Magazine Specialization Today

Matt York - Founder, Videomaker magazine

The magazine industry is really under stress these days. Videomaker is a 22-year-old publication aimed at video enthusiasts and semiprofessionals. So, maybe in the beginning of our company's development, there were just a very small number of magazines competing with us. Magazines, generally speaking, at that time were kind of a bottleneck in the market. If there were a bunch of enthusiasts who were interest in making video or playing tennis, there weren't that many ways for people selling tennis rackets or selling video cameras to get to that marketplace. Magazines did a great job of kind of aggregating a community to create channels to sell products. But today, I'm sure that yesterday afternoon Billy's Basement Bargain Video Web site went up, and now we have our 150th competitor. The bottom line is that special interest magazines or these affinity communities that have been relying upon paper as the medium are under a tremendous amount of competition, under duress because of really hundreds of small Web sites that can be launched with very little barriers to entry.

Mike Molenda - Editor, Guitar Player magazine

Guitar Player has at least ten times as many readers, viewers on the Web as we do actually by the magazine every month. The print magazine circulation is about 150,000. That includes subscribers and the people who buy us on the newsstand every month. The visits to the Web site monthly are in the million plus category.

Ernie Rideout - Keyboard magazine

The convergence of media is central to what we do, and it's provided a tremendous opportunity for us, something that we've really been wanting to do for the thirty or forty years we've been in publication. It's a lot easier to tell someone how to make a sound if you can have them hear the sound. And it's a lot easier to make a very complex piece of music software seem simple if you can just show someone where on this huge menu of choices they should just click to get the effect they want.

Matt York

Magazines publishers are reacting to this pressure by jumping into more media. So first they went into events, face-to-face training. So it could be for the canoeing magazine, there's a little canoe show. We've started in the events business, several years ago we had hands-on workshops for making video. Also, many magazine publishers have moved into the book space, so publishing books. Clearly, every magazine has a Web site.

Mike Molenda

I'm a media person, so having Guitar Player television is a boon. It's not something that we were scared of or, "Oh my God, we're being forced to do it." It's like, images, words, all that stuff works together. Why would anybody sit there and go, "We're just going to be a print magazine."

Ernie Rideout

Our dream is to become, in the case of Keyboard magazine, the keyboard channel. It will all be on the Web site. We're shooting our own lesson videos and editing them and posting them online. An essential element of our plan for success transitioning into more and more of a Web-based publication is the weight that our brand does carry. The names of our publications say it all: Guitar Player, Bass Player, Keyboard. If we had to come up with something new to communicate the same kind of things, it would be extremely difficult, so we are really hoping that just the very name of our brand can help us reach all those new community members that we haven't reached yet online.