I’m writing live from the American Magazine Conference, hosted by the Magazine Publishers of America in beautiful, sunny and warm Phoenix, Arizona. The conference kicked off on Sunday with an MPA-IMAG meeting where, similar to their May conference in NYC, staffing remains a concern.
It seems that a good majority of magazine publishers remain convinced that they don’t need to dedicate full-time staff to their websites. They want the revenues, but aren’t willing, or just don’t realize that they need to staff that effort appropriately.
We can’t help but wonder, if any of these publishers were considering launching an additional print magazine, do you think they’d dismiss the importance of staffing that new launch appropriately? Of course they wouldn’t. Why do they still, in late 2006, treat the Web like the redheaded stepchild?
To some publishers’ credit, there are a few who do get it.
For example, Fabio Freyre, CEO of Latina Media Ventures, LLC said that when he got there a few years ago, the staffing was very segmented. The event marketers worried about events, the circulation directors worried about magazine circulation, etc. But Fabio knew that if his company was truly going to succeed in fulfilling their mission (which is to bring the U.S. Hispanic community the best, most empowering, engaging and culturally relevant content across a range of media platforms), he needed to integrate his staffing and get them all focused on this one coherent goal.
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Fabio had worked in sales at Time, Inc. for 17 years and openly admitted that some of these big publishing companies are too siloed. The staffing is too vertical and this type of organizational structure really doesn’t allow them to truly to enhance the consumer’s life, which should be their primary focus.
One way that Fabio got his staff in agreement with him was by kindly reminding them that their pay checks come from Latina Media Ventures, LLC, not Latina magazine.
After a few years of what he describes as a “cultural change,” his company is seeing double digit growth in Web traffic every month and triple digit growth in their online revenues so far this year. I think I see a Mequoda Case Study in the works…
Today Fabio has a staff of 6 dedicated entirely to Latina.com and has plans to add three more full-time editors devoted strictly to the website.
The sum of it is pretty clear: if you want to generate significant revenue from your website, you must treat it as a separate business unit and staff it as such.
For more information on the MPA and up to the minute information on this event, please visit www.magazine.org/amc.
For more information on staffing your media company in the 21st century, join us at the next Mequoda Summit.
