Freelance Unbound

Just as Haymarket canned Promotions & Incentive‘s print edition, it also made Marketing Direct web-only. I’m not as sad about this, though I did work on its launch about 10 years ago and have written and subbed on it over the years, so it does affect me.
And like P&I, the web-only move means just one person uploading content, with little or no freelance input, which scuppers all those fascinating features I used to write about database cleansing back in the day.
But is this a real loss? Not for the readers maybe – by moving online, the magazine will probably be able to track and analyse what it is they want much more accurately.
It’s the journalists who are facing the real challenge. Their worry is that there simply won’t be enough work to sustain them if a whole swathe of the business press follows suit.
Of course there are still scads of written content on direct marketing on the web. The big question for traditional magazine journalists is how they can make money from it. More thoughts on this in a later post…