@ FOCM: Will Celeb Mags Still Be Around In Five Years? Ask Your Kids
This story was written by David Kaplan.
Time Inc.'s People magazine is one of the few positives in the print industry these days, seeing its ad pages and revenue rise, said Ken Sonenclar, Managing Director, DeSilva+Phillips, introducing the first panel at the Future of Celebrity Media. So when Sonenclar asked Mark Golin, People.com's editor, if the print mag would still be here in five years, he sounded even more self-assured than he would otherwise be required to at a public event. He suggested that the site and the print mag both reinforce each other's brand, as opposed to competing or cannibalizing. It's two different formats and will continue to inspire different uses, Golin said. "We do make a conscious effort to not put the story online. For someone with a casual interest, they'll come to the website. For others, it's to whet their appetite."
No time machine: Dave Levine, senior executive producer of CNN Entertainment/Showbiz Tonight, dismissed the question: "Two years ago, who would have predicted Twitter? And who knows if Twitter will still be here in two years. Who knows what the technology will be in two years, let alone five years. It's impossible to answer. But yes, having said that, I'm sure that there will still be a place for our show and others like it. TV's not going away."
Dying Habits: Levine posited that individual magazines tend to hold consumers' attention for longer than corresponding websites. And the habit of flipping through a magazine and saving it has become an ingrained habit. Levine: "How long do people stay online? Consumers spend 40 minutes with a magazine. But online, these same people spend eight, nine, 10 minutes with a particular website. We overestimate how much people read online. All of us have a pile of magazines that we say we're going to get to. We like to delude ourselves that we're going to become so smart by reading these 40 magazines. But that's a habit we have; people still want magazines." But how many younger people are keeping those same habits? Golin: "Radio should have died a long time ago. But it hasn't." An audience member shot up: "But radio is a dying medium. The bigger question is not whether print goes away, but how will it survive in the future? I have teenage kids. They don't read magazines, they're only online and that scares the hell out of me."
What the kids say: Piping up from the front row, Henry Copeland, business/technology chief of PerezHilton.com and founder/president of Blogads, said, "It's either funny or sad that we're just talking about our kids." However, he did note that Perez maintains a young audience and that the shift between online and mobile has been notable, perhaps showing that there's more to the divide than just print and PC.
By David Kaplan