learned: a successful magazine must first of all be clear about its mission and committed above all to its readers. It must tell the truth, never allow government, advertisers, friends or even stockholders to influence its content, respect its readers’ intelligence, be sensitive to their changing tastes and interests, and be as well-informed, well-written and attractively presented as possible. This is easy to say and very hard to do. But I am convinced that it holds true for every magazine, whether it be focused on business, fashion, automobiles, travel, decorating or anything else. What you need is this conviction and, above all, enough talented and committed people to make better magazines than any of your competitors can.
INNOVATION: How long do you think magazines will survive as a print media? What are the key things a magazine publisher has to keep in mind, while conducting this transition from mono to multimedia platform publishing?
RC: As I said before, I think that print magazines have many decades still ahead of them. On the other hand, we don’t have
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any time to lose in beginning the digital transition, because many of our current and especially our future readers already want to receive their favourite publications on the new platforms. In other words, the two forms will have to coexist, and complement rather than conflict with each other. If we can master the transition both
editorially and economically, the digital dimension will enable us to take our content another step forward, with the addition of videos, sound, music, the opportunity to update and add background and, very probably equally as important, the creation of an ongoing dialogue with and between our readers. The biggest difficulty at the moment is not in developing suitable content but in finding sustainable new business models to replace the traditional ones.
The main thing, however, will be to learn
to create and package our unique content for multimedia consumption in such a way that it continues to attract the audiences and advertisers we have been so successful in attracting over the course of some two centuries. Practically all of the young talents that we recruit every year think that this is absolutely normal, and have no trouble at all in producing great content that