Two staff writers were laid off; regular freelance contributors to SIN at the time of its closing totaled six.
Three sources who responded to our inquires said they were told that SIN's Web site, www.securitiesindustry.com, will also be shut down in about "a month" and that content - archived articles or SIN-related beat coverage - will be subsumed into the site of Traders Magazine, a sister publication and another title of SourceMedia, which also publishes American Banker, The Bond Buyer, Bank Technology News and some 20 other titles, mostly financial trades. Contributors and staff were notified June 8 by management that the magazine would no longer publish. How long SIN failed to meet expenses remains unclear. We're awaiting official responses to this and other questions. The editor and one longtime staff writer remain. They were at press time reporting from an industry event, posting coverage on the magazine's Web site. And, full disclosure: We used to write regularly for SIN and so were among those notified of its demise.
While by all accounts SIN's reported content was considered high-quality and respected by industry leaders and readers, as well as rival publications, its long struggle with ad sales was also no secret. The entire print industry has for years battled falling revenues from advertisers, which still appear to need convincing they'll get as much bang for their buck when news and ad content are delivered online, as well as in print. Advertisers have been able to pressure and low-ball any print-based publication on ads because they argue online ads are measurable due to clicks and pageviews and the like, even though they still price print ads far above online advertisements. (Update: That more people can't see that this is a complete swindle, essentially a grift aimed at getting favorabe content for cheap, makes us want to simultaneously cry and vomit and take a dump on anyone's head who doesn't get it. Look: Nobody, not ourselves, nor anyone we know or talk to, ever, EVER clicks on online advertisements. No one. Ever. Those that do are a tiny, tiny, weirdo subset of a subset of a subset of an itty bitty minority, which makes the data you collect on them as freakish and essentially worthless as - and we hate to be mean here, but oh, go ahead and eat shit: that of its sources. And pageviews are worth as much as, or are equal in value to print ads: The same amount of people either flip past the ads, investigate them, take casual note of them either consciously or subconciously, or completely fucking ignore them - meaning their power of persuasion is just the fucking same as it ever was, in either medium. Simple analogy: If ads are beer and the medium's the glass it comes in, lets say print ads are mugs and online come-ons are pint glasses, or vice versa, it doesn't matter. Unless you're a soothsayer or savant beer expert, you're still clueless as to the exact amount of each ingredients comprising the beer. The online-print ad game is the same: it's still alchemy - just because a bunch of morons click on a link to stare at an HTML page that has your ad on it, you have no idea if what you're paying for is worth it, because you've still no idea whether they've even seen, read or taken notice of it, in any way! So the difference in the value or cost of ads should be de minimus between print and Web, because where the attributes of production are more attractive and carry a premium in print, online ads do at least promise to show more accurately the number of persons potentially exposed to said ads, even though just like circulation, online ad measurements are never accurate, and so often manipulated by their purveyors as to be nearly wholly untrusworthy. It's the same bullshitters game, played by the same bullshitters. Who's the sucker now, suckers? Blow it out your asses! But we digress.)
Recent economic downturns like the housing bubble-inspired "Great Recession" that began in 2007 can be particularly damaging to publications that cover finance, as money in this niche gets quite skittish, quite fast. Already falling print ad revenues dipped even further as financial institutions slashed expenditures to help themselves ride out and survive the tumultuous markets over the last three years.
SIN is the third high-profile financial trade pub to shut down in less than 18 months. The decision to close hedge fund trade, Alpha magazine, in June last year was made just six months after hedge funds turned in their poorest performance on record; 2008 was the worst year for hedge fund returns since performance data has been kept (beginning in 1990). So London-based Euromoney Institutional Investor consolidated by folding Alpha into a sister pub, Absolute Return.
Trader Monthly, a slick glossy that targeted Wall Street VIPs, was shut down in February 2009 by publisher Doubledown Media for similar reasons. DealFlow Media picked up Trader Monthly and several other Doubedown pubs for trademarks, copyrights and subscriber lists but has thus far included the assets only in lead generation and Web seminars.
As for SIN, it remains unclear what specific role, if any, Investcorp, the Bahrain-based private equity group that owns SourceMedia, played in shutting down the magazine; whether executives at SourceMedia solely made the decision to close SIN; if explicit word was sent by Investcorp; or if there was some overall but unspecific mantra to cut costs that executives were following. As to whether there was a willingness or any deadlines involved for bankrolling a 'zine operating in the red, it's impossible to know without official input.
In many ways, SIN's story is one reflective of the hard times facing all print-based journalism, in which the foundation of the old advertising model appears to have been near fatally fractured by the Internet's freedom to let readers choose whatever they want to look at, read or hear and do it mostly for free. (We think the hype about how journalism is desperately enfeebled by the supposed tall challenges of Internet ad delivery is bullshit, but more on that later. Update: See the long rant in the parentheticals above. But also know that Google thinks online ads will cost the same as print ads by 2012; also, as if anyone needed to prove this, laying off bunches of writers is, even just by the numbers, the stupidest thing you can do to cut costs, when most costs are wrapped up in production. Editorial can share pain, but there is no imminent journalism decline, but that which hedge funds seeing an easy target have shorted the fuck out of you for, because you're an easy mark: dumbass media folks. Easy get. So smarten up. For fuck's sake! You need to stop playing victim and hacking your editorial resources. Know that you're cheapening content. And nobody, we mean no one, respects content that doesn't offer a critical eye, or shows it's smart: You're giving head basically to your advertisers in the editorial well and getting it from behind from hedge funds and Internet fundamentalists who promote your death, and continuing like that will get you nowhere. Nowhere respected, at least. Or expect to arrive at Idiocracy, precisely the kind of batshit, dystopian swamp tail-chasing of basal desires gets ya. So stop sucking cock for a moment and think about your business! It's your job to win this fucking argument. So wake up! Corporate America is turning you into a demeaned husk for advertising, an empty shill, which is how their most fundamental regiments have generally viewed you anyway. And you're letting them. Don't say we didn't warn you. Fight back you unimaginative obtunded cowards! Are you really that weak and stupid? Or just scared and confused? Get your back up: Ack-ack! But back now to the story:)
The fear and loathing inspired by such big change ratcheted up in this case, when Investcorp purchased in 2004 a group of publications that included SIN from Thomson Corp., now Thomson Reuters (Thomson and the well known newswire service merged in 2008). The $350 million sale of these Thomson Media titles to Investcorp was among the last amid a longstanding effort by Thomson to get out of the print news business and get fully into selling data to financial institutions - essentially a complete jettisoning of the ad-based revenue model for a subscription-based one. It was the first foray into publishing and media for Investcorp, which is known for being bankrolled by wealthy Persian Gulf investors and buying (low) and selling (high) retail concerns like Gucci and Tiffany's. Investcorp renamed the Thomson Media group of titles, calling it SourceMedia.
SIN had struggled to grow revenues via both ads and subscriptions for years prior. Some say the problems started after the tech bubble burst in 2000; others say initial difficulties with sales revenue became a real issue with management post-9/11, around 2oo2. New executives shifted numerous department heads in the following years across the mastheads of titles including SIN, such as naming new group publishers or editorial directors, who in turn had ideas for change at the magazine. Efforts included reader focus groups, which involved rewarding subscribers with candy for critiquing the magazine's content. While some felt the focus groups were smart efforts at garnering direction in determining coverage, others felt they diluted the strength of the editorial and essentially amounted to a passive flare shot up, signaling a weakness of leadership in steering the publication from the inside. The success rate of focus groups when used by traditional advocates like consumer product makers - and most famously by Hollywood - to optimize sales of their products has been less than stellar. The study referenced in this article, http://www.slate.com/id/2089677,
cites an 80 percent failure rate. However, focus groups have increasingly been applied to journalism as the soundness of its business model has been reexamined.
SIN had six editors at the helm in the last seven years. Four of those were editors in chief while two were acting in that capacity but without the moniker; their executive and managing editor titles remained during their tenures.
SIN could be said to have been on the less promotional side of the spectrum than the average trade pub can tend to be in reporting on the industry it covered. The warts-and-all coverage included leading with issues that did not always show the industry in the best of lights. However, such coverage was considered generally balanced and to have embodied the critical scrutiny required when reporting on any powerful group; hard news was also mixed with features and profiles and explanatory pieces detailing the latest financial technology. Coverage did become increasingly contextual and analytical, more suited to the magazine style of higher-profile, more mainstream newsweeklies. It ended as a bi-weekly, a format it switched to for financial reasons two years ago. SIN's most direct surviving competitor is United Business Media's Wall Street & Technology.
When a magazine is killed, there's always a debate among former staff about whether management, ad sales, editorial decisions or some degree of each contributed to a revenue problem that murdered the endeavor. These debates are usually easily drawn between the editorial and ad sales sides blaming each other; both typically blaming management, which is too smart or fearful to blame anyone, certainly not themselves. It's often hard to find a single culprit, if there is one.
Ad sales were known to "have been a perpetual problem" for SIN, according to a source who has been aware of such difficulties since before Thomson sold SIN and the others to Investcorp. This source thinks management should have trained advertising salespersons to go more after the big fish, like senior executives at the largest investment banks, the major tech vendors and the big buy-side institutions. However, the source concedes, successfully locking down recurring revenue deals is much more easily talked about than done.
"I believe the sales people never really understood the stories and who they were aimed at," this source said. "If [SourceMedia] had put two knowledgeable sales people onto SIN - one for ads and the other for subs - and they called the right people at BDs [broker-dealers], vendors and buyside, the circulation could have been doubled or more. I'm tempted to try something on my own, maybe a blog or website... but the problem is selling ads."
Others throw the blame more at the editorial side, saying the coverage should have been less focused on industry issues and included more stories triggered by press release material from vendors and announcements from the industry, which is the way SIN began. Still others point to a leadership vacuum in which shifting roles of publishing executives, editors and staff sapped confidence in the product and/or muddled its direction.
One thing we can all likely agree on is the horrible timing of the decision to close SIN, which comes just as the biggest financial reform in nearly 80 years is being conferenced through Congress, including reforms that will force technological change on how derivatives and other markets are traded, and right when firms have begun to hire again, not only in emerging markets but in the U.S. too.
We always thought SIN should have been the Wired of Wall Street, covering all the technology used by capital markets firms big and small to run their businesses, meaning similar to Wired magazine's full-court press on all technology. It's admittedly an usable tagline, but one that clearly references the great potential SIN once held. It's important to note that potential - the mission SIN set out to accomplish - remains untapped. There's a mantle there again waiting to be taken up for anyone with enough foresight, cajones and money to do it.
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