Tim Burrowes finds hope for the printed word in the trials and tribulations of one tenacious trade magazine. Cartoon by Judy Horacek

I can tell you almost precisely when the finalstraw came. It was about 2am on the night of Wednesday, June 11, 2008. That was the moment I finally faced the fact that, as wonderful a medium as print was, it was not where I was going to be breaking stories any more.

To give you a little background, the magazine I edit, B&T, is a publication for the advertising,  media and marketing industry. Back in June, we were weekly and went to press on Wednesday nights, with our readers receiving the magazine on Friday mornings. The previous Wednesday, shortly after sending that week’s edition to press, I’d received a great tip-off. One of the biggest accounts in the business was up for pitch.

We began a nervous seven days’ wait to see if the story would hold. Much to my surprise, by the following Wednesday morning, the cat was still in the bag. We stuck it on the front page, and sent it to press. Now it would just have to stay exclusive for another 36 hours until we hit the street.

That night, I got home late from a Sensis media dinner and went online to see what The Australian’s Media section had the next day.
My drunken good cheer was ruined when I saw they had the story – it would be ancient history by the time my readers saw our take on it.

However, there was one comfort to be drawn from this minor disaster – it at least confirmed that the course we had already embarked on was the correct one. By the time this article reaches you, B&T magazine will be very different to the one it was back in June, and indeed
significantly different to the format it’s enjoyed for its first 58 years.

For some months now, we’ve been working on a fundamental rethink.If B&T did not already exist, what form would it take? One obvious thing is that rather than awaiting the one weekly slot, the place to break news is online, as soon as it happens. An experiment we had been carrying out since the start of the year pointed towards the same thing.

Previously, we had followed the format favoured by many trade magazines – to supplement our paid-for print product, we also offered a free daily HTML newsletter with links to our website. The stories tended to be a mixture of press releases and non-exclusive breaking news. We had a respectable mailing list of 6000 or so, growing slowly but steadily.

In January, inspired by the success of a sister title, Travel Today, we switched to what felt like a more old-fashioned format, PDF. I had my doubts – I’d heard it described as a new-media solution for old-media hacks who didn’t understand online.

But it let us present the news with headlines, pictures and copy in as enticing a style as a newspaper or magazine. For the reader, it meant
a single scroll through to view every story, rather than clicking back and forth to HTML headlines.

Immediately we had 20 or 30 new subscribers a day. The viral effect was obvious – if you wrote about a particular company, people from that firm appeared on the email list within hours. PRs liked it because it followed the design of the print edition – making a much
better cutting than a website or HTML printout.

Over the next few months, B&T Today took off. And last month we signed up our 16,000th subscriber. But the format has its limitations. While it’s perfect for one-fact stories, it’s not ideal for analysis – print wins by a long way (lucky – as that’s where most of our revenue still comes from).

Our strategy began to emerge: to tell online readers what’s happened, and then tell print readers why. Clearly, that meant that our print product needed to evolve, to make the most of its best qualities. A longer read works better by far with a magazine. We asked ourselves the same question – how would B&T look if we were starting afresh?

We gave a 4900-word, 19-page design brief to Sydney-based Frost, one of the world’s best typographically-led design agencies. Out went a news-led front page; in came an image-led cover. Out went news briefs; in came longer analysis pieces. We upped the image budget, and doubled the pagination. Then we took the logical next step and switched from weekly to fortnightly. Not only will that allow the team to deliver the increased pagination, it will allow more time to reflect on what we want to say.

The first of the new look B&T was due to reach readers on October 8. As I write this, we’ve just sent the last of our old B&T to press. We’ve started showing our dummy to advertisers and contacts. The response so far has been excellent.

The important thing for us now is that regardless of the medium, we stick with the basic principles of any good trade title – aim to help the reader do their job better, or develop their career. We need to remember that B&T has several different relationships with our readers, and we must make the best of each one. Our most regular contact with readers now is online – that’s where we give them the facts, fast. Then there’s print – which is where we explain. But we need to remember other relationships, too – we hold regular boot camps (oneday
training in online marketing) which demand a different tone of voice, where we call in the experts. And we also hold a major annual awards program, where our contact with readers is different again.

But when we look at each touch point the key is the same: understanding what works best in that particular medium. When B&T began in 1950, the initials stood for Broadcasting & Television. Back then a major preoccupation of the industry was whether TV would kill radio. Of course, it didn’t, even if radio had to find a new place for itself. The same is happening now – print isn’t going to be killed by online, but it must evolve.

Tim Burrowes is the editor of B&T

Judy Horacek is a freelance cartoonist, writer and children’s picture-bookmaker: www.horacek.com.au