollar advertisers such as Lexus and Nest Labs, the Google-owned maker of smart-home hardware. “We’re trying to be nimble,” McGray says. “We’re launching with the footprint of a magazine that a big media company would produce, but we’re really influenced by the start-up culture of Silicon Valley.” California Sunday is an outlier. For most fledgling magazines, print cannot pull in the necessary advertising dollars. Crowd-funding goes only so far, and few print magazines launch with enough subscribers to entice advertisers. Nor are many sufficiently well funded at launch to keep publishing long enough to build the circulation and reputation that attracts advertisers. (Afar is one exception; its founders, Diaz and Sullivan, as well as another investor, Ernie Garcia, have pumped $20 million into it.) The Outpost had hoped initially to generate virtually all of its revenue from advertising, but now has given that up. “We’ve literally stopped contacting or approaching advertisers,” says Nehme, the editor in chief. “It’s just discouraging and demotivating and we’re worlds apart.” The alternative is a higher price for subscribers and single issues—in effect, forcing readers to pay more for the content. Still, print often carries a cachet that digital formats do not, at least not yet, many entrepreneurs say. A print product—a copy of The Economist or The New Yorker lying on a coffee table—is a fashion statement. At Boom, a three-year-old quarterly about Californian history and culture published by the University of California Press, “the print edition is the beautiful, substantive and evocative object at the center of the whole enterprise,” says editor Jon Christensen. Boom features long essays and photographs on everything from John Muir to the San Francisco housing boom and is somewhat reminiscent of Monocle magazine, but on a California level. Last year, when Boom devoted an entire issue to the controversial history of Los Angeles’ water imports from the Sierra Nevada mountains, it generated plenty of attention despite the magazine’s modest circulation. One of the most improbable new titles of recent years is Makeshift, a quarterly magazine devoted to the ingenuity of ordinary people. Myles Estey, editor in chief and co-founder, had been living in Liberia for a couple years and became fascinated by the informal economy there—how people built and fixed their own motorbikes, how discarded stuffed animals were cleaned and reused, how people scraped and scrapped for a living. And so, in 2011, he and a like-minded engineer, Steve Daniels, decided to start a magazine devoted to this niche. The subject matter was so specific that they knew they wouldn’t attract many advertisers or even enough subscribers to break even, but they pushed forward nonetheless. Print was the obvious choice, according to Estey, because magazines have a special way of telling stories and building community. Makeshift has built a following by publishing long essays on subjects such as the blind hawkers in Mumbai’s train stations and how the tunnels under the border between Gaza and Egypt are built and destroyed. “It’s a lot of work,” admits Estey, who spends much of his time in Mexico City and has written about drug smuggling and film pirating. Makeshift’s editors all work other jobs, because no can yet make a full-time living from the magazine. It’s an advantage, Estey argues, because editors pull ideas from their outside lines of work. Readers—and, just as crucially, sponsors—have responded enthusiastically. Makeshift has built its circulation to 20,000. Crowd-funding helped with the early issues, which also received support from an engineering group; subsequent sponsors have included General Electric. The magazine is now expanding into design consulting and teaching as other ways of raising revenue. It has also innovated on the distribution side, taking advantage of new digital tools that can help small publishers reach wider audiences. Single-issue copies can be purchased at Magpile, an online library and media shop that charges sellers like Makeshift a monthly fee and takes an 8 percent cut of an issue’s cover price. Publishers themselves are responsible for mailing out the magazines. Another service is U.K.-based Stack; founder and director Steve Watson buys a different magazine each month to send out to his subscribers. Watson aims for interesting, fresh titles, and Makeshift, says Estey, is in the 2015 lineup. For these nascent titles, digital strategies diverge. Many lack an elaborate Web presence; Lucky Peach, for example, has a Tumblr presence, but mostly steers users toward its print edition (“We’re going to start a real site next year, with daily content,” says Meehan.) The Web has a faster metabolism, as Casey Caplowe, co-founder of Good magazine, puts it. “The Web is a great place for the more quick and news-responsive thing,” he says, whereas print allows for sitting back and digging into nuance. Yet the question remains whether digital media will one day erode print so profoundly that it disappears completely. There are signs, in fact, that users are increasingly comfortable reading long-form writing on tablets and mobile devices. Earlier this year people spent more than 25 minutes reading a 6,000-word BuzzFeed story on their phones about buying a cheap home in Detroit, according to The Atlantic. The story received more than a million pageviews, with nearly half the people accessing it from mobile devices. The venture planned by former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson and journalist and media entrepreneur Steven Brill, which will feature mammoth long-form stories each month in digital rather than print, shows that even old media types are considering digital as a way forward for long-form journalism. For now, though, the new print magazines are living in the moment, and hoping to expand. California Sunday, for one, has grand plans. McGray hopes to increase distribution, on apps and in print, and steer the publication toward biweekly and finally weekly frequency. “We talk around the office of not having the benefit of 100 years of history,” says McGray. “But we don’t have the burden either.”

Few entities have the potential to help improve news production and consumption more than Apple. This falls short of hopes. By Joshua Benton Apple announced its much-anticipated premium news service today. It’s called…Apple News Plus? Apple News+? News+ seems to be the official branding (a shift that began in iOS 12.2 beta 4), but the  character doesn’t show up on most non-Apple devices, so let’s go with Apple News+. (Ugh, that “+.” is ugly+. Make it Apple News Plus.) You can watch the keynote here; the Apple News part starts about 6:30 in. I’m disappointed, I have to say, though that may just be a case of my hopes being too high. Apple News Plus is based on Texture, the Hulu-for-magazines app that Apple bought last year. And “based on” is probably an understatement; it’s pretty much Texture squeezed into the Apple News interface. Texture isn’t bad! I’m a happy paying user, and it does some things well. But Texture’s origin story also limits what this important new product can accomplish. First, let’s go over the basics: Apple News Plus is, like Texture, fundamentally about giving you access to issues of magazines. Not magazine content — magazine issues. Apple says News Plus has 300-plus (or is that 300+?) magazines, but the chances are good that the ones you’ve heard of were already on Texture, which currently lists 204 magazines. (Among the new magazines I could find in Plus: Cricket, Edge, FourFourTwo, All About History, Alta, Babybug, and BBC Gardeners’ World.) The current free content in Apple News will remain unchanged — the same editor-curated stories and packages, the same personalized stories, the same interfaces. Apple News Plus subscribers will get issues and select stories from them highlighted in their main feed and a separate tab that is basically Texture reskinned with the same design aesthetic Apple’s other flagship apps got in iOS 10. In addition to all those magazines, Apple News Plus will include some content from a few non-magazine publishers. In newspapers, that’s The Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times. From the digital natives, that’s three brands from New York magazine (Vulture, The Cut, Grub Street), a new product from Vox (The Highlight), TechCrunch’s subscription product Extra Crunch, and The Skimm. That’s…it, as far as we know. It’s pretty evident that Apple doesn’t consider the newsier part of the package all that critical to the bundle. Based on the timestamps at The Verge’s liveblog, Apple spent a total of 17 minutes and 20 seconds talking about Apple News Plus — and only 1 minute and 10 seconds of that were spent on the non-magazine content. The cost is, just as it was in Texture, $9.99 a month. (Though if you pay with it for the new Apple Card, er, Card, you’ll get 20 cents back!) Apple CEO Tim Cook said that to subscribe to all of these publications individually, you’d have to pay $8,000 a year, so what a deal! Which is mathematically true, but not many people are paying for ABC Soaps in Depth and All About Beer and Birds & Blooms and Canadian Cycling and Cottage Life and Cruising World and Deer & Deer Hunting and Diabetes Self-Management and Family Handyman and Fit Pregnancy and Baby and Gluten-Free Living and Golf Tips and HELLO! Canada and Journal of Alta California and L’actualité and Marlin and Midwest Living and Parents Latina and Popular Woodworking and Salt Water Sportsman and Sport Fishing and Successful Farming and The Pioneer Woman and Truck Trend and Wood and Yoga Journal to begin with. So it’s a difficult comp. Again, it’s a fine product, just as Texture was a fine product. And obviously, being pitched as an upsell inside an app that 85 million people use monthly will convert a lot more subscriptions than something called “Texture” that the average iPhone user has never heard of. (The most pertinent quote from the whole event was Oprah detailing her reason for wanting to work with Apple on TV projects: “They’re in a billion pockets, y’all. A billion pockets.“) But there are no companies with greater capacity to do good for both the news industry and the state of news consumption than Apple and Google. They control the operating systems that we spend countless hours staring at and getting information from. When Google decides to show users more news, it works — fast and at scale. When Apple decides to make a News app, it drives a lot of news to people who wouldn’t otherwise have seen it. And because Apple’s customers are the most attractive for news organizations — they on average have more money and consume more news — what they do with paid content matters even more. Here are my biggest disappointments with today’s announcements. Apple News Plus is all about magazines, with a heavy dose of lifestyle titles. Nothing against magazines, but it’s supposed to be Apple News. Go watch the keynote and tell me that non-magazine content doesn’t feel shoehorned in. We see zero images of what the digital outlets will actually look like in the app; the newspapers get the barest mention. This is Lauren Kern’s editor’s note for Apple News Plus, which is all about the glory of glossy periodicals: It’s just a little odd to see The Wall Street Journal (mentioned briefly on the next screen) presented as a side dish. Apple’s marketing presents Plus as having “built-in subscriptions to The Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times,” but doesn’t foreground the fact that you’re only getting a “curated collection of general interest news” from the Journal. (Looking at the L.A. Times in Apple News Plus, it appears to offer pretty much all of its stories.) It’s actually a little hard to even find L.A. Times and Journal content in Apple News Plus because they don’t fit into the magazine UX it’s dependent on. Tap “Browse the Catalog” in Plus and you can scroll all day, but you’ll never find either paper, because they’re not contained in “issues.” Want to see some Journal stories? Head to the Plus tab, scroll past the nav buttons, past the “My Magazines” carousel, past the “First Look” section, past a curated sports section called “Keeping Score,” and you’ll see four Journal stories. Tap on one of them, then tap on the logo at the top of the article page, and you’re finally at the Journal “built-in subscription” you paid for. And the L.A. Times? Scroll past everything you saw on your way to the Journal, then a “New Issue” module, then a “Queens of Comedy” feature on Amy Pohler and Maya Rudolph, then a “Health” section, then “Inside Politics,” then “Breakthroughs,” and then you’ll see “From the L.A. Times.” (As I type this, the most recent story listed is 15 hours old.) Tap an article, tap the logo at the top of the article page, and you’re there. How about the digital offerings — Vox’s The Highlight, New York’s verticals, TechCrunch, and The Skimm? How do you find them? No, seriously, how do you? I’ve looked and I can’t find them anywhere in the Plus tab, which has no search function and whose browse section is, again, limited to magazines. (I did find The Cut under “Style & Beauty,” but there’s no Grub Street under “Food” or Vulture under “Entertainment.” I found Extra Crunch in the non-Plus part of Apple News, but not in Plus.) I’m not saying all this to complain about the UX, which is something that can be fixed. I’m pointing it out because it shows how tacked-on the non-Texture parts of the app are. It’s a thin and mostly hidden coat of news over what is overwhelmingly a monthly magazine product. Speaking of which… It’s stuck in the “issue” metaphor. Texture was built by a consortium of magazine companies (Condé Nast, Hearst, Meredith, Time Inc.), originally under the name Next Issue. It was meant as a way for those magazine giants to make sure that they would be able to control the means of distribution for their products and not let a tech giant like Apple take charge of it. (So what did that consortium of magazine companies do with the independent distribution platform they’d spent a decade building? They sold it to Apple, of course. Sometimes you just need cash.) But no matter how much Apple’s aesthetic epigenetics have contributed to Apple News Plus, the underlying magazine industry DNA is very clear — and not to the product’s benefit. Magazine companies produce issues; it’s what they did for many pre-digital decades, and it’s the frame through which they have typically viewed the transition to digital, usually to their detriment. But even for magazines, only a relatively small share of the work they produce today finds its way into an issue. Take The New Yorker, which produces 47 issues of the magazine each year — but which can publish 47 digital-only stories over just a couple days. (If you want to read those in Apple News Plus, you get thrown out into a web browser, where you get the standard New Yorker paywall. Your “subscription” only goes so far.) Or Vanity Fair, a monthly magazine that has published 22 online-only stories including the word “Mueller” in the last week alone. Magazine companies wanted to sell issues — what unbundled industry has ever enjoyed the unbundling? — so that’s what Apple is hocking today.

To be succinct, there really isn’t an “average” or standard number of pages for magazines. Magazines can range from 32 pagers to 212 pagers with everything in between. With that said, however, most magazines, whatever their overall page count may be, will have a magazine page count that is either divisible by 8 or 4. Why is this? It has to do with the offset printing process and the fact that magazines are printed in what are called “sigs.” A sig is printer parlance for “signature” and a full signature is 16 pages while a half signature is 8 pages. Keep in mind that the 8/16 rule is principally applicable to web offset presses. A web offset press uses large rolls of paper that are fed into the press; usually a Heidelberg or similar press. Another common press utilized in offset printing is a sheet fed press. As its name suggests, a sheet fed press uses pre-cut sheets of paper (as opposed to rolls) that are fed into the press. With a sheet fed press it is possible to go “4 up” instead of “8 up” like a web press. Essentially, when utilizing a sheet fed press, it is possible to have four page increments instead of eight. Thus, the total page count can be divisible by 4. It is a rather lengthy endeavor to try to explain “print imposition.” In a nutshell, “imposition” refers to how magazine pages are organized for the offset printing process. In this regard, it is important to understand the difference between a “reader spread” and a “printer spread.” A “reader spread” refers to the order in which the pages actually appear in the magazine. A “reader spread” is sequential. i.e. front cover, inside front cover, page 1, page 2, page 3, etc. In essence, it is the sequence that the magazine is in when you pick it up to read; hence the name “reader spread.” A “printer spread” is how the pages of the magazine are imposed (hence the name “imposition”) for the printing process. A “printer spread,” also referred to as “print imposition” is non sequential. So, what does this mean? Well, when a magazine is printed utilizing an offset press, there is a printing schematic that determines the imposition (the ordering of the pages) for the printing process. The printing schematic will vary predicated upon the overall page count and whether the magazine is full color, all black and white or a combination of the two. In a “printer spread” page 1 may be next to page 14 and page 7 may be next to page 21, etc. and the overall layout of the pages in a given signature will vary. So remember, as mentioned earlier, the magazine will be printed in “sigs.” Hence, a magazine that has, let’s say, 64 pages, will be printed in “4 sigs” (16 + 16 + 16 + 16 = 64). When you request a printing quote from an offset press, it will make mention of the total number of sigs in your magazine and how they will be printed, i.e. sig #1 1/1 = 16 pages black and white, sig #2 4/4 = 16 pages 4 color (CMYK = Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black,) etc. Ok, you say, but if a magazine is printed utilizing a printer spread, which is non sequential, how does the final magazine, once it’s printed, come out in a sequential reader spread format? The answer is that, after all the sigs are printed, they usually go through a heater (which dries or “sets” the ink; hence the name “heat set offset press”) and subsequently the sigs are folded. Once the sigs are folded (and then stitched using a saddle stitching machine or perfect binding process), the pages will appear in the reader spread format that we normally associate with magazines. In summation, it would be prudent to know if you intend to utilize a web press or sheet fed press so that, whatever you ultimately decide in regard to your overall page count, you adhere to the “4 up” or “8 up” sig rule and save yourself some money on your printing quote! #magazine page count, #magazine printing, #offset printers Do you need more information about starting a magazine? Magshoestring has launched The Magazine Minute to provide free tips on every aspect of starting a magazine!! These informative videos are located under "Mag Tips" on the home page. Are you a magazine publisher who would like to get interviews with A-List actors and actresses? There is a very easy way to get access to these individuals and, best of all, it is 100% free! Watch the video below to learn how! #Magazines, #US Magazines, #Start a Magazine, #Magazine Startup, #Launch a Magazine, #Love magazine, #Design magazine, #Interior design magazine, #Fashion magazine, #Inspiration magazine, #Style magazine, #Art magazine, #Small business magazine, #Motivation magazine, #Foodie magazine, #Home decor magazine, #Travel magazine, #Photography magazine, #Beauty magazine, #Food magazine, #Real estate magazine, #Wellness magazine, #Fitness magazine, #Lifestyle magazine, #Home magazine, #Architecture magazine, #Skincare magazine, #Luxury magazine, #Entrepreneur magazine

Start with an idea, research and write an article and then try to find a publisher. Follow a few key steps to find a publisher and tailor your work to that magazine's needs. Purchase a copy of "Writer’s Market" or "Writer’s Digest," which list magazines, publishers and presses in which your work can be published (see Resources). Fit your interests with specific magazines. Do you love to travel? Are you a computer wiz? Is fiction your thing? Send a carefully worded and proofed query letter explaining your intentions and qualifications to the magazines in which you're interested. Keep in mind that this isn’t merely a sales pitch; it’s a writing sample. Research and write your article. Write an article tailored to the interests and requirements of the magazines you're interested in if you did not get a go-ahead from one of your queries. Send it to the publications along with a sales pitch explaining why your view of the subject matter is best and why readers will love your story. Keep trying; be willing to rework, rewrite and retry.

Well, the short answer is: Incentivize them!! While phishing for subscribers on Facebook groups and the like may not necessarily be a bad idea, any good fisherman/woman worth his or her salt knows that you won’t catch many fish without some tantalizing bait! Now, with that said, the latter posits that there exists an inextricable nexus between the kind of fish you want to catch and the type of bait that you utilize to achieve your objective. In regard to the aforementioned, it would behoove you then to revise your query and, instead, submit the following for the approval of savvy Quora readers: What are some cost efficient ways to incentivize my magazine’s demographic to subscribe to my free local magazine? Your magazine’s demographic is analogous, of course, to the fish and the incentive that will lure them to subscribe is no other than the bait. It is imperative to remain cognizant of the fact that the latter is invariably predicated upon the former. Hence, it is incumbent upon you, as the magazine publisher, to have already compiled accurate and thorough demographic data on your magazine’s readership. This indispensable information should already be located in your media kit! If your media kit was put together properly, it should contain subscriber and reader surveys that specifically delineate the consumer trends of your magazine’s demographic. In fact, ‘consumer trends’ should be a separate section unto itself in your media kit! The consumer trends of your demographic will provide you with the necessary insight to discern what tangible and intangible products, services, etc. could be used to entice your magazine’s demographic to subscribe. Furthermore, your media kit’s distribution analysis and circulation analysis will help you to effectively target your magazine’s demographic with the incentives that you ultimately decide to utilize to increase your overall magazine subscription rate. Like consumer trends, the distribution analysis and circulation analysis should be separate sections in your media kit. Since I am not privy to your magazine’s media kit, and as a consequence the demographic data contained therein, I am not in a position to recommend with conviction the precise incentives you should utilize. In other words, I don’t know what type of fish you desire to catch or the environment (salt water ocean, fresh water river, lake, etc) for that matter and, as such, I am in no position to suggest, with any certainty, the type of bait that would best assist you to achieve your objectives.

Well, I definitely believe that this question is predicated upon a false premise. Advertisers aren’t fooled by inflated readership numbers but rather are more concerned with more “concrete” metrics like print run, circulation, distribution, demographics, etc. The act of ascertaining a magazine’s readership is a rather nebulous affair that is tantamount to another term that is thrown around by the magazine publishing community in the hopes of influencing potential advertisers: the “pass along rate.” This is the supposed number of times that each copy of a magazine gets “passed along” to another reader. A more accurate picture of a magazine’s readership is painted via the magazine’s circulation and distribution method(s). With this said, however, one should not, of course, confuse a magazine’s print run with its total circulation for the two are not necessarily one in the same. Let’s be clear; “circulation” answers the question: “How many?” and is synonymous with the total number of magazine copies that is made available to the magazine’s demographic via a distribution method. The term “distribution” answers the questions: “Where and How?” and is indicative of the total number of points/locations to which the magazine is sent (and by what means: paid, free, etc..) for the targeted reader demographic. The print run, on the other hand, is simply indicative of the total number of magazines printed per each issue. If, as in Darren’s case with Campus News, the print run is 10,000 copies, that does not tell a potential advertiser how many magazines are actually circulated. Advertisers will calculate a magazine’s “ad rate base;” which is the actual number of magazines that is circulated per issue to the targeted demographic, predicated upon the total number of magazines in the magazine’s circulation mix. What do I mean? Well, let’s look at this terse hypothetical magazine circulation mix example: Print run: 10,000 Subscriptions: 2,000 Expos & Special Events: 1,500 Paid distribution: 6,000 Miscellaneous: 500 From this example, the ad rate base would be predicated upon the 2,000 subscribers and the 6,000 copies circulated via paid distribution. Ad media buyers would not necessarily be inclined to include the 1,500 copies utilized for Expos and Special Events unless it could be clearly demonstrated that these events are specifically geared towards the magazine’s core reader demographic. The 500 miscellaneous copies would also be excluded. Thus, the ad rate base in this example would be 8,000 magazines. Simply put, the advertising rates for this magazine should be calculated on a CPM (Cost Per Thousands) based upon 8,000 magazines per issue and not 10,000 magazines; the effective print run! It’s worth stating that it is incumbent upon the magazine publisher to specifically state, usually in the Ad Rates section of a magazine’s media kit, what the actual ad rate base is, so that potential advertisers, and especially ad agency media buyers, can compare CPMs of various magazines to ascertain, in conjunction with other analyzed metrics, which magazines offer the best media buy for their clients. To be sure, one way to effectively assuage the trepidation of would be advertisers and ad media buyers is to have a magazine audited by a major auditing bureau such as ABC, BPA Worldwide and VAC. A magazine that has an auditing report from any of these auditors has invested a lot of time, and a considerable amount of money, to assure potential advertisers that their circulation is not based upon fluff but, on the contrary, is indeed quite factual.

Actually, the ink shouldn’t smear in any of those magazines that you listed! I’m confident that all of those publications utilize a “heat set” offset press to print their publications. Most magazines with significant print runs (10,000 or more) will use an offset press (also referred to as a 4 color press - Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black) to print their publications. I won’t go into detail about the offset press process here, but “heat setting” is in reference to the paper of an offset press passing from the ink rollers, after impressions have been made from the “plates,” to an oven that dries or “sets” the ink on the paper so that it doesn’t smear when touched. After the ink has dried, the paper can be handled and moved to the next stations in order to be stitched (most commonly saddle stitched), trimmed down to the final trim size and then packaged according to the magazine publisher’s specifications. Bear in mind that those magazines are printed on coated glossy stock paper, as opposed to newsprint which is uncoated. Coated paper has a low “dot gain” index and this is one of the main reasons why it’s used for magazines; in addition to the obvious aesthetic benefits that it offers. “Dot gain” is in reference to the rate at which a particular substrate (in this case paper/paper stock) absorbs ink. The higher the dot gain, the more ink the paper stock will absorb and the lower the dot gain, the less ink the paper stock will absorb. An easy way to understand this would be to take an ink pen and put a drop of ink on a regular sheet of (non coated) white copy paper used for copying machines. After the ink is placed on the paper, the ink drop will slowly increase in size as the ink is absorbed by the paper. This is dot gain. Uncoated paper has a very high dot gain and can smear easily when touched. Glossy paper stock, on the other hand, has a very low dot gain and, as a result, it allows for the utilization of higher ink densities (more saturated colors) and more vibrant colors than uncoated paper like newsprint. It is also a lot harder to smear! All this to say, the ink on magazine pages, like the ones you mentioned, should not normally smear unless, of course, it gets wet.

Well the short answer is, it depends on what you are trying to sell! Newspapers, like magazines, have various sections, departments and columns that appear in each issue of the paper. They are usually static. By this I mean they appear in the same place (page location) in each issue of the newspaper. Many advertisers often request “special placement” when reserving an ad space. Special placement is when an advertiser requests to be next to or near a particular section, department, or column in a newspaper. For example, let’s say that one newspaper section is called “Computer World.” As its name implies, this section does product reviews on the latest home and laptop computers. This section may fall under the department “Inside Tech,” which looks at all things related to technology of which home and laptop computers are a subset. Lastly, there may be a column called “Tech Reviews,” in which the columnist provides reviews on various technological gadgets on the market. Now, let’s say that you are trying to sell computer flash drives and external hard drives. Your first step, of course, will be to determine your consumer demographic. It is your responsibility to obtain as much information as possible in regard to your consumers as this will ultimately determine the type of newspapers you should target with your ad. Once you have obtained specific metrics; i.e gender, age, race/ethnicity, individual income, household income, educational attainment, geographic region, etc. to develop a very specific consumer profile, you can then contact newspapers whose circulations coincide with the demographic profile and geographic region of your consumers. You will want to contact these newspapers to request a media kit. Most newspapers and magazines have online media kits in PDF that can easily be downloaded from their websites. It will be incumbent upon you to analyze the various newspaper media kits in order to ascertain which ones make the best media buy. Essentially, you want to see evidence that the demographics of the newspaper’s readers overlap with your consumer base. If there is a good match then this newspaper(s) will provide you with the best ROI (Return on Investment) and that is what advertising is all about. So, since you sell computer flash drives, you will want to make sure that your ad is in the part of the newspaper where people who may be interested in your product will see it. This is where special placement comes into play. Essentially, you will submit a request to the newspaper to have your ad next to one of the sections, departments or columns that deal with computers or technology. Thus, you may want to request an ad placement next to the section Computer World, since this section deals specifically with home and laptop computers. Special placement increases the probability that the newspaper’s readers who are interested in all things computers will most likely see and/or take an interest in your ad. Requesting special placement usually incurs an additional charge that will vary depending upon the size of the ad, word count, and the particular section and/or department; especially as it relates to the location of the section and/or department in the newspaper.

Well, first of all, your question is very ambiguous. In addition, there is a change in person since you stated “model’ (3rd person singular) and then followed up by using the object pronoun “them.” Is it one model or more than one? Ambiguity aside, I am going to presuppose that it’s your magazine, (you are the publisher and/or owner) and that the cover image in question is owned by the magazine. Predicated upon the aforementioned, you could charge the cover model any price you deem fit. With that said, however, it is not very common to charge models for a copy of a magazine cover. On the contrary, usually free copies of the magazine are given to models or to other contributors to the magazine. Usually when a magazine does a print run (utilizing an offset press in most cases), there will be additional copies made above the quoted print run. First, it should be said that offset presses, such as a Heidelberg, take time to warm up before they do an actual print run and, as a consequence, additional copies of the magazine are invariably made to test the color output of the equipment. If a magazine’s print run happens to be 20,000, anywhere from 100 to 300 additional copies may be printed at no extra charge. In addition to this, a magazine publisher may request that a printer run “Additional Thousands” often abbreviated as “Addl M’s” on a printing quote. Additional thousands are magazines that are printed above the quoted print run. So, if the print run is 20,000, a printer may charge $240 dollars, just as an example, for each additional 1,000 magazines above the print run. The additional magazines are often used for promotional purposes and, of course, to give to potential advertisers, models and contributors to the magazine for free.

This is a pretty straight forward question and so is the answer. Magazines have different frequencies. The frequency of a magazine tells its readers, and especially its advertisers, how often the magazine is printed on an annual basis. The most common frequencies are weekly (once a week), biweekly (twice a month), monthly (once a month), bimonthly (once every two months), quarterly (one every three months), semi annually ( twice a year) and annually (once a year). If a magazine is a monthly, for instance, it means that there will be 12 issues of the magazine printed and circulated every 12 months. Thus, in this instance, the magazine’s issue is indicative of a particular month in which the magazine is printed and made available to its readers. Hence, “in this issue” is simply a way to inform the magazine’s readers of what they can expect to read in any given copy of the magazine.