For magazine industry, less may be more

Time declined to make any company officials available for interviews for this story, but an editor's note in the magazine said Time hoped its redesign would make it "more meaningful and more forward looking."

In perhaps its most drastic move, Time is hoping to persuade advertisers to consider its cumulative reach, including website readers and those who read someone else's copy of the print magazine.

Traditionally, advertisers focus on a magazine's paid circulation, but Time is reducing the number of paid readers it guarantees to advertisers by 19 percent. In 2005, TV Guide made a similar move by slashing its guaranteed circulation from 9 million to 3.2 million.

While it may seem counterintuitive, dumping paid readers can save magazines money by allowing them to reduce the amount they spend persuading fickle subscribers to renew. And advertisers may appreciate being able to reach a more select and loyal audience.

Newsweek, meanwhile, continues to publish on Mondays and offer a more traditional mix of stories. Writers still tie up stories with pithy conclusions, using what staffers have called the authoritative "voice of God."

Newsweek wants to report less and interpret more, says worldwide publisher Gregory Osberg. "In the past, you followed the news. Now we're getting out in front of it and providing analysis."

Along those lines, Newsweek's website may offer a more specific focus on topics like politics, technology, and healthcare, Mr. Osberg says.

As for the third-place newsweekly, U.S. News & World Report remains the most serious – or the stodgiest, depending on your point of view – of the Top 3. It continues to focus heavily on topics like international news, politics, and business. It gives scant attention to, say, Paris Hilton's latest shenanigans. In fact, an analysis of eight months of 2006 issues by the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that U.S. News allocated less than 1 percent of its pages to celebrity and entertainment news; Time and Newsweek devoted 11 to 12 times as much of their space to those topics.

In regard to the future of magazines as a whole, industry insiders will be closely following the success or failure of a glossy new monthly business magazine called Condé Nast Portfolio, which published its first issue in April.

"Portfolio is being held up as the last big example of whether an old-school print magazine launch can still make it," says Matthew Kinsman, managing editor of the industry journal Folio:. "Their fate will have a lot of impact on the rest of the magazine world."

Overall, there seems to be much less hand-wringing in the magazine industry compared with, say, the newspaper business. There's plenty of speculation that your local daily newspaper could vanish in 20 years or less, but no one is saying that People, Good Housekeeping, and National Geographic will go the way of Life and Look magazines.

People move from place to place and encounter different newspapers, but magazines remain longstanding parts of people's lives, says journalism professor Sumner. "People feel more of an emotional bond to magazines, particularly if they've been long-term subscribers," he says.

Then there's the simple pleasure of reading a long, fascinating story on the couch instead of in a desk chair, staring at a computer monitor. "The portability and convenience factor will ensure that print magazines will be around for a long time," Sumner predicts.

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