What do you get when you put 2 magazine editors and 2 art directors of varying age and experience and ask them about the future of their craft? The answer: uncertainty, because no matter how much any of these men think they know the answer, the truth is that none of them have ever experienced anything quite like what is going on in the magazine industry today.

One editor has been around long enough to have seen and done just about everything, but isn’t the most tech savvy. The other editor is well-versed in technology, but hasn’t been an editor long enough to know what makes readers tick. One art director is idealistic and hopeful, but unsure about anything related to new media and how to reach people, and the last guy can see all sides of the sorry, but can’t make a decision to save his life (guess which one I am).

The big problem with magazines is the self-fulfilling prophecy of planned obsolescence. Fewer mags are sold, less people are reading. Advertising pays off less, if at all, so advertisers pull their ads. Less ad revenue means smaller budgets and fewer pages per issue. Lesser quality editorial means even more people stop reading. Of course sales ebb and flow based on the economy, but since the advent of the Internet, the long term trend is a long fall into nonexistence. It’s entirely possible that the magazine stand at your local bookstore will cease to exist as you know it within a few short year, and that’s the fear these four guys have as they pontificate on their futures.

This is a Game Changer For the Whole Industry

The ripple effects would stretch a long way, from magazine sellers, to distributors, from print designers to printing presses. The first question is always the same, “Why not move it all to the web?”

The truth is, at least for the magazines published my our company, is the readers aren’t on the web. Most of our readers are older, less savvy and less interested in reading on the web. It’s not to say their inept, but rather, they just don’t like to sit on a computer to get the kind of information they liked getting in the mailbox. The tactile aspect of magazines is probably the one thing that’s keeping them afloat the most.

Also, the money isn’t on the web, at least not the kind of money needed to run a magazine like we do now. Granted, there are lots of places we could cut (some of which scare me personally) that would make our magazines more online friendly, but its likely our websites would not be able to sustain the budgets needed to keep creating the kind of content we do each month on the web.

Consider all the automotive related magazines out there, namely the more technical books that do complicated builds and installs that you just can’t find anywhere else on the web. There just isn’t anyone out there online doing what we do in the magazines. Mostly its because the technical stories cost money time that up till now hasn’t existed, which is part of the reason the readers aren’t online. The quality of content keeps readers away, and with them go the advertisers and the money.

Other smaller problems exist like how poorly designed our websites are and how their run more like traditional media style of broadcasting rather than interacting. Our marketing efforts are rooted in the old school and the use of social media was widely discouraged up until recently when us editorial grunts started drifting into Twitter and Facebook on our own. I won’t go into the company mandate of not linking to any sites outside of our own, or acknowledging the existence of any other media sorts.

So Where Does That Leave Us?

Good question; one that the four guys in the room have been scratching their heads over for nearly 2 hours, and nobody seems to have an answer. You would think the amount of knowledge in the room would lend itself to some sort of success system, but we’re stumped. At the point, only time will tell. Maybe the answer will come to us in a dream. If anyone out there has any thoughts, we’d love to hear them so we can debate them further to no avail. In the meantime, I’ll be here doing what I do best, riding fences.

Four newspaper conglomerates band together to form one giant online ad network, because that’s the obvious answer to the problem.

Yes, I’ve started yet another project, but finally one that I can really get behind. It’s taken a lot of soul searching and mind-mapping (that one’s for Sean) and I came up with a solid concept for a site/business/blog. Some of my diehards will remember my time with MODE. It was great and I really like that site, but I was having a hard time staying motivated and generating content. For my first blog effort, I have to say I did fairly well, but after a self inflicted database disaster that I couldn’t recover from, I killed it off. This new site takes the idea of MODE to a more specific niche.

I have spent the majority of my time in marketing/graphic arts inside the automotive industry, specifically the aftermarket portion. Anytime you hear about someone customizing their car in anyway, whether is for more horsepower, a nicer interior or a fancy new stereo setup, that’s the aftermarket. I’ve spent time with all types of companies from magazines to manufacturers to the small speed shops that do the grunt work. One thing I’ve noticed over the past 10 years is that a large majority of these companies are either stuck in an outdated marketing frame of mind or they no clue what they’re doing, most likely being led by the nose by someone who just wants to sell them something. Recently I heard a prominent manufacturer took their entire ad budget away from print mags and moved it to the websites because some young turk in the digital sales department convinced the company that “the internet is where everything is going”. I nearly flipped!

Yes, the internet can be useful, but to change your entire platform on the word of some slick salesman is asking for complete failure. That was my breaking point. At that moment I decided to stop talking about what I would do different and put act on it. Thus brings me to The Backfire Blog. My hopes for the site is to educate and insight conversation and maybe pick up a client or two in the process. It’s a work in progress right now and I’m still working out the bugs on the theme, but the content is fresh and updated regularly. If you can ignore the aesthetic changes, you’ll have some good, chunky content to digest (at least I hope).

I’m toying with the idea of occasional video blogs and and ebook or two down the road a bit. So that should be fun. If I know you and you’re already involved in these things, be sure that I’ll be hitting you up for advise advice at some point in the future.

So if you’re in the aftermarket industry, come check out The Backfire Blog and join the conversation. If you’re not, well, come by and spread the love anyway because I need all the readership I can get my hands on right now. I’m totally open to suggestions and criticism, so please give me your hardest hitting remarks. I’ve got nowhere to go but up.

I’ve always used this site as a testing ground for different plugins and other experimentations so that I could help some clients have an easy plug-n-play experience with their blogs. Many plugins have come and gone but I want to give special mention to a few that have really impressed me lately.

WWSGD – What would Seth Godin Do? The one question every marketer should ask themselves when in a promotions pickle. This simple plugin has been around awhile, but it’s value far exceeds it’s ease of use. By dropping in a simple box asking folks to subscribe, you create that always desired permission to sell/promote/endorse directly to those folks checking in on a regular basis.

WordPress Automatic Upgrade – Upgrading WordPress isn’t brain surgery, but it’s not Tiddly-Winks either. The worst part about upgrading is the tedium, and when the fine folks at WP upgrade their software every 3 months, upgrading becomes a pain. Top that off with managing several blogs at a time, and you’re bound to write off upgrading ever again. This plugin is my saving grace. It couldn’t be easier and any less painless.

Feedburner Monetize – I’m not exactly discovering fire by announcing Feedburner as a useful tool. Honestly, the lot of Feedburner’s toolset are among the most important and useful items in my arsenal, but since they recently added the option for people to integrate Adsense directly into feeds and posts, it’s been great for my clients trying to monetize their blogs. I’ve been using it hear just to test and seems to work well. I’ll be pulling it down from this blog, but I definitely recommend it to others who want to get a little coin for their efforts.

iPhone – Ok, not a blog tool, but definitely a productivity tool. Before I purchased my iPhone, I had a Blackberry, a camera and an iPod. Granted, the camera on the iPhone doesn’t compare to my digital, it’s great for those quick snapshots. Direct interaction with Gmail is vital for me, although I’m still trying to figure out how to send email from different accounts. Multiple recipient SMS, Direct Youtube access and being able to select which voice mails to listen to without having to call in, these are all extremely useful, but still not where I’m most productive. That comes from Google Reader.

I constantly rotate about 50 or so RSS feeds, which isn’t ridiculous compared to some, but if I don’t stay on top of my reading, it gets out of hand fast, especially with sites like Apartment Therapy posting 50 to 100 times a day. With the iPhone, I’m always ahead of my reading because I’m not limited to my time in front of a computer. I’m even considering adding some more feeds to the list, but we’ll see. Yeah, the phone is a bit pricey, but not ridiculous and considering my increased productivity, I’d say I made my money back already.

I won’t ever claim to be as knowledgable about the science of blogging as some of the pros, but one thing I’m sure of is that if your desire is to alienate your readers, the best way to do that is to attack them when they disagree with you.

I had my first blog feud today with Adie Cooke of Net Business Blog. He posted about how one of his clients had a logo redesign to go with their new ecommerce site. I had my misgivings about the post because I felt the information was a bit lacking and the arguments he was making were, well, wrong.

Let me state for the record that I have been a subscriber to Net Business for awhile now and he typically has some really informative pieces. I’m not really sure why it is, but I’ve never commented there before, but since this particular post dipped into my area of expertise, I figured I’d chime in.

I tried to be as constructive as possible with my comment and avoid making any ego driven comments. I’m not the greatest designer ever, far from it, so I wanted to come off as knowledgeable and helpful but humble. Unfortunately, Adie didn’t take it that way.

I always subscribe to comments when I’ve commented because I never know when I will learn something, but when I got a message with Adie’s response, I was honestly taken back. I wouldn’t say his response was caustic, but definitely not happy. His first comment I chalk up to being a miscommunication, but his second comment was definitely passive aggressive, calling me ignorant in a round about way.

Now I’m a pretty easy going guy, but if you call me ignorant, especially on a subject I feel I’ve fairly knowledgeable on, I’m going to stand up for myself. So I responded, still professional, but definitely telling him what I thought about him and his comments. Once that was posted, I was done with it… or so I thought.

I then got another email, this one an automated response to my first comment:

Hello Dave Conrey,

Thank you for posting a comment on this Article…

If you haven’t already, please sign up to our full RSS Feed

Now I’m pissed off. So you want me to subscribe to your feed? Why? So you can attack me again in another post? Reading this pandering auto email after that exchange made me reject him completely, and I let him know in a response email. Then I went to Google Reader and unsubscribed myself.

So, if you’re a blogger, but tired of all your trusted subscribers, follow Adie’s example.