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Speaking at the PPA's annual magazine conference today, the boss of the international specialist-interest media group was bullish about the future of magazines.

Spring said: "The next three years are going to be better than the last three years for everybody in professional publishing."

Despite double digital losses in advertising and subscription revenues, and loss of market share throughout the industry since 2007, Spring believed there was still a strong future for print magazines.

"Darwinism continues, but it's Darwinism on speed," she said. "Survival of the fastest rather than the fittest."

She predicted a future in which publishers become consumer-centric to a much greater extent than they had been before. She admitted that historically magazines had been able to hide "a multitude of sins" in the packaging, but warned there was no hiding place any more.

Print products were tipped to evolve into a different type of product – not necessarily based on the "cunning stunts" of augmented reality and digital plug-ins, but rather "collectable, keepable artefacts". Spring pointed to a growing distinction between the content we wanted to own and content that we just wanted access to.

The chief executive also told publishers to adapt and accept that "some things are much, much, much better done digitally than they are in print".

Spring said the two things driving this consumer centricity were Google-centricity and data-centricity – data-driven content, not just data-driven advertising.
 
She recognised the business would be an especially good place for people who were excited by change, believing "all of the changes that are driven by technology are feeding back into changes in consumer behaviour at a speed that we've never seen before".

Earlier this month, Future reported a "challenging" first quarter, with revenues slipping 12% year on year to £36m.

Today, Spring admitted publishers in financial terms would have been much better off not making the investments in digital they had in the past three years, but she believed the industry was set to see "genuine return on investments" made in the past three years.

She added: "The good news is that the next three years are going to be better than the last three."

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