Johnson’s World Trains, Magazines, & Portals Have you fl own in a plane, ever? Whether you fl y once a year for vacation or every week for business, if you’ve been on a commercial fl ight you’ve seen and read the in-fl ight magazine of whatever airline you were fl ying at the time. In-fl ight magazines are as ubiquitous on airplanes as barf bags, and they’ve been around just as long. Th eir primary purpose appears to be entertainment. As fl ight became transcontinental and then transoceanic, airlines were challenged to occupy the time of passengers. Drinking and smoking, sumptuous dining, movie theater screens, and planes with cocktail lounges have given way to microwaves, the internet, and postcard-sized seatback tv screens, but even with more distractions than ever the infl ight magazine remains. Is the infl ight magazine doomed, now that we have wifi and literally hundreds of movie choices to entertain us? It appears that the opposite is true. People fi dget. Only printed material can satisfy the need of the seatbound passenger to touch, to feel, to mark with a pen. Th e glut of digital media becomes overwhelming, and print media feels like a peaceful vacation from the electronic bombardment. Now Amtrak, the U.S. government-owned rail passenger service, has announced plans to launch its own national infl ight, er, in-train magazine. Amtrak is always out to prove that taking the train is as good as or better than fl ying, and if you can’t make the trains run on time, publishing your own magazine may be the next best thing. To be sure that they do it right, Amtrak has tapped Ink, the British travel magazine publisher that handles publications for United and American Airlines. Smart move. I actually enjoy United’s magazine Hemispheres more than I enjoy fl ying United. “We’re launching a huge print magazine, in a world where everybody is scared of print,” Ink CEO Simon Leslie told Th e New York Post. “Brands are excited to see what we are going to bring.” Speaking of magazines, the Atlantic Monthly’s July/August issue went back on press for an unprecedented second printing. Th is is unheard of for a modern magazine, but newsstand demand was so heavy that a second press run of 25,000 additional magazines was warranted. “At a time of troubling newsstand performance for many magazines, it was kind of thrilling to order up a second printing for this issue,” Bob Cohn, Th e Atlantic’s president was quoted as saying in Publishing Executive magazine. “Even as our website attracts millions and millions of readers, we are especially gratifi ed by the overwhelming response to the print magazine.” Did you get that? Th e content is freely available on the Atlantic website, but people want that inkon paper magazine in their hands, and they are willing to pay for it. Something else happened recently that hasn’t received the press one might expect. In a summer when Amtrak launched a print magazine and the Atlantic had to order an additional press run, another media icon is quietly going away. Yahoo!, once the internet’s most popular website, was bought by cellphone provider Verizon. Oh, I know, the deal won’t close until next year and the website is still up, but it’s over for Yahoo. Once the world’s preferred search engine (search directory, actually) Yahoo! expanded to become, well, a little bit of everything. Yahoo claims to be the highest-read news and media website, which refl ects its largely failed strategy to be a “portal” i.e. the website where netsurfers would go to fi rst, no matter what they were looking for. Such a web portal as Yahoo! was supposed to eliminate the need for newspapers, magazines, libraries, even television. Yahoo!’s future has been murky for the past decade or better. Verizon will be paying one-tenth of what Microsoft off ered for the company only eight years ago. Let’s put things in perspective. Th e Atlantic Monthly was founded in 1857. It has had its ups and downs, but this year the magazine is burning up the newsstands, with every issue signifi cantly topping last year’s sales. One hundred and fi ft y-nine years aft er its founding, the Atlantic is on fi re. Twenty-two years aft er its inception, Yahoo! is toast. Don’t sell your printing press yet. By Steve Johnson President, Copresco Find this article at PrintingNews.com/12243675 58 Printing News ® September 2016 PrintingNews®com
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