After years in telecoms and international business, publishing was not the most obvious next chapter.

That was part of the attraction.

Sitges had an unusually concentrated mix of tourism, hospitality, restaurants, culture and international visitors. The opportunity was to create something useful enough for visitors to keep, attractive enough for businesses to want to be associated with, and commercially viable through advertising.

That became Sitges Media Factory.

A physical product still had real distribution power

The magazine was annual and we printed more than 10,000 copies per edition. Distribution mattered as much as editorial content. Copies went through hotels, restaurants, municipal locations and visitor-facing businesses across Sitges and the surrounding area.

The objective was not simply to produce a nice magazine. It was to become a useful reference for people arriving in the town: where to go, where to eat, what was happening and which businesses were worth discovering.

That gave the publication two audiences.

There were the readers, numbering in the thousands. And there were the businesses paying to reach them: restaurants, hotels, services and other local operators.

The product only worked if both sides saw value.

Local publishing is really a network business

We produced interviews, photography, tourism information and commercial recommendations. Some of the people I had the opportunity to interview included Andy Fletcher of Depeche Mode, 500cc Motorcycle World Champion Wayne Gardner and golfer Ángel Gallardo.

We also produced photographic and editorial coverage around the Sitges International Fantastic Film Festival.

But the publication was not built only in front of a computer.

It was built through relationships: restaurant owners, hotel managers, advertisers, municipal contacts, event organisers, distributors and readers. The stronger the network became, the more useful the product became.

A local media business is not really selling pages. It is selling access to a community.

Then the alternative became cheaper, faster and measurable

The business eventually ran into a structural problem that had little to do with whether people liked the magazine.

Printing paper was expensive. Physical distribution was expensive. Producing a premium publication was expensive.

At the same time, Facebook, Instagram and other digital channels were becoming increasingly attractive to the same local advertisers. A restaurant could put money into a digital campaign, change it immediately, target an audience and see some form of measurable response without paying for thousands of printed copies.

The comparison became harder to defend.

The magazine still had value. The economics underneath that value were changing.

Disruption rarely announces itself as disruption

When people talk about industries being disrupted, they often describe it as though everybody can see the turning point clearly.

That is not how it feels from inside a business.

Customers do not disappear on a Tuesday because a new technology has arrived. Instead, the conversations get slightly harder. Budgets become more difficult. An advertiser asks why a printed page costs what it costs when a social campaign can be tested for a fraction of the amount.

The old product can remain good while the business model around it becomes progressively weaker.

What I remember most

I still like that business because it was tangible.

You could hold the product. You could walk into a hotel and see it. You could meet somebody who had used it to find a restaurant. You could see your photographs and interviews physically distributed across the town.

There is something satisfying about that which software does not always reproduce.

But it also gave me one of the clearest examples in my career of a market changing around a product.

Good execution is not always enough. Sometimes the customer's alternative becomes so much cheaper or easier that the underlying economics simply move.

The job then is not to defend the old model because you worked hard to build it.

It is to recognise what has changed.