By STEVEN LAGERFELD [Wilson Quarterly] – So let me introduce myself. I am a wristwatch. Or, more accurately, a wristwatch maker. Okay, so I’m really the editor of a print magazine—the media world’s equivalent of a wristwatch.
Now, if you’re a wristwatch-maker and cell phones come along, you have some choices to make. You could go into the cell phone business. But that doesn’t seem like a very good idea. Or you could drastically reduce the quality and price of your watches—dumb them down—in order to sell more of them. Also not a good idea. Actually, it looks like it’s really not such a bad thing to be a Rolex in a cell phone world. A fancy watch isn’t just a device for telling time. But I don’t think I’d want to be a mass-market watch, like Timex.
So it appears that the only logical thing to do is to go on making Rolexes or Patek-Philippes or whatever while trying to adapt to the new era. Maybe you even make your watches more luxurious and expensive to distinguish them from cell phones, even as you do other things to cope with the cell phone challenge.
Since the WQ has been pretty successful in the past, my first reaction to the digital age is to keep doing what we’ve been doing at least as well as we’ve done it in the past, and maybe even better—making the magazine more intellectually and aesthetically luxurious. If we could afford it, I would make the magazine more physically luxurious, with nicer paper and color illustrations. Because I think print magazines like mine are already akin to luxury products, and in the future they will become even more so. That’s not ideal, but it’s better than being the print equivalent of a Timex—a newspaper, for example, or a weekly magazine.
What about those cell phones? What about the Web? We’re out there. We just redesigned our Web site for what seems like the umpteenth time. We have a blog, a Facebook page, an e-newsletter, we’re rolling out a digital edition, we’re on the Nook, we have a Twitter account—I Twitter too (@stevelagerfeld), and I really like it.
Continued at the Wilson Quarterly | More Chronicle & Notices.
