A quarterly people keep, and a website that pays for it.
Print is a terrible business and a very good object. The version that works is a quarterly nobody throws away, funded by subscription rather than by advertising, with a digital operation underneath it that carries the running costs.
The shape of it.
The object
- Frequency
- QuarterlyMonthly is a treadmill that eats editorial quality within a year.
- Extent
- 96–128 pagesEnough to be kept. A 48-page magazine is a brochure and is treated as one.
- Paper and print
- Uncoated, litho, perfect boundIt costs more and it is the entire reason somebody keeps it on a shelf.
- Cover price
- £12–15Priced as an object rather than as a newsstand purchase.
- Subscription
- £40–48 a yearWhich is where essentially all of the revenue comes from.
The economics
- Break-even circulation
- 11,000–14,000 subscribersFor a staff of four to six, at that extent and that paper.
- Print and post, per copy
- £3.20–4.60The largest single cost and the one that does not fall much with volume.
- Advertising
- Welcome, never depended onA magazine that needs advertising to break even is a magazine that cannot write about farm policy honestly.
- Digital
- Free, and it funds the printThe reverse of the usual arrangement, and the only version that works at this scale.
The staff
- Editor
- OneWho commissions, edits and takes responsibility for it being any good.
- Art director
- OneA magazine is a design object before it is a text object.
- Staff writer
- One or twoAnd a freelance budget larger than the staff budget.
- Production and subscriptions
- OneWhich is a real job and is invariably underestimated.
Why subscription rather than advertising.
Because the most valuable thing this estate could publish is honest writing about farm economics and farm policy, and both of those are subjects where the obvious advertisers have an interest in the conclusions.
A magazine funded by input suppliers cannot write plainly about input costs. A magazine funded by machinery dealers cannot argue that most small farms should contract rather than buy. Those are the two most useful arguments available and both of them are unprintable in an advertising-funded title.
Subscription funding costs a great deal more effort and produces a smaller business. It also produces the only version of this that would be worth reading, and the audience that already exists here is the one asset that makes it plausible at all.
What would be in it.
| Section | What it is | Roughly |
|---|---|---|
| The accounts | One farm’s actual numbers, annotated, every issue | 8 pages |
| A long piece on policy | With the lobbying register printed alongside it | 10–14 pages |
| The failure | One thing that went wrong somewhere, told properly by the person it happened to | 6 pages |
| Photography | One farm, one season, properly shot | 12–16 pages |
| The method | Whatever the open agronomy protocol has learned that quarter | 8 pages |
| Letters | Printed at length, including the ones that disagree | 4 pages |
| The parish pages | Twelve parishes, what each did, and the dates for next quarter | 6 pages |
| A recipe that uses a whole animal | From the pub kitchen | 4 pages |
Print magazines fail for well-understood reasons: monthly frequency, advertising dependence, and a cover price set as though it were a newsstand product. This design avoids all three and would still need eleven to fourteen thousand people to pay forty pounds a year, which is the whole risk stated in one sentence.
There is no magazine
This page describes a business that does not exist, has not been started, and has no staff, no subscribers and no printer. It is part of an unofficial demonstration build.
The magazine, questioned.
Because monthly frequency is what kills small magazines. Four issues a year can each be good; twelve cannot, at this staff size, and the first thing to go is the writing.
Because the digital operation already exists and costs very little to run, and print does not scale down. It is the reverse of the traditional arrangement and it is the only version that works at this circulation.
It would accept it and would never depend on it, because the two most useful arguments it could make are both unprintable in a title funded by input suppliers or machinery dealers.
And the format, which is not ours to sell.
The idea travels better than the person does.
