An Independent Relaunch

East West publisher Anita Malik explains why she chose to relaunch her independent title in the midst of an economic recession.

By Chandra Johnson-Greene
Monday, July 6, 2009

Relaunching a print magazine during this dismal economic period may seem like a foolhardy idea to most publishers, but some are doing it anyway, and most are doing it independently. East West, a title geared towards Asian Americans, is relaunching after a one-year hiatus with a goal to broaden and extend its audience with a mix of traditional and innovative marketing tactics.

Publisher/editor-in-chief Anita Malik launched East West in 2003 as an online-only magazine. A print edition with a circulation of 20,000 debuted the following year. East West was the first media brand to target all Eastern cultures including Asian, Indian and Middle Eastern. “There was nothing out there like us,” Malik told AD. “Asian Americans are an underserved group [in the media industry].”

While the magazine and the Web site flourished, the company soon ran out of money. “It is the tale of a small, bare-bones company that has grown too fast,” Malik said at the time. So she put the print edition of EW on hiatus and stopped updating the site.

The Web audience, however, never went on hiatus. “The site was still generating traffic and, because of that, we felt it was a good time to come back,” she says. “Also, pop culture has changed since a year ago—there’s more focus on Asian and Indian cultures in mainstream media and it didn’t make sense for us to wait any longer.”

The environment in which East West returned to, however, was not very sympathetic to a print relaunch. Advertising revenue for magazines have declined forcing companies to shutter titles left and right. But because EW is a niche magazine, Malik says, print is still viable.

“Obviously, it’s a bad time,” she admitted. “People have been telling us to look at newspapers as an example. But my argument has been that there is still a need for niche publications in a print format. No one wants to read in-depth content online. Readers want to be able to pick up a magazine off of their coffee table and relax with it. It’s a form of pleasure for them.”

Although Malik is confident that East West will be able to survive this time around, the relaunch will not go without a hurdle or two. While EW has received some funding, more is needed. The staff is also looking for ways to keep cost low and engagement high. The site was relaunched in June, but the print edition will require some extra planning. “We want to get our advertisers comfortable with working with us again as well as facilitate some more funding, but our plan is to eventually go print—that’s our goal,” Malik says.

To keep costs low, EW might switch to a subscription-only distribution model. Malik says that although the company had success getting into retail stores such as Whole Foods, the costs are just too high to justify the returns. “We had gotten pretty far before, and we were happy with where we got, but we’re not sure if that’s the right thing for us to do now with the rise in shipping and distribution costs,” she says.

Otherwise, East West will stick to its previous model of low overhead and put more money into building its audience. “We were always small because we didn’t have the marketing dollars, but once our readers found us they loved us,” Malik says. “Social media wasn’t big when we started, but it is now, so our focus is definitely on viral marketing.”

East West is slowly growing its presence on Facebook and Twitter, Malik says, but the company is not looking to reinvent the social networking wheel. “In the past, we’ve tried to build our own social network,” she says. “EW Date, our matchmaking service, completely failed because our audience, who is already extremely tech savvy, already has networks like that to go to. They’re coming to us for content.”

Despite the hard times, Malik feels that smaller niche magazines like East West are actually in a better position right now than larger publishers. “They’re overhead is huge,” she says. “They were too fat to start with. Independent publishers know how to do things on a shoestring budget. We don’t reach as many people as the bigger magazines do, but we know how to sustain what we have.”