Great Book, But to What Purpose? Scott Fosdick (bio) Business Strategies for Magazine Publishing: How to Survive in the Digital Age. Mary Hogarth. Routledge, 2018. 192 pp. $39.95 paperback. If you love magazines— and if you don’t, why the heck are you reading this journal?— you’ll want to pick up a copy of Mary Hogarth’s slim volume Business Strategies for Magazine Publishing: How to Survive in the Digital Age. A lecturer in journalism at England’s Bournemouth University, Hogarth has penned a book that is nearly as deserving of close scrutiny as an engraving by the eighteenth-century British painter and cartoonist William Hogarth (I’ve no idea whether the two are related). It is chockablock with ideas for how print publications can adapt to digital realities. There are chapters on market research, audience engagement, market sectors, platform diversification, advertising, and sustainable business models. There is even a chapter on “Monetising Online Content,” written by another British academic, Steve Hill. (Curiously, it is the only chapter not written by Hogarth.) Although the spellings and the numerous industry sources use British English, the lessons are universal. From start to finish, the authors eschew the theoretical and hone in on practical tips and models for success. So, yes, you’ll want to read this one. The question is, Will your students? I’m assuming that, like me, most readers of this journal not only love magazines but teach magazine courses. Unfortunately, this book isn’t quite right for any of the courses I teach. I have been searching for years for a suitable handbook for student magazines— something equivalent to Rachele Kanigel’s step-by-step book The Student Newspaper Survival Guide. If there’s a good one out there for magazines, please let me know. Many of you will recall fondly The Magazine from Cover to Cover by [End Page 143] Sammye Johnson and Patricia Prijatel. I do. That was an excellent introduction to the ins and outs of— as well as the theories behind— the magazine industry. It covered the waterfront thoroughly, although it did give short shrift to photography. I’ve managed to shoehorn that book into magazine-writing classes for years. Alas, its final revision was in 2012. Business Strategies for Magazine Publishing covers some of the same territory, but it is even further from the kind of handbook I crave. Of course, blaming Business Strategies for not being something it was never intended to be would be as wrong as, say, slamming William Hogarth for not producing sculptures. But you have to wonder, given that the book is all about finding a market for magazines, what does Mary Hogarth think the market is for her book? Perhaps if it had a larger potential readership, the book would have received more attention from its publisher. Routledge appears to have printed it on the cheap. It is nine and a half by six inches, features color only on the cover, and has annoyingly small body type, clunky graphics, and rudimentary design. If there is an academic market for the book, it probably lies in the courses that produce magazine business plans and prototypes. In the United States these courses are offered by the magazine programs that enter the Start-Up Magazine Project category of the annual student magazine contest sponsored by the Magazine Media Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (which also publishes the journal you are now reading). Unfortunately, that category only attracts a half dozen entries most years. When you consider that some of those entries come from the same universities, you get a sense of how small the academic market is for Ho-garth’s book. For all of that, the book is so good that it makes me want to design a course around it, perhaps for graduate students. The challenge facing this book is the same one facing magazine educators everywhere. We have been marginalized, branded “legacy,” made to feel like vestigial organs destined for the remainders bin or the list of canceled courses. But what we are good at— fashioning attractive messages that speak loudly to carefully targeted audiences— is what the media industry...