Let me start by saying that my opinion here is coming from a perspective that is 1/3 someone who has been behind closed doors at a magazine office, 1/3 adamant, life-long magazine lover, 1/3 someone who works in advertising. Meaning I’m putting bits together to create an assumption, however imperfect that assumption might be.

Here’s what I think. Magazines are failing for many reasons, but what ends up being the silent, invisible nail in the coffin is when they attempt to save themselves by writing exclusively for their target advertising demographic.

This is what happens. The money gets tight. Per diems and business lunches go away. Advertisers start to seem like the only answer – you have to sell ads. And to do that, you have to make sure your audience is as appealing as possible to your advertisers. You stop writing about what seems interesting to a wide variety of people and do this:

You sit in a room and name the person your ads are targeted at. You decide how much they make per year. That’s important. You decide what they do on weekends and what bands they care about. What their political orientation is. And you write for that.

For example, let’s say a popular men’s magazine knows a lot of their readers are artistic, upwardly-mobile (but not wealthy) gay men and teenage girls. The advertisers want your audience to be a guy named Ray who makes 110k per year, loves Kings of Leon, votes Libertarian, and loves top shelf whiskey, red meat and staring at boobs.

Suddenly, you have to change all your editorial content so your car ads are going to Ray. Ray doesn’t like it when you have a pro-Obama editorial, or when articles about women don’t include pictures of them in their panties. He doesn’t like cooking articles that involve “kale.” And suddenly your magazine loses that content.

This might seem like a good idea. Yes, you can shape your audience to be a coveted, rich demographic with your content! But can you? Can you really get Ray to read your magazine? Does he give a shit about having the right watch? Does Ray really exist?

What happens in this process is that magazines start to lose their point of view. When that goes away, writers start to resent their work. The fun and creativity that used to seep through the pages is no longer there. There’s a tinge of resentment. A lack of sincerity. Your non-targeted readers start to feel left out and confused. The whole magazine falls apart because the point of view was what made it good in the first place.

I have noticed this happening a lot. It’s funny to me, because I work in advertising, so I should technically be the devil here. But we don’t want to put print ads in boring magazines anymore. We want to find writers with a point of view wherever they are, and pay them to have fun, write something they really believe in and have a cool experience. Scale of publication doesn’t matter as much when interesting writers have hundreds of thousands of followers on their personal Tumblrs. Because we know that a point of view is important. It’s what makes their Tumblrs’ readership higher than the circulation of many city newspapers.  It’s also what makes people like your product.

So magazines, don’t assume you have to do whatever it takes to sell ads. You don’t. Vice magazine has become a media empire because their point of view makes them marketable in ways other than just selling ads. Monocle magazine opened stores because people trust their taste so much they want to buy products curated by them. You don’t have to let your advertisers become the new editors of your magazine. You don’t have to resort to horrible gimmicks like the one below to get people to grab your magazines off the stands. Just have a point of view and think creatively.

–Becky Lang