I’m going to wander off topic here today, because I need to get some things off my chest about the sad state of magazine publishing in this country.

As you probably know, I publish Airstream Life magazine and have done so since 2004.   Airstream Life is a magazine that, by conventional wisdom, shouldn’t exist. It serves far too small an audience, and attempts to do it with a level of quality that is far above a magazine with circulation of 12,000. Most full-color magazines, even quarterly ones, have circulation in the tens of thousands at the very least.

Honestly, Airstream Life would not exist if not for the Internet revolution. Virtual offices, easy electronic collaboration & document sharing, digital photography, digital layout & proofing, online marketing, and e-commerce are the essential technological elements of a business such as this. If I had to open a physical office and give everyone a desk and telephone, the magazine would never have launched. If we couldn’t market the magazine inexpensively via the Internet, we wouldn’t have many subscribers. In a dozen different ways, Airstream Life and other niche magazines — such as Atomic Ranch and Route 66 Magazine — are symbols of the efficiencies made possible by the Internet.

This is great not only because new technologies have enabled magazines to pop up that couldn’t exist before, but because these small magazines have to be of very high quality in order to survive in today’s competitive environment. The world is awash in magazines, and it is an extremely competitive business. Hundreds of new titles launch every year, and most of them die quickly. Magazines have to fight for advertisers and spots on newsstands, in a time when paper prices are rising as much as 20% per year, and as advertisers move their budgets from print magazines to other forms of marketing.

Remember the Avis rental car commercials of the 1960’s? “We’re number two. We try harder.” That’s the situation of niche magazines, except that we’re not number 2, we’re number 71,532. The media buyer at a national advertiser can go to a major RV magazine like Trailer Life and get 200,000 pairs of eyeballs with one ad, so how do we get them to advertise in tiny little Airstream Life?

We do it by being more focused and better than other RV magazines. In other words, we try to publish better articles, better photos, on better paper and with better customer service. We’re not perfect by any means, but we hustle and do our best. We do our homework. We take quality seriously. All of those things are appreciated by our subscribers. I know because they tell us. The other niche magazines do the same, or they earn a quick death.

And that brings me to the inspiration for this little editorial. I read most of the competitive magazines in the RV segments, and let me tell you, there’s a lot of crap out there. Really. I’ve never called out my competition before but I just can’t stay silent any longer. Too many of the titles are publishing junk articles that are:

• poorly researched, just plain wrong, or misleading
• badly written, hopelessly vague or useless
• entirely and obviously pandering to an advertiser
• dumbed down to the point of being insulting

This problem exists to some extent across the magazine industry, but nowhere is it worse than in the RV segment. There seems to be a general malaise across the sector, and a feeling that low standards are good enough for the RV owner. Look at the selection available to an RV owner on the newsstand sometime. The editors seem stuck in the 1990s, and they seem to think their readers are exclusively people of low-brow interests and completely undiscerning of the pap they are receiving.

This is utterly wrong, and a huge disservice to the RV-owning audience of today. RV owners encompass all ages, all interests, and they aren’t just dumb yokels looking for cheap gas & flea markets. But read most of the magazines and you could be forgiven for making that assumption.

I finally hit my personal limit when I read an article on a visit to Yellowstone in an RV rag. Here are two excerpts:

“After arriving at Yellowstone, we stopped by the visitors center where we grabbed a sandwich, some ice cream, and oh yeah, some souvenirs. We were greeted by the picnic tables by a rather chubby chipmunk with whom our daughter delighted in sharing her Lay’s Potato Chips. A young cafeteria worker emerged happily from the visitor’s center and brought with him two whole-wheat crackers; he claimed they were the chipmunk’s favorite. I told him, ‘This one is eating some potato chips,’ to which he jokingly replied, ‘He might have a heart attack.’ “

… later in the same article …

“Before we left, I had tromped through brush, taken a photograph from our truck window of a grizzly bear less than five feet away, and had been ordered back to my vehicle by a park ranger with a bullhorn for getting too close to a mama black bear and her cub. My adrenaline had already warned me of the fact, but the park ranger wasn’t in the waving mood after that. As for me, I am now ready for a safari hat and the Serengeti.”

If this strikes you as intelligent, quality travel writing, then you probably won’t appreciate Airstream Life.   (Hint: What’s the first thing they tell you about animals in a national park?)

But here’s the irony. You’d think with the generally low standards of RV publications, there’d be a strong demand for an intelligent, well-written and beautifully presented magazine that explores a more diverse range of topics than just tow vehicle comparisons and tips on how to feed Cheez Whiz to squirrels.

Sadly, the opposite is true. I’ve spoken to several well-placed consultants in the industry, and they all say the same things: you can’t make it on editorial quality alone. Circulation is king. Put out a sorry rag of a magazine, make it cheap so lots of people subscribe, and the advertisers will come. Don’t waste money on better articles because the advertisers don’t care. The media buyers don’t actually read the magazines, they just evaluate on the basis of CPM (ad cost per thousand readers).

This really hurts me because I won’t go that route, but it is a fact that no magazine can survive for long without ad revenue (or some other form of financial support beyond subscriptions). Subscriptions alone pay only a tiny fraction of the true cost of producing a magazine. If we had to charge what it really costs to produce Airstream Life, an annual subscription would be about $50 per year instead of $16.

I would like to think that there are advertisers who value quality. In fact, I know there are a few because they buy ads in our magazine. Those advertisers know that many Airstream Life readers save their issues, collect the back issues, and even buy them on eBay when they can. (Last month a copy of the inaugural issue — Summer 2004 — sold for $48 on eBay!) But those sorts of advertisers are far too scarce.

For three years we’ve been trying to convince media buyers that paying for quality really does result in a higher quality of customer. A few of them have figured that out, and they do really well. But we’ve never had an advertisement from any of the vehicle manufacturers, and we’ve been ignored by hundreds of other national advertisers with products and services aimed directly at the RV traveler.

Thus, the structure of the magazine industry reinforces and even encourages mediocrity. Bad magazines thrive on the strength of their circulation numbers, because that’s what media buyers think of first. They get that circulation by promoting subscriptions at ridiculously discounted rates (as low as $8 for 12 issues of a magazine like the one I quoted above — which barely covers the cost of the printing!), and the RV owner buys them because they are “a bargain,” thus perpetuating the cycle.

I can’t say that any of this is a surprise, but it does make survival a constant challenge.   Despite the odds, we’ve been making a go of it by serving those folks who actually care about what they read, and hoping that eventually the advertisers — including the 70+ Airstream dealers who don’t currently advertise in Airstream Life — catch on.

In the meantime, the wonderful people who subscribe and tell me how much they love the magazine, continue to motivate me and all the other people who work on Airstream Life.   Thank you.   You’re the reason we’re doing this.