At the crossroads? Make the product scarce or diminish its financial value

An interesting interview in Media Guardian this morning with Time Out's Tony Elliot may give a few clues to how the magazine industry is going to tackle the changing media environment.

After toying with the idea back in 1968 when the magazine was founded,he is once again thinking of making the listings magazine free and slimming down its content.

"We are in quite an intensive period of thinking and researching to re-plan for the future. The issue is, if you have got a situation in two to three years where the comprehensive role that we play is online, the question is what shape does the print magazine take? Do we have a smaller magazine that is cheaper? Also we have to look at the free route. I am not sure, but there are people in the building who say 'maybe we should look at free'. There is an audience out there, younger people, who because of online do not expect to pay for things. The downside is that advertisers in general do not like free."

Is this the way to go for the magazine industry?

Last week saw Philip Stone looking at another angle.Pointing out that

For many publishers online growth has slowed to negligible while print’s advertising losses are gaining with each reporting month.

His solution was that publications should in fact hold back from using the web to replicate all their content,use it for breaking news only and only publish online when the reach of the print content has been exhausted.

I can hear the gasps of the media pundits now but multi platform does diminish contents exclusivity so maybe there is case for that argument.Stone was looking at the decision of the Philadelphia Inquirer to follow such a strategy

For if news is really a business, which it is, and for newspapers the bulk of its business revenue comes from the print paper, and since the web model has shown it is not bringing in replacement or more revenue, then does it not make economic sense to complete the circle so to speak and go back to original newspaper-web policy and protect the newspaper’s content?

Roy Greenslade whilst recognising the sentiments accused Stone of

falling into that trap of seeing journalism only in business terms. Unless news can attract advertising, it makes no commercial sense to transmit news. No profit, no news.

Now we get into the depths of what news is about.It is the ability to deliver quality information to the public.However it relies on economic models of profitability and as with any enterprise,no demand equals no profit and no investment.