2009 Business Report to the Readers

editors | 23 October, 2009 19:01

By George Marinakis, George@JournalofSustainability.com

“The Media is a faceless leader in America.”

Prof. Scott Taylor, UNM Anderson School of Business,

attributed to Prof. Suresh Srivastva, Case Western University

Up ‘til now, the Journal of Sustainability has been in a test marketing mode. We had a lot to figure out.

- Who was our target market? Or better yet, was there a market for a sustainability magazine, and if there was, who would our readers be?

-What was our role? Our mission? Our business model? Would we be agenda-driven, or news driven, or something else?

-What makes us different from existing magazines? Should we be another National Geographic? A Mother Earth News? Solar Today? Home Power? A policy magazine? A news magazine? A newspaper?

-Who would write for us? How would we compensate them?

- How would we finance the enterprise? Should we reorganize as a not-for-profit and seek grants? Should we charge for subscriptions, or pay for it by advertising? How do we get advertising without widespread distribution, and without glitzy graphics?

-What sort of brand are we building? Where are we taking it? Where is it taking us?

I’ll talk about these in turn:

Target Market

Over the last two years of publication, we have discovered some interesting things about you:

You read folksy how-to articles more than serious policy or opinion articles by a factor of at least 3-to-1 in the short term and at least 5-to-1 in the long term.

You read folksy how-to articles more than interviews by a factor of at least 3-to-1 in the short term and at least 10-to-1 in the long term.

Nevertheless, many of you still read the serious policy/opinion articles, the interviews, the poetry and fiction. We intend to continue with this mix.

What you like to read still surprises us. People would tell us we needed more photos, but photo essays are not especially popular. “Sustainability in Greece” gets 2X to 3X the reads as the average piece, and it has no photos. I think what we really need is good graphic design. Articles by people in organizations sometimes get a lot of hits. We wonder whether the organization is driving readers to the article. But our interview of Bill McKibben has a readership well below average. Until we get a better idea of what you are looking for, we will continue to cover a diverse subject matter.

Our Mission

We now understand that media plays a leadership role in America, and you are looking to us for leadership. We get it. Look for more of it from us in upcoming issues.

We tried from the outset not to be agenda-driven, but it was not clear to us what we would be instead. We thought of ourselves as something like “Foreign Affairs,” but we also ended up publishing pieces that belonged in “Wired.” We were described by one reader as a “green” New Yorker magazine. Our model was a Shakespeare play: something for everybody, at every level. Nevertheless some said we were too intellectual, too hard to understand. And that still didn’t answer the question of the scope of the subject matter.

We tried to publish a wide variety of perspectives on sustainability. One difficulty is finding writers. We will discuss that below. The other difficulty is identifying the scope of subject matter. We will now use our leadership role as a touchstone for the scope of subject matter.

We thought about becoming more a news service, but we found that few people wanted to send us press releases. Corporations (for-profit and not-for-profit) like to post their press releases on their websites, but they don’t send them out to the rest of us. Among those that did,they mainly comprised announcements of events, which suggested to us that we really needed a public events calendar. In any case, there really isn’t a lot of sustainability news out there. Sustainability is much more than clean tech or green tech, and there are already plenty of news sources for technology.

We wanted to democratize the movement, so we enabled comments in the articles, but that just got us spammers (even with Captchas enabled). We decided instead to introduce a Wiki, focusing on sustainability. A “Sustendium” if you will. I am beginning to notify professors that it would be a great source of homework assignments, i.e., assign students to write in the Sustendium.

So far, neither the Webcalendar nor the Wiki has gotten any attention, but we think that is a result of our poor splash page, so we are adding a web portal (discussed below).

Our Difference

We commit to you to remain uncensored. We don’t agree with everything we print and we don’t want to.

We are not all about you and your precious lifestyle. We are not all about selling you non-toxic face creams, or non-toxic house paints. Our goal is to teach you how to lessen your impact on the world, not to teach you how to lessen the impact of the world on you. Our by-line has been “exploring new ways of living green,” not “exploring new non-toxic products for your pampered lifestyle.” The key concept is “social responsibility” or “civic duty.”

Our Writers

Getting publishable articles was harder than we thought it would be. Journalists want to be paid, but without advertising we can’t afford to pay them, and in any case journalists generally do not have the education or background to write the sort of cutting edge articles that would be of interest to you. We are not a news magazine.

Corporations (for-profit and not-for-profit) like to be interviewed, but don’t even try getting stories. They are too busy writing content for their own websites.

People running organic farms etc. are not generally competent writers, either by training or talent. The solution is for us to interview them and to write the articles ourselves, but we are too busy making a living in our day jobs. We could do so for a fee, or in exchange of an advertising contract with us, but that would ruin our neutrality and credibility.

Who would have thought that such a situation would be a barrier to the marketplace?

Nevertheless, we continue to receive some great articles from some great writers. We hope to attract more to us, as we change our look and feel with the web portal.

Our Financing

We will remain free to readers for the present. That means we are going to have to introduce in-page advertising. We are also considering an online store (see below).

Our Brand

Brands are used to sell stuff. Problem is, the Journal is all about voluntary simplicity. We want you to buy less stuff, not more stuff. But it is not that simple, because we also want you to change what you are buying. We’d like to introduce an on-line store, maybe specialized as a holiday gift store. We also have some great ideas for chic furniture design, championing simple green elegance.

The blog format for the articles works for us, because it requires zero graphic design, and we have not budget for graphic design. We’d like a more traditional magazine format, with more variety on each page. We’ll see what we can do. Our look and feel needs work.

But let’s get back to our brand. How do we define the marketplace to our advantage? That is an ongoing project, a work-in-progress. Stay tuned.

So where do we go from here?

In our next phase, our goal is to become your default page in your web browser. To that end we’re installing a web portal, making it easier to see what’s new in the Journal, the Wiki and the Webcalendar.

We’d really like to upgrade the look and feel, but we don’t want to lose our grassroots identity. Too many web pages look alike, even though they look professional.

One thing we’re considering is focusing on growers’ markets, both as sources of stories and as distribution centers for hard copy. We envision running in-depth stories on the microeconomics of organic farms, on craftspersons, on persons harvesting the wilds.

As discussed above, look for us in upcoming issues to step up to our leadership role. We expect the same from you, through the articles that you send us.

As always, we are open to your ideas and comments. Let’s look forward to a great 2010 together.