Bigger Isn't Better

If the print revolution comes (again), publishers will have to make one Tiny Leap

Following yesterday’s announcement that The Onion is launching a premium monthly print edition for its superfans, a few commenters have suggested that this model could be the way forward for a lot of legacy print media.

Well, yes…and no. Maybe?

How’s that for a thesis statement? Cut me some slack, I got two vaccinations yesterday.

A look inside my bloodstream RIGHT THIS MINUTE

As I’ve said, premium print is a wonderful upsell—a great way to olive-press more money from a reader with whom you’ve already established a relationship. And it’s an even better way to get customers to come back, after you’ve tried the whole online-über-alles hustle.

Print’s existence in the world, its inky-smelling, finger-slicing hefty physicality triggers something deep in the human mind. “This is a valuable thing. This I will pay for.”

That was the big aspect of reader behavior the digital-maximalists never predicted—digital products never feel quite real. Philosophically at least, we all know that something like Slate requires many of the same jobs, and much of the same effort, as producing a print magazine. But after a digital product delivers an emotion or an experience, the reader thinks, “But why should I pay for that? It’s not even a thing.”

So the vast savings of digital publications came with an emotional—thus monetary—detaching of readers from publications. What used to be newspapers and magazines (and even books) turned into “content,” a word writ in water.

At Bystander, we’ve found the reverse is possible; Bystander print subscribers are fanatically loyal, like Japanese-soldier-in-a-cave loyal. We thank God and Harold Ross for them every day. And the comments to yesterday’s post suggest that to me that The Onion will immediately have a cadre of folks with that kind of dedication. What they will do with them remains to be seen, but unless they launch off into some truly Caligularian dream, The Onion should really prosper, and have more stability, too.

The New Yorker could do the same—put together a quarterly best of digest for its superfans. No listings, just the best pieces from print and the web, from the preceding quarter. I can’t keep up with the weekly New Yorker, but a quarterly? I’d pay for that, and read it too.

Someone mentioned Nat Geo, and I don’t think this premium print model is lucrative enough for them. What’s really valuable about Nat Geo costs a lot of money; you’ve got to fly the photographer down to Australia, then put them in a boat where they wait for sharks that may or may not show up. If the sharks do show up, you put the snaps-man down into the cage, and hope he gets something good. And that may take weeks, too.

So much cheaper to write an essay about Alien: Romulus, right?

It’s the same with the old LIFE: any magazine designed to go out into the world and bring it back home to the reader, needs big scale to pay for all that.

But Sports Illustrated? Yes. They could potentially do this. Have a Defector-like website, and a big thick quarterly full of opinion, essays, features (the only expensive part), and archival stuff. Same with Esquire—same with Entertainment Weekly—same with Playboy. When the print Playboy closed down, I started composing a letter to Hef pitching this very model; I was putting the finishing touches on it when he died. But it would be a piece of cake for them, and solve the whole nudity/not-nudity thing.

Magazines on the bubble that deal in journalism—necessary, expensive journalism—might have a more difficult time using this model. I don’t think The Atlantic or Harper’s or NYREV could launch a premium print product for superfans, because that’s what they are already doing.

The Onion is leveraging its frequency, the ease and cheapness of producing more comedy, and the ability of comedy to create cult-like subgroups. If we laugh at the same stuff, we’re part of the same tribe.

I think it’s a winning formula.

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The only hurdle I can see is psychological. Probably since Gutenberg, success in publishing has been measured by size. The craving for print run—which made sound business sense initially, getting economies of scale and turning a newspaper that costs you 3c per, into a bigger one that costs you only 1c—is no longer useful. It’s a mass-market model, and after the advent of TV, print just hasn’t been that. Now with the internet, print is even more niche than ever.

At Bystander, the first thing we did was jettison the size fetish. Our goal has always been profitability and stability, not size; a small magazine that makes $1 more than it needs is a better business than the usual gamble—a magazine spending investor dough hand over fist in a desperate race against time.

A small, profitable magazine with a super-strong connection to its readers, that’s a type of print that can succeed, in 2024 and beyond.

But I think the picture is even rosier for The Onion. Suddenly their website isn’t just a vehicle for online ads, the rates for which are in an eternal race to the bottom. Now, Onion.com is one big in-house ad for this new print edition. And every day they build the cult.

One of the tenets of micropublishing is, “Properly done, print is a cult. And cults make money.” I think this new Onion venture may turn into a new People’s Temple. But, you know, in a good way.

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Editor & Publisher of The American Bystander MICHAEL GERBER wrote this with a bloodstream heavy with not one, but two vaccines. Take that, RFK Jr!