It is a brutal piece, but, rereading it this morning, there's a lot of "Oh you're doing it wrong" in this piece and when you go and read something like this it is not clear the magazines are doing it right.

Yes a dose a business acumen probably wouldn't go astray in most small amateur run publications (I could certainly do with some!) but magazine circulation departments are notorious for treating their readers like idiots and I still believe the web holds far more promise longer term than print does.

I can't claim any expertise on the business end of print publishing but the thing that chimed most with me here were the parallels between the small/niche pubs David Rose is talking about and the small/niche travel cos that I tend to work with. Things like understanding conversion rates, % repeat business, acquisition costs, measuring returns and so on, these are things that a lot of people struggle with.

A particularly striking para was:

"You used to be able to find vocational courses at institutes on circulation modeling, for example, on marketing metrics. They were the hardcore bones of publishing. You dont get those things anymore, because people stopped learning about print publishing in the early 2000s when they said print was going to be dead."

So basically the print biz is dying because enough people said it would.

Brilliant read anyway, thanks for sharing. Would love to hear what some of our other publisher members think @compasscultura @John_Summerton @Maptia etc

I read this the second it went live. I've been following and enjoying Caroline's "Little Magazines' series on Neiman Lab. But, for me, the article/interview read as a "When I was your age, I had to walk to school& uphill& both ways& in the snow& barefoot" kind of piece. Clearly Rose has an immense level of industry expertise and publishing intuition but what he posses in pragmatism, he lacks in farsightedness. 

That said, I found some extremely useful bits of information in the interview. Publishing industry standards that I, as one of the types of publishers that Rose rails against, had no idea even existed. Things like Subscription Liabilities. Overall, I think Rose has a great mind for publishing but he's still playing the short game. He's been around a whilehe'll be long retired by the time the industry becomes wholly unrecognizable to print-hardened veterans like himself.