Even homeless magazines

Now even an edition of a social-enterprise magazine, designed to give homeless people an income, is cutting back on print.

UK pedestrians are used to seeing high street The Big Issue sellers, who keep a portion of the cover price for each title they sell. Now The Big Issue In The North, a Manchester-based edition, will also ask its homeless to sell a printed card containing a code that can be redeemed for a PC or mobile version of the magazine (via announcement).

Update: The Big Issue In The North tells paidContent the digital cards will be launched alongside, not instead of, the ongoing paper edition.

Big Issue vendors buy copies from their publisher at £1, sell them for £2 and pocket the rest themselves. Going digital risks leaving those vendors with nothing to sell and no income. So the title will not allow direct-to-consumer subscriptions on devices. Either way, the link between the seller and immediacy of the content they sell is lost.

The Big Issue In The North circulation has halved in six years. FT reports: “now there is an advertising squeeze because of public sector cuts. The publication covers its costs and print and distribution is a big part of those.”

The Big Issue‘s nationwide UK edition introduced a digital edition back in 2009 via the Yudu digital store, which said it would examine ways to share digital content revenue with homeless sellers.

Car dealers

Honda Europe will stop printing showroom brochures and switch to issuing marketing on USBs by 2014 to save money, customer operations director Phil Dix told Tuesday’s Informa Telecoms & Media Industry Outlook conference in London.

Retailers

UK high street retailer Argos will now be “repositioned from a catalogue-led business to a digitally-led business” with “a leaner and more flexible cost base” in an e-commerce “digital future”, its owner Home Retail Group said on Wednesday.

That will involve “leading the market growth of digital commerce through online, mobile and tablet, and offering customers more products with the fastest, most convenient fulfilment options”. Argos has a growing online ordering business with click-to-collect, but has also retained its classical mode – at-home and in-store magazines which customers peruse to find required items.

Traditionally, not all of Argos’ customers were necessarily prevalent owners of the kinds of gadgets through which e-commerce is done, so this move now is significant, suggesting the time is right to move mail order retail from publication-supported to search-oriented for the masses.

It’s a very simple idea: If a photographer has taken a fine-art-quality snap somewhere around the world, they can upload it to Photocircle for consideration, choose the markup they’d like put on it and the percentage of that markup they’d like to see donated to charity.

Photocircle then sells the prints, and customers are given a list of three projects close to where the shot was taken. Once they’ve bought, the company hands over the donation — and gives an additional six percent of the base price to the project as well.

“There are other websites for photography, but there’s none with our concept,” founder Thomas Heinrich told me on Tuesday, the day of the launch. “You’d think someone would be doing it already, but we’re the first ones.”

Not all the projects are in the so-called developing world — one, for example, aims to give the less-well-off in Berlin a chance to take in culture they might otherwise miss. But the bulk are in places like North Africa, India and Latin America.

What kind of projects are we talking? Relief supplies for Sudanese refugees. Deprived children in Haiti. Health education in Cambodia.

The photographers need to give at least 30 percent of their revenues to the projects, but according to Heinrich, many of those who signed up during the closed beta have chosen to give as much as 70 percent.

Photocircle is quite keen on transparency, and some of those it’s partnered with are pretty high-profile, notably the UNHCR refugee agency and Plan International, the children’s development organization.

Early funding for the scheme comes from the European Social Fund, the Berlin Senate and the Beuth Technical University. According to Heinrich, Photocircle does want to be profitable at some point, but that’s not the main consideration. “We consider ourselves a social business,” he said.

It’s nice to hear the term used in that context for a change.