Wayfarer magazine

The Wayfarer reader is young, curious and excited to travel. Wayfarer magazine aims to provide a platform for students, young people and travellers to publish their adventures. As a customer publication it will be contracted out to STA Travel who provide the perfect platform and audience for this magazine. In return, Wayfarer will promote their business by featuring their destinations and prices. It will build a relationship with STA customers, while also attracting new ones. Wayfarer magazine will produce content for STA and will of course be subject to approval by them, much like airlines and their in-flight magazines. Editorial direction will always balance STA with its customers and feature a wide range of destinations and activities.

The monthly title will be 28 pages long and will feature guides to destinations, upcoming festivals and events, hotel and restaurant reviews, adventures and photography, along with historical and cultural features and anything else to inspire travel. For its readers it will serve to inspire travel; provide informative cultural content; and provide a platform for them to publish their travel stories.

What differs Wayfarer from its competitors is its contributors and content, it is targeted and tailored to a specific group of people, the STA customer, and will feature many of its readers, as writers.

As a contract magazine, the main revenue stream will be from STA Travel and it will be distributed free throughout their shops. It also has the potential to be distributed as a supplement in university newspapers in the future. Additional revenue will come from advertising, advertorials and student journalism awards.

A core editorial team, including an Editor, Art Director and Advertising Manager, will produce the magazine. Content will be sourced from STA customers, students and young travellers. 

For Better Or Worse: An Analysis Of Digital Publishing

It’s been 550 years since Johannes Gutenberg pioneered a new printing technique and began to publish on a mass scale for the first time. With the dawn of digital publishing a new frontier revealing itself to us. Digital is being promoted as the future of the publishing industry and as tablet computers and e-books become increasingly widespread the ways in which we devour our media is changing faster than ever before.

While this is only a brief analysis of the arena of digital publishing and it wouldn't surprise anyone if this information is rendered irrelevant in 6 months, looking at the industry as it stands provides an interesting view.

Political

As digital generated content and Internet access is becoming increasingly widespread there is a new generation of writers from all backgrounds on an international scale. These new writers can create followings and generate interest in their pursuits, whether they are political or creative. With a wider field of reporting and the repercussions of coverage can be felt in political institutions across the world. The recent Arab Spring was accelerating by the use of digital communications and localized revolutionary reporting. The flip side of this is that those with an extreme agenda have the same soapbox from which to speak.

Economic

There are a series of new revenue streams that digital publishing presents for the industry in general, which goes some way to explaining why the leaders of publishing companies are fiercely pursuing it. While 40% of tablet owners have purchased a magazine app and 25% regularly read magazines on their device, there are still considerable gains to be made in that market. Advertising has been deemed more effective if it is seen to be interactive. With companies such as Facebook have been quick to adopt purchasing software such as Synapse and Alvenda buying direct from a digital magazine can hardly be light-years away.

Social

There is an increasingly social side to the way digital content is created and eventually published. Publishing efforts from 37 Signals have pioneered the use of blogs to release parts of their book over time and in order to engage with their readers to see how they were being received.  Wayne Gladstone’s book Notes From The Internet Apocalypse was originally a serialized novella published on Cracked.com but will soon be published by Thomas Dunne books.

Technological

The reading experience has been enhanced by the dawn of this new technology. The time spent reading magazines rises with digital publications, the average number of minutes spent on Vanity Fair rose from 65 minutes to 200 when the audience used a digital copy. Since their release in 2010 over 100 million iPads have been sold worldwide and this is a considerable audience for any publisher.

Legal

With digital content being so easily exploited, copied and reproduced there are a number of legal issues revolving around the rights of digital content. Acknowledging the right of workers and professionals is one key aspect of this but also the rights of the purchaser. Looking at the widely reported story that Bruce Willis was to sue Apple in order to leave his considerable digital music collection to his daughters raises an interesting question, who actually owns downloaded content? In reality customers never actually buy a lot of digital content, rather they purchase the license to use it. The same is as true for ebooks and magazines as it is for music. There may be a digital artifact on your kindle but we cannot say that you “own” it in the traditional sense of the word. As such that feeling of “buying” something may be misplaced.

Environmental

A great deal has been made about the benefits of digital readers to the environment. If there are less trees being felled for magazine paper then there will be a positive impact. However, the natural resources that have to be harvested and mined for the creation of tablets and various e-readers could have a negative impact on the environment. Books and magazines are easily recyclable whereas technology is particularly hard to dispose of and can lead to terrible amounts of waste and landfill.

Even this blog (which was meant to come in at a tidy 300 words) cannot fully incorporate every aspect of the burgeoning digital publishing industry, but hopefully it has demonstrated that in this relatively infant medium there is plenty of potential for great success.

Issues impacting the business of the media

Issues impacting the business of the media.

Political- One of the Political issues that has affected the media is the pressure to be more economically friendly. Reading a book or magazine on an E-reader or tablet saves paper and the costs of actually paying for and producing the book (although digital publishing execs say it is just as expensive to produce an E-book). But apart from saving trees it has also lead the media businesses to be innovative which has resulted in great advances in technology and has made people realise how beneficial owning a tablet, smartphone or laptop etc. can be for consuming media in an environmentally friendly and convenient way.  

Economic- Today’s economy is not great and people have very little money so what impact does this have on the Media Business? Well the best way media companies are going to make money is if they make as much content and products accessible to as many people as they can for as cheaply as they can and then throw loads of advertising all over it. By offering a product like an E-book at half the price and embedding it with advertisements, say two 30 second adverts at the end of each chapter, or every 30mins the reader would be happy to sit through these if they paid £5 instead of £10 for the book.     

Social- Today people have greater expectations of the business media than ever before. Information must be readily waiting at any given time. News must be immediate and books and magazines have to be more than just artifacts to be read; they must be interactive and engaging. In a world where nobody waits, readers demand the ability to at the click of a button have instant access to a book, a magazine a movie or music.

Technological- Technology has had a huge impact on the business media in recent years. The internet has allowed innovation to take a great leap for example Wikipedia has not only replaced the encyclopaedia but it has surpassed it in terms of usefulness, quality, timelessness and convenience (Mod, Craig (2012) “Post-Artifact Books & Publishing”.http://craigmod.com/journal/post_artifact/). Amazon changed the way we buy books, music, films etc. E-readers and tablets have changed how we access them. Facebook, MySpace and Twitter have changed as how a society we interact which in turn has created a grand place for advertisers to reach a global market, all without anyone leaving their desks. 

Digital Innovations Do Not Spell the End for Magazines

Technology has been the biggest driving force of change in the publishing sector. The Internet and invention of the smart phone and tablet have revolutionized how people gain access to information.  When the first tablet, Apple’s Ipad, was launched in 2010 many predicted the end for print media.

Jonas Bonnier, CEO of Bonniers international multi-channel media company, says that, “magazine publishers can survive if they are able to monetize a variety of revenue streams and operate on different mediums.”

The tablet meant that many magazines brought out apps to allow readers to download issues to read onscreen. This has been successful but online subscriptions still only account for a fraction of any magazines total sales. Most people would still prefer to have a magazine in hard copy, to touch, hold, smell and enjoy at their leisure.

However, it is important for magazines to have a strong online presence to retain customer brand loyalty. Therefore, all content written for the magazine must serve a function, the content should not be the same on all levels. For example it is important that there is material specifically produced for the app, which works well on the platform incorporating interactive elements.

Magazines need revenue from print advertisements and having a website only cannot supplant this. Many magazines, such as Teen People or Seventeen in the USA, made a mistake in moving to digital only format.  According to Fipp Research this spells death for the magazine, because if you can’t make it in print you won’t in digital. The problem lies not with the medium but the magazine.

Conglomerates tend to control distribution systems and retail outlets, so by cutting out the middle men and selling directly to the public online, independent publishers are able to operate more easily. Independent magazine publishers, such as Stack magazines, have a page on the Internet where subscribers sign up for monthly delivery of magazines, which cannot be found in shops.

So, instead of the Internet killing magazines off, it is actually helping them to thrive. The future of magazines looks promising as long as they continue to move with the times and have a strong presence on many platforms.

PEST Analysis for Media Journalism

By carrying out a PEST Analysis into the current Media Journalism sector, we are able to gain an in-depth understanding of the current industry, highlight new opportunities and also threats or problems and how these can be over come.

The Internet and advances in digital technology has changed the model of mass communication and has had a major impact on the external environment of the newspaper and magazine industries, gradually substituting traditional print media. Digital media has also increased competitiveness within the market and with low capital cost and global accessibility of resources, this has been a threat for many established prints publications. Many existing newspapers have therefore had to compliment their daily prints with online version and further updates throughout the day, instead of waiting for updates till their next publication to be released.

The current economical climate also means that people may be less likely to buy a newspaper or magazine when they could access this information free online - either via newspaper websites, independent websites, blogs or forums. This has had a knock on effect for companies who may have previously used print promotion to reach consumers, as their target consumers might be struggling to buy products, they may have smaller marketing budget or may be choosing to spend their budget on other promotional platforms.

The current economical climate has also led to the public becoming less trusting of the government and therefore, it is easy for consumers to avoid certain publications depending on their political standpoint. With developments in technology and an increased access to resources and information it also means that the public are more likely to investigate news stories themselves - allowing more transparency and angles to a story.

Socially peoples needs are also changing in the way readers access information. More people are accessing digital and social media and by going online, newspaper and magazines can offer their readers multimedia and interaction - something which was not possible only a few years ago.