Bo Sacks, an old friend of the industry, has been publishing his Heard on the Web Newsletter daily for 33 years. He’s put out three distinct issues each day for as long as I can remember. Bo is, indisputably, an industry oracle, someone who’s devoted a career to observing, informing, challenging, and cajoling the rest of us. His consistency is the magazine-industry equivalent of Lou Gehrig or Cal Ripken
Oftentimes, Bo uncovers some off-the-beaten-path article that informs and edifies. But what I like best are his “Bo Speaks Out” reports. I’ve been meaning to speak out on one of those columns for a couple of months. Now seems like a good time to do that, before it gets too old. In Mid April, he summarized a series of columns from the prior month. I think Bo’s analysis is worth its own analysis. So here’s my stab at an assessment. This is how Bo starts:
Fox SVP Bill Bell, right, and Bo Sacks.
“I looked back at a full month of Bo-writing, ranting, analyzing, and occasionally wondering why this industry still insists on learning everything the hard way, and I have reached a simple conclusion,” he writes. “Every piece I published this month was part of the same argument. Whether I was talking about AI eating our crown jewels, the collapse of the traffic economy, the generational discovery gap, the absurdity of our measurement systems, or the industry’s chronic refusal to act together, it all pointed to one unavoidable truth. The magazine business is out of alibis.”
That’s an ominous start, for sure. But Bo doesn’t end up there. He concludes with a ringing endorsement of the magazine industry and its prospects in the years ahead.
Bo continues: “I wrote about AI’s silent takeover and how generative systems now ingest our work, summarize it, and deliver the value directly to the reader without sending them back to us. That was not a forecast,” Bo stated. “That was a coroner’s report. The value exchange we depended on for twenty years has collapsed, and we are still acting like it is a temporary outage. The kind of outage where the utility company tells you they are investigating, but you know the transformer is already in a landfill.”
Again, this is hard to dispute. It’s real. This is an industry that in my years covering it, has always distorted the old “hope-for-the-best-but-prepare-for-the-worst” aphorism. It becomes “hope-for-the-best-and-don’t-worry-about-anything-else.” Remember the old “information wants to be free” line the first generation of internet bros sold us? It was devastating to the industry. It undermined the essential business model.
More Bo: “Then came the pieces on measurement, where I reminded us that we have spent years worshipping metrics that were never designed to measure anything meaningful,” he writes. “Magazine professionals know this better than anyone. We lived through the era when a rate base was treated like a sacred oath, even when everyone in the room knew it was a negotiation tactic with a glossy cover. We optimized for the wrong numbers because the wrong numbers were the only ones we could see. We built strategies on illusions and then wondered why the outcomes felt hollow. We trusted dashboards more than we trusted our own editorial instincts, which is a bit like trusting a horoscope to run your production schedule.”
Some of these references admittedly come from a different era. There will be people for whom they’re all but meaningless. But the thing to take away is that many—or most—of today’s engagement metrics are equally as inadequate as those old print-magazine forms. Today, pageviews, time on page, shares and so many other ways of measuring value remain ephemeral, and not surprisingly, they shift all the time.
Next Bo shifts to the younger generation’s media consumption habits, which are predominantly online, particularly social media.
“Younger readers are not disinterested,” Bo asserts. “They are undiscovered. They are navigating a discovery ecosystem we refused to build for. They are not ignoring magazines. Magazines ignored them. And we have no one to blame but ourselves for pretending TikTok was a fad and Instagram was optional. We kept waiting for younger audiences to return to the formats we preferred, which is the publishing equivalent of mailing a renewal notice to someone who has not checked their physical mailbox since high school.”
In the piece, which is relatively long at 1,406 words, Bo covers a variety of other transgressions, including operational fragility and the discounting of a real industry strength, which he characterizes as editorial “voice,” plus other acts of folly.
But in the end, he writes, all these things did was demonstrate that AI didn’t break a healthy system, it exposed a fragile one. But on the contrary, there is reason for great optimism.
“The magazine industry has been declared dead more times than disco, and yet here we are,” Bo continues. “Still publishing. Still creating. Still reaching readers. Still producing work that matters. If any sector in media has earned the right to a little optimism, it is magazines.
“Magazine professionals know something the rest of the media world keeps forgetting,” Bo says. “This industry has survived every apocalypse anyone has ever thrown at it. We survived the first digital wave. We survived the second digital wave. We survived the platforms, the pivot to video, the pivot away from video, the pivot to newsletters, the pivot to whatever came after newsletters, and the consultants who insisted that print was finished while quietly subscribing to three titles themselves. We survived paper shortages, postal hikes, supply chain chaos, and the kind of budget meetings that should qualify as endurance sports. We survived the era when everyone said attention spans were shrinking, only to discover that readers will still spend twenty minutes with a story if it is actually worth twenty minutes.
“That is the part we forget,” Bo asserts. “Magazines have always been built on value, not velocity. On intention, not volume. On trust, not tricks. On the simple but powerful idea that a well made magazine can still stop time for a reader. That is not nostalgia. That is a competitive advantage.”
You can read Bo’s complete article here. It’s well worth your time.