Every subculture needs its holy scriptures. Business executives feel more like business executives when they read The Harvard Business Review. Marketers replenish their chops with Brandweek, start-ups with Entrepreneur. And so on. From The Mining Journal (founded in 1835) to Fish Farming International, name a specialty, and there’s a specialty publication that confers at least wannabe-insider status on its readers.
Like all enterprises that sell something that you can now get for free online, trade publications have to come up with new ways to maintain relevance and generate advertising.
For example, a site called GIS Lounge consolidates links to just about every publication the professional geospatialist could ever dream of consulting, and no doubt similar sites exist for every vocation. But trade publications just don’t wield the mighty clout that once made marketing and PR departments tremble; social networking and blogging have become the main focus for reaching targeted audiences.
Variety, the entertainment industry’s venerable trade paper, was once my tribal talisman. I haven’t read it in years, but that racy swoosh of an iconic banner logo is enough to conjure up a bittersweet Proustian nostalgia for a show biz period of life when Variety mattered to me. Oh to be young, employed no matter how tenuously, and riding the subway to work from not-yet-chic Brooklyn to Midtown Manhattan while ostentatiously crackling the pages of the weekly edition of Variety!
How my bosom swelled with pride when Variety reported that a French movie I repped broke foreign-film box-office records by grossing a million (that’s gross, mind you). Reading Variety for the gossip, the hired-fired merry-go-round (“You’re kidding! HE made VP??!!”), the fundraiser/big-donor leads, and of course, the movie reviews, was essential even in an esoteric corner of the entertainment industry that generated so little money it barely registered on balance sheets (culturally, however, it was a different story—we mattered to the Style pages for sure).
Across town on the East Side, close attention to Advertising Age was de rigueur among the magazine, publishing, and creative agency whiz kids. And just as Variety still conjured up ghosts of the Polo Lounge and Sardi’s, Ad Age still exuded the snappy smarts of those “men in the grey flannel suits” lunching at 21 or The Four Seasons (now glamorously immortalized on “Mad Men”) decades after their big moment.
But a recent dust-up at Variety illustrates how times have changed for all the trades. Longtime senior film critic (and prestige brand name) Todd McCarthy was recently laid off, along with other film and theater review staff. Lamentation has ensued. One L.A. Times piece was headlined “Hollywood reacts to Variety’s axing of Todd McCarthy: ‘What were they thinking?’” The piece notes that “People don’t read Variety for news anymore. That’s now available free of charge, at any time of the day, from any number of websites on the Internet. People in the business read Variety for its analysis and opinion. And especially now that the paper is behind a pay wall, if you want people to pay for a subscription, you have to offer them something unique—which is what McCarthy was able to offer with his knowledgeable reviews.”
The Trades may no longer maintain their bygone mystique—somehow I can’t picture young go-getters of the 21st century as avid followers—but every in-group likes to have its own secret codes, so surely something serves that purpose. Online.
