With generally under-funded readership research so notoriously unreliable, with often huge lie factor-generated margins of error and editors getting more and more involved in distracting revenue generation strategies, it is small wonder that so many newspapers and magazines are barely making ends meet, in spite of the fact that the adspend pie is growing like topsy and more and more people are reading newspapers and mags.
It is so bad in fact, that a lot of publishers believe that South Africa's magazine and newspaper market is now completely over-traded and that there is no room for new titles unless the publishers are part of big media groups with deep pockets and lots of patience.
But, every now and then, a new title hits the market out of left field and surprises everybody.
Take Full Circle for example. Its a very good looking, glossy A4 magazine that was launched about two years ago by a small but enthusiastic group of, one assumes, youngsters working out of a garage in Fish Hoek on the Cape Peninsula.
It started life as a free drop to a few thousand residents of the South Peninsula but now two years later its distribution has whipped past 20 000 and would be three times that, I reckon, if they had the resources to print more.
In short, what has happened, (according to an editorial in the most recent issue) is that residents from outside of the Full Circle distribution area have inundated them with requests to distribute to other areas.
Not only that, but it has an impressive enough advertising to editorial ratio to give the impression it must now be making serious money, unless they are giving the ads away, which I very much doubt.
I haven't met any of the people behind Full Circle and can only go on what I hear from local media and advertising people in the area.
But, having been a recipient of three or four issues so far, it seems quite clear that the success of Full Circle was probably not because they conducted a lot of formal research. Rather, I think that the publisher and editor decided from the word go to apply the basics of marketing ("It's not what you want to say, it's what the consumer wants to hear") and give the communities it was serving what they really wanted to read.
Given its past few editorials, there is no doubt that the magazine encourages feedback from its readers and also acts on it.
I just have the feeling that instead of relying exclusively on formal readership research, a lot of big publishers of borderline magazines and newspapers should get hold of people who produce magazines such as Full Circle and ask them what their secret is.
I don't have a problem with formal research, by the way; I just believe that more often than not it is done on the cheap and then analysed on the cheap.
And I also don't believe that just anybody can be an editor or trained to be an editor. It's more likely that successful editors are born with that rare gift of being able to put their own egos, prejudices and lofty intellectual editorial ideals aside completely and give their readers what they want.
