The Magazine Phoenix
By Owen Clarke
As a full-time freelance writer, I regularly contribute to a number of magazines, specifically in the outdoor niche. The strange thing is, almost all of them are under one roof now. The Outside+ conglomerate owns nearly 40 titles, essentially every major existing outdoor publication in the United States. Whether you think that bodes well or ill, it is what it is.
Many folks cry foul at the morass that has become modern digital media, complaining about ads and sponsored content and too many gear guides and buyouts and the decline of journalistic standards in favor of clickbait churned out on an assembly line.
The irony is... scant few are paying anything to support the mags.
Statistically, the vast majority of people who read the content produced on digital publications do not subscribe to them and never have.
In other words, you’re probably reading your content for free.
Originally, magazines were paid for by the reader, via print subscriptions. As a result, they were published primarily for the reader. It’s a simple quid pro quo. When the digital age dawned, print subscription revenue still footed the bills for early digital platforms, which were initially accessories to print content.
As we all know, digital boomed. Now a single clickbait-y Buzzfeed video is viewed by magnitudes more eyes than any article ever published in print. The vast majority of all individuals interacting with content from any magazine or newspaper, whether The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, or your local state news outlet, are exclusively digital, and they aren’t paying a dime for the content they’re getting (though larger outlets like NYT and WSJ are continuously decreasing the content available to non-paying viewers).
With print subscriber lists shrinking and the average age of any mag’s remaining subscribers rapidly approaching the geriatric, what are the mags to do?
Print subscriptions don’t foot the bill anymore. Years of magazines barely clinging on financially, scrambling to find ways to stay afloat, left a void. Someone had to fill that void. So advertisers stepped in. Affiliate links stepped in. The philosophy of: “We have to get readers to click on this article however we can” stepped in.
To the people complaining in Facebook comments about content quality in the digital articles you read (for free): It’s simple.
You get what you pay for. More accurately, you get what you don’t pay for.
As a professional writer, in some ways, I’m living the dream. When I was a kid, all I ever wanted to be was an outdoor writer. Naturally, my list of ideal careers also included special ops sniper, eco-terrorist, anti-poaching mercenary, and altruistic bank robber, but writing eventually presented itself as the only realistic objective.
While I have somewhat accomplished that goal, and I do bill myself as an ‘outdoor journalist,’ less than a fifth of my income is from writing editorial directly for outdoor publications (or any publication, for that matter). The rest of my income is from working for brands and organizations, whether that’s in the form of sponsored articles, native blogs, email copy, ad copy, website copy, or something else.
In short, I’m a part of the “sponsored” system, too. It’s not by choice, though there are plenty of brands I love working with. It’s a reality I can’t escape. Magazines don’t have cash anymore, and the scant money they do get comes from their advertisers, not their readers.
No one is paying to read digital content anymore, so the quality of said content has changed. Is it really that surprising?
It goes without saying that magazines play a vital role in our community, telling authentic stories from an unbiased, well-researched, third-party perspective. In particular, they represent a critical check to the growing lawlessness of social media self-promotion, which I talked about in-depth in a piece on Rock and Ice (a piece which is now, ironically, behind a paywall). Although social media has “cut out the middle man” when it comes to news, so to speak, paving the way for figures to tell their own stories without the filter of a news outlet… the filter of a news outlet is necessary, in many cases.
As I wrote in the edition of my column, “The Choss Pile,” linked above, the click-and-post, rapid-fire spew of social media content is missing a few ingredients. Namely, the forethought and careful editorial that goes into a news publication’s content. It’s almost always worth hearing what someone else (a third-party professional who has dedicated at least some portion of their life to reporting) has to say about someone, as opposed to hearing what they have to say about themselves. Social media only promotes the latter.
In short, digital and print publications offer a beneficial outside opinion, a much-needed counterbalance to the Instagram caption your favorite explorer/climber/outdoor lifestylist typed out with their thumbs in 27 seconds.
Their balance to social media notwithstanding, most of us can agree that magazines are worth something, simply by virtue of the fact that good writing and photography are always worth something. By virtue of clicking on this article in the first place, even though it’s on a small, boutique publication like Dead Foot Collective, you must be interested in what I have to say here, on some level.
We can’t have our cake and eat it too. We can’t expect quality content at our fingertips, thinking the funding for that is going to come from thin air. When we as readers stop footing the bill for the content, we start to lose our voice and our say in the content that comes out. That’s why you see more sponsored content (and yes, I write a lot myself in my professional career), more ads, and more clickbait-y articles. It can be irritating, but it’s also perfectly understandable.
Someone has to pay the bills.
The hard benefits are listed in the descriptions of any digital subscription model, (ad-free digital access, curated content feeds, etc.), but the one benefit not mentioned on those lists (arguably the biggest benefit of all) is that digital subscriptions like this offer us a chance to start supporting our digital publications again.
They offer us a chance to have a voice as readers (and to do away with all the ads). It doesn’t happen overnight, but if we start paying our dues, then slowly but surely the mags start publishing content for us again, first and foremost, not for click rates and not for advertisers.
The power comes where the money is. When we start putting money back into the system, we get our power back.
Another benefit not often talked about… mainstream adoption and acceptance of the value of digital work and the necessity of digital subscription models also makes room for smaller, indie publications (like Dead Foot Collective) to return to the stage. I pay for the domain and hosting of this website and out of my own pocket, and I and all the contributors work on this project for free because we love doing it. But most digital publications like ours don’t last long, simply because free work is never eternally sustainable.
When we normalize the simple reality that digital content shouldn’t be free for all by default, we start to change the standards and lower the barriers to entry for smaller outfits again.
The free-for-all, open world of the Internet has spoiled us. It has put us under the false notion that everything should be free. We can pirate movies online, download scans of books for free, steal and repost photos from Google Images without consequence. If you’re hell-bent on getting free content, there’s plenty of shitty, spammy, biased, ad-ridden stuff out there for you, and there are always notable open-source exceptions like Wikipedia.
By and large, however, it’s ludicrous to both expect a certain level of quality in the content you access, and to ask to receive said content for free from a private entity.
It’s been a hard nut for me to swallow because there’s so much free content out there. Why waste cash paying for it? The fact of the matter is, though, digital subscriptions are quite cheap. The Wall Street Journal, for example, is running a promotion where you can subscribe for only $1 a week. I can’t remember the last time I paid a dollar for anything.
So recently, I’ve subscribed to a handful of magazines that I’d like to support. Iron & Air, Foreign Affairs, The Wall Street Journal, ADV Moto.
I encourage each of you to think about a few magazines you appreciate and to do the same.
Magazines aren’t dead yet, and they’re worth saving. Digital subscriptions are how we do that. Let’s give the voice and the power back to the readers, by supporting the magazines we read.
Owen Clarke is a writer, motorcyclist, and mountaineer currently on assignment in Peru, and the founder of this publication. You can find his work on his website.
