Following a Thread

Pull on a thread and something is bound to start unraveling. This thread was a re-Tweet of a Tweet of a blog post about the demise of ID Magazine (For my readers that need an explanation: someone wrote a blog, someone twittered about it, someone that I follow on twitter re-sent the tweet to all his followers and, finally, I picked up on it. That's a convoluted path, isn't it?).Another magazine closure, at this point, is hardly news. We are all sadly resigned to the fact that newspapers and magazines are under a lot of stress, to say the least.

ID Magazine, also known as International Design, was established in 1954, and was originally called Industrial Design, the eponymous journal of the then relatively new profession that shapes the things we use every day. The tail of its demise was told in the blog post: ID Magazine was based in New York for a long time until it was taken over by a publishing company in Cincinnati, in turned owned by a private equity company, where it was subsequently moved. Cincinnati, for all its good points and history as an industrial city, is probably not best known as a hub of activity for top designers and top design editors. Those kinds of people are, in the main, in larger metropolises: New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco. Although good design can happen in the hinterland, big cities with masses of companies and people is where there is action.

Deprived of the action and vibe that drove the magazine, readership began to fall. No doubt the drop was aided and abetted by the general decline in magazine readership and the digital distraction that affects industrial designers as much as everyone else, if not more. It's pretty sad. I was an occasional newsstand reader, but I found the last couple of years of ID less than stimulating myself.

But I also happen to know that the publisher of ID is also the publisher of Popular Woodworking, a very good woodworking magazine. I tugged on the thread and discovered that Popular Woodworking and Woodworking Magazine (also acquired by the same publisher) are to be merged but, in their editors blog posting, they claim that there is no economic reason for this. It's only so they can "grow and serve the woodworking community". To which I think: "The lady doth protest too much". If I had two profitable titles I would focus on their differentiation and continue to promote them.

Further pulling on the thread turned up the fact that Woodwork, another fine publication, also ceased publication this past Summer. And the industry leading amateur magazine Fine Woodworking ? Their media kit shows a significant decline in paid subscriptions, as far back as 2003 (though as I recall from a previous life, the decline began even earlier than that).

Woodworking itself, I believe, is in decline and this explains some of the fall in circulation of those magazines. On a commercial basis, much manufacturing has been moved overseas, both of furniture and ready made cabinetry (as would go into all those houses in the recent building boom). On an amateur basis, the fall of manufacturing generally has thinned the ranks of skilled workers whose hobbies run to hand crafts. Further, the schools have cut shop programs (wood, metal and otherwise) out of the curricula and the attention of people, generally, tend to digital pursuits: computers, video games, Facebook and Twitter. If few people are exposed to hand work, they are less likely to turn to it has a hobby, or to read magazines about it.

Within the unraveling of this thread:

• Nothing has an indefinite life. Magazines, crafts and entire industries may fall into and out of favor. This is not new, it has always been so, even before the Internet. 
• Private equity, managing primarily by looking at the "bottom line" may miss a crucial point: in some parts of an enterprise, people and place matter. Managing this can be tricky. Outsourcing is an art.
• There are mutual links between what is taught in school and what happens in the real world of designing, making and selling things. This is something that, collectively, we may consider trying to influence.

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