Making the Switch From Consumer Magazines to Trade Publications
While consumer magazines are in decline, for the most part eradicated by social media, trade (B2B) titles dedicated towards a specific niche or industry, are on the rise. Added to that, the work is more steady and usually pays better which is leading to swathes of career journalists ‘changing sides’ and moving to what many consider the ‘dark side’ of publishing. Here’s what you can expect.
(How to Find Freelance Success Pitching to Magazine Families.)
I’ve been in the magazine industry most of my working life, having started freelancing in my early-20s to help fund my education. At various points I have also been an English teacher in China, a factory worker, and a bar tender. Around a decade ago I landed my dream job writing for a men’s magazine (not THAT that kind of men’s magazine) in London when someone who worked there thought I was funny on Facebook. Yes, things like that really do happen occasionally. It was my first full-time journalism gig. The magazine was mostly about action movies, sport, and rappers. The only problem was, it was on a downward trajectory and cutbacks were inevitable. I was laid off after six months.
From there I worked for a couple of sports magazines, including a new launch which cost the publishing company £7m and folded within a year, before ending up on a very niche hunting and shooting title. I won’t go into detail, but let’s just say it takes a special kind of person to do that job, and I wasn’t that person. There was also a lot of worrying takeover talk. I’d been in that position before. I could read the signs, and started looking for a new job. One stood out; Senior Staff Writer at a company I’d never heard of.
I’m not going to lie, the thing that initially attracted me was the money which was almost double what I was making at the hunting and shooting magazine. I did what any responsible person would do and Googled the new company. I soon learned that the magazine department was just one branch of the company, which was involved in the plastics industry. It also held conferences and exhibitions, performed data analysis, and published white papers. Is that what I would be doing? It sounded both complex and boring. Still, it would make a change from writing about dead animals. It was a newly created position, which meant the company was growing. That would make a welcome change from working for a company heading in the opposite direction which describes most publishing companies.
In a perfect world, the new hire would be a journalist with a background in chemistry. But that was a pretty tall order. A more realistic alternative would be to either take someone with a chemistry or science background and teach them how to write, or someone with a journalism background and teach them about plastics. For someone who had spent almost his entire career in consumer magazines, these were uncharted waters. But as a fellow ex-consumer journalist once told me, it’s where we all end up. Evidently, he was right.
The trade magazine sector is far less glamorous and you get invited to fewer parties, but the work is more stable. When you reach a certain age you don’t want too many surprises. In consumer publishing, the rug gets pulled out from under you. A lot. One minute you’re on top of the world, winning awards, schmoozing with celebs, and going to red-carpeted film premiers, and the next you are being shut down. It happened to me so often that I thought I was a jinx.
Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I can see it was mostly about timing. I just managed to catch the end of the golden age of UK magazines, when the industry was going through its death throes and titles were closing as quickly as the pubs, but the major publishing companies were still throwing money around trying to buck the trend. It was a strange time. It was all very panicky, and a lot of rash decisions were made.
One of the first things I learned after I made the initial switch is that the trade press is very insular and self-contained. You won’t find many of these publications in the big newsagents. In fact, you wouldn’t find ours in any newsagents, not least because we are digital only. The companies we write about are the same ones spending their advertising budget with us, and our readers are their customers. The more subscribers we get and the more social media impressions our posts get, the more we can charge for advertising and the more money our company makes.
Transferable Skills
On an average day, my first job is to sort through my inbox for useful press releases and collate the most recent industry news from various trusted sources into an email I fire off to my editor-in-chief, who then selects the stories he wants to run in our news sections and on our social media channels. X (the platform formerly known as Twitter) is our main outlet. Our socials are the most front-facing part of the business, which draw people in and encourages them to interact with other departments.
As a seasoned staff writer, news gathering is something I’m used to. The process is the same, you just use different media outlets. It can be a challenge identifying those outlets at first, but most journalists are trained in such occupational pursuits and it’s a valuable transferable skill.
The plastic industry, like every other, is extremely very fast-moving. There is always something happening. Not just one something, a hundred somethings. My job is to identify the developments of most value to our readers, who are invariably industry professionals, and report on them. It can be overwhelming at first, but after a while you get a handle on things and learn which companies are worth paying attention to. You can follow some stories for months.
As a journalist, you are always thinking about how you can best utilize and package what you have at your disposal. If something as simple as filing away a press release can save you time later, you do it, and if you come across a particularly interesting story, you might consider contacting one of the companies involved to see if a spokesperson or representative will answer a few questions. They usually jump at the chance of some free publicity.
On previous magazines I was on the phone a lot, usually tangled up in wires as I struggled to record interviews on a Dictaphone which then had to be transcribed later. Everything was time sensitive and I always seemed to be in a hurry. In the trade press, there’s less urgency so most people prefer answering questions via email. This also serves as a written log of your communications. A lot of the data we deal with is very technical, and some of it quite sensitive, so a digital version of a paper trail is a good idea. Not only for legal reasons, but because you can always go back and check something if you need to. Plus, of course, it allows you to simply copy and paste the bits you need.
Talking to these companies serves many purposes. You are showing an interest in what they are doing and (usually) saying nice things about them, which puts you in their good books. Plus, you might get a jump on your competitors (they exist in every industry and ours is no different) and maybe grab a few precious original quotes to add weight to news stories or features further down the line.
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Meat and Potatoes
My main responsibility is writing features. This is nothing new to me. I have written about everything from Chinese UFO sightings to chili pepper farming. The features I write now are very detailed, tech-heavy, in-depth detailing very specific aspects of the plastics industry. They are comprised mainly of news stories and carefully curated press releases. There is a lot of making media requests, researching, chasing images, etc.
Regarding content, the magazine has to not only be topical but remain objective. Every company toots their own horn in their press communications and makes outlandish claims like being ‘best-in-class’ or ‘world leaders.’ Our magazine tries to avoid using terminology like that and refrain from calling anybody ‘world leaders’ even if they are. This is because we can’t be perceived as giving anyone preferential treatment. It’s a matter of integrity.
And from a more pragmatic viewpoint, we can’t risk upsetting current or potential advertisers. There are a couple of other writers on the team, mostly freelancers. We never see each other because we are based in different countries, but we maintain a good relationship and help each other out by sharing contacts and material. It makes everyone’s life easier.
When I write a feature, any feature, I follow a formula. It’s the same formula I used when writing the article you are reading right now. You narrow down a topic as much as possible, do some research, decide an over-arcing theme, gather some suitable material, and then stitch all the components together into a cohesive narrative. There are usually have a handful of items I want to include, or points I want to make, and I use them as signposts. Collectively, they form a sort of skeleton.
Then I simply put meat on the bones, taking advantage of the natural segues which appear during the process. This formula is why I find writing features so much easier than fiction. You may have more freedom in fiction, but there is no blueprint and no structure. Sometimes, the lines get blurred. Writer’s block doesn’t exist in my world. If I am struggling on one project, I switch to another. Writing is writing to me, I just write different things.
Infuriatingly, my best ideas always seem to come when I am working on something else. I used to jot them down somewhere, but they invariably got lost. To remedy that I started using different Word files for each idea and saved them in a folder on my desktop. Now I have a ton of word documents with just a few lines of text in and no context whatsoever. Some files don’t even have names.
Every magazine has a distinctive house style. At this stage in my career I find it relatively easy to mimic the style of whichever magazine I happen to be writing for that day, but it sometimes requires a period of adjustment. However niche your area of expertise becomes, you will meet people who know more about it than you do. They are completely immersed in it. They are your core readership and you have to keep them happy. You can’t dumb things down too much, but you also have to cater for the more casual reader who may not have such exhaustive knowledge. It’s a thin line.
Plus, around a third of our readership come from countries where English is a second language so they naturally have a limited vocabulary. This means getting the tone right is vital. We have to be accessible but not too simplistic, and the language we use must invite readers in rather than alienate them.
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Networking
Another aspect of the job that crossed over from my years in consumer magazines is dealing with outside PR agencies. These are usually used by mid-sized companies, as smaller companies can’t afford the expense and larger companies tend to keep comms in-house. As a general rule, the bigger the company, the more resources they devote to public relations. You could debate all day whether they pay more attention to PR because they are more successful, or whether they are more successful because they pay more attention to PR.
As a journalist you build up a symbiotic relationship with PR executives. You need them to produce content, and they need you to generate the publicity their client pays for. What you don’t need is them trying to push irrelevant content on you. Do any of our clients have any new thermally conductive polymer offerings? No, they don’t Mr Saunders. But one just released a new line of interior EV parts with 55% recycled plastics content (mass balance approach) boosted by a new stripping agent, would that do? It’s the equivalent of asking for a steak and being offered a Pop Tart instead. As far as annoying things PR execs do, that is right up there with sending you an email to ask whether you received their last email.
Pre-Covid, it was standard practice to meet PR execs in person every few weeks and let them treat you to a free lunch or dinner. They have to spend that expense budget somewhere. That kind of thing is probably illegal now. These days you just trade a few quick messages or perhaps have the odd 2-minute video call. Public relations is another fast-moving industry where people switch jobs all the time. You might work with one PR exec for a couple of years, then they’ll disappear only to pop up again months later at a different agency.
In my last couple of jobs I have worked ‘across titles,’ which is industry speak for having one person do three people’s work. Publications which had a bloated staff of 22 six or seven years ago now limp along with a skeleton crew of four, most of whom divide their time ‘across titles.’ The reduced staff also have to take on new, often unfamiliar responsibilities. There are digital versions, websites, newsletters, apps, and social networking channels to maintain. The result is that the quality of content drops. That costs you readers, so profits dip still further, and so it continues. It’s a vicious circle.
Job descriptions themselves have also become more fluid. Being a staff writer no longer means you are focused on writing copy. Now the role might also take in sub-editing, picture researching, designing, laying out, and any number of other duties, many of which you are not actually trained for. But even working across titles is easier on trade magazines because I can use the same resources and recycle the same material. It just appears in different places.
Perhaps the biggest plus point of all is because the trade press doesn’t chase trends as flagrantly as the consumer sector does, things are much more organized. I know what I will be working on up to a year in advance, which leaves plenty of time to plan and prepare. This all helps the operation move more smoothly, and is just one of the reasons why I will probably stay on the dark side.