The Magazine Market

The attached column by Daniel Gross is about Conde Nast's decision to close several of their magazines. I'm sure that there are people who will miss Modern Bride, Elegant Bride, and Gourmet. None of those has broken into my list of periodical subscriptions, but Gourmet might have had a chance of the occasional supermarket purchase, now that Helen and I are devoted watchers of Top Chef.

I think Gross's key point, that the magazine market might already have bottomed out when Conde Nast woke up and smelled the coffee, is both important and quite possibly correct. As noted above, I receive a number of periodicals. Over the past couple of years, I saw page counts diminish dramatically. I see this as a result of two related forces. First, there are fewer advertising pages. Second, because the magazine is selling fewer ads, it is forced to cut back on content. Information Week, which ran around 60 pages an issue a couple of years ago, has been down in the 30s and 40s more recently. The Economist produced a lot of issues under 100 pages in 2008 and dipped into the low 80s a few times. Even Commentary slimmed down for a while.

Of course, the biggest change on my list was to U.S. News and World Report. The venerable weekly cut back to alternate weeks in early 2008 and then became a monthly. It also became thinner, and each issue has become a mini-book on a single issue: health, the economy, retirement, education, and so on. That a drop in advertising revenue would lead to cutbacks is obvious. A little more subtle is that by focussing each issue on a single topic, the magazine is trying to recruit a lot of advertisers interested in that topic.

So, in 2008 and early 2009 a lot of the magazines I see, from The Atlantic to Wild Bird put out thinner editions and made other changes to react to the economy. But that trend may be over. I'm now reading the October 3rd issue of The Economist, and it hits 122 pages, plus a lengthy special report on the world economy. So Gross may well be right, and the magazine trade may have hit bottom, or at least a bottom.

On the other hand, some publications may be in death spirals. Advertising has dropped, so they've cut content, so fewer people read the paper (in fact, some publications have set out deliberately to cut circulation), which limits advertising rates, so revenue falls even more, so there are more cuts, and so on to the ghastly end. Information Week may be in that boat and sinking fast. Our local newspaper, the Gazette, has shrunk to three sections, and it seems to be shrinking to invisibility. It is also becoming even more parochial than it has been. Even major sports stories have to have a local angle. I'll miss the Gazette a lot less than Gross misses Gourmet.