Anette Johansson

Magazine Publishers Embracing New Media: Exploring their Capabilities and Decision Making Logic

Abstract During the last decade, new technologies, such as the Internet, mobile phones and more recently the new reading devices, have posed new challenges for the magazine publishing industry and will continue to do so. Here we explore commonalities among magazine publishers in the forefront of integrating new media into their businesses. We approach this by combining two streams of management literature: dynamic capabilities and decision making. A case study of four innovative magazine publishers has been conducted where the practices related to business development and their underlying decision making logic have been analyzed.

The interplay of dominant logic and dynamic capabilities in innovation activities

Within the strategic management literature, both managerial cognition and dynamic capabilities have been identified as drivers of change and transition in changing business environments. The purpose of this study is to explore the interplay of dominant logic and dynamic capabilities in the magazine publishing industry. We investigated four magazine publishing business units of a large media corporation situated in four different countries, namely Finland, the Netherlands, Hungary and Russia. A total of 40 magazine managers were interviewed. The results imply that dominant logic and dynamic capabilities coevolve in a reciprocal relationship, and the interplay of cognition and capabilities seems to be most visible in the seizing and reconfiguring capabilities. The results of the present study also illustrate that there may be several contradictory dominant logics within a single company. Dynamic capabilities useful to innovation processes are developed in the areas that are pinpointed by the managers as the locus of attention. Industry transition does not automatically change what companies think and do. That requires managerial attention and an active reconceptualization of the business and active development of not only day-to-day operations, but capabilities needed to change the way we work.

The role of the website in a magazine business – revisiting old truths

This paper explores consumer behavioural patterns on a magazine website. By using a unique dataset of real-life click stream data from 295 magazine website visitors, interesting behavioural patterns are noted: most importantly, 86% of all sessions only visit the blogs hosted by the magazine. This means that the visitors short-circuit the start page and are not exposed to any editorial content at all, and consequently not to any commercial content on those pages. Sessions visiting editorial content, commercial content or social media links actually represent only 1% or less of all sessions recorded. Consequently, the online platform gives very limited support for the business model. Our data questions the general assumption that online platforms are key components of a contemporary magazine’s business model.