Sara Nelson speaks out

In an interview yesterday with Mediabistro’s David Hirschman, new PW editor-in-chief Sara Nelson dishes on the magazine’s new direction, online competition, and where PW fits into the scheme of things. Granted, she only just accepted the job and won’t actually begin until January 24, but some of the answers struck me as disappointingly vague:

Will you modernize PW specifically online? How can you make a weekly magazine more relevant in the age of blogs, when news is broken in such a widespread, instantaneous manner?
Well, that’s the $64,000 question. PW the magazine has stuff that exists on the website but that you probably wouldn’t read on the web. For instance, I don’t think most people are going to read all the reviews of the week on the website. The fact that they are there is good, but when you want to see what’s going on this week, you are much more likely to want to read it in the print form. I think that’s not going to change significantly. There may be individual changes in the physical layout of the pages, et cetera. It’s really going to look very different than it does now.

Blogs? More blog content?
I don’t think so, at least not in the print magazine. One of the early priorities however, will be to redesign the physical magazine. The second priority is to make some significant additions, and shuffling of the web products.

Now, that might just be a ditz moment but how would blog content translate into a print magazine, exactly? Or maybe I just misunderstood the question as asked.

But to be fair, taking over a magazine as old and as large as PW is, as Nelson acknowledges, a fairly big challenge, though one she’s looking forward to:

Do you anticipate it being tough to take over such a well-known brand and making changes?
I don’t know. I’ve frankly never run something of this size before. I feel like it is going to be hard in the sense that people involved with Publishers Weekly, you have to keep reminding yourself that things don’t have to be the way they’ve always been. For instance, maybe we shouldn’t have this column, or maybe this review should go in the front and maybe it should be in black and white and not have any color pictures or vice versa. So it’s a question of sort of releasing yourself from some of the things that have existed. And that’s hard for the people who have been there. But, while it needs a lot of change, it does function well and it’s profitable, and so you want to make sure you don’t fix the parts that aren’t broken.

As I said before, I wish her much luck in the new position. And for those looking, her former job at the NY Post is still up for grabs….