This week we hear from two of the three editors of The Paper, an intimidatingly-sized Welsh indie magazine. Oliver Gabe and Owen Davies take us through the annual publishing plan, why they launched the title with a live variety show, and what makes the title feel truly distinctive in a saturated marketplace.
In the news roundup Esther, Peter and Chris discuss some items of relatively good media news, before segueing into the bad. We ask whether generalist media titles are one end of a seesaw and bespoke local and specialist titles are the other, and discuss why ‘distinctiveness’ and ‘community’ are too often used to paper over cracks in media business models.
Some highlights from the interview, lightly edited for clarity:
The origins of The Paper
Oliver: It’s intimidating in size. That was a must for us, because I’m pretty small and scrawny anyway. It is exactly four times the size of That’s Life magazine. We wanted it to be like…those trashy magazines, one of them, but as if you’d enlarged it with a ray gun.
It started during lockdown. I was reading a thing the other day about how obviously Covid was terrible, but lockdown itself, just that time, loads of music’s coming out now, loads of people made albums and stuff during lockdown because they genuinely had more time on their hands. The Paper is kind of a product of that.
I started thinking about it years and years ago. Then I lived with my mate Dan in this weird house, and we found this article which was talking about the ‘brain drain’ in Wales, which is this sort of phenomenon…where university students move out of the places where they’re from, and then they never move back. This article came out saying that things have gotten so bad, and in Wales there was going to be a gene drain. It went so far as to say humanity would split in two, and that Welsh people would be this goblin-like underclass.
We basically would load that article up and laugh at it. We were like, that’s going to be us soon. And that’s sort of where it began, that was the idea of it, this magazine made by mutants.
The secret of their (sold out) success
Owen: We need to stop doing ourselves dirty by saying that a lot of it was accidental, but as with most things, a lot of it is accidental. Something like it didn’t really exist. It wasn’t like we identified a gap in the market, but there wasn’t anything that was doing something similar. And people just sort of connected with it really. That’s a real, reductive, simplistic answer!
Oliver: Nothing’s accidental, but a lot of it is intuitive. What we’re doing can be replicated by anyone. It’s nothing special. Essentially all we’ve done is… we can’t put Harry Styles in our magazine because we don’t know him! But we do know our mates.
I think the reason possibly people like the magazine, or maybe it’s perceived as different, is because we’ve literally just put what’s around us out. That’s a formula which can be replicated by anybody. What do you have access to? What do you have around you? And thinking that’s good enough to put out there because it’s probably from the attitude that you don’t need to try and do things like everybody else, just whatever you’ve got access to around you was good enough.
The brilliance of The Paper’s humanity
Owen: There aren’t many magazines where people are writing articles about fancying your co-workers in the chip shop, but those are things that people do relate to, and it’s a very human thing to connect to. I think a lot of them as well have this tone, like they read at the start like they’re taking the piss.
The piss-taking lets people get their guard down, so there’s a really funny article about how horrific it is trying to get a diagnosis on the NHS. So we almost softened people up with the humour, then you get them in that little weak spot of humanity when they’ve been tenderised.
Oliver: There’s so many good stories that people tell each other in the pub. We just wanted it to be a magazine of stories really, rather than anything else. And I do think those stories are inherently human. You get all these big magazines… like of course I want to find out what Kanye West has for breakfast, you just do. But we’re not going to be able to do that stuff. So we’ll just do what’s around us. And we’ll put out the stories which are around us.
The news round-up
A bad start to the year for some publishers, but others are ‘thriving’:
- New York Magazine’s The Cut is expanding
- 404 Media is profitable after just 6 months
- Dotdash Meredith has seen 9% digital revenue increase in Q4 YoY
- Subscriptions and events revenue has grown to offset consumer media decline at DMGT
- NTY added a further 30,000 subscriptions in Q4 2023, with annual digital subscription revenue rising above $1bn
However, thriving is a relative term. The Cut is growing, but it’s adding four staff in a market that’s shed 20,000 people the previous year.
The week’s bad news:
- At The Guardian, advertising revenue was down by 16% to £9 million in the nine months to 31st December, and membership revenue from readers was £3 million behind budget. The Sunday Times reported that GNM is now “braced for cuts” and that Guardian editor Katharine Viner told staff they “should worry but not panic”
- The Messenger is dead, and it took Grid down with it
- Just in the US, January saw over 500 journalism job cuts
- Neil Thackray has described the ‘Jim Mullen Paradox’ – even though media companies know that what they do creates a bad user experience, they see no alternative for fear of losing revenue. E “We are in the real world,” Chief Exec Jim Mullen told The Guardian. “I need to get the page views, that is the way we sell advertising blocks, and advertising blocks deliver revenue. I know it is not ideal. We don’t talk about engagement and quality. We do, but it is not in the trading report.”
