Blurt Magazine Publisher Scott Crawford Defies Trends By Going From Pixel to Print

The former musician (he played guitar in local post-punk band Darkness at Noon) is one of the few publishers singing that refrain right now. Last week, a Publishers Information Bureau report on magazine advertising painted a particularly bleak picture: First-quarter print ad spending is down 20 percent from the same period in 2008, with ad pages off by nearly 26 percent. The chief marketing officer of the Magazine Publishers of America described the trend as "advertising paralysis."

Blurt's core advertisers are in the music business, which isn't exactly thriving: Album sales -- the industry's primary revenue source -- declined by 14 percent in 2008 and are off 45 percent since 2000, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Still, multiple record labels, from small Seattle indie Sub Pop to giant Sony Music, signed up to advertise in Blurt's inaugural issue, which included pieces on indie-rock siren Neko Case, the Stooges' late guitarist, Ron Asheton, and chamber-pop drama queen Antony Hegarty.

Other artists you're likely to read about in Blurt: Wilco, My Morning Jacket, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Artists whose names the magazine dare not print: Katy Perry, Lady GaGa, Nicole Scherzinger. This is a niche outlet that tends to ignore the mainstream.

"Blurt has a slightly older readership -- meaning, not the tweens," Crawford says. "It's a demographic that really knows music and culture. They're very passionate about music, very loyal, which makes them much less fickle. When you're doing the flavor-of-the-month stuff, you're constantly having to shift and figure out who's the next Britney Spears. . . . I think there's always going to be a place for this type of magazine on the newsstand."

Simon Dumenco, media columnist for Advertising Age and a magazine-industry veteran, isn't so sure.

"The consumers that Blurt wants to reach -- smart, passionate music fans -- now tend to consume information about their favorite artists almost by osmosis, basically in real time," Dumenco says. "It gets to them not only through active search on the Internet, or through visits to their favorite music sites and blogs, but automatically, through Facebook and Twitter and band e-mail blasts.

"Now, Blurt's backers clearly believe that there's a subset of that audience that wants more carefully curated information -- information assembled by journalistic pros with a sometimes almost literary sensibility. I believe that's true. I just don't know how big that niche is. And advertisers are definitely showing a diminishing interest in reaching that audience through print vehicles."

So why go print in 2009? "I'm just a magazine person," says Crawford, whose roots in print publishing go back 25 years, to a punk-rock fanzine he started when he was 12. Called Metrozine, it focused on the thriving D.C. hardcore scene, featuring interviews with the likes of Henry Rollins. It was Xeroxed at Crawford's mother's office on weekends, when nobody was around.

"When we launched Blurt-online, everyone else was going under or going strictly digital; we're doing it backwards," Crawford says. "But I get e-mails all the time from people who say, 'Hey, the digital magazine is great, but I can't curl up with my laptop at night and really thumb through the pages.' I think that by doing the print magazine, we're reaching those people, too."