Brand Central Station

It’s gotta be tough running a trade magazine nowadays.

In the old days, being the “bible” of an industry meant you were there first and (usually) didn’t have to be much more interesting than the Bible. Age mattered. Roots mattered. Inertia was king.

Then came the Internet and those yahoos like Yahoo! and Google. Next thing you know, they’re putting buyers in direct contact with sellers and there was no messy paper, closing deadlines or ink to get in the way. The business of business had moved online and many of those crusty, old industry bibles were caught unaware.

According to this article in Ad Age, Pat Kenealy, the CEO of IDG (a huge tech-trade publisher) warned the attendees at a conference sponsored by American Business Media that Google (and other search competitors like Yahoo!) were horning in on the trade pub business through products like Google AdWords and the like.

What’s at stake here is hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars in advertising. That’s no lie. The B2B segment of the magazine biz has been hurting for the past few years (since the Internet bubble burst) and many of the magazines have been biding their time, cutting expenses and waiting for the rebound. But Kenealy’s words should be seen as a bell weather warning:

“There isn’t going to be a rebound.”

At least not like the kind most of these old dogs have been waiting for. The trade pubs that have reinvented themselves and invested in online content have learned an important lesson. The Internet search engines (e.g. Google) can aggregate but they can’t edit. You stand a better chance of survival if you have a clear editorial voice and point of view.

Remarkably enough, there are still hundreds of trade books out there that are nothing more than an amalgam of press releases and customer-supplied case studies. It’s lazy publishing and takes less than half a brain to do. That’s why it can be automated.

So will Google and Yahoo! kill the trade publication market? No. Definitely not. But those pubs that are going to survive and grow have to have a clear editorial mission.

And all this leads to an interesting conclusion.

If the successful trade books are going to be more editorially focused and work on providing real stories and cover issues of importance, then what does this mean for corporate flacks who have grown accustomed to having their releases run verbatim? It means they’ll have to sharpen their pencils and get back to work.

Companies that provide value to their customers make stories worth covering. And it will be up to the corporate PR folks and their outside counselors to find the angles, pitch the stories and make sure their angles match up with the editorial bias of the trade journal covering the industry.

The other advantage to all this, of course, is that in industries where there seems to be a very real difference of opinion, rival trade journals will be able to go mano-a-mano on those issues. Who would have thought that by eating away at the sleepy, fat side of the trade journal biz, the likes of Google and Yahoo! may have found a way to revitalize an industry?

Later.

TRADE PUBLISHERS WARNED OF GOOGLE’S IMPACT ON MAGAZINES

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