Building Engaged Communities: How magazines stay relevant in changing media landscape

Ever since I took on the responsibility of the President of AIM at the peak of the pandemic in Sep 2020, it has been my dream to showcase the strength and significance of magazines in the media landscape. 

Having spent over three decades of my life in the pursuit of keeping myself relevant, I am patently biased towards the magazine media industry, but here goes! 

The magazine is a unique medium that has always driven perspective and enabled its communities to draw insights, rather than simply reporting and provoking audiences like most other media. We thrive in digging deep, and then digging wide in our coverage of happenings around us. We groom thinking and discerning communities and that has traditionally attracted our utility as an ideal brand building platform for compelling brand stories. 

Yet, in India, magazines are a small fraction of the print media industry- in single digits percentage- while our counterparts in the west, are almost equal the size of newspaper sector! What were the building blocks that enabled this mega size in West, and ones that we have seemingly missed in India. What could we learn from our international peers? 

My intrigue was enhanced by the approach of the west when digital became centre stage to our future. They had adapted and adopted best practices by experimenting and chiselling their way through consistently creating engaging communities. 

Whilst the typical magazine brands of yesteryear was successful when it was ‘broad-based’, of ‘general interest’ and meant ‘something for everyone in the family’, the magazine brands that succeed now are ones that cater to specific interests of a communities, are utilitarian to their readers and subscribers, represent value not just for money, but more important, for the only irreplaceable component of our daily lives – time!  

I had to unlearn and relearn everything I thought I knew about my industry. 

All this came to me from my partaking in international seminars like AIM’s Indian Magazine Congress, FIPP’s World Magazine Congress, FIPP-DZW Digital Innovators’ Summit, and so many more. Learnings in these events came not just from the deeply insightful presentations that these world class speakers showcased, but from heated debates and interactions I had on the side-lines of these events. 

In a world where readers have also become our competition (influencers), fake news has overtaken relevance over fact checking, ChatGPT has almost crossed the Rubicon of human reportage with machine language (AI/ML), when big tech and governments in vibrant democracies decide what is content ripe for take-down, it is ever so important that we discuss our concerns around policy, technology, distribution, client needs, and most importantly, what our communities expect of us. 

That is what we have been fostering under the hood for 6 months now. We are proud to present AIM’s 12^th Indian Magazine Congress – Building Engaged Communities 

The road has been anything but straight and narrow. For starters, we all took giant leaps of faith! 

Faith that we could actually pull off such an international event when the market was still bearish, faith that we would make up the costs and contribute to AIM’s corpus when we then had no sponsors in sight, faith in our moonlighting skills - agonising over the agenda, curating the best of speakers, getting sponsors to commit, fixing the venue and ensuring that policymakers, clients, agencies, tech partners, international speakers and delegates. 

One look at the agenda (aim.org.in/imc12) and any publisher will realise that we are addressing magazines in the post pandemic new reality. 

The magazine industry took a crippling hit during the pandemic.   

• Distributors were crushed under the weight of holding fort their last mile to the customer, while the country was convulsing under unpredictable, successive lockdowns. 
• Advertisers lost hope that people would ever return to buy goods and services ‘the good old way’ – while online was clearly becoming a ‘tiger by the tail’ – more and more opaque, expensive, unrelenting.
• Readers, viewers, surfers – communities were creating their own content like never before, opinion makers being hailed as truth tellers, and big media being relegated to ungracious truants.
• Our own people were losing morale with the grapevine of losses and job/ salary cuts. 

Yet, I can say that in these past 3 years, in this new normal – we have come out stronger, more efficient, more willing to adapt and adopt, constantly growing our revenue streams, listening to our communities, creating engaging content around what matters most, having the guts to go behind a paywall, empathising with advertiser needs and creating marketing opportunities that suit client need and community fulfilment rather than force fitting what we have on offer – in short, we survive by transformation to stay relevant. 

The scenario is painfully the same world over, and the answers we have come up with are unique, yet similar.  

Please join us for AIM’s 12^th Indian Magazine Congress, to be held at The Oberoi on Friday, 24^th March, 2023 and learn how publishers are pulling up their socks, shedding their weight and transforming to stay relevant with only one commitment – to Building Engaged Communities. 

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not in any way represent the views of exchange4media.com