Starting a new magazine,need some help!

Journo11

Hey a group of journalism students are setting up a magazine aimed at students covering entertainment, events and student life. We aim for it to be a free magazine and this is where we hit problems, we have contacted loads of companies looking for advertising but so far we have nothing.

Does anyone have any advice on where we could look or how to go about raising some cash to cover our printing costs?

Fenners99

its a bad time to be looking for advertising. companies have a an excuse of the recession! I ran a mag before in the boom time and even then we struggled. Getting ads is one thing getting paid is another.
if your target market finds it valuable and you market it correctly then its a case of "if you build it they will come" be sure and get your costs down. if you find the right printer they should help you along by doing samples and advising on best material to suit your budget, i found woodland print, in cork pretty good. they may not have been the cheapest but extremely helpful and never let me down, which was brill cause we always ran it to the 12th hour for the deadline!
best of luck, hope it all works out!

amywise9

I was involved in a magazine for five years and to be honest chasing up advertisers for payment was a nightmare!
Although I was involved in the editorial side, I used hear the stories from the commercial department about nonpayments etc.
My advice to you is to target potential advertisers whose products or services directly relate to students.
Have you considered what paper to print it on gloss or mat?
Size and pagination?
Don't give up
Best thing to do, if you haven't already done so, is to design a 'dummy' mag and take it round to your potential advertisers so they have an idea of what the product will look like.
You could offer six ads for the price of 4.
Front and inside front and back and inside back are prime spots.
Have a look at medialive.ie and go to the magazine section. Then look at some of the advertising rates charged by the various mags. It will give you an idea.
Best of luck.

Journo11

thanks for the replies! We were put in touch with a printer in wexford through our college because they are the one we use for our college paper and were quoted €1600 for 1500 copies on a4 gloss!

Thanks for the suggestion of medialive i had not heard of that site, very helpful thank you!

I'm working on a dummy mag now hopefully we can get more people interested that way. We really don't want to have to convert to online but it seems print is getting harder and harder to sustain.

jdivision

You might be better off developing an App or a tablet format magazine, these days there's very little interest in new titles that are actually printed unfortunately

flogen

jdivision wrote: »

You might be better off developing an App or a tablet format magazine, these days there's very little interest in new titles that are actually printed unfortunately

More importantly an app has far lower production costs and there are very few real ongoing costs in terms of getting it out there.

The downside is that more effort would be needed to market it and you're also narrowing your potential audience, especially if you choose to got the tablet route which is under-developed at the moment.

You'd also need to make far better use of the format to draw people in - if it's a route you're considering it would be wise to look at what people are doing already, specifically the likes of Wired and Virgin's Project.