Under the Hood: What a Magazine Audit Can Reveal

Don’t be afraid to put your publication under the microscope.

There are two kinds of people in the world: people who only see a doctor when they feel sick, and people who often see a doctor when they feel well. The second group understands that preventive medicine is both more effective and less expensive than reactive medicine, viewing an annual physical, for example, as an investment in good health.

Your magazine needs the same level of preventive maintenance. If you only examine your content and creative processes when there’s an obvious problem, you risk losing readers and advertisers, not to mention creating bigger headaches for your staff as they try to correct the issue. That’s where an independent creative audit can help you.

To clarify: This isn’t a circulation audit. That’s an important report for ad-supported publications, but it won’t tell you a thing about the reading experience. A creative audit reviews the building blocks of your magazine and assesses them against industry best practices and trends.

These are some of the components of a creative audit:

1. Text/Image Ratio: A picture really is worth a thousand words, but its value in publishing goes far beyond concision. Images provide crucial access points; in some cases, the only information a reader may examine on a given page before moving on is a photo and its caption. A healthy balance between your text and imagery ensures that readers don’t suffer from fatigue but also that they’re not scanning through your content too quickly.

2. Reading Level: There are two sure-fire ways of boring your readers: Overestimate their education level or underestimate it. Most publishers want to believe that their audience is both unique and uniquely qualified to absorb their magazine content. And while technical publications can afford to traffic in more jargon than the average newsstand magazine, there are still universal standards of readability that supersede a niche audience’s specialized skills. Reader personas should be a part of your magazine’s editorial platform; make sure you’re consistently reaching that group as you intended.

3. Brand Consistency: This has nothing to do with your publication’s (or organization’s) logo. It has everything to do with your magazine’s editorial and design voice. Too many magazine staffs attempt to solve individual content problems through “cheating” the magazine’s established standards, e.g. shrinking text or leading when articles run long, allowing a one-time contributor to alter the magazine’s tense or narrator, or creating new departments that only pertain to one article. A magazine’s foundational brand needs to incorporate flexibility, but taken too far too often, readers will notice. They may not be able to identify the cause, but they’ll still recognize that something sloppy is going on.

The Value of a Second Opinion

You may believe that you have a strong handle on your publication and its staff, and that an outsider’s opinion won’t be able to tell you anything you can’t see for yourself. But there’s a double-edged sword to being on the inside. On the one hand, you possess first-hand knowledge of the history and challenges behind your publication’s current state. That’s also your biggest drawback. It’s impossible to divorce the reasons that contributed to your magazine’s present content from an honest assessment of its quality and performance, no matter how legitimate those reasons may seem. A disinterested third party only cares about the results.

In the past, audit subjects have been surprised to learn things like:

1. Their copy wasn’t too long; it had been laid out using justified text without adequate space between text columns. Readers couldn’t follow a story from line to line.

2. Their finished product looked flat because their color palette hadn’t been optimized for 4-color printing, incorporating RGB and spot swatches that needed to be converted on the fly during pre-press.

3. They didn’t get credit for using all of the available photos from a custom session because there was too little variety in the compositions. The photography didn’t advance the story; instead, it rehashed the same part of the story over and over again.

A good audit will also point toward direct, actionable remedies for your magazine’s troubles. A high reading level score can be translated into quantifiable editorial fixes (adjusting sentence lengths and limiting unnecessary technical language, for example). A low image-to-text ratio tells you that your pages are too dense, requiring layout revisions that can incorporate more access points and white space.

Nothing to Lose

At Quarto Creative, we believe that a stronger publishing environment benefits us all. That’s why we offer creative audits at no cost, with no obligation. If you have any doubts about the strength of your magazine, you have nothing to lose from an honest, third-party assessment.

All we require is a few recent issues of your publication and a discovery meeting to understand your market position. We’ll supply a detailed report that includes specific examples and potential solutions. And you never know: Maybe your magazine really is perfect. Wouldn’t it be nice to have that affirmed?

Take the first step. Reach out to us at contact@quartocreative.com.