Where will the leaders and readers of the future come from?

Magazine publishing might not be for the fainthearted, and the idea of selling it as a career demands a headshift. But we need to accentuate the positives if we’re going to attract young people that can lead our magazines into the future, Peter Houston and Joanna Cummings write in the latest issue of the Grub Street Journal.

“Magazine publishing — actually, pretty much any kind of publishing — is not a place for the fainthearted these days. You can read about closures, cuts and staff culls any day of the week.”

Mediatel Newsline, 2013

I wrote that more than 10 years ago, in an article describing how I became a magazine editor to avoid the decimation of my hometown’s shipbuilding industry. FML!

I don’t regret my career path. I’ve welded sheet metal and this shit’s way easier. But I made my choices nearly four decades ago and the world now is a very, very different place. These days, the magazine industry is like one of the boats I never built, being tossed around in a perfect storm of rising costs, falling profits and crashing indifference.

Here’s the thing though: unless we all decide that there’s no point in publishing magazines – and that’s never happening – we need to enlist a new generation of magazine people to help us navigate to a safe harbour.

OK, I swear that’s it for the nautical symbolism. I’m making myself seasick.

Hey teacher

The starting point for bringing the brightest and best into the magazine business has to be education, and one of the first things we did when we started putting this issue together was talk to some educators.

Mary Hogarth, magazine expert and senior lecturer at Bournemouth University, writes on page 20 about the parlous state of university-level magazine courses. I was kind of shocked to read that of more than 500 journalism courses in the UK, there is only one pure magazine journalism degree.

That doesn’t mean magazines aren’t being taught as a career choice, but it does mean they are rarely taught as a specialism.

Separately, I spoke with my old magazine pal Dr Margaret Hughes, senior lecturer at the University of the West of Scotland and Chair of the World Journalism Education Council. Margaret teaches BA Journalism and echoed Mary’s findings – there are few magazine specific courses.

When Margaret introduces the magazine modules she teaches, one of the first things she does is a show-and-tell, asking students to bring magazines they like into class. “They’ll talk about them, say ‘I love this magazine, it defines the life I live or aspire to’, but then they hold it like this,” she says, clutching a copy of Vogue tightly to her chest.

“That’s a really encouraging thing. If I were a magazine publisher, I’d be delighted with the fact that people are hugging my product.”

Magazine love

From the standpoint of future readers, magazine love among students is a really good sign. Less positive is the fact that very few of them have ever considered magazines as a career option.

The magazines that are popular with Margaret’s students are the ones that they like to be seen with, the ones that say something about them. Fashion magazines, movie magazines and politics magazines are most common. But Margaret says, their knowledge of the industry is very limited, and almost exclusively focused on consumer titles.

“When we have the magazine modules and I speak about the magazine industry, almost without exception they are shocked and surprised by the size of the sector.”

These are third-year journalism students, and the prospect of finding a job looms large. “I sell magazines as somewhere they could get a job, where they could have a successful career and really feel part of both the world of magazine journalism and whatever community you’re representing.” But she explains that until they walk into that class, most have no concept of the nature of the opportunities in magazines.

Of course, Margaret also has to explain the challenges in the magazine business… but whether they go into magazines, newspapers or broadcast, they are likely to face similar challenges – and having one more potential career path to follow is a positive.

Get a job

We’re so used to facing the day-to-day crap of our magazine work, that the idea of selling it as a career demands a headshift. Parking the negatives and refocusing on the positives.

Margaret starts with an easy win: today’s students trust magazines more than news. “I think the whole trust thing is something that the magazine industry could really sell itself on,” she says.

The bounded curation at the heart of magazine publishing is also incredibly attractive to students assaulted by more information between getting up and getting to class than their grandparents were in a week.

“You go online, you’ll get 100 million replies to a question. That’s really challenging,” explains Margaret.

“Go to a magazine you trust, it’s almost answering your questions for you. It gives you something, beautifully packaged, that you can identify with, that makes you feel safe.”

She says recent student cohorts no longer have any concept of a job, or even an industry for life. In response she spotlights the transferable skills that her students develop through their degree, a broader skill set than any other generation before them.

“When my students leave, they can do it all: broadcast, online, writing for magazines, editing video, making podcasts. They can anchor a news program, because we teach them to do everything.”

They also gain skills like working in teams, project management, working to deadlines, understanding very specific briefs and the context of narrow market segments.

“We know that these are skills you can use in many different types of professions. Learn to make magazines, because it’s a great job, but if you end up working in another sector you’ll have an incredible range of transferable skills.”

Reach out

So, if you want the brightest and best students to join your magazine company, what do you do?

Margaret says the starting point is to get into the universities and talk to students. The UWS course is 20 years old and she has alumni in almost every newsroom in Scotland. “We get a lot of people to come and speak to our students, from the BBC, The Daily Record, The Sun, the big mainstream news organisations. What we hardly ever have is people from the magazine industry.”

Where larger magazine publishers might automatically establish relationships with the leading journalism courses, smaller B2B magazine publishers don’t always make the link. But they should – it’s the super-niche titles students don’t know anything about.

“I think that what the magazine industry could do to make itself more attractive, is just become known. There needs to be more outreach. You need to meet people where they are.”

Remember, it’s not that journalism freshers have a negative view of the magazine industry when they start their studies. It’s that they have no view at all.

Whether it’s phone distractions, the disappearance of magazine- buying rituals or the pathologising of discretionary spending, few students buy magazines. So, why would they want to work in a business they have no connection to? But there are real opportunities for young journalists in magazine publishing, maybe more than in news. It’s our job to let them know what they are and why they’re worth pursuing

This article originally appeared in The Grub Street Journal, the magazine for people who make magazines. Brutally honest but relentlessly optimistic, we’re looking for answers to the biggest questions in modern publishing, like ‘What kind of idiots still make magazines?‘ and ‘Can you make a magazine AND a profit?‘ Get your own copy at grubstreetjournal.com.