Contentions: All publications go to purgatory

Insider recently broke the news that Andreessen Horowitz’s (a16z’s) much-hyped publication Future will be shutting down.

The news sounds surprising because it launched with such hype, and was even active in June:

Head of a16z marketing and Outcast Agency co-founder Margit Wennmachers has said, “Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.” Generally, I didn’t see many people mourning for Future’s possible demise; in fact, the vibe feels gleeful. 

That’s for good reason—in addition to the hype of its vision and strong ambition, Future represented a call for companies to go direct to audiences and skip traditional media. Future’s inactivity is evidence that this is clearly easier said than done, and it’s clearly not an option for every company. Here are some responses that got me thinking:

It’ll take more time than I have in this blog post to figure out exactly what happened and why they shut it down. One possibility is the other bets it’s nurturing—the blog, podcasts, YouTube, etc.—are paying off with greater dividends, so why not do more of what’s working? As Natasha Mascarenhas suggests in the above tweet, is that the medium was simply not working for a16z. 

https://twitter.com/TaylorLorenz/status/1598429457403981825

This really hits home. An editorial calendar needs to live up to a vision and ambition. If not, then don’t announce it in the first place. Leave the hype alone, start slowly and quietly, and let satisfied readers do the talking for you.

It’s also a matter of patience. Within a company or as an independent, making a publication work takes time; how much time is really out of the team’s control (Protocol also recently shut down). When the money or budget runs out, it’s out, and it’s onto the next thing.

This resonates with me too. Consider WePresent (by WeTransfer), or The Creative Independent (by Kickstarter). C-suite support always makes things easier to sustain; a personal belief in the brand, without direct attribution, goes a long way.

I’ve loosely held the idea that even within a company, a publication needs to clearly pay for itself in order to survive. It has its own business model outside of branding for a business. That could mean it is responsible for its own profit and loss statement. For example, a publication team might organize a conference in order to pay the bills for the content. It might create products based on its content, like Increment’s print magazines and Stripe Press.

For now, Future remains on the internet, along with more beloved publications owned by brands, like Glitch’s Glimmer, Adobe’s 99U, and Basecamp’s Signal v. Noise

There are a handful of implications here, more of which I’ll blog about as they reveal themselves to me:

  • Making a publication is easy and fun. Sustaining a publication is challenging, and high risk work. Figuring out how to keep costs low, and how it will pay for itself, really helps. Moreover, the reward from branding only comes from years of sustained effort; patience is key, and profits can go a long way to creating this patience.
  • Personal blogs are a great way for teams to communicate; Signal v. Noise (SVN) shut down and the Basecamp team still blogs at HEY World. I believe one of their team members said, in one of the Rework podcasts, that SVN and blogging were both actually fun initiatives, not necessarily measured for their marketing ROI. There’s something to that; can you create a program or culture of creativity, in which it’s actually inherently a part of the team’s culture to document and express themselves? (See also security culture.) This could be a good, simple, way to test out building a publication.
  • If you’re going to be loud and controversial, then your stories better live up to the vision. Otherwise, if you’re uncertain this publication is going to work and want to test it out quietly, then do that; share your work proudly, and give people a chance to get on your side.
  • Curate the best of your team’s personal blogs at a corporate blog (or some other central repository), so that when prospective customers or team members look for your work they can see the best of all of it.
  • Publications are high risk projects; don’t bet the farm on it. Make it a small bet, and try other media and communications bets. You’ll never know what medium works for you and your potential readers until you try it out. Be flexible with how you communicate ideas.

Honestly I did not think I’d write so much about this. Here are a handful of really cool business publications—er, media businesses—I’m keeping my eye on:

One last thing that I’ve taken for granted, but still worth emphasizing: you can make a great publication, tell great stories, and still end up needing to shut it down. A publication shutting down is not a reflection of the people who work on it, it’s a reflection of how well its business is operating.

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