Publishing lessons from the land of the free
We didn’t see free print for what it was when we launched our first title. We thought ourselves rather clever, black-roll-neck-owning media professionals, but trust me when I say, we had no idea.
Shortlist Media turned 10 this week
We sensed the internet was coming, but we didn’t know it would come via our phones, via social media, that it would decimate the newsstand. But more than all that, we didn’t understand the entirely new relationship a magazine could have with its readers, when they take it from a street vendor’s hand without payment. Free print wasn’t a new way of presenting old content, it was a totally new creative challenge.
Today, the streets of our cities are filled with distributors handing out free titles covering everything from music to wellness, and what the good ones will find is that everything their teams learned in conventional publishing can be turned on its head in the free market.
As an editor, the first change you notice is the absence of fear.
For years I’d lived with the fear that my sale would be disappointing. I’d worked on successes and disasters, and the fear follows you in both scenarios; even on a magazine that’s breaking records, the targets are set and the creeping notion that you will be unable to meet them seeps into you. I remember editing a glossy monthly adrift of its sales goals and haunting the main newsstand at Waterloo Station watching the display stack of my magazine stand, unmoving day after day, a retail monument to public indifference. And yes, I was aware they restock the shelves – the urge to hover came from a dark place far beyond logic. And this fear focused me. If I didn’t secure the right celebrity, select the right image, assemble the most tempting array of articles and craft the most appealing cover enticements, I would be facing consequences, and in extreme cases, my entire team would be facing consequences.
The focus, the fear, affected the creative process. Success, a strong sale, became the most fascinating phenomenon – what on earth, you ask, went right? You theorise: was it the cover star, the lighting, the location, the verbs in the cover lines, was it a word? Was there a word that had a magical effect? If so, could you use that word again?
Every element of the magazine was designed to be a sales tool when compressed into eight or so words on the cover. It was a fascinating and consuming task but always left me at risk of working a formula. And this is why when you line up the covers of so many titles, they repeat, they yell at you. They offer 127 of something, an ‘exclusive’ something else, they offer unlikely promises and easily detected exaggerations.
The cover of a newsstand magazine is not a summary of its contents for readers, it is a sales poster for non-readers or very occasional readers, and if it had arms, those arms would be reaching out and grasping passers-by and making them stop.
A strong editor will manage the fear and innovate in the teeth of anxiety – extraordinary paid-for covers are obviously made all the time – but I found the hunt for a winning combination of sales factors in no way prepared me for the task of producing free-to-the reader magazines.
As we launched ShortList and watched the behaviours of our audience, we began to break our minds out of our ingrained habits and it became clear freedom from the newsstand meant we could experiment with covers and feature ideas we would never have entertained in our previous jobs. The readers grew to know and trust us enough to accept the magazine from our street vendors – this took a while, urban audiences guard their time/space carefully. As long as they could see the logo, it seemed they would take a copy with very few words on the cover, enigmatic or demanding topics and sly, knowing jokes… we were, it seemed, free to do whatever we liked.
But not quite.
We realised our features and our cover were a form of brand marketing – the relationship with our loyalists was a close one, they read every issue. Why wouldn’t they? It was there for them to take every week. Our content was not prompting purchase, it was communicating a set of values after the moment of pick-up. If we strayed, if we ever became witless, obvious, if we made a wrong step, they would let us know... immediately. Freedom came with a fresh set of obligations.
The hand-distribution window is around two hours. This means that hundreds of thousands of people are all reading the same stuff at the same time: a big impact. And if they don’t like something or they love something, we see the social conversation build and emails fly into our inbox becoming an immediate and powerful wave of feedback.
We quickly began to feel the force of the distribution moment and the new ‘contract’ we had with our audience. We were expected to surprise and entertain, to demonstrate ingenuity because these were values our demanding, metropolitan readers held dear.
We were expected to craft something visually experimental, every week. For our target audience – educated, knowing, well-read, busy: we were a brand that reflected the kind of people they admired, they kind of people they wanted to be.
Also the magazine had to be designed to be consumed in public, where it was handed out. A lot of the visceral material that drives traditional titles – sex, vanity, extreme human stories – could not be enjoyed on the Circle Line without discomfort. The reader had to feel proud of their choice to pick up a copy.
The feedback we received led us to play and take chances and, at times, print material we knew they would have been unlikely to buy had we carried a cover price. Some of the subject matter we were able to explore would sit comfortably in literary magazines or business titles, and yet here it was being read – genuinely being read and enjoyed – by a very large audience who had grown to trust us and stretch with us into material neither would have entertained in the past.
And this is the continuing miracle that we have all come to accept as normal.
It is exciting to see other vibrant print experiments taking shape, some like our own in the high-frequency free space, but others moving in the opposite direction, positioning themselves as collectable, opulent accessories with high price tags and uncompromisingly heavy paper.
As we translate our brands into social video, live events, Facebook articles, it feels like the age of the Big Idea has finally arrived. A cover story is also a film shoot, a roof-top bar cinema event and echoes across Instagram and Twitter. But 10 years on from ShortList’s launch, emerging from the Tube, I’m being offered an array of brilliant print magazines made with passion by journalists who come to work every day knowing they are part of our industry’s future.
Phil Hilton is the co-founder and editorial director at Shortlist Media