Once a month we invite our member magazine publishers and enthusiasts to guest-edit our fortnightly email newsletter. The aim is to inspire others with magazine-related content, connect members and build our community so we can learn from each other.
This month our guest editor is Alex Mead, Managing Director at Sporting Eric and Editor in Chief of Rugby Journal. You can follow Alex on LinkedIn – remember to connect and say hello!
Tell us about yourself
I’ve been an editor since I was 18 (back in Devon, a local music magazine called tdb – the dog’s bollocks), and after a couple of decades of working in sport, food, travel, music, and car magazines, I launched Rugby Journal eight years ago. It’s a proper coffee-table print beauty, every read is 3,000 words plus, all pictures/illustration are bespoke, and we try and tell stories that go beyond the game, using rugby as a vehicle to go into everything from history and culture to politics and travel. The journal also has an exhibition – Rugby Photographer of the Year; a podcast (of course), Rugby Lives; a weekly newsletter (Rugby Journal Weekly) and all the usual social and digital gubbins.
What’s on your mind?
As always, it’s about making people realise how amazing print is, but in a digital world, so they subscribe to the print edition. We’ve just signed our first partnership with a TV channel, Premier Sports, so we’ve been creating a TV ad and spent a lot of time trying to get across the smell of print without it looking a bit odd – it’s a work in progress. As Rugby Journal is a bit of a creative window to Sporting Eric (our sports marketing agency), we’re also doing lots of other content around rugby, golf, tennis, badminton and general health stuff. Possibly best of all though was talking to Hagrid’s body – aka Martin Bayfield – about the time he went for the job as Darth Vader… that’s on our latest podcast, Rugby Lives.
Members receive their first 5 Ikon Images illustration uses for £50 each
What’s the best article you’ve
read this month?
I probably should put some really insightful thought-leadership article, but to be honest I find 99% of them absolute tosh, usually they’re just finding convoluted ways of telling people something they already know so they feel like they’ve learnt something. Either that, or giving a new tagline to an old idea as if they’ve invented it.
Instead, something that is of us, is the best marmalades in the world, I really love marmalade, I’m with Paddington on that one, and it’s one of the only preserves I will splash out on – lemon curd is the other. So here’s a Longread about marmalade, it goes on a bit, but there’s lots of fun facts and bits and pieces in it (much like a quality marmalade) – sweet potato and coffee marmalade anyone?
Show us an incredible magazine cover
I know I’m supposed to dig up a super-cool cover from some random Scandi magazine you’ve never heard of – it’s a bit like when a musician gets asked for their favourite song and selects an obscure B-side from a glam rock band that never quite made it – but, much as I love my BBC History mag, with two small children I usually read theirs more than mine, and I always think What on Earth! are excellent at what they do. And this cover taps into my passion for pop art combined with rockets – what’s not to love?
What’s your top tip for publishers?
Create a multi-platform ecosystem. It sounds obvious but so many print titles don’t have a strategy for digital, and to make an editorial brand – even one led by a print mag – sustainable you need the digital numbers that print can never deliver. You might get an advertiser in because they love your print title (and you’ve posted it to them), but once they’re on the hook, it really helps to say ‘well, we’ve got a whole ecosystem behind it’, and then reel off your social, digital, event and even podcast strategy.
Each channel of the ecosystems needs its own strategy too, looking at how you can deliver the USP of your mag brand to those specific audiences, and more importantly what can you offer that’s different within those different channels.
Don’t go to a channel just because of the numbers you might get, consider if those numbers will eventually lead to a subs sale, or a regularly engaged follower – are they actually your target customer? If it’s not a fit, and your target audience doesn’t live there, don’t bother, it’s better to have quality over quantity when it comes to audiences.
Also, don’t try and point every channel to your subs page, try and build the right audiences in-channel first, then bring the subs issue up later. And don’t be too eager, play it cool, get them to like you, then love you, and then ask them to seal the deal with a print subscription.
Questions for the community
What subject or issue would you like the International Magazine Centre Members Group to discuss and untangle over on LinkedIn?
My question is: Why can’t all print magazines get together and create a proper print campaign that sells print to everyone? I’m bored of organisations offering me another piece of research that says print works, I obviously believe that, otherwise I wouldn’t have launched a print title. What I need is a massive campaign that EVERYBODY sees saying ‘get off the phones and screens and read a bloody magazine’. But I can’t afford to do that alone, so if we all chip in, maybe we can buy Tom Cruise or someone and ask him to tell the world to buy magazines
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