It’s not every week you wake up to the noise of a well-run business shooting itself in the foot. But Waterstone’s decision to start selling Kindles in-store certainly looks like a case of “letting the fox into the chicken coop” as Today interviewer Simon Jack said this morning.
And there is no doubt that Amazon can be cast in the role of fox. If you don’t believe me, ask
I’ve just been reminded of this year’s traditional family Christmas row. I mentioned that I was planning to buy a Kindle. My sister, an author of many books, spluttered that I shouldn’t mention Kindle to her. It would kill publishing – and media jobs – just as surely as downloading had killed the music industry. She also felt that authors were entitled to a larger slice of revenues from e-books because the publishing companies had much lower overheads.
It is the end of the year – and I would love to be able to give some seasonal good cheer about the jobs market. I rang Allan Cross at Media Networks to see if he could sprinkle a little fairy dust. But, like me, he is cautious.
In the fourteen years I have been a headhunter and media search consultant, I have been lucky to have worked across an astonishing range of titles and products: from Horse & Hound to The Financial Times, from heat to AOL. We have recruited journalists for Reuters in Russia, Euromoney in the US, and, toughest of all, Saga in Folkestone. Bella, Men’s Health, The Jewish Chronicle; all boast current editors recruited by us.
If that question brings you out in a rash, take a deep breath. With B2B publishers fighting for every penny, journalists need to think broadly about media jobs, they need to be to able make a real-terms contribution. They are expected to create supplements, roundtables, and conferences, and work with advertising sales to maximise revenue opportunities. So what does this mean for editorial integrity?
Not so long ago, Louise Chunn and Marie O’Riordan were facing it off across the newsstand: Chunn at InStyle, O’Riordan at Marie Claire. Yet this year, they were competing for the contract to publish the John Lewis magazine.
For many years, customer publishing was considered the poor relation among magazine publishers. But publishing agencies were quietly building an impressive portfolio of titles: many would not disgrace the newsstand – indeed, the source of their funding means that their production values can be higher than their paid-for cousins. There are now over 1000 customer titles, with 92 launches in the last 18 months: two of these (I and Arise) have been nominated for BSME’s Launch of the Year category.
In a tough trading environment, the difference between success and failure is marginal. Let’s assume that 5% makes all the difference. This means publishers squeezing 5% more out of their budgets; sales directors improving their profitable revenues by 5%; and editors getting 5% extra creativity out of a budget reduced by 5%. The same principle applies for the events and research sectors – indeed, for any business.
But how does a company achieve this? Well, it requires a senior team which is flexible, dedicated, and leads by example. And that means hiring the right people for publishing in a recession and, where necessary, replacing the wrong ones.
