Magazine Execs Batten Down the Digital Hatches at AMMC

Magic 8 balls dotted the ballroom tabletops, but clairvoyance about the future of the magazine industry was in short supply at the 2018 edition of the American Magazine Media Conference, in which executives from across the magazine world gathered in downtown Manhattan to discuss the resilience of their brands and the adaptiveness of their businesses in the face of an uncertain path forward.

Alan Murray, now billed as chief content officer, Time Inc. Titles, Meredith Corp., joined WPP founder Martin Sorrell for an opening discussion about the underlying business challenges, in advertising and otherwise, faced by media companies—a conversation that in 2018, like in previous years, centered around Google, Facebook, and to a lesser extent, Amazon.

Opining that Google and Facebook are indeed media companies, not technology ones as they self-identify, Sorrell agreed with his friend Rupert Murdoch’s recent assertion media brands ought to charge the platforms carriage fees to distribute their content—a goal Sorrell says is worth overcoming the inherent difficulties in getting hyper-competitive publishers to work together.
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