da Silva: Magazines aren't going anywhere, but...

A magazine editor visiting the University of Wisconsin says the quality production values of magazines will ultimately be what saves them from their economic woes.

Wilson da Silva, Editor-in-Chief of the Australia-based science magazine Cosmos, readily acknowledged that print media faces some challenges, but that he supports magazines as “low-cost high tech.” What he means by that term is that the cost of printing the magazines is easily offset by the quality of content and production values that magazines offer readers including high-resolution photographs and quality features that are more enjoyable offline. He even went as far as to say that magazines, as a form of quality distribution, is an inevitable creation.

“If magazines didn't exist,” da Silva said, “we would have to invent them, I would argue.”

Da Silva says that the economic problems that newspapers and weekly magazines like Time and Newsweek are facing are difficult issues to pin down. Cosmos is a bi-monthly magazine and according to da Silva most subscribers subscribe for two years at a time and only 8-10 percent of the magazines revenue comes from advertisers, where weeklies have more content and more magazines per year and thus must rely more on advertising.

Print, web, or cellphone — the medium doesn't matter as much as the idea that news and advertising are “decoupling,” says da Silva. Advertisers are leaving print, but not following through to the Web, and in that process news disseminators are left with a large bill to pay. Magazines, with their unique attributes and unmatched quality, will survive precisely because of those attributes and quality. Subscribers would be more willing to pay more to support a magazine that is worth their time — if it is not worth their time then why should it be worth their money?

Cosmos is an example of a multi-revenue supported magazine that can serve as a blueprint for other magazines, says da Silva. Whether or not that model can work for all kinds of magazines, like weeklies or bi-weeklies, is still not determined, but publishers and journalists have to be willing to listen to what their audience wants. That is what he and his colleagues at Cosmos do.

“We have a saying in the office,” da Silva said, “We don't do worthy, we do interesting.”