Labor negotiations have stalled between the publisher and staffers at three of its subsidiary brands.

A group of roughly 100 employees at the New Yorker, Pitchfork, and Ars Technica are set to strike soon if they can’t reach an agreement with parent company Cond&ecaute; Nast. Maxwell Tani of the Daily Beast reports that the staffers “voted this week overwhelmingly in favor of moving ahead with a strike if Condé continues to rebuff demands about key issues, primarily around proposed wage increases.”

The conflict has been simmering for quite a while, says Tani: “The trio of Condé publications threatening to strike have each separately been involved in years-long bargaining negotiations with the parent company’s management to establish first-time union contracts ... but the glacial pace of negotiations has frustrated staff, who believe the company has been in no hurry to establish contracts with the unions.” Read more about the situation here.

Also Notable

Examining Good Housekeeping’s Membership Model

Nearly a year in, Good Housekeeping’s new membership program, GH+, is outperforming publishers’ projections. Kayleigh Barber of Digiday.com reports that the brand is on track to have 10,000 GH+ subscribers by the end of the first year. For $20 per year, subscribers get the print magazine and “access to all digital content, free challenges and bonus guides ... deals and discounts to retail stores and even the chance to be a product tester for brands that are hoping to capitalize on GH’s authority in product reviewing.” While revenue projections are relatively modest for the program, the experiment likely won’t stop at GH+. Barber note that “GH+ is still young and can very well serve as a test case for Hearst as it continues creating more digital subscriptions and membership offerings.” Read more here.

Publishers Resist Online Subscription Cancellations

Readers can do a lot online: engage with magazine brands, comment on content, converse with contributors on social media, and even purchase subscriptions to their preferred content. But many publishers aren’t making it quite so convenient to cancel those subscriptions. In a recent piece for Niemen Lab, Laura Hazard Owen talks about publishers’ reluctance to offer online cancellations, as shown in the results of a recent American Press Institue Survey. “Just 41% of U.S. news publishers “make it easy” for subscribers to cancel their subscriptions online,” she reports. Read the full piece here, and access the American Press Institute survey here.

Journalists Covering Anti-Asian Hate Crimes

The recent murders in Atlanta have brought issues of anti-Asian racism to the forefront for many publishers. On March 17, the Asian American Journalists Association issues its guidance for outlets covering this story and others like it. Among other things, the association cautions journalists not to cover Asian women in hypersexual terms, to provide greater context around the recent rise in violence against Asian Americans, and to look to Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders as experts and sources for research. Read the complete set of guidelines here.

McClatchy Outsources Design and Layout

News outlet McClatchy has been hard hit by the pandemic, with over 200 layoffs over the past year. Kristen Hare of Poynter.org reports this week that the downsizing continues: “On [March 29], McClatchy announced a change to its page design and typesetting via an email that Poynter obtained. At least 26 people will lose their jobs.” Page design and layout will go to Express KCS, a global vendor with offices in Connecticut, the UK, and India (according to their website contact information). The layoff will happen in three stages between May and August. Read more here.

Meredith/Amex Shutters Two Magazines

Two copublished titles from Meredith/Amex shuttered this month: Departures and Centurion magazines. Keith J. Kelly of the New York Post reports that “American Express ... will now take it over and run the mags as digital-only brands.” Kelly reports that group publisher Giulio Capua will stay at Meredith, but most of the magazines’ staffers were let go late last week. Read more here.

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What your sales team needs to know before they start selling ads.

By William Dunkerley

There are techniques that work well for selling advertising space. And there are others that are, well, suboptimal. This article and its follow-up parts will help you to equip your sales force with highly effective techniques for selling lots of ads.

Before launching into sales presentational techniques, there are several essential prerequisites your sales agents will need to be able to deploy highly successful selling technique. (Of course, if you're satisfied with your current level of sales, you may not need them.)

Essential Prerequisite 1

Your publication must be effective at generating sales or other benefits for its advertisers. Achieving that requires careful cross-departmental coordination of strategies.

To start with, the ad department will have to articulate the audience attributes that advertisers in your field are looking for. The audience development department will have to target readers that possess those attributes. And the editorial department will have to supply content especially targeted at those readers.

Is that kind of strategy coordination happening at your publication? If not, you're not alone; a lot of publications don't. And for some of them their level of ad sales success is adequate and satisfactory. But it is not optimal.

Often a publication will see its mission as simply to provide content in a certain subject area. It might be an industry or profession, a specific geographic area, or a certain interest of the general public such as news, general business, or fashion.

With this as a starting point, the publication sets out to produce content consistent with that mission. It seeks readers based only on their interest in the content. Finally, the ad department is asked simply to sell ads.

If that's all you want, there's nothing wrong with it. However, that alone is not a formula for maximizing your publication’s business performance. If that is your goal, please consider some additional prerequisites.

Essential Prerequisite 2

You need to have expert knowledge of the marketplace you’re selling in. Your editorial staff undoubtedly possesses expertise in the content area they are writing about. Sometimes, though, the ad salespeople have only a superficial understanding of the subject matter. That may be acceptable if they sell only to ad buyers who likewise only have surface-level knowledge. However, in specialized areas of publishing, the buyer may be deeply immersed in the subject. Your sales agent will be more respected if he or she can match the buyer’s knowledge and understanding.

Beyond subject matter knowledge, there is other subject expertise that will help your sales agents. Knowing market trends is of particular importance. Understanding the challenges faced by the companies that place ads is important too. We'll discuss ways for achieving that later.

Essential Prerequisite 3

Within your market, you need to know what the various product or services categories are and the relative amount of ad dollars being spent in each. You also must know what categories are of greatest interest to your readers.

There is a way to acquire insight into this that I've found useful: Analyze what your competition is advertising. This was relatively easier in the print era because your competitors were primarily other print publications. Now, however, you are competing online with other publishers. In addition, publishers face massive competition from social media platforms, large and small. There are also blogs that carry advertising.

For simplicity, I'll illustrate the analytical practice only with print magazines. In this hypothetical example there are five competing publications. The analysis is being done on behalf of "Competitor A."

I've looked through three representative issues of each publication and made a list of categories in which the advertisements fall. There are 16. Then I counted up the advertising space devoted to each category. The count includes fractional pages, full pages, everything. The total indicates how many full pages all the advertising is equivalent to. I divided that by three to get the average per issue. The illustration below presents the information in tabular form.

Comparing several magazines by ad category.

You can see that the data is totaled both horizontally and vertically. The vertical column totals tell you how your volume of advertising compares with the competitors'. The horizontal row totals give you an indication of the categories in which advertisers are spending their ad dollars.

Comparing ad page counts translates meaningfully into dollars only if the various publications have similar prices per page. Ultimately, the most accurate assessment can be made if you convert the page counts into dollars based on the relevant ad rates. And when you bring digital ads into the comparison, there may be no good alternative to converting measurements into dollars. With digital comparisons you also may not have neatly defined periodic issues to compare. In that case, use a specified time frame, say, one month, for measurement. And for giants like Facebook you can't even stop there. The amount of ad content is too massive. In such instances just use a sampling technique for measurement.

The horizontal row totals are especially interesting because they can inform your publication's editorial plans. For instance, there is much more interest in the "auto" category than in "culture and entertainment." That means it is more beneficial to attract readers interested in autos than those with interests in culture and entertainment. That will make your audience more responsive to the advertisers that are spending larger sums of money. This emphasis should also be reflected in audience development efforts. More readers in that category will translate into more good prospects for those advertisers.

There are additional considerations when it comes to attracting new readers. We’ll pick up on that topic next time and look further into other prerequisites.

William Dunkerley is principal of William Dunkerley Publishing Consultants, www.publishinghelp.com.

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During this time of crisis, we stand ready to answer privately any specific questions our readers may have, time permitting. You can contact us at:

crisis-help@stratnewsletter.com

When the national health crisis subsides, publishers unfortunately should not expect to easily resume business as usual. Economists are predicting tough times ahead. In addition, the impact of the crisis may well result in different expectations of us on the part of our audiences. STRAT will provide a series of articles to help you all through the period of recovery and readjustment.