Gordon Woolf's Blog

Magalog or catazine - good idea but not a new one

There's nothing new under the sun. That was my reaction when I read a US Postal Service blog suggesting the latest trend was the "Magalog" or the "Catazine", a hybrid of catalog and magazine. My reaction was thus because this is how one major category of magazines, the trade magazine or trade journal, started a couple of hundred years ago.

The Morgan brothers, who ran a business which combined the categories of druggists and hardware sellers, decided back then that they'd get more readers and more committed readers for their catalogs and thus more customers if they included news and information. And that meant news etc that was not just puffery for their products.

In the 1960s I worked in London for the firm of publishers which had been, a century earlier, that firm of chemists. Those catalogs became the world's first trade magazines, The Chemist and Druggist and The Ironmonger. As they became successful in their own right, they split from the chemicals company (which became Morgan Crucible) and the one which became Morgan Brothers Publishers (and subsequently the Morgan-Grampian Group, now part of Fleet Holdings).

When I started work for the descendants of the Morgan Brothers (Sir Charles Morgan Hudson was the chairman) I worked on The Ironmonger and they were approaching their centenary year as publishers. They set a high standard with an editorial staff of around ten on that magazine alone, a supplements department with two or three (I worked for that section for a while and wrote a 64-page guide to glues and adhesives - exciting stuff!) and an inquiry department with 5 people fulltime answering phone and mail questions from subscribers.

It was definitely profitable and as a young reporter I was sent UK-wide reporting on the meetings of hardware retailers and ironmongers. When John Betjeman (later appointed Poet Laureate by Queen Elizabeth II and following on previous appointees to that position such as Tennyson, Wordsworth and John Masefield) called for some information in order to write his speech to open an exhibition of Opercula (perhaps better known as "coal hole covers" those often ornate cast iron plates set in footpaths in front of houses above the coal cellars) I was told to find the booklet on that subject we had published long before, try to find some updated information and arrange to meet him before the event and then report on the opening. It took many hours and resulted in about a 6-inch story.

But that was the way things were in those profitable days. Maybe some of the "new" catalogues with news will do as well. As long as they follow the basic rule that the Morgan Brothers followed, that there must be no puffery. Readers had to be respected.

I'd suggest that a good start might be not to call the new publication a "Magalog" or the "Catazine".

Surveys: do they tell you anything

A magazine editor asked about some suggested questions for a survey on responses to his publication to be put to those attending a forthcoming meeting.

It was an opportunity for me to explain why I hate surveys, especially those presented at meetings or conferences: you either fill them out at random or go for the middle answer after you realize that you've been talking to colleagues and there isn't time to read the questions let alone answer.

It's a question which came up when I was preparing a new edition of a book for the printers, Type & Layout. The author, Colin Wheildon comments "over the years of my research, David Ogilvy more than once raised the question whether I was measuring reading comprehension or merely readability. I'm grateful for his persistence in moving me to confront this important and difficult question."

In this research he was measuring the extent to which typography and design affected understanding. His answer was that to overcome statements which might just reflect that a person had perused the articles and thought they understood them, was that there had to be actual questions on content to see whether the subjects had not only read the content, or thought that they had done so, but that they could answer questions which showed they had done so.

I was, in a way, pleased that it presented such major problems for the academics and practical researchers who advised Colin on this research, because it supported something I wrote in my own book on magazine publishing:

'Let's put a reader survey in the next issue, to find out what the reader wants!' To my mind this is like governments forming a committee: it gives the appearance of doing something without actually having to take any possibly unpopular decisions. Surveys have to be exceptionally well designed to get useful answers and can be designed to produce mostly the answers those setting the questions want to get.

I also quoted Dick Smith, the millionaire businessman and adventurer who started Australian Geographic magazine as suggesting the best way to find out what needs doing is to talk to staff and customers. He was surprised how many companies, especially large ones, which forgot to do this.

So, I suggested better results would be gained by walking among the attendees and raising the subject of the publication, and have a few other people do the same.

Did I say that I dislike surveys?

Journalism at its best

As someone commented on an email list for copy editors, the the big difference at a smallish weekly is that just about anyone can march into the editor-publisher's office and take him to task for anything in the paper. They also collar him at the supermarket, on the street, or at a high school hockey game. "There is no statute of limitations. Accountability, up close and personal", stated the writer.

And for those reasons, in my view, it is the best form of journalism there is! My first experience of it (after having been an editor of a couple of magazines, including one with a worldwide circulation) was on a country town paper with an editorial staff of two (the owner/manager and me). It came out at 11am on a Thursday morning and if it was a few minutes late there would be a queue stretching down the street. Even the bus to the next town waited on the opposite side of the street though there was no official stop there -- the driver knew his passengers would be in the queue, as well as having to face the people in that tiny town if he arrived without the supply for the general store.

You very quickly get to know how to spell every family name in town, and you are working every hour that you are awake. Sometimes there are national stories too and you see the difference in the care which has to be taken to get things right. Getting the little facts right is also the key to acceptance as an outsider, especially when you print the things they'd rather were not said.

City newspapers used to send young reporters for spells of a few months on small country newspapers but that is a tradition which seems to have disappeared, though it helped many borderline publications to survive and gave the bigger newspapers much better journalists.

Where does news come from?

That's a question we really all know the answer to but which many of us have decided to forget or disregard.

News in its original form comes from two sources:

1. People who want the information to be known (i.e. businesses, groups, politicians, individuals).
2. People who ask questions of businesses, groups, politicians, individuals.

The first group, whether they know it or not, are publicists. The second group, again whether they know it or not, are journalists.

The second group are people who mostly have to be paid for doing their job by the people who read what they write. In some cases this direct payment can be separated by their work being paid for by the first group, usually indirectly by paying for space or time in the media which then has funds to publish output from the second group.

Group 1 knows that unless there is an acceptable quantity of material from Group 2, then Group 1's output will not be read as avidly and in extreme cases may not be read at all.

This was understood by the men of commerce who started the first trade magazines. By including at least some independent information in their catalogs, those catalogs were read more widely and more thoroughly.

But now news stories from the people in Group 2 may be so widely disseminated that the originators are forgotten. Google News Alerts can tell you what is happening, and of course they quote sources. A page of "old media" national news in a local online "webnews" is briefs which quote and link to earlier sources, not even necessarily to the publication which published the original story first.

There have been union battles to ensure that print journalists may receive a few cents extra if the story appears online for the first time, but who gets the benefit from a level of syndication where even the original syndicators may lose control.

The Murdochs are right in saying that the consumer must pay for online content, but the problem is working out just where the payment point is on a tortuous route from originator to the last consumer in the line.

But does it look OK in print?

Have you noticed an increasing use of yellow and cyan for headlines and text in otherwise well designed magazines. I wonder if this unreadable print is a result of on-screen proofing where light colors do tend to show up more clearly than when printed. When this problem occurs in multiple issues I wonder whether graphic designers ever look at the finished product. Maybe the on-screen version is regarded as the final version and no longer is there the thrill of having someone pick up a first batch from the printer and throw a copy on to ever desk at the publisher's. With everything now seen on screen in what we are told is what it will look like in print, have we collectively lost the excitement of seeing "the real thing" -- and why? The problems of light type and the loss of readership and understanding it causes are dealt with in Type and Layout: Are you communicating or just making pretty shapes, the book by Colin Wheildon.