For magazine industry, less may be more

Time magazine's move to shed subscribers aims to shore up the publication.

By Randy Dotinga | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor 

from the May 14, 2007 edition

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These days, Time magazine may not have much time for its 2006 Person of the Year – you.

A few months ago, the venerable newsmagazine announced that it will cut the number of paying readers that it guarantees to advertisers from 4 million to 3.25 million. Publicly, at least, Time doesn't care if 750,000 subscribers throw all those pesky renewal notices in the trash.

On the other hand, Time is reaching out to its most loyal readers through a beefed-up website, a new arrival date on newsstands, and a stable of spotlighted writers who fill its pages with commentary instead of traditional news reporting.

Why the extreme makeover? While the magazine industry is doing well as a whole, Time and its rival newsweeklies are struggling to stay afloat. Gutted by staff cuts and suffering from sluggish circulation, they're trying to figure out how to avoid the grim future facing the newspaper industry.

Time's solution is to adopt the philosophy that's ruled the wider magazine industry for years: Don't try to please all readers all of the time. Instead, just make some readers happy most of the time.

"The trend in the whole magazine industry has been from the general to the special interest," says Shirrel Rhoades, a consultant and a former vice president at Reader's Digest. The result: hundreds of magazines geared toward miniature dollhouse aficionados, surfers, and owners of old houses.

While there have been some high-profile magazine failures in the last decade (including Talk, George, and, most recently, the movie magazine Premiere), the total circulation of American magazines rose to 370 million in 2006, the highest since 2000.

High-brow magazines like The New Yorker and The Economist are doing especially well, and there are some 200 more magazines about just three subjects – dogs, golf, and interior design – than there were just a decade ago.

But the circulation of the Big Three newsmagazines (Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report) was largely flat in 2006, reaching a combined audience of about 9 million. They've each lost readers over the past 20 years, despite the growth of the US population.

"The extent of their influence has declined," says journalism professor David Sumner, coordinator of the magazine program at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind. "News has become more of a commodity, and it's cheap and easy to find."

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