The Economics of Publishing
Sep 2nd, 2008 by Jinja
A lot of talk about print media lately. The Phnom Penh Post has gone daily. The Advisor is ‘not dead, just resting’, and The Mekong Times has come to a halt. Some of my friends were complaining about the lack of English language reading matter.
But hey, there are heaps of publications – there’s a magazine boom on!
Every day it seems like there is a new magazine, newspaper or book. To prove the naysayers wrong, I rocked up to the newsstand and grabbed a few tidbits.
Economics Today (August edition pictured here) kinda sorta looks like… a similarly named magazine, don’tcha think? I expect they were counting on that.
The fact that there are enough buyers in the Kingdom to warrant a separate Khmer and English edition rocks my world. Looks like they are tailoring it to different readerships too – the English edition has a different numbering than the Khmer edition. (And at the newsstand I went to, no Khmer edition was available. Sold out? Hmm…)
Let’s see… the obligatory tourism article or two, recipes and filler from wire services – especially when it comes to global markets and issues. The magazine shines the most in its original content – with articles ranging from local intellectual property issues to analysis of how middlemen function in the agricultural market (and how farmers get market info via text messages!) Coverage of local exhibitions, a tactful mention of human rights concerns, and a spotlight on the self-employed (‘Wat Phnom’s Women Photographers’) aren’t bad either. The most potentially controversial item is the most understated: pages of market and commodity statistics, including inflation rates. I’ll be reading this magazine again.
By billing themselves as ‘Cambodia’s Business Magazine’ and offering Paypal PDF downloads by issue or article, the publisher is certainly working it.
Perhaps the main purpose is to flog their service of economic data provision. Behind the publisher ETMCambodia.com is – The Economic Institute of Cambodia, a nonprofit. It wouldn’t be the first time a not-for-profit entity spun off a profit generating funnel – Hagar Soya, anyone?
What I’d particularly enjoy amongst all these articles is an analysis of how ‘Economics Today’ came to be, and where it fits in the mixed economy of business and nonprofits. Would it be safe to assume that the overall institutional opinions of EIC (cited as an objective source in one article) will be reflected in this publication?
Economics is not an exact science; the one thing missing is a robust debate on its nonexistent ‘Letters To The Editor’ page. I’ll be curious to see how the magazine evolves.
Tags: cambodia,economics,magazine,business
It looks as though EIC now asks browsers to pay for access to ALL reports from their website. This includes research paid for by other agencies/donors and is pretty cheeky to say the least. It also makes their results less transparent and therefore less reliable – we can’t see anything about the methodology for their studies for example.
This makes me wonder about the tag ‘non-profit’…
… on their site they only claim to be ‘non-govermental’ but that moniker covers Microsoft and Coco-Cola as well
please update me hot new…
[...] – bookmarked by 3 members originally found by littlemoon on 2008-10-25 The Economics of Publishing http://jinja.apsara.org/index.php/2008/09/the-economics-of-publishing – bookmarked by 4 members [...]