Launching in a wintery climate.
In the last three months I have been fortunate enough to work on the launch of a new weekly magazine and the refining of a monthly title. For me they have one thing in common and that is the workflow, after all that’s my area of interest and expertise.
Launching a weekly in this current climate may at first glance seem wildly optimistic or even foolhardy. However, where many weekly magazines are seeing dangerously large drops in circulation others are seeing real sustained growth with their biggest publishing numbers ever.
I have worked with weekly magazines with over forty staff and an army of contributors so when this new weekly set out to produce their title with just four staff and a handful of contributors I had some doubts, yet here I am three months later reading issue three of their fifty page magazine, It’s produced on time and is perfectly designed for its wide target audience and all staff are still standing.
The fascinating aspect for me was how do four people get so much content together, designed, edited and published consistently on time, week in week out. Well apart from good old-fashioned hard work it is the efficiency in all aspects of the workflow. In this particular case Knowledge Publish from PCS was the editorial workflow solution of choice, with its history of efficient production in daily newspapers proven.
This did mean that a new way of working was called for, where structured templates became a critical part of the design and flow for the magazine. This approach means plenty of work up-front but with real gains once the magazine is under way. Being hosted in the cloud with largely browser-based tools also means that the small team and their contributors are never tied to their desks. They can and are out ‘doing’ and editing from any location even with the smallest of bandwidths. Their coordination is through the flat-plan and with just four staff a good deal of conversation.
Time will tell if this new title will be a success but for me this very tight efficient way of working means that costs are kept to a minimum, which in turn means new launches can be attempted. By letting go of some of the older more typical editorial structures new ideas can be tried, new audiences can be sought. This attempt to evolve a print environment into a leaner more adaptive creature can only be a good thing, surely?
So my advice to publishers thinking of launching new titles or overhauling their current workflows is: Think long and hard about how you have worked in the past and check it is suitable for the present, and more importantly is it adaptable and flexible enough for the future?