The scenario: a newspaper decides to launch a new magazine for its subscribers, but the new editor is told there is ‘no budget’. The editor, incidentally, is an existing staff member upon whom more responsibility has been heaped with no commensurate reward.
In most other businesses new duties involve a renegotiation of the salary package, but not in journalism. This could be to preserve the generous profit share that the head honchos like to squeeze out of the business. I prefer to put it down to appallingly lax and disinterested management.
For example, I should have thought that an advertising revenue incentive for the editor of a new publication would be logical with the payment increasing dramatically as more advertising rolled in. However, the idea that a mere journalist should be rewarded for effort betrays the finest tall poppy traditions of the trade.
Back to the oft repeated ‘no budget’ caveat. If a company launched a new product and it was found that the directors had not sanctioned an amount for marketing, sales, promotions and what have you, the business press would ridicule that company, and rightly so. But it is quite acceptable for media companies to launch a new product on the sniff of an oil rag.
So why bother? If management seriously believed in the potential of a new publication they would invest time and money in it, and they would surely want to motivate those involved. The fact that there is always ‘no budget’ suggests that they couldn’t give a toss whether it sinks or swims because there are another half dozen equally hare-brained schemes in the pipeline.
Whether this attitude is designed to be deliberately insulting to the journalists involved is difficult to say. Personally, I think one should give management the benefit of the doubt and put it down to a woeful lack of understanding of the rudiments of business.
Whether this attitude is designed to be deliberately insulting to the journalists involved is difficult to say. Personally, I think one should give management the benefit of the doubt and put it down to a woeful lack of understanding of the rudiments of business.
Even more bewildering are rescue plans for ailing publications, known in the industry as ‘relaunches’. If a magazine has to be relaunched or repositioned, you can be pretty sure it’s haemorrhaging money for its owner. Sales are dropping, advertising is drying up, and staff are demotivated. The reasons for this are pretty easy to assess (unless you happen to be a magazine publisher). Put bluntly.the magazine is crap and is no longer attracting readers.
So what’s the solution? Well, you might think the solution would be to improve the content and pay top rates to get the best writers, but you would be wrong. The solution is to hand R3 million to an advertising agency to redesign the publication. For that money you will get more white space, a different logo, and no curly tails on your g’s and y’s. You then throw what’s left of the budget towards a relaunch party with the usual sad bunch of media hangers on and people desperate to get a mention in Gwen Gill’s column and sit back to watch the result.
Sales continue to fall. Obviously, the magazine buying public are not as gullible as the magazine publishers (who still believe in what amounts to the publishing world’s equivalent of feng shui).
Improve the quality of the content and you will attract not only readers, but good writers. Pay peanuts and you will attract monkeys and gradually go out of business.