why magazines publish

I read Seth’s blog almost every day, and today he makes an interesting point about why businesses produce what they do and why they want us to buy their products. He uses film in his example, but I think this is also extremely relevant to magazines.

The first reason is “me-centric” and explains that (commercial/mainstream) magazines publish because they need a space in which to sell advertising. They fill their pages with celebrities and say “buy me because [insert celebrity name here] is on the cover”.

The second is “you-centric”. Independent and alternative magazines focus on the needs and desires of the reader. They fill their pages with useful and interesting viewpoints, experiences and talent, and say “buy me because there is a lot of cool stuff in here we want to share with you”.

This is why lip is going to stay ad-free – we want to bring you the best content we can, and not have this dictated or censored by advertisers. We have explored including advertising in order to keep lip in print, and to have it available to as many people as possible, but making money is not why we publish lip and we have decided that printing ads is not an option.

We will have more news about the next issue of lip soon: we’re making some exciting changes, but rest assured, we’re not going away.