Purchasing Magazine’s Demise Raises More Questions Than it Answers
Over the weekend, I gave quite a bit of thought -- and had numerous conversations and e-mail exchanges with various colleagues -- to Purchasing Magazine's untimely demise last Friday. For those who are just waking up to the story today, Reed decided to shut down a number of its trade titles, including Purchasing and Supply Chain Management Review, after failing to find a buyer for them. As a new media company that was technically competing against Purchasing for eyeballs (I say "technically" in the loosest possible sense because I think there's a big difference between journalism and blogging/analyst research), the entire Spend Matters team views the event (from a self-serving lens, in part) with a combination of sadness, trepidation and potential. But for us, Purchasing's demise raises more questions that it answers:
- Is there room for print in today's procurement and supply chain world from a wide circulation perspective (or a narrower one, aimed towards a more senior audience)?
- Did Reed "toss the buying baby out with the bathwater?" Why did they not try to remake the title into something different, cutting costs to bring it to profitability?
- Where did the Purchasing business model fail -- or more specifically, where did it fail to adapt to the current environment?
- What would a next generation Purchasing publishing model look like (i.e., an online and/or print source that combined significant factual reporting on markets, commodities, technology, etc.)? How would it differ from the direction Purchasing was headed in?
- How should Spend Matters and MetalMiner react? Should we continue down our current path (combining a blog and a research business) or should we also consider pursuing more traditional reporting to fill the void left by Purchasing's loss?
- Are there any lessons for us in this? How can we learn from Reed's move, so that we never find ourselves in a similar situation down the line?
- What assets of Purchasing -- outside of their basic reporting -- did Spend Matters readers find most useful? Should we try to replicate this in any way?
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Let's face it, S&DC Exec was going hard after Purchasing's Market, CPO Agenda was the UK's answer to SCMR, Procurement Leaders has been trying hard to cross the Atlantic -- and Mr. Perera is now actively recruiting ex-Reed journalists, and the ISM has two of its own publications (Inside Supply Management and eSide Supply Management) that it might step up efforts on to try and pick up ad revenue on to try and stem the bleeding (that amounted to losses of over $2 Million for the organization as a whole for the last two years).
9) How is this going to affect the course of your competition in the blogsphere, new media, and the Analyst 2.0 research space -- namely Sourcing Innovation, Horses for Sources, CPO Rising, and Supply Chain Matters?
Let's face it ... I don't think any of us are going anywhere!
10) What aspects were Purchasing, SCMR, Logistics Management and the other publications missing?
It's been well established that, on a regular basis, the blogs get more traffic than the stale publication sites, which not only means that the blogs have something the publications never had, but that the online presence of these publications obviously wasn't very attractive. Thus, the real question is, what were they missing (as they obviously failed to attract the reach of their print publications) -- and would it make sense for blogs, research firms, and Analyst 2.0 shops to add these aspects?