For magazine industry, less may be more

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

from the May 14, 2007 edition

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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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Click to enlarge Sources: Averages calculated by the Magazine Publishers of America from Audit Bureau of Circulations statements for the first and second six months of each year. Domestic titles audited by ABC; annuals, international editions, and comics have been excluded. Totals may not add up exactly, due to rounding of averaged numbers./Scott Wallace – Staff