Bill Emmott. Magazines in the real time era: A success story

Do you thing that weekly magazines still have a say in the world of the media?

I think that weekly magazines provide things to think about, thinks to enjoy, thinks to try to understand and that is always going to be necessary for people in the media, through the media, in this increasingly complicated and hard to understand world, so the role of magazines I think will remain. The way magazines are published may change , if people in large numbers start reading and thinking using devices like the iPad in the future , but that is somewhere ahead of us .

Do you see that change coming, that the future of the magazines is going to be different?

I think that the iPad and competing devices in the next few years is going to produce a new medium for thinking, for analysis for understanding, for slow news, of just the short the magazines competing. So magazines need to work out, how to serve this new media. Print will not disappear, but it will compete with iPads and we need also to treat this as a new opportunity, to publish magazines in a new way.

So although change is coming, you don’t think that this is the end of the magazines there is still future ahead for them …

It is certainly not the end of the magazine, just as it is not the end of the book. But magazines will change as we publish in new ways. The internet was not the end of the magazine, and indeed hardly damaged the magazine. The iPad will, I think, produce change for the magazines because it is more like a magazine, and people read it in the same way, as they would a magazine, so we need to change more with the iPad, than we needed to change just because of the internet.

What do you think that are the main obstacles that magazines have to face? Because I heard you talking saying that the economic crisis is not the biggest problem for the magazines…What are the obstacles?

I think that the biggest obstacle is simply internal conservatism. Not being willing to try new things and to adapt what you are doing to a new media. That is the biggest obstacle, is within ourselves. It is our resistance to change. Second obstacle is money. Of course the economic crises if it reduces advertising then it produces less money for the publication, and so the ability to invest in new technology ,in new ways of doing things, especially in the high quality journalists that needed for this , is impaired , is damaged . So I think those are the two big obstacles, but I think this change is unavoidable. If magazines don’t start thinking about it now, then as individual magazines, they may be dead in five years time.

So what about the economic crisis, this is not a problem for the magazines or is it?

I think that the economic crisis has hurt magazines by reducing advertising, because it has been a problem for many companies, who are the traditional advertisers for magazines .Less compared with newspapers but nevertheless magazines have lost money as a result of it. Now we are coming into the recovery, and I think that the magazines advertising will increase again , with the problem that even during the crisis , two or three years of crisis the movement of reading habits on line, into digital forms, has increased and so more of companies advertising budgets is going to moved on line ..

But only in terms of advertising, in terms of people that read the magazine the crisis hasn’t changed anything for the magazines?

I think the economic crisis has not affected people’s desire to read magazines. But most magazines only make a small amount of income from their readership; they make their money from advertising.

From your years of experience in the field , what would you suggest to a young journalists , that wants to pursue a career in journalism , what can he/she do in order to be successful?

I think that what an aspiring journalist needs to understand is that the reader is paying them to think on their behalf and really to think deeply and to explore deeply and to find things out for them. A journalist wanted to work for a magazine, must realize that to be valuable they must really be the brain of the reader. Really must try to do the work for the reader, in thinking, though helping understand, doing original reporting. Is different from being a daily newspaper reporter, or being a news agency reporter. You really got to be an adder of value, a provider of valuable thinking for the reader.

Events like this here, how can they help in seeing what the problem is and facing it.

I think that all events like this, that in which people are encourage to seat back for a few minutes and reflect on what they are doing and what is happening in the media, and what they are doing as journalists are very helpful. Most of us spend our time rushing around barely (have) time to read our emails on our blackberries on our I phones or pick up our voice messages , and we don’t have time to think . And I think an event like this provides us with the time to think and be stimulated by opinions of other people.

Tania Georgoupli