36 word on the street Twenty to thirty years ago, creating a magazine was pretty simple. You struggled with Quark or InDesign, you created a layout, you worked with a printer. That was the main focus of the technology, and that magazine was the one way to reach people. These days, there are many other ways, and you could spend your entire life trying to figure out which one will work. What’s important is to think about how you reach your community in a way that will service them the best. And the only way to do that is by experimentation. At the moment, the issue is not so much that people in magazines are scared of experimenting, but that they’re not doing it in ways that teach them what they need to know. The classic example is: let’s ask readers what they think. They do a survey. But many times people will tell you what they think you want to hear. They do it unconsciously. They don’t want to be the ones to disappoint you. You need another way. Take the iPad. The problem wasn’t lack of experimentation. It was that Apple didn’t test whether people would actually pay for it. Apple and Adobe sold us the idea that print issues would look great on the iPad – and we all had a need to save magazines, so we did it. We thought it was like print, that people would pay for the content, that they would have a relationship with the magazine like in the 90s and 2000s. The truth was, the only magazines that people paid for were the ones they would pay for already. The lesson there: build experimentation in a way that gives you an answer. What are you actually trying to find out? Companies will give you shiny objects all the time. But are they actually growing the number of people who know about your brand or accomplishing whatever goal you have? At the moment, there’s a lot of discussion about whether or not TikTok makes sense for brands, and I wish I had an answer. I know a lot of people who are spending time on TikTok. What I do not know is if those people will spend time with your brand and eventually your magazine. You have to remember that TikTok is trying to get people to spend time with them, by convincing them it will bring them value. On the other hand, they want to bring in content from you – the magazine’s creators – because they don’t have to pay you. You’re actually paying them with your own time. So if you’re going to do something There is a kaleidoscope of tech possibilities for magazine publishers – the important question is, which one will actually connect you to your community? By Kilian Schalk. THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS like TikTok, you need to be very clear as to what the value is for you. Thankfully, these digital platforms allow you to do quick tests to see what works and what doesn’t work. You can learn about the impact in days, even hours. We’re all suffering enough at the moment, putting a magazine out and having it read by the world. You don’t need that stress for digital. You can learn quickly. Remember that what you are offering to the world as a magazine editor, as a magazine designer, is that you know your community better than anyone else. And you want to share the community with itself and with others. That’s really valuable, whether you want to sell ads to that community or if you just want to know them better. My job is to help people see things in a different way. The joy for me is seeing the way magazine people think about their communities be transformed just by doing the work in a different way, or practising a new way of thinking. When you start approaching problems through the lens of experimentation, you start discovering that things are not as scary as you thought. Every experiment is an opportunity for you to learn about your community. And that’s the key.
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