Other Voices, Other Views

The Great Ironies of the Business Magazine

They cover management, so why can’t biz publications manage themselves properly?

Fall 2009 By Paul B. Brown

It was at the end of a pleasant evening with friends that my wife, founder and CEO of a successful company, uttered the line that best explains what is wrong with business magazines today. She had listened all night to a handful of writers and editors opine in detail about the economy, large companies, small companies, and what needed to be done. When the last guest had left, she turned to me and said, “What you guys don’t know about running a company could fill a magazine.”

A quick look at the newsstand proves her right. The biggest lessons that business magazines are teaching their readers today aren’t found in the stories they print—they are found in the fact that magazines are running themselves into the ground. Which leads us to:

Irony No. 1: The folks who write about business can’t run their own. And unfortunately for the way I make my living—I write for magazines—the ironies just keep on coming.

Irony No. 2: There is absolutely no doubt that many (if not all) business magazines are on life support. Collectively, those magazines have published literally hundreds of stories about how to deal with downturns. You would think they would have learned something from them. And yet a quick survey of the landscape shows they have not.

BusinessWeek, despite substantial layoffs, is hemorrhaging tens of millions of dollars a year. The magazine is being shopped aggressively, and insiders say its owner, McGraw-Hill, will sell it no matter how low the offer. Meanwhile, CFO’s combined July/August issue had just twenty pages of advertising, including its own two-page ad promoting an upcoming conference. Forbes, Fortune, and the rest are hurting as well, as partly evidenced by issues so slim that the spines can barely accommodate the magazines’ names.

Yet, like incompetent managers everywhere, the editors and publishers who are watching their firms implode cite factors beyond their control (the recession, the Internet) instead of their own refusal or inability to deal with the problem.

In a recent essay in The Atlantic Monthly, Michael Hirschorn argued that The Economist presents an appealing model for success due to “its status as a humble digest, with a consistent authorial voice, that covers absolutely everything that you need to be informed about.” Well, maybe, but there is already an Economist, and you have to wonder whether the world needs another.

But Hirschorn was right when he wrote: “In the digital age, razor-sharp clarity and definition are the keys to success. Knowing what and who you are, and conveying that idea to an audience, is the only way to break through to readers ADD’ed out on an infinitude of choices.” That brings us to …

Irony No. 3: Even if they haven’t read their own stuff about how to handle hard times, the folks who run magazines don’t have to venture farther than their local newsstand to see one approach they could be taking. They should look at women’s magazines, specifically the “service” ones, like Good Housekeeping, Parenting, Cooking Light, and others that are designed to help their readers improve their lives. Month in, month out, they continue to attract readers—and therefore advertisers.

It’s All You

Most magazine writers don’t like to do service pieces. They consider such articles to be simplistic and beneath them. And business publishers aren’t crazy about running them, feeling the basic nature of the articles—“Six Tips for Conducting an Annual Performance Review”—sends the wrong message to advertisers who want to reach a more sophisticated audience. But here is …

Irony No. 4: Readers love them. Over the years, I have written numerous “how to” columns, and I am consistently overwhelmed by reader responses. People write in (something they almost never do), and advertisers ask me to speak at events they hold for clients. The number of responses to a typical three-thousand-word profile of the company du jour? Nada.

Anecdotal evidence tends not to cut it with publishers, who are businesspeople, after all. They want hard facts. So OK, here’s a suggestion to business-magazine publishers: Pick up your most recent issue and hold it in your right hand. Now hold a copy of All You (or almost any service magazine) in your left. Now ask yourself: Which one is attracting more ad pages? There is no contest. The paucity of ads on the right should tell business publishers that their current approach is anything but right.

The reason that All You (a Time Inc. publication sold primarily through Wal-Mart) is kicking serious butt is because it has transformed into reality all the concepts that business writers have turned into clichés: understanding your audience, sticking close to your customers, providing your consumers with something that they can’t get elsewhere.

Sure, it is easy to make fun of cover lines such as “Easy 30-minute family dinners,” “Try a fall trend for a nice price,” and “How streamlining your life can save you money and make you happier—every day!” that All You ran in its August issue. But you know what? It is “news you can use,” which is never, ever a bad thing.

What is less helpful is the way business magazines traditionally report. Somebody came up with a whizbang product; or a company made a fortune selling the latest widget; or Jenny Jones, she of the little black dress, is a heck of a manager because sales are soaring. But you never learn exactly, or even in much detail, how you (or your firm) can do something similar or how you are to benefit from reading the piece.

One classic definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result. It is time for the publishers and editors of business publications to tear out a page from the women’s magazines and start trying harder to help their readers do a better job.

PAUL B. BROWN PAUL B. BROWN is author or co-author of more than a dozen business books, including Customers for Life.