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Intro | Content Analysis | Audience | Economics | Ownership | News Investment | Public Attitudes | Conclusion | Charts & Tables
Audience
Three trends in news magazine circulation and readership
stand out.
First, readership surveys indicate that the audience for
news magazines is holding steady, while the audience for pop
culture, entertainment and lifestyle magazines is growing.
This fits with the trends in ad pages and revenues and suggests
one of two things: Either the market for news magazines is
more or less at its capacity or the genre needs to be reinvented.
Second, despite changes in content designed to grab younger
readers, the audience for news magazines is aging - more than
for most other magazine genres. News magazine readers are
also more affluent than magazine readers overall, but that
is not a big consolation financially. Advertisers are often
looking for youth more than money, particularly in general
interest magazines like the news weeklies.
Third, while the big three news magazines are finding it
hard to increase their circulation, a few smaller circulation
books that focus on news and public affairs have found steady
growth over the past 15 years. This may suggest that the genre
is ripe for change and indeed that the news magazine audience,
or at least part of it, is looking for a new approach.
Who is Gaining and Who is Not
Over the past 10 years, there has been a clear division
among magazine genres - those that are rising and those that
are sitting still. Readership figures from Mediamark Research,
the leading U.S. provider of syndicated consumer magazine
audience data, indicate that since 1995 the entertainment
and pop culture genre has gained popularity.
Interest in the news and business genres has remained flat.
Both news and entertainment magazines trended down in readership
from 1995 until 2000. Then both categories began to rise again.
But the increase in entertainment magazines was much more
substantial, increasing 14 percent from 2000 to 2003.
News rose only 9 percent in the same period.
Business magazines followed an opposite course. These magazines
grew in readership from 1995, peaked in 2000 and then began
to fall off.
Part of this is explained by the dying off of some magazines
that were riding the success of the stock market and the technology
boom. But other losses may have more to do with the fact that,
when the market dipped, people stopped looking at their copies
of Forbes and Fortune. For many readers, no news on their
401(k) was better than the bad news.
The figures also may suggest some shifting going on from
genre to genre. Readers have only a certain amount of time
to devote to magazines. If that time is not going to one genre,
it's going to another. News and entertainment benefited from
readers turning away from business publications.
But the uptick in entertainment readership is too sharp to
be the result of falling business readership alone. It also
follows logically another basic theory about media. If more
of the media agenda is focused on lifestyle and entertainment,
it increases interest in those areas. The media is both reflecting
and reinforcing a broader cultural shift toward celebrity,
entertainment and infotainment.
Newsmagazine Demographics: A Graying Market
Other key trends in news magazine readership, according to
the Mediamark data, are affluence and age. News magazines
are a graying habit. Despite the occasional hiccup in the
data, the age gap is quite noticeable. And with few or no
new titles entering the news genre, the hopes of significantly
lowering the average age will probably go unmet.
Why does age matter? Advertising. Over the long term the
aging of the news audience suggests fewer dollars will likely
be flowing to news magazines, which have a higher average
age than pop culture magazines. Advertisers, who seem ever-
interested in younger demographics, will likely be more interested
in spending their money on entertainment and pop titles that
reach those target age groups.
Offsetting the "age problem" is that along with
age often comes wealth. News readers have much higher income
then the U.S. adult population overall and have for some time.
In 1995 news magazine readers were 28 percent more affluent
than the U.S. adult population,
and in 2003 that gap was about the same, 29 percent.
The advantage has allowed magazines like Time and Newsweek
to charge more for the ads they run. Given that these magazines
have had smaller increases in the number of ad pages they
run than other magazine categories, this is some consolation.
More Demographics: The Affluent Boys Club
The readership data on the newsmagazines are not extensive.
But combining what we know about the age, sex and income of
the readers, one can draw very rough sketches of the audiences
here. Among the big three news magazines, readership tends
to be male. Time and Newsweek each have about two million
more male readers than female, and U.S. News has three million
more men than women thumbing through its pages.
Time, the oldest magazine of the three, has the youngest
readership, an average age of 43.1 Newsweek is a bit older
with an average age of 44.4. And U.S. News is the highest,
with an average reader age of 45.
Newsweek's readers are slightly more affluent than Time's
- average annual incomes of $66,739 and $65,697, respectively.
U.S. News readers, while still above the industry average
as a whole have a slightly lower average income at $63,603.
This finding is surprising because it is generally true that
older readers have higher incomes. U.S. News seems to be an
exception in this regard. Up until 2001, U.S. News actually
had a higher average reader income, but in the past few years
its figures have been surpassed by both Time and Newsweek.
Outside the Big Three: Younger, Richer, More Female
Move beyond the traditional three news magazines, however,
and one can see more differences. Of all those listed in the
news magazine category, Jet magazine, a magazine with a predominantly
black audience, has by far the youngest readership. In the
past decade the average reader age never got above 38.7 years
old and some years its average age was in the early 30s. Its
readership was also always more female than male, in 2003
it had two million more female readers than males. Among the
news magazines examined, Jet also had the lowest median income.
In 2003 the median income was $35,536 - below not only the
news magazine average but also below the U.S. adult population
average of $50,760.
The New Yorker and The Atlantic have the oldest readerships
of any of the news magazines examined - 45.4 years and 50.0
years respectively. But they also had the readers with the
highest incomes, by a large margin. Readers of The New Yorker
have a median income of $78,538, about $12,000 higher than
the next nearest news publication, Newsweek. The Atlantic
readers' incomes were higher still, an average of $82,983.
That pushes The Atlantic nearly up into the range of readers
of business magazines. In terms of gender, The Atlantic's
readership tends to be more male than female - 774,000 versus
615,000 in 2003. The opposite is true of the New Yorker, which
has a few more women readers - 2.1 million females compared
to 1.9 million males.
Getting Subscribers
The differences with more specialized news magazines raise
another question. While the news magazine category is flat
overall, some of these more specialized publications are faring
better in keeping readers. An even worse picture is painted,
however, for two of the big three news magazines - Time and
U.S. News.
Time's circulation has fallen by 13 percent from 1988 to
2002. U.S. News has lost as well, also 13 percent from 1988
to 2003.
Newsweek has been the most stable of the three, experiencing
a smaller drop of 3 percent in circulation since 1988. This
disparity has significantly closed the gap between Newsweek,
the historic No. 2, and Time, the long-time genre leader.
The gap, 1.4 million in 1988, narrowed to 928,000 in 2001
and may have narrowed even more in 2002.
Yet financially, this has not helped Newsweek - or hurt Time
-- as much as it once might have.
The circulation losses have occurred despite the fact that
these magazines have changed format and content to try to
hold on to readers and to attract the much valued youth demographic.
Pictures are larger and stories are often shorter in an attempt
to lure the MTV generation and its more visual sensibility.
Graphics have also become a larger part of all of the big
three.
At the same time, however, the circulation trends among the
smaller, more specialized news magazines are all up, some
slightly, some more sharply, and these among publications
that have not lightened their fare as much. Again, of particular
note are The Economist and The New Yorker.
While there may be some question as to whether The New Yorker
publishes a product that is similar in format to a traditional
news weekly, the same argument cannot be made about The Economist,
which has seen its subscriber base more than double in the
past 15 years.
And it has done it with a decidedly different approach than
the big three..
The circulation numbers are particularly telling, considering
the fact that magazines often "buy" circulation.
Publications sometimes make their subscription prices so low
that many readers simply find them too low to resist. On top
of the discounts, publications can do enough promotions, mailings
and gift giveaways that they can pretty much control the amount
of circulation they will gain and, to some extent, where they
will gain it. The idea is to attract readers - and certain
kinds of readers - in order to get higher circulation numbers
that command higher ad rates. All of the big three magazines
employ this technique. Subscription cards in Newsweek, for
instance, offer a year of the magazine home-delivered for
$42, a savings of $209 or 80 percent off the cover price.
The question is whether it is worth the money. That depends
in part on whether the new readership is converted into more
ad revenue. It also depends on how much a magazine has to
spend to maintain its circulation base. How many existing
readers is it retaining, versus new readers it has to attract,
to hold its overall numbers?
On the other hand, The Economist has had its circulation
rise although its subscription prices far outstrip the big
three. According to subscription cards, a 51 percent discounted
annual subscription rate of The Economist still comes to $129,
a bit more than triple the discount card of Newsweek.
The Opinion News Magazines
The other end of the news magazine universe is a group of
magazines whose importance may have more to do with influence
than economics. These are the nation's major opinion news
journals, from The Nation on the left to National Review on
the right. Looking at the circulation of these sorts of journals
over the past 15 years, one trend is particularly notable.
There seems to be an inverse relationship between which party
controls the political dialogue in Washington and the circulation
of opposition magazines. The last few years have been very
good to the liberal Nation. Its 2002 circulation was up to
more than 135,000, and increase of 40,000 (42 percent) since
the election of George W. Bush in 2000. At the same time,
the conservative National Review has seen its circulation
fall almost 40 percent (to 114,082) since its high point in
1994, when anger over the presidency of Bill Clinton led to
the elections in which the Republicans took control of the
House of Representatives.
The New Republic has been relatively immune from this roller
coaster effect. Its circulation is relatively unchanged over
the past 15 years. It has experienced a slight drop in circulation,
perhaps in part because of a string of problems it has faced
ranging from the changes in the magazine's editorial staff
(the loss of big-name writing talent), to its less-than-celebrated
redesign, to the problems it faced with Stephen Glass, a reporter
who made up articles out of whole cloth, to fluctuating changes
in its overt political ideology. But as The New Republic has
become less overtly partisan, it may also have less appeal
to any particular political constituency and for that reason
it may be missing out on the circulation increase it could
have as a voice for the loyal opposition to the Bush Administration.
(The country's other influential conservative news-opinion
magazine, The Weekly Standard, is not included in these figures
because it has chosen to opt out of the ABC audits).
The circulation gains that seem to come with being the loyal
opposition put the news/opinion journals in an odd position.
They get the most readers when the views they espouse are
out of fashion in the town that matters to them most, Washington.
It makes some sense. When one party loses control of the political
scene, it is standard practice that its members wander the
wilds of policy-journals and hash out what exactly they believe,
why they lost control and how to get it back. The opposition
opinion journals are, in effect, needed more when their side
of the political spectrum is in a funk.
These journals' successes are probably best measured not
in economic terms but in the pull they have inside the Beltway.
That is quite difficult to measure numerically. Circulation
is only one proxy.
Conclusions
The circulation numbers for the magazine industry make one
thing clear: The news genre may not be dead, but growth and
energy is outside the traditional big three news magazines.
Whether that is a permanent condition, or a reflection of
their current hybrid format, is a question that cannot be
answered here. But the attempts by these magazines to become
younger by becoming lighter do not, according to the numbers,
seem to be working. Magazines that have a little of everything
but specialize in little are not where the growth in readership
seems to be. Magazines that are more serious, like The New
Yorker, or more strictly entertainment-oriented, like In Style,
are hotter. And magazines of ideas - and of opposition - seem
to endure in having a place at the table. One question is
whether bloggers,
those little-read but influential writers of opinion on the
Internet, will chew away at magazine audiences. So far, there
is no measurable sign of that.
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here to view footnotes for this section.
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