Quite enjoyed watching Ben Stillers Walter Mitty last night and remembered how much I enjoyed working at Future Publishing. The downsizing chat from the Director of the Transition made me wince with familiarity though* and then today theres this great piece in the Guardian about Futures proposed sweeping content changes: theguardian/media/media-blog/2014/may/18/publisher-future-magazines-content-advertising Now, the thing with Future, certainly when I was there, was that it unapologetically employed enthusiasts for their niche magazines (which was all of them). An enthusiast will work harder and cheaper to create a product that he or she is proud of. No one I worked with was a qualified journalist - we were all cyclists who loved being able to write about what we loved. By doing this, Future guaranteed authentic, enthusiastic and desperately accurate content for a wage bill far less than if you employed qualified, careful fact-checking journalists who could turn a hand to any subject. To a certain extent you can do this with magazine design, but only to a degree. Each designer there, was skilled in knowing what made a great and authentic cycling (or knitwear or guitar…) photo and corresponding layout. So, to throw this all away and assume that content writing is a skill transferrable across many genres is foolish. The reason that people read Futures mags is that theyre written by deep-down enthusiasts with a passion for the subject a knowledge that no amount of careful fact-checking can overtake. Although were, ostensibly, a rival publication at Singletrack Magazine, Im also an ex-employee of Future (admittedly a long time ago) and I hold their journalists in high esteem. The world of competition is far healthier with a quality adversary and I wouldnt want to see that enthusiastic spark snubbed out in the name of cost-cutting. Especially when employing enthusiasts was one of the low-cost innovations that Future helped pioneer. (* In 1998 when my publisher told me that he was closing Mountain Bike World magazine, a magazine I deeply loved working on, he said Yes, Im sorry, but were closing your magazine, but hey! Ive got a GREAT opportunity for you. How would you like to edit our new, quarterly, learning to drive magazine? - quitting that day was, in retrospect probably one of my better decisions.)
Posted on: Sun, 18 May 2014 22:08:07 +0000