Local Magazines have a Strong Future

About Seattle Business Magazine

When I tell people what I do, sometimes I see a sad look in their eyes as if I had just told them I had cancer. It doesn’t surprise me. After all, there’s a lot of death in our industry. Every day some dear old friend succumbs.

The Seattle PI stopped printing earlier this year. In the past three years close to 2,000 magazines have folded. Why? The Internet, of course. More people are getting their information online and advertisings are following them.

In spite of all that doom and gloom, I’m an optimist about local magazines. It’s not that I think the Internet will go away. It will continue to evolve and player a greater role in our lives. But there are three things in which local magazines can excel:

1) Reflection: In an age of instant news, we need publications that step back and reflect on the news. From a little distance we see trends that aren’t apparent right away. Magazines can do this in a way that makes them last for months, even years. In a community that is changing as rapidly as Washington’s, we need to have that perspective.

2) Emotion: Online writing provides lots of information. But it is hard to become emotionally connected to articles that are very short. Magazines have the ability to tell a story that engages us and involves us in the story. Take our story about the Seattle Times and the family that owns the paper. Everyone knows that the newspaper is struggling. But how many of you knew that Frank Blethen, the publisher, had a difficult relationship with his father and that he used our newspaper as one way to bind his family together? This is a fascinating story that is relevant to all of us and Bill Richard did an incredible job telling that story.

3) Community: There are many communities on the web. But a local magazine offers a different kind of community. At its best it serves a group of readers who may not have similar values, but who look at the world from a similar perspective. In the case of Seattle Business, that perspective is the business and economic development in Washington State. What companies are making money and creating jobs? What policies encourage economic development? If we consider education, we look at whether it is serving the needs of the economy. When we look at health care, we look at the impact of costs on local companies. We provide a targeted approach to a topic that will be more relevant to readers than stories from the national press.

Websites are also an important way to connect to our community, and that’s why we are putting a renewed focus on our web site.