Recently, I seem to do very little other than go to weddings. My friends are mostly at the time of their lives where they decide to get married – in disparate parts of the country, mostly.

That means I spend a lot of time at wedding receptions making increasingly boring small talk with strangers. Summer 2011 was the worst time for this. At the height of the worst period of hatred against journalists in the history of man and I lost count of the times that I had this conversation:

“So Marc, what do you do?”

“I’m a journalist.”

“OH! One of them!”

“Yeh – but don’t worry… I’m self employed.”

“So you haven’t tapped my phone?” the stranger laughing asks,

“No.” I reply straight faced.

For me, it wasn’t the assumption that I was some kind of unethical monster that really annoyed me. It was what always came next.

“So you’re a self employed journalist?”

“Yup. I edit a magazine.”

“Oh… which magazine?”

“Plastik Magazine.”

“Uh…” they would muse, “haven’t heard of it.”

“It’s an online magazine about creative culture in Cardiff.”

“I see! So how do you make money then? Advertising is it?”

When I tell them that no, that’s not how I make my money, they look absolutely perplexed. For a magazine publisher, assuming that the only way that their brand can make money is advertising is an insulting idea. Let’s reverse the roles for a moment:

“Tell me about what you do. You’re in finance aren’t you?” I imagine asking them,

“Yes. That’s right. I’m a stockbroker.”

“Oh. I see. So you make your money through insider trading and embezzlement?”

The whole room is silenced… it’s the Bride’s beloved uncle who I’ve just mortified. One more victory for journalists all over the world, alienating the public.

Jonas Bonnier, CEO of the formidable publishing force Bonnier, is quoted in the December 2011/January 2012 issue of Monocle as saying the following,

For a long time, people have been walking around and talking about “content”. In my opinion, if you’re a person that speaks about content, you haven’t understood anything about journalism and storytelling. You think that words are like earth that you can shovel and pour somewhere.

You heard the man! A compelling edict by one of publishing’s most authoritative voices that made me rethink the way that I write/commission/design for journalism.

I’ve been doing it wrong!

Today at lunch, my father said to me:

To be an expert, you only need to know a little bit more than everyone else about your topic.

That’s true. So often, we put our own expertise in a subject down by asserting that we’re not the authority on the subject.

But you just might be.

What’s your expertise and how are you going to package/use that expert status?

I’m looking to find out about your attitude towards starting an exciting journalism project that you might have. I’ve spoken to a lot of people in the past year who feel that their lack of knowledge about HTML, PHP, CSS or the WordPress Codex has stopped them from realising a really great journalism project that they’ve had in mind. I’d like to quantify some of that feeling and would love it if you could fill in this short form.

I’m also working on a solution to some of these problems and would love to get in touch with you if I ever come up with it. Although it’s not a required part of this form, please consider leaving your e-mail address if you wouldn’t mind me contacting you with an e-mail in the future.

Thanks!

Here’s an extract from the e-book that I’ve been writing recently on how to launch your own online magazine. This is from the chapter about some considerations before your launch:

When I was very young, I wanted to be an actuary. A family friend told me that actuaries can earn upwards of £100,000 each year. I was sold. The actuary deals in probability. His job is to work with an insurer to predict or imagine every possible outcome of a decision and work out how likely a person is to, say, crash his car. While his decisions are at best, estimates, the amount that you pay towards your insurance has, at some point, passed through the mind of an actuary.

While his prediction is theoretical, your car accident is actual.

Just like the actuary, we can consider all of the possible outcomes for our magazines and the amount that we consider might have a big impact on how much time and effort we put into our publishing careers. Either that, or some idiot on his mobile phone will drive into the side of us anyway – regardless of our careful planning. But there’s no harm in considering the opportunity for success or failure.

Before launching your magazine, you’d do well to consider the likelihood of success or failure but you should also consider being sideswiped by things that are unpredictable.

Be brave! Publish something for yourself.
My first e-book will be ready early next year. Keep checking back here to see updates from the writing stages or alternatively follow me on Twitter.

Thicker than my laptop

Let’s just stop worrying about print dying for a moment and take a look at the Dec/Jan issue of Monocle. Although I always seem to be talking constantly about the magazine, it’s with good reason.

Sure, this month is the double issue, but at 314 pages in length, it’s proving that print is certainly not dead – we’re just doing it wrong.

While the rest of the print world is cost cutting and skimping on reporters, Monocle’s recruitment page tells an entirely different story.

The dream of a magazine publisher is to create a brand which is so good that the shelves empty almost too quickly to be filled again. I get the feeling that Monocle is making that dream come true for its publisher Pamela Mullinger.