Audience

The audience picture for news magazines varies markedly. The magazines we refer to as the nontraditional titles — The Economist, the New Yorker and The Week — are seeing their circulations grow, in some cases rapidly, and some are aiming to increase print circulation even more. Yet the most conventional titles — Time, Newsweek and U.S. News and World Report — continue to struggle to hold on to readers and may be moving away from print in trying different strategies to win audience. As a result, some publications may try to move to a new way to measure audience and sell ads, one that looks at readership rather than circulation, with the goal of trying to combine print readership and Web visits. Even such a new mode, however, is not all good news for the stalwart titles. The readership surveys they hope will boost their audience numbers also reveal that those audiences, while wealthier than the overall population, are also older. Meanwhile, their less traditional challengers in the field are reaching an audience that is young and even wealthier. Time It Is a-Changin’… but How Much? The shifting approaches to news magazines’ audiences were most dramatically signaled in the moves by the biggest, Time. It announced three major steps in 2006, all of which are expected to play out in the coming year. First, Time announced that it was deliberately cutting the number of subscribers it promises to deliver to advertisers (its so-called rate base) by 750,0001, while also raising its newsstand price. (Newsweek, the other big player, later raised its cover price to $4.95 as well, but has not as yet cut its rate base) Then Time announced a new delivery day, Friday, replacing its longstanding newsstand day of Monday. That change coincided with a shift in content toward review and analysis of the week’s news rather than trying to break stories. That task, Time said, would be left to its Web site. (The announcements followed on U.S. News’s pledge in 2005 to focus more on Web content.) Time also said the move to Friday might help it add advertisements aimed at weekend shoppers. Potentially the most far-reaching change, however, came in the new way Time said it wants to measure audience. The magazine wants to move away from circulation completely as a metric and turn instead to overall readership. To measure that, it intends to use online surveys from the firm Mediamark, a demographic research company. Focusing on the readership numbers rather than circulation would create a radically different image of the reach of Time — as well as Newsweek and U.S. News. Time’s 4 million2 in print circulation yields about 22 million readers3 according to MRI data. (Newsweek’s 3.1 in circulation4, meanwhile, nets 19 million readers5 and U.S. News’s 2 million6 gives it 11 million readers7). Those reader numbers would presumably be adjusted upward if Web readers were added to the mix, though how much is not clear. Time says the move is “the first step toward our ultimate goal of measuring the combined audience of our multi-media brand.” But at the start, the readership numbers generated from the survey will be based on print-only readership. Advertisers, meanwhile, can choose between Time’s reduced subscriber number or that print readership figure. If the shift to measuring the magazine’s combined audience is successful, and, soon, Time begins to sell ads based on its combined print and online audience it will move Time toward being less a magazine than that new thing in media, “a multi-platform content provider,” – one with an audience that is potentially much larger than anything measured in traditional circulation figures. If advertisers accept the changes and show an interest in buying cross-platform ads, other magazines may follow suit and turn their attention to focusing more heavily on the Web. But those remain big ifs. While the changes at Time are dramatic – they were in the early stages as 2007 began – and could potentially change the business structure of the news magazine field. But some kind of large-scale moves were not a complete surprise. They represent a considered response to a major structural challenge. The Big Three traditional news weeklies have been struggling for years to maintain circulation. While they welcomed even small bumps in audience, there was a law of diminishing returns. The magazines were paying to keep those numbers up through promotions and discounts. Some subscriptions have even come through third parties who offer deep discounts and capture a big part of the actual fees from the subscribers. For the big weeklies, that was acceptable, if sometimes painful, because it meant big circulation numbers that allowed them to keep ad rates high. But as the Internet posed greater challenges, the cost of maintaining circulation rose. And the value of a big print circulation also has to be weighed against the costs of printing and mailing the issues of the magazines, both of which have risen. Numbers Dip Again for the Biggest Titles In 2006, Time and Newsweek were both slightly up in audited circulation — the first small bump each had seen in a few years – but essentially flat. U.S. News also saw a small bump, its second consecutive, but was still below its numbers from 2003.8 In general, all these magazines have seen flat circulation for the past several years. And experts note that the figures would likely be declining if the weeklies did not fight hard to keep the figures up by offering subscribers big discounts. Circulation Among the Big Three News Magazines 1988 - 2006 Design Your Own Chart Source: Audit Bureau of Circulations, annual audit reports & publisher’s statements Circulation figures are averages for the second quarter annually At the close of 2006,Time’s circulation was 4.066 million, up from 4.026 million in 2005.9 That’s a small increase, less than 1%, and even with the bump there were problems for the magazine. First, Time was only 66,000 ahead of the 4 million in circulation it promises its advertisers. That suggests a struggle to stay above that critical line, and is a likely factor in the reduction in the rate base. Second, the 2006 circulation number, while an increase over 2004 and 2005, was lower than any other figure we had seen for Time between 1988 and 2003.10 The audience news for Newsweek appears to be on a similar path. Again, the increase was very small, to 3.118 million in 2006 from 3.117 million the year before, also less than 1%.11 But that total, was the second lowest circulation number recorded for the magazine in the time for which we have data – 2005 was the lowest. The figure places Newsweek just 18,000 in circulation above its rate base of 3.1 million and may lead the magazine to consider cutting its base somewhat, if not as dramatically as Time. And while U.S. News circulation was up for the second straight year in 2006, the moves were very small and the figures don’t seem to bode any better for long-term trends. The publication continued to bump along at right about the 2 million mark. Its 2.036 million for 2006 was an increase of 2,000 over 2005, less than 1%.12 Since 2000, U.S. News has hovered right around its rate base of 2 million — staying between 2.086 million and 2.022 million. One question is, were Newsweek to cut its base, would U.S. News follow in order to save on its cost of maintaining that circulation? The future for both magazines may rest with Time, the leader now not just in audience but in the way it wants Madison Avenue to think about audience. If Time is successful in its move toward using readership — including Web readership — as its base for ad rates, that could amount to a revolution, one that others, it seems, including the newspaper industry, would likely try to follow. It is also possible, ironically, that U.S. News or other publications may be best situated to capitalize on the proposed new measurement. Time is in the midst of figuring out exactly what its more Web-based approach will look like. Newsweek, for the time being anyway, is primarily relying on its connection to MSNBC for its Web traffic. But U.S. News already had a jump on trying to focus on the Web, announcing its intent in 2005. And its heavy “news you can use” content, full of information on colleges, graduate programs, hospitals, etc., already has something of a database feel on parts of its site. Users of U.S. News’s site have to pay for those premiums, but they could be used to drive traffic and Web ads. The broader online-and-print readership measurement model also opens the door for some other publication — one that may not be burdened with the costs of a print structure — to enter the field. The Audiences for the Other News Titles The shifts proposed by Time stand in marked contrast to the story of the nontraditional new weeklies. Magazines like The Economist, the New Yorker and The Week are not only seeing growth in the circulation of their print products, they are actively aiming for more. Some are aggressively seeking to expand, such as The Economist, and some are growing more “organically,” as The Week’s editor, Bill Falk, puts it. And some of them are doing it while charging more for their publications than the big weeklies. Whatever their approach, they offer evidence that, first, print is not yet dead, and second, that hard circulation numbers can still be desirable. “Even in the dawning Web era,” Falk wrote to PEJ in an e-mail, “there is a role for a print magazine that is edited for the way busy people live today.” Consider the differences in the circulation of these titles over the past five years. In 2000, Time, Newsweek and U.S. News had a combined circulation of about 9.3 million. By contrast, The Economist and the New Yorker in 2000 had a combined circulation of about 1.2 million.13 That was a ratio of about 8 to 1. For 2006, the three traditional weeklies, after Time’s cuts, will show a combined print circulation of about 8.4 million.14 The Economist, the New Yorker and The Week will be more than 2.1 million15 over all. That is a ratio of less than 4 to 1. Looked at that way, in six years the alternative news weeklies will have cut the print dominance of the Big Three almost by half. Circulation of Non-Traditional News Magazines 1988 - 2006 Design Your Own Chart Source: Audit Bureau of Circulations, annual audit reports & publisher’s statements *The Atlantic is a monthly magazine The fastest-growing of the alternatives is The Week, the publication owned by the British company Dennis Publishing that edits news accounts from other organizations into short capsules for readers. From 2005 to 2006, The Week added over 75,000 in circulation, climbing to 443,952 from 366,758 — an increase of 21%.16 And the magazine’s rate base has was bumped up to 400,000 in 2006, a rise of 100,000 over it 2005 base. That kind of increase allows the magazine to increase what it’s charging for ads. The numbers are even more impressive when one considers that it was launched in 2001. The news magazine world’s other British import, The Economist, also had another good year, climbing over the half-million mark in U.S. circulation for the first time in its history. As of December 2006, it had a circulation of 639,205, a gain of roughly 70,000, or 12%, from 569,366 in 2005.17 That growth, moreover, follows a long-term trend. The Economist has seen its U.S. audience grow in each of the 17 years for which we have data — a feat unmatched by any of the other titles we follow. And it has made known its desire to reach 1 million, in large part because as an English-language magazine, if considers the U.S. a critical market. The New Yorker similarly continued its upward trajectory in 2006. The title, which broke the million mark in 2005, rose to 1.067 million in 2006 from 1.051 the year before — an increase of over 16,000, or about 1.5%.18 That figure is an all-time high. As we have noted in recent years, the New Yorker has become “newsier” as it has grown, an approach that, among other things, may have helped draw a different crop of readers to its pages. But with its focus on long pieces, the arts, poetry and New York and Washington, the New Yorker is also a magazine for elites. How high can an elite circulation climb? Jet magazine, aimed at African Americans, saw a down 2006. Circulation dropped to 901,594, down from 948,694 in 2005 — a decrease of about 47,000, or about 5%.19 That 2006 figure, however, was still above 2004 – 2002 circulation numbers — and just above its rate base of 900,000. After a few years of deliberately trimming circulation, The Atlantic, the only monthly we measure, is sitting right at the cusp of 400,000. Its 2006 circulation of 404,688 was just slightly up from the title’s 2005 number of 403,636 – an increase of less than 1%.20 It’s not yet clear how far The Atlantic intends to cut circulation, but the number it promised advertisers may provide a hint. As of April 2005, the rate base was only 355,000.21 That means there is still room for further cuts. The strategy is intriguing, considering the jumps at other highbrow titles like the New Yorker and The Economist. Bradley has stated in the past that his goal is to shrink the magazine’s circulation and aim for a more exclusive niche. Behind all the changing fortunes, the differentiation of “traditional” from “nontraditional” news magazines may be getting less and less salient. If Time indeed is moving more toward commentary, the New Yorker has moved more toward breaking news. In turn the three traditional news weeklies, so long noted for their similarities, in time may be more notable for their differences. Who Are the Readers? News magazine readers continue to represent something of an elite audience. They are wealthier than the U.S. population at large, according to reader surveys by Mediamark Research. In 1997 (the first year The Atlantic joined the Mediamark survey) the average household income of news magazine readers was $50,807, compared to $39,035 for the general population, a spread of 30% and more than $11,000. By 2005 news magazine readers’ average household income was $67,000, compared to $51,466 for the general population, still a 30% gap but a difference in dollars of more than $15,000.22 23 Along with that pattern, which advertisers might consider good news, news magazines also do not skew quite as old as many other media. Over all, news magazine audiences are consistently about two years older than the U.S. population. From 1997 to 2005, the median age of the news weekly readers in the survey went from 44.1 to 46.3.24 The median U.S. adult population in that time went from 41.8 years old to 44.25 Most other news sectors have average audiences ages of over 50. For network news, the average is roughly 60. Readership data also suggest that there may be some market for younger audiences here. For the first time since we have kept track, Mediamark has added The Economist to its survey, and the results are surprising. The Economist has the youngest audience of any of the news magazines we examine — at 40.1 years old it’s even younger than Jet’s 41.4 — and it is the richest audience as well, with a household income of $96,257 that easily outstrips The Atlantic’s $83,984.26 The bad news is that both of those titles have small readerships (as distinct from circulation) compared to the biggest news magazines. The Economist, for example, has about 1.7 million readers, but Time has more than 22 million and Newsweek more than 19 million.27 That suggests that if there is a young news audience out there, it may be a small one, and it may be going off in its own direction away from the more mass-audience titles. It also may further explain why Time wants to push readership, if the number of different people who see each copy of the magazine — the so-called pass-along rate — is so high. Median Age of Readerships by Magazine 1995-2006 Design Your Own Chart Source: MediaMark Research, ’’Magazine Audience Estimates’’   Median Income of Readership by Magazine 1995-2006 Design Your Own Chart Source: MediaMark Research, ’’Magazine Audience Estimates’’ The Economist’s demographic numbers, nonetheless, represent a departure from the structure of the Mediamark survey numbers in the past. Generally it was the older titles that had wealthier readers, with the oldest, The Atlantic — average age over 50, average income over $80,000 — as case in point.28 Those addition of the Economist’s readers to the survey on the one hand raise the median household income of news magazines readers to $70,409 for 2006— more than $28,000 above the median U.S. household income, according to Mediamark. That figure would be by the far the largest difference we have measured. The Economist readers would also put the median age of news magazine readers at 45.6 years old, putting it closer to the national median of 44.3 years than it has been since 2003.29 Average Income of News Magazines Readers Compared to U.S. population, 1995-2006 Design Your Own Chart Source: MediaMark Research, ’’Magazine Audience Estimates’’   Average Age of News Magazine Readers Compared to U.S. population, 1995-2006 Design Your Own Chart Source: MediaMark Research, ’’Magazine Audience Estimates’’ Those numbers might only serve to show how little such overall averages mean. Two magazines sit below the national age median — Jet with a median average age of 41.4 and The Economist with a median of 40.1. All the other news titles we measure are above it. (Incidentally, The Week, which isn’t yet included in the Mediamark survey, has a subscriber median income of $93,000 and an average age of 48. Again, though, those figures are for subscribers, not for readers — reader numbers include a much broader base of people and generally skew younger and less wealthy.)30 Conclusion There are a many lingering questions about the future of news magazine audiences going into 2007. Will Time’s Web strategy and new delivery day have an impact on its audience? And, perhaps more importantly, how will advertisers react to Time’s audience-tallying approach? Will the smaller nontraditional magazines pay any heed to Time’s moves? Right now these titles are seeing growth and seem more than happy to stick with traditional audience measures and hard-copy publications. Will one approach win out? Is it in fact an either/or proposition? The answers may not emerge in the next year. But they hold promise in time of reshaping the news magazine field. SIDEBAR Topics in the Weeklies The Web Site profiles in our digital section offer a look at what online readers get when they click on the sites of the news magazines we examine. But what about the old-media part of what they do? Halls Magazine Reports tallies the topics in the pages of the Big Three news weeklies, Time, Newsweek and U.S. News and World Report, to give a picture of what is actually in those pages year to year. What did the pages of the big news weeklies look like through the first eight months of 2006? National affairs was the biggest single segment of content, as it almost always is, but it was down ever so slightly to 24.9% in the first months of 2006 versus 25% in 2005. That was a bit of a surprise because 2006 was a mid-term election year — and, it turned out, an unusually significant one. But keep in mind that those first eight months include the summer, when most titles run lighter content and do not include the fall run-up to the election and post-election analysis.31 See chart. The next largest topic in the Big Three weeklies was global/international, which made up 18.8% of the pages in the first eight months of 2006, up from 16.2% in 2005. among other topics, entertainment/celebrity took a small drop, to 7.7% from 8.2%, while health/medical science grew slightly to 10.5% from 10%.32 Title by Title But under those broad average figures there are wide differences between each of the titles included in the Hall’s survey. And those differences reflect different news agendas. National affairs, for instance, made up almost a third of coverage in U.S. News at 30.9% in the first eight months of 2006, but only about a fifth of the coverage in Newsweek at 20.5%. Time sat between the two with 23.3%. Time’s and Newsweek’s 2006 national affairs numbers were actually down when compared to all of 2005, but U.S. News was up slightly.33 See Chart. U.S. News is also the leader in percentage terms in global/international news. The magazine devoted 21.2% of its pages to the issue area through August 2006, compared to 18.8% for Time and16.4% for Newsweek. In fact, U.S. News led in business and health coverage as well, devoting 11.1% and 13.5% of its pages to the topics respectively. Time did the least business coverage and medical coverage and Newsweek was between the two.34 Time led the way in celebrity/entertainment coverage with 11.5% of its pages on the topic. Newsweek was a close second at 10.9%. U.S. News barely covered the topic at all — nine-tenths of one percent of its pages.35 The topic breakdown shows that the three magazines are distinctly different and that one, U.S. News, is hewing to a more traditional news agenda. It is carving out a hard-news niche among the three magazines and avoiding the broadest “general-interest news magazine” approach taken by its two bigger-circulation siblings. That may be a factor in the smaller size of the audience for the U.S. News, but perhaps in the long run it’s a more devoted one. The New Yorker Maybe it was the war in Iraq or the coming election or both, but The New Yorker was newsier through the first eight months of 2006 than it was in all of 2005. National affairs coverage rose to 12.2% of all pages, compared to 9.1% in 2005. And global/international coverage was up to 7.1% of pages compared to 5.1% in 2005.36 Those 2006 figures for the heavier news topics mirror almost perfectly the magazine’s topic selection in 2004, the year of the last presidential election. Those numbers suggest what many already intuit from reading the magazine: It has become newsier over time, but specifically more political — weighing in on big national debates to take stands (and hammering away at President Bush). See chart. At the same time, the New Yorker’s two biggest topics continued to be culture, with 21% of its pages, and entertainment/celebrity at 23.4%.

After a hard 2005 for ad pages, many in the news magazine business were hoping for a rebound in 2006. It didn’t happen.

For most of the magazines we examine, 2006 was a year with marginal gains in pages of 2% or less. The exceptions were the New Yorker, which stood out for having a particularly bad year, and National Journal, which had an unusually good one.¹

Ad pages over all declined ever so slightly — a tenth of a percent — among the 250 publications that list with the Publisher’s Information Bureau. Early in the year there was some hope that improvement on Wall Street might translate to the industry, but by the year’s end the hope had vanished.²

Some analysts also suggest that the industry is becoming less tied to economic cycles than to the changing media landscape. According to the Veronis Suhler Stevenson Communications Industry Forecast, the slowing in ad revenues for magazines as a whole that started in 2005 will continue as people and advertisers divert their attention to other media.³

With continued declines expected in both ad revenues and circulation, Time magazine will offer advertisers the opportunity to figure ad rates by counting overall readers, not just subscribers, and cut its ad rates. But the test for all the titles may be how well they handle moving to the Web, something magazines have been slow at doing. (See Digital.)

The News Titles

The news magazines largely follow the advertising trends of the industry overall, with few exceptions.

One of those exceptions was the New Yorker. Even as it picked up readers, its ad pages dipped by nearly 13% in 2006 — and that followed a 3% drop in 2005. Even dollars, which usually at least appear to be up because of the way magazines design their rate cards to show steady increases, were down 5.2%.⁴

There are a few possible reasons for the declines. The magazine’s highly successful publisher, David Carey, stayed within the Conde Nast empire, but changed publications — moving over to aid the launch of the company’s new business magazine Portfolio. And in an age of specialization and niche advertising — especially with the Web — the more generalized content of the New Yorker may not be as appealing to advertisers. If so, the magazine may be in for some tough times.

It should be noted that while this report cites ad dollars, those numbers are not as reliable a measure of financial success as pages. Total dollars are figured by multiplying pages by rates on each title’s ad card, and the cards are notoriously inaccurate. Experts in the industry say ad revenues in reality are often about half what the magazines report them to be. Thus despite figures showing healthy increases year-in and year-out, some titles are not profitable.

Change in Ad Dollars and Pages, Select Magazines

2005 vs. 2006

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Publisher’s Information Bureau

At the other end of the spectrum was National Journal, the boutique policy journal published by David Bradley. It saw a 13% increase in ad pages in 2006. (It should be noted that the publication has less than half the ad page of the other, larger titles we track, including the New Yorker.) Total dollars were up even more, 18.9%. Part of the success may be linked to the 2006 election. The mid-term vote generated huge media and voter attention down the stretch as people realized that it could end up being exceptionally meaningful.⁵

Elsewhere, the biggest titles — Time, Newsweek and U.S. News — saw essentially flat trajectory in ad pages. Time’s pages were up .8%, while Newsweek’s were up a scant .1%. U.S. News rose slightly more, 1.9%.⁶

But again, after 2005 when all three the titles were down — Time and Newsweek by double digits — it was hard for the titles to feel good about 2006. In total dollars, regarded as the less meaningful measure, all the titles at least reported more respectable numbers. Time’s dollars were up 4.7%, Newsweek’s 2.2%, and U.S. News’s 4%.⁷

Among the other titles we watch, The Economist posted minimal gains in pages — up 1.1% — but a much larger increase 16.7% in reported ad dollars. How to explain the big jump? One possibility is that the magazine has been adding subscribers at a good clip in recent years (see Audience) and at some point those new readers turn into higher ad rates.⁸

The same might be said for The Week, which actually caps the number of ad pages in every issue to keep its content/ad ratio constant. It added only four pages in 2006 — a .7% increase — but reported a 34% increase in ad revenues. Again the growth in ad revenue is attributed to the magazine’s growing subscriber base.⁹

The Atlantic Monthly and Jet were both largely flat in pages — the former down 1% and the latter up 1% — but the Atlantic reported an increase of 16.6% in revenue on its drop. That figure seems high for a publication losing readers, though perhaps the richer demographic it’s reaching (see Audience) helps boost profits. Jet, meanwhile, reported a more restrained ad dollar increase of 3.8%¹⁰

That’s one year’s data. But looking at ad dollars, and particularly pages, over time shows how things have soured for the Big Three titles since the late 1990s.

News Magazines Ad Pages, by Title

1988-2006

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Publisher’s Information Bureau annual reports

News Magazines Ad Dollars, by Title

1988-2006

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Publisher’s Information Bureau annual reports

Even with the slight improvement over last year, Time’s ad pages are down in the territory they occupied in the early 1990s. Newsweek’s are down to where they were in 2001, of the year of 9/11. The numbers for U.S News look slightly better, but only because the magazine has had such a bad run lately — from 1988 to 2000 it had more ad pages every year than it did in 2006.

And the numbers for the other news titles aren’t very good either. From 1988 to 2002, The Economist had more ad pages every year than it did in 2006. The New Yorker’s 1,937 ad pages are the lowest total we have seen in all the years we have on record back to 1988.¹¹

Despite an occasional good year here or there, the trend for the news titles is not a sunny one. The numbers have looked especially gloomy as broadband Internet use has taken off. In November 2003, some 35% of online users were getting online through some high-speed connection. By the beginning of 2006, it was 61%. The economic outlook for magazines is not clear, but it looks as if it could be uncomfortable even for some of the biggest, oldest titles.¹²

That was, in part, what was behind Time’s announcement in late 2006 that it was looking to change the way it measure its audience, cut its ads rates 19% and bump up its cover price.¹³

The Changing Picture of Magazine Economics

If Time wants to measure its audience by readership rather circulation, how would that work? The magazine plans to work with Mediamark Research’s new Issue Specific Accumulation study, which surveys 2,500 adults each week online and asks them whether they have read specific issues of magazines. It will only measure the print versions of them for now, though Time says it sees this as the beginning of measuring its total online and print audience. The approach is an Internet version of the way Mediamark does its annual reader survey with data on specific issues of the titles. The goal is to give the magazines and their advertisers a better idea about which cover issues attract readers, with data that are solid enough to replace circulation figures.

The news that Time was raising its cover price is significant as well (particularly if the increase bleeds over into subscription prices) because it will increase the share of Time’s revenues that come directly from readers. Some skeptics wonder whether the move is mostly a gimmick — an attempt by Time to lure readers with deeper discounts on subscriptions. Time, however, says the cover price increase comes as it is making a concerted effort to cut discount subscriptions from its rolls. It has trimmed its rate base by 750,000 subscribers (see Audience) many of which it says were brought in through third-party discount subscription sellers. The move also gained extra weight when Newsweek raised its cover price to match Time’s. Time’s cover price increase (combined with the rate-base cut) suggests that it may be moving toward to the British model of magazine funding — readers pay a premium price, so circulations are smaller but ultimately from more loyal and generally wealthier readers.

Time may also be turning to a two-tier revenue strategy, that is, selling different news products. The magazine will be charging more for its hard-copy product, but at the same time editors say they plan to rely more heavily on Time.com for breaking news. Currently, at least, Time.com is a free site, which receives revenues only through advertising, and online ads are known to be worth a small fraction of print ones. The result could be two different products that essentially tap separate revenue streams. There will be the shrinking print side, increasingly a weekend summary of the news for which readers will have to pay more than they once did. And a growing free online side, which will offer more in the way of breaking news and generate only ad revenue.

Right now Time.com is extremely light on advertising, a situation that could change as the site is leaned on more heavily for readership.

If there is a danger in such an approach it may be the potential for diluting a weekly’s brand. Will the Web’s ad-only revenue stream generate enough money to make up for the losses the magazine will experience with its rate-base cut? Will one side, say print, be forced to subsidize the other and for how long?

Those are some serious questions that will be answered in the next few years. Time’s experiment — an experiment not by a small title, but the industry leader — is important.

A Look at the Ads in the News Titles

One method of learning about the economics of a magazine is to examine where the advertising comes from. That offers some reflection, among other things, of the diversity of a magazine’s economic base, its vulnerability to change, and some sense of how Madison Avenue views the publication.

A look at ads in some of the news titles in 2005 and 2006 shows some major differences.

The biggest change may be the decline of auto ads — not exactly a surprise. But if 2005 was a down year for such ads, 2006 was dreadful. The Publisher’s Information Bureau found that auto ad pages were down 14% in 2006 in all magazines.¹⁴

The good news for the news magazines, at least partly good news, is that other advertisers, it seems, have filled the gaps — particularly banks and other financial companies and computer and other technology companies. Why might that be only partly good news? Because finding out what magazines charge for ads is difficult, and if the decline in auto ads has reduced competition for magazine ad space, the magazines might be selling those pages at reduced rates.

What follows is a look at the ads in three different kinds of news magazine: Time (America’s first news weekly), The Economist (the growing foreign import that focuses on recapping the week’s events) and the New Yorker (the longstanding literary weekly that has developed a news bent). For each we compared issues from the week of September 25 in 2006— the week that corresponds with our digital content analysis (see Digital). ¹⁵

The two biggest ad buyers in Time were computer and electronics companies (14 pages of ads) and banks and financial companies (12 1/3 pages). Both those totals were more than double the tallies from 2005. But car ads fell by about half, to 5 pages in 2006 — including one from German sportscar manufacturer Porsche—from 9 pages in 2005.There was also a big package of ads in the back of the 2006 issue marking “Life Insurance Awareness Month” — 7 pages from a non-profit life insurance group and 8 pages from various insurers. Other big advertisers were drugs and pharmaceuticals (11 pages), clothes and fashion (4 pages) and books and media (4-plus pages). The magazine had a whopping 87-plus pages of ads in the 110-page issue.

The Economist also leaned heavily on banks and finance for ads in 2006, carrying 13 pages compared with 7 pages of such ads in the 2005. There were differences from Time, though, in the ads. While many of Time’s ads were for things like credit card companies, many of The Economist’s financial ads were more far-flung —for Credit Suisse and for the Qatar Financial Centre.

The other big ad drivers in the magazine are also a departure from what one finds in most U.S. news magazines — classified ads (14 ½ pages) for positions like representative of the Ford Foundation in Vietnam and for the Australian Secret Service. And there are 12 ½ pages of ads for educational courses leading to MBAs and other degrees in various locales around the world. That’s not to say there were no similarities with Time, however. Both magazines ran the same ad for the food giant ADM and Microsoft’s Windows mobile. There were 66-plus pages of ads in the 114-page issue of the Economist.

The September 25 issue of the New Yorker in 2006 was interesting because it was not a normal issue, but one devoted especially to “style.” And in a down year for ad pages for the magazine, a perusal of the issue’s pages shows the advantages of putting a specific focus on an issue. There are more than 39 pages of clothing and fashion ads here, far and away the largest ad buyer for the issue.

The next-highest advertising group, hotels and travel, has only 13 pages. And most of the fashion ads look less like ads than photo shoots — whether they are elegantly lit black and white or perfectly selected hues of green or grey. The focus on “style” might also explain why that issue of the New Yorker was the exception where car ads were concerned. It had more than 11 pages of car ads, more than twice as many as we saw in the 2005 issue. Some were not the usual advertisers, though; ads for Jaguar, Mercedes and Saab were all focused on design. The other big ad buyer was hotels and travel, which again featured upper-crust hotels like Renaissance, which had a four-page pull out, and Preferred. It was an up ad week for the New Yorker, with roughly 90 pages of ads out of 158 total pages.

Conclusion

The year 2007 could prove pivotal to the magazine industry and news magazines specifically. After a series of down years, there is no projected upturn on the horizon, and falling subscriber bases may be leading advertisers to look elsewhere to spend their dollars. The biggest news weeklies — and the New Yorker, which had a very hard year — may be the most vulnerable. They have broad audiences and do not offer advertisers the specific targeted niches they are increasingly interested in, and that they can reach on the Web.

Time’s experiment, using readers rather than subscribers to set ad rates, may prove an important step. It would allow the titles to further integrate their Web sites with their hard copies and perhaps make the magazines more appealing to advertisers. But the outlook for that experiment remains unclear.

There was no change in rankings of the top 10 magazine companies in 2005 (the latest year for which data is available), but there was movement within them. Titles are being sold and bought. New launches are being prepared. And much of the new landscape’s look is being determined again by the industry leader, Time Warner, which is selling off some of its magazine holdings and slashing staff at others.

Meanwhile, where the online world is concerned, things are moving slowly in a few different directions. The move to the Web was always likely to be more complicated for news magazines, a medium that was never focused around timeliness the way others, like TV or even newspapers, were. Thus far, they’ve adapted unevenly.

Though Time Warner is still the largest of the large owners, the gap is rapidly closing as the company prunes properties. Time Warner saw its total magazine revenue fall to $4 billion in 2005 billion from $4.8 billion the previous year— a drop of 17%. In part it was due to a miscalculation in 2004 of what segment of the company’s revenue came from magazines — the book division was mistakenly included by Ad Age, which collects and calculates the data.^{1 2}

Meanwhile, Advance Publications, which owns Conde Nast, has become a much bigger No. 2, with net revenues climbing to $3.4 billion from $2.4 billion, an increase of 42%. It is now closing in on Time Warner, in part because it is buying properties and expanding its Web presence.³

The No. 3 company, Hearst, had a quieter year with no big acquisitions or sales. Still, revenues for the company were up about 16% from previous year, climbing to $2.1 billion from $1.8 billion.⁴

Magazine Revenue of Top Ten Companies, 2005

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Advertising Age, Chart: Top 25 Magazine Companies

Those three companies’ combined revenues dwarf the rest of the top 10 companies combined. But the top two appear to be charting different courses.

Time Inc. spent some of last year fighting off a bid by the investor Carl Icahn to break up the company, and while it remains largely intact, its plan to sell off 18 titles suggests it wants to become smaller and more focused. The publications for sale were targeted niche brands that stand apart from such broader titles as People, Time and Sports Illustrated. Niche publications remain good magazine business, but are not the direction, apparently, in which Time Warner wants to go. And the titles the company is holding on to are cutting staff. In short, this does not look like a company looking to grow, at the moment anyway.

Advance, meanwhile, is still looking to add titles. In July, the company, which owns Wired magazine, bought Wired.com, its online home. For eight years the two platforms for Wired have actually been held by different companies. Advance also is preparing to launch a new high-profile business magazine, Portfolio, in May. That one is a highly anticipated gamble. Advance brought in some big names to join the effort, including David Carey from the New Yorker as publisher and Joanne Lipman from the Wall Street Journal as editor.

News Magazine Owners

Aside from Time, the other news magazines owners did not make any major changes in 2005. As we enter 2007 they are likely waiting to see what happens with Time’s readership gambit. If that falls flat, the magazine and the company may have suffered from the effort.

The Washington Post Company, which owns Newsweek, is having magazine troubles. For the latest year for which there are data, 2005, magazine revenues fell to $345 million, a decline of almost 6% from $366 million in 2004. Newsweek is the primary cause for the rough times. For the Post Company’s limited magazine holdings, a bad year at Newsweek means a bad year for the magazine portfolio. And that is likely to be truer in 2007, because in December 2006 the company sold its technology titles, including Government Computer News, Washington Technology, Government Leader and Defense Systems. Over all, the drop in magazine revenue pushed the Post Company from being the nation’s 15 th largest magazine company to being the 16th.⁵

But the Post Company has diversified holdings and is expanding in other media. In 2006 it purchased AM and FM radio stations in Washington on which it simulcasts news/talk programming. The stations, like all terrestrial radio, are local, but on the air they aggressively promote the fact that they have global reach over the Internet.

The Post Company is now just ahead of No. 17 Dennis Publishing, which owns The Week and climbed two spots from No. 19. Dennis, which also owns the “lad” titles Maxim and Stuff, saw its revenues climb to $341 million from $316 in 2004, an increase of about 8%. Dennis was helped in particular by the explosive growth of The Week, which saw another good 2005 as its audited circulation (see Audience), ad revenues and subscriber revenue (see Economics) grew. The company has no set target audience number for The Week, according to the magazine’s editor, but sees it growing fairly steadily for the next few years. That could push Dennis even higher in the size rankings.⁶

Zuckerman Media Properties, owner of U.S. News and World Report, made no moves of note, but saw its revenues increase to $246 million from $236 million in 2004, an increase of 4.2%.⁷

Online and the Future

Other than Time, which is owned by Time Warner, none of the news magazines we examine are owned by companies that fall within the 10 largest media companies in the U.S. Looking at revenue derived only from magazines and not from other properties, only Time and the New Yorker, owned by Advance, are in the 10 largest magazine companies and therefore part of larger corporate Web strategies.

Those two companies, however, are taking different approaches the Web.

In 2006 Advance launched a Web portal, Brides.com, that combines three of its print magazines into one site. Advance is particularly eager to make its sites into Web destinations. Besides Brides.com, it is interested in the Web portal model for food (with Epicurious.com), travel (with Concierge.com) and fashion (with Style.com). The New Yorker Web site, however, exists outside that strategy. It is treated as a separate holding from the rest of the company’s titles online.

Time Warner, meanwhile, appears more interested in building its Web identity around its various titles — Time, People, Real Simple and Cooking Light — rather than interest areas. All titles have their own Web identities. Even In Style has its own home, with no obvious homepage links the title it was spun off from, People. Time also took a step toward raising the profile of Time.com by renovating and relaunching the site. In the first issue of the new Friday-released print version of the magazine, the new editor, Richard Stengel, told readers in a letter, “The new publication date reflects the way the Internet is affecting pretty much everything about the news business. Today our print magazine and TIME.com are complementary halves of the TIME brand.”⁸

As Advance and Time Warner build their Web presences, it will be interesting to see whether one strategy emerges as better than another, or if both succeed.

Elsewhere, news magazine owners are proceeding ad hoc, as they have in the past, with much depending on who is overseeing the site or how the editor or publisher feels about investing in the Web. In a time of tight budgets and staff cuts, such an approach means Web sites might more easily become an afterthought. At the same time, those sites are freer of the restrictions that can grow from big corporate Web strategies — restricted to a certain look or certain features because of owners’ demands. The sites can be focused around what their owners believe each individual publication needs.

The pluses and minuses of such an ownership situation can be seen on Newsweek.com. The site does not look like others owned by its corporate parent, the Washington Post Company, and that makes a certain amount of sense: Newsweek is a different kind of publication from the Washington Post or Slate.

Newsweek.com has had some successes, winning some best of the Web Awards from the magazine industry site minonline.com for its online coverage. And the site may soon be adding more features. Mark Whitaker, Editor of Newsweek from 1998 until September 2006, has moved over to Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, where he will oversee new projects for the digital division.

But Newsweek.com is in some ways poorer for that independence. While washingtonpost.com, for instance, has done much to add to the Post’s franchise in recent years — adding video and interactive features— the site for Newsweek without question thinner. It has no video reports (just segments featuring editors) and a lot more white space (see Digital). Meanwhile, Slate looks much more finished, with several podcasts and a lot of new material daily.

What will the Post Company do with the sites? That decision may well be part of Whitaker’s mission. The company is beginning to cross-promote them — a step further than last year — but Newsweek.com is still tethered tightly to msnbc.com.

The Week has seen exceptional audience growth, but its Web presence has so far been something of an afterthought. That may be starting to change. In 2007 The Week plans to do a daily version online of what it does every week in print, a daily summary of accounts from other outlets. But the magazine’s owner, Dennis Publishing, has done little with its other Web sites thus far beyond offering and encyclopedic backlog of photos of the women it has featured in its pages — some of which it seems to mark as Web-only.

Proof that one doesn’t need a big owner to have Web focus and strategy comes from The Economist. While the Economist Group is clearly pursuing a print growth strategy, the Web site, economist.com, is not an afterthought. There is a wealth of free statistical data, notably including country profiles from the magazine’s “Intelligence Unit” that look at various nations’ economic data, political structures and histories as well as forecasts of where they are headed. And last fall the site added new features including daily stories and updates, an economics blog where readers write, and more podcasts, including a five-minute summary of that week’s print Economist.

The magazine industry’s financial woes and the effect they’ve had on staffing are hardly breaking news. The end of 2005 and the beginning of 2006 were marked by staff cuts at well-known titles like U.S. News & World Report, Business Week and Time (see 2006 Report).

The latter months of 2006 had none of the big staff-cut announcements from a year earlier, but smaller hits kept on coming, as when Business Week cut another dozen positions.¹

With the arrival of 2007, however, came a bigger blow. On January 18, Time Inc. announced it was going to cut 289 people from the staff of its top magazines — 172 from the editorial side and 117 from business side.²

The cuts announced were to hit Time magazine particularly hard. It was to lose about 50 people in all, a mix of editorial and business jobs. It would close its bureaus in Los Angeles, Chicago and Atlanta and cut four correspondents from its Washington bureau. (The magazine said it would keep three “laptop” correspondents in L.A. who would work directly with editors in New York.) The latest cuts added to Time Inc.’s two rounds of reductions at the end of 2005 and beginning of 2006.³

Other notable Time Inc. properties were to be hit as well — Sports Illustrated was to lose 30 staff members and People 37 editorial employees — but the cuts at Time had a special significance, coinciding with the magazine’s attempt to redefine itself.⁴

According to a company statement, the cuts, made as part of the new “multi-platform publisher,” are “ focused on increasing efficiencies and allowing for closer collaboration between our digital and print businesses.”⁵

What do the cuts mean about the direction of the new Time? It will almost certainly rely less on its own reporting, since it has fewer people in the field. And the closing of bureaus in Chicago and Atlanta (often viewed as the capitals of the Midwest and South) probably means regional coverage will take a hit. Correspondents in such regional bureaus usually exist to be a magazine’s eyes and ears there. One also wonders if the magazine’s voice will grow more coastal as New York and Washington, always a big part of its coverage, hold a larger percentage of its staff.

Tallying up the staff boxes at Time and Newsweek, as we do annually in this report, it’s clear that even the 12 months before the latest cuts were hard. Staffing and bureaus for both magazines were at new lows since we began keeping track of them. Both witnessed the steepest one-year declines in staff on record.

There is little question that cuts in staff and bureaus have an impact on a news organization’s ability to gather, understand and analyze the news. They also make it hard to break news — to do enterprise.

The cuts may mean the two magazines titles will focus more on recapping the news and then interpreting it. The Week, which has growing circulation and ad revenues, puts out a weekly publication effectively without reporters. It employs a group of editors who scrutinize the week’s news and consolidate coverage from various outlets into a single account that tries to not only say what happened but to give a favor of how different outlets covered developments.

That kind of approach at Time and Newsweek, of course, would involve dramatic alterations in format and mission.

Time says it is going to alter its content, and in its print form switch to being less of a breaking-news vehicle and more of a reflective and analytical one. But the magazine has also announced it is going to rely on its Web Site more for providing breaking news.

Such a move, unless it simply involved running wire copy or repurposing stories from other parts of the Time/Warner empire (like CNN.com), might easily require a bigger staff, not a smaller one. (And though it is early and changes are still under way at Time, the Time.com part of the magazine’s staff box actually shrank in 2006 to 7 people from 13 in 2005.)⁶

The proposed changes mean Time’s staff box in particular bears watching in the next few years. One question, particularly after the most recent round of cuts, is whether the proposed redefinition of mission at Time is an elegant way of dressing up cost-cutting.

Staffing at Time and Newsweek

An examination as of October suggests that 2006 was a tight year in the newsrooms of Time and Newsweek. According to the totals offered by the magazines’ own staff figures, Time had a head count of about 226. Newsweek was at about 165.⁷

News Magazine Staff Size Over Time

Time and Newsweek select years 1983 - 2006

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Project for Excellence in Journalism from magazine staff boxes

Those numbers equal staffing drops between 2005 and 2006 of roughly 38 people at Time and 20 at Newsweek, or 14% and 11% respectively. Those drops, which came long before the January cuts, are steep. For comparison, consider the years from 1983 to 1993., In that 10-year period Newsweek reduced staff by a total of 77 and Time by only 18. As of October 2006, Newsweek’s staff was less than half what it was in 1983.⁸

On what positions did the axe fall? It is always difficult to tell precisely with a magazine staff box. Titles are not always what they seem — “reporters,” for example, are often actually researchers. But tallying up the numbers in the Time box, some figures stand out. The number of reporters (writer-reporters, senior reporters and regular reporters) dropped to 26 from 29. And as we’ve noted, the number of people working only for Time.com fell to 7 from 13.⁹

Newsweek’s cuts included four jobs in its art department — photographers and layout people — from 35 people from 39; among senior editors, reduced by three; and editorial assistants, reduced by four.¹⁰

Correspondents and Bureaus

Both Time and Newsweek cut the number of their bureaus in 2006 along with the number of people working in them. Again it is unclear whether those moves were part of larger efforts to change their missions or simply ways to save money. Whatever the reason, the net impact was few reporters on the ground.

Time’s bureaus dropped to 20 in 2006 from 25 at the end of 2005 — and, of course, will drop even more next year. The magazine closed its offices in Islamabad, Pakistan; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Seoul, and Toronto. Time also closed its New York bureau, though the effect of that closing is probably relatively small since the magazine’s headquarters are in New York.¹¹

Newsweek cut three bureaus, going from 20 at the end of 2005 to 17 in 2006. Its bureau casualties abroad included offices in Brussels, the home of the European Union, and Cape Town. Within the United States, the magazine also combined its Chicago and Detroit bureaus into a “Midwest” bureau, though it’s not clear exactly what the meaning of the move is; the staff box continued to show a reporter in each city.¹²

News Magazine Bureaus Over Time

Time and Newsweek select years 1983 - 2006

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Project for Excellence in Journalism from magazine staff boxes

And those cuts weren’t just a reshuffling of personnel — pulling back reporters from their far-flung perches and placing them closer to home. They resulted in less overall staff. Time reduced its bureau correspondent staff to 48 from 52 the previous year. Newsweek’s bureau staff was cut to 42 from 49 in 2005.¹³

Number of Correspondents in Bureaus Over Time

Time and Newsweek select years 1983 - 2006

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Project for Excellence in Journalism from magazine staff boxes

Such reductions are important because they go to one of the principle strengths of the weeklies, a big, spread-out newsgathering operation. The bureaus, and the correspondents who staff them, give the magazines listening posts that let them offer comprehensive coverage of the world. When news broke in a remote location, the weeklies would have reporters nearby who had been paying attention to the news form the region and had a feel for the scene. As the outposts and their staffing are reduced, those abilities diminish.

Considering the steady stream of cuts in bureaus and bureau staffing, the question is whether what remains will be enough to cover a complicated world where news from distant outposts has taken on an increasing importance.

Contributors

Newsweek’s list of “Contributing Editors” changed little in the past year, declining to 17 names from 18 the year before. The changes in Time’s “Contributors” list were bigger in terms of size — the list grew to 31 from 24 — and in type.¹⁴

Number of Contributors in Staff Boxes Over Time

Time and Newsweek select years 1983 - 2006

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Project for Excellence in Journalism from magazine staff boxes

In the past Time’s contributors list has been a way to highlight particular writers, a collection of distinguished personalities largely known in journalism for their work at other outlets —Michael Kinsley, for example, or the New Republic’s editor, Peter Beinart, or CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta. But Time’s list in 2006 was notable for the nature of the additions, mostly staff members cut from the other places in the staff box. Some of the new contributor additions: former Senior Foreign Correspondent Johanna McGeary, former Jerusalem Bureau Chief Matt Rees and former Senior Writers Daniel Kadlec and Michelle Orecklin.

That has long been more of the approach of Newsweek, which has several people on its “Contributing Editors” list who were once full staff members, including Eleanor Clift and Ken Woodward.

That use of the contributors lists may continue to grow as the staffs of the weeklies are cut. Often moves into the contributors list are part of the layoff negotiation that goes on between management and staff. Moving personnel from staff to contributor leaves the titles more flexible. It still gives the magazines access to the people they once had without paying them benefits or big salaries. It is a likely way of the future as the publications face tight economic times.

Summary

Staff reductions seem to go beyond a trend for the big weeklies. If January’s cuts at Time are any indication, such reductions have become a way of life in the past few years and seem likely to remain one in the immediate future. The magazine’s staff boxes grew fat in the good economic years as they moved more and more resources and operations inside their headquarters. But increasingly in their desire to be nimble and cut costs they seem to be adopting a larger trend in American industry as a whole — outsourcing.

Bureau offices are being closed and staffs trimmed as the ability to track news online grows. That doesn’t, however, mean foreign coverage is going to become something done from a computer terminal or strictly by personnel who “parachute” into hot news areas. Stringers, who have always been put to use by the news weeklies when news breaks, are likely to get more work, and former staff people will be called upon in a fee-for-service way to offer expertise.

Where does all that leave the weeklies in the future where staffing is concerned? Leaner and meaner, but ultimately with a product that is less under their control. Smaller bureau staffs and fewer foreign offices mean scoops will inevitably be less common. But that may fit with the weeklies’ new role in the media landscape, particularly with Time’s new approach to coverage, which may be more in line with that of The Economist: part week in review, part opinionated analysis. The one thing that isn’t clear is what it will mean to the Web operations of those publications, which increasingly will be the platform charged with breaking news.

News magazines have had a difficult time figuring how they fit into the world of the digital media. Their long lead times and more reflective style of writing don’t jibe well with the Web’s continuous nature. And on the whole magazines have lagged behind other media in integrating the Web into their larger plans.

Some events in 2006 suggest that now may be changing, at least at some publications.

Several magazines increased their daily online output, began creating content specifically for the Web, and gave users more multi-media features.

The changes are also reflected in online finances. Ad spending on the “e-media” side of magazines was expected to grow by more than 34% in 2006 to over $400 million. That’s an impressive jump, but it still makes up only 1.7% of total ad spending on consumer magazines.¹

And then there was Time, the news genre leader, and its stated goal to begin to count audience as a combination of print and Web together. The magazine announced it would be relying on its Web site to handle breaking news. It instituted a major Web redesign that de-emphasized the print publication. It put its top editor in charge of the magazine and its Web site as well — uniting the two sides of editorial. (And all of that followed a 2005 announcement by U.S. News that it would increasingly be transitioning itself to the Web.)

The question is what those moves will amount to. Some observers cite them as positive and necessary by a medium slow to the party. Yet other critics believe the talk may just be a way to dress up cuts in staff, and recent reductions may lend credence to that thinking.

But there’s also little question the publications hope to generate more clicks and dollars from the Web. The success of Time’s plans to calculate its ad base on readership (ultimately including Web readership) may dictate how the rest of the field approaches the challenge.

To assess how far news magazines have traveled on the Web entering 2007, PEJ examined some of the top newsweekly sites and did a site-by-site accounting of the features and advertising on three: time.com, economist.com and theweekmagazine.com. They were part of a larger inventory of 38 different news sites on various types from across the Web. (See Digital Journalism chapter for the full analysis along with an interactive tool to help citizens evaluate their favorite news sites and a full description of the methodology.)

We measured sites using six different criteria: The customization options the sites offered, their use of multi-media, the possibilities they offered for interactivity, the branding of the content (that is how much was from the outlets as opposed to outside sources), the depth of information available and how the site was doing economically in terms of drawing advertising. On each of these measures each site was placed into one of four categories ranging from a top group that offered a lot to the last group which offered the least amount.

The three sites were widely different in most regards — how they handled podcasts, if they had them at all, whether they charged for content and where they got that content from. In short, there is no dominant approach to news-magazine Web sites. And that may be the case indefinitely if those three titles are any indication, since they seem to be differentiating themselves increasingly in their print content. But as of now these sites, sometimes going in a few directions at once, are serving as test kitchens for their parent titles.

Time (www.time.com)

At the start of 2007, Time revamped and relaunched its Web site. It added new features, limited its color palette and cleaned up a site that was fairly cluttered. The new site is more organized and simpler without being sparse. It looks and feels more like the online home of a new Web outlet than it did before and less an online parking space for the magazine.

Still, some of what we found on the site in October still held true in January. For instance, the first thing a visitor is likely to notice is that Time is not alone here. Signs of its partnership with CNN — another news outlet owned by Time/Warner — appear in the header. But there is more brand differentiation now than before. In the earlier incarnation, the site offered “The Latest Headlines from CNN.” That has been replaced by “Latest Headlines,” which lists 10 news items from a variety of sources, CNN among them.

The new Time.com is also an environment more distinct than before from the print magazine. The image of the current week’s magazine cover, for instance, is pushed further down on the page, rather than appearing in the top right hand corner.

One thing the old and new sites have very much in common, however, is that everything here is still free.

Visually, the new Time.com uses a cleaner three-column format as opposed to the four-column approach it used to have. And while the old site had pictures scattered all over it, the new one features only a changing slide-show picture, with an ad on the right side and a row of three photos in the section below. The layout is modular.

The old cluttered Time.com was not without its advantages. It was one of the more customizable Web sites, finishing in the top tier in part because it offered several different RSS feeds, podcasts and a mobile version of itself. It also finished in the top tier for branding, using human editors to make decisions about layout (rather than computer programs) and using bylines on staff copy. The site also relied heavily on its staff for lead stories – more than 75% of its lead pieces carried staff bylines.

It scored lower, in the third tier, in depth. Its score was hurt by offering fewer updates than other sites (something true of most magazine sites) and not using embedded links to take readers further into a subject

Time put even less emphasis on multi media (it finished in the bottom tier). This is a text based Web site. It also earned the lowest marks for user participation. It offered users little in the way of communicating or reacting, not even the opportunity to send emails to authors.

Time also does not have a significant number of revenue streams on the site at this point. It did not have many ads – eight – and it did not charge for any content.

The new Time.com seems to place less emphasis on allowing users to customize it — it certainly highlights customization less—and is more focused on presenting users with a clean, uncluttered first view of the page. It still has multiple RSS feeds and podcasts, and a link to get a mobile version of the site, but those links are at the bottom.

On the other hand, blogs have multiplied. Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish is still here (though Sullivan announced that his blog was moving to Atlantic.com), and it has been augmented with blogs about Washington (Swampland), The Middle East and entertainment (Tuned In). The site also added a column called “The Ag,” which stands for aggregator, which talks about what’s news in other media.

Interestingly, the redesign actually left the site with fewer ads. There were a total of four in September, placing it in the bottom 10 of the sites we looked at. But there were only two in January and they were coordinated for the same product — Bentley College. That approach, also taken by Economist.com, makes the ads feel more like an integrated part of the page and less noisy.

The strength of Time.com is its willingness to reach beyond its own pages for content. There is a lot here. The 10 stories in the “Latest Headlines” box are usually wire copy, but they do at least offer users a link to major breaking news. And such fare as Andrew Sullivan’s blog not only brings more outside content to the page, its teaser text can definitely bring a different flavor, as it did on December 9, 2006: “If the Democrats have the balls to restore our constitutional order I may have to stop being an independent for awhile.” Not exactly journalism in the tradition of Henry Luce.

Perhaps most interesting, the new Time.com does not make a point of offering content from the magazine. The daily stories from Time’s staff, on the page’s top left, are often shorter than magazine stories and feature either a different tone or some exclusive tidbit, and Time.com clearly differentiates between them and the stories on the rest of the site. And articles from the actual magazine are hidden down the page under the image of that week’s cover. Users have to click the image to get to those pieces.

It all amounts to a step toward a Web environment that is more than the magazine, with plenty of short items and Web-only content. That is what Time promised in the summer of 2006 when it said it was going to turn to the Web more and more, particularly on breaking news.

The Economist (www.economist.com)

The brand. The brand. The brand. If there is one thing that Economist.com accomplishes, it is clearly and successfully pushing the Economist brand online. Lest anyone wonder, the site is anchored in the top left corner by the signature white lettering in a red box — in this case spelling Economist.com — with a picture of the current magazine’s cover prominently beneath.

Like the magazine, the site is clean, well-organized and text-heavy. It is also, like its print sibling not heavy with pictures or graphics (there were six on a representative homepage, and four of them were quite small). Even the site’s ads, (often for petroleum companies or large blue-chip corporations) are designed without a lot of colors or jumpy graphics.²

There is a lot of free content here, but most of the stories from the print edition are accessible only to subscribers — those who get the magazine delivered or pay a fee to access premium online content.

At the time we did an accounting of Economist.com it was in the second tier in terms of customization, receiving points for having a multiple-component search and several RSS feeds. It was also in the second tier on multi-media, due to the photos on the page several and podcast options.

Its weakest scores came in interactivity and depth, where it was in the bottom tier. A user-based blog (one where the Web editor picks a topic of the day and users are invited to sound off on it) was essentially the only way for users to participate on the site, hurting its interactivity score. And the site’s twice daily updating – as a magazine site it seems less interested in being up-to-the-minute – cost it points in out depth raking.

The site was in the top tier for the number of revenue streams it tapped. It was boosted by a significant number of advertising combined with the content available for a fee helped its economic score.

But it was brand that stood out. The content here all comes from the staff of the magazine. This is not a place to go to keep up with what’s on the wire. Nor is there content from other publications in The Economist Group, which includes Roll Call and European Voice.

Nonetheless, Economist.com does keep a steady flow of content coming by magazine standards. The top story is new every day, as are the items in Today’s Views — which includes a staff column and a Correspondents Diary (both unbylined) and Debate, a blog devoted to an interesting topic elsewhere on the Web. That is the closest economist.com gets to outside sources for news. The online pieces are short — in most cases, it appears, a bit shorter than the tightly written pieces that appear in the magazine — but they attempt the same kind of news blended with analysis for which the magazine is known.

One of the best features may be the staggering amount of data accessible here. Beyond the news and analysis pieces there are entire separate sections like the site’s Cities Guide, with information about happenings in 27 cities around the world, from Atlanta to Zurich. And there are the country briefings, which look at economic and political news from countries around the world. They include recent stories from the magazine on each country and an economic forecast, a fact sheet and information on the political structure of each.

For The Economist, which prides itself on giving readers data and raw facts along with its analysis, it is yet another way to extend the brand.

The Week (www.theweekmagazine.com)

The online home for The Week, www.theweekmagazine.com, can best be described as exactly that — a place for the online versions of the content that appears in the print title. It is a sparse environment, and appears by and large to be an afterthought.

Its narrow, three-column format is evocative of a magazine page and fills only about half the screen. Only the wider middle column holds real content, which is labeled “In the Magazine…” and features a large photo. The narrow left column is saved for navigation. The current week’s cover image is displayed prominently in the narrow right-hand column (it links to a page where users can subscribe to the print version) and is followed down the page by ads. Users coming to the site are greeted by only three images and three story links on their first screen.

All told, there are 24 links directly to stories on the page, an extremely low number among the sites we examined.

There is no place for breaking news and no attempt at posting daily staff-written content.

In fairness, The Week’s format, which involves giving a weekly summary of news accounts from around the nation and world, may not really be suited to the Web. First, publishing more often online goes against The Week’s raison d’etre: the premise that people are overloaded with information and need a simple, short synopsis of events that they can carry with them. Second, if one wants a quick look at what’s going on in the world from several sources while online, online aggregators already offer many such services.

But that limited approach is ending. The magazine has announced it will soon launch a new Web site that will do on a daily basis what the title does every week — condense news from around the nation and world.

Looking at the rankings in our site inventory, The Week was not a big winner in much of anything. It scored well in one category, branding, where it was in the top tier because editors choose what content goes on the page and all of it is generated in-house – though it must be noted the content consists of summarize stories from other outlets.

In all other categories, the site was in the bottom tier. There were, in essence, no opportunities for customization.³ The page’s only multi-media only components were the photos it ran. There were none of the participation options (user blogs, author email addresses, live chats) we looked for on the site. The site was not updated during the day (in fact only once a week, at the time of our inventory) which hurt its depth score. And the site had few ads – only six – and no fee content which placed it near the bottom in revenue streams.

While many people look at The Week as the print version of a Web aggregator, its Web presence pays little or no heed to the capabilities of the Internet or the on-line world’s 24-hour news cycle. It is the new-media home of a very old-media approach.

The Others:

Newsweek — Like Time.com, its well-known competitor, Newsweek.com shares its Web space with another news organization — MSNBC — and like Time the site gives its partner high billing. Alongside the red “Daily Edition Newsweek” banner running over the page sits a smaller, blue MSNBC box on the left. The site itself is clean, dominated by a white background and black text with red highlights, which helps make its four-column format seem less crowded.

There is a link for users to get a mobile version of the site, multiple RSS feeds and a podcast of Newsweek on Air, the radio show long produced by the magazine. And there are two ads that, as on Time.com, are for the same product.

But unlike Time.com’s variety, there is only Newsweek content here, and the magazine seems to be churning it out at a pretty good clip. The top story, which sits on the upper left of the page with a large photo, is generally a Web-only piece written for that day. And while there is some material from the actual magazine here, most of the pieces are written specially for the Web and marked with “Web only” on the top. The site also does the magazine’s well-known up-and-down-arrow Conventional Wisdom watch feature every day, abbreviated here as The Daily CW.

One possibly surprising thing about the site is how blogs, a favorite Web addition lately, are hidden well down the page and subtly displayed. Instead, the magazine’s current cover is emphasized, as are a lot of offers to subscribe running up and down the site. Over all, the site looks and feels like something of a bridge between the online and print world.

U.S. News & World Report — The word that comes to mind when one looks at site for U.S. News is sparse. Unlike the sites of Time and Newsweek, it has no pronounced online affiliation with another news organization and, perhaps for that reason, appears somewhat thin. Visually, the left 2/5 of the screen is empty and the only daily updated material sits in a box on the right side at the top of the page.

While the site offers a mobile version, its RSS feed is weekly, and there are no podcasts. There is one ad on the page along with many promotional messages to entice users to subscribe.

Of the three big news weeklies, U.S. News in some ways had the most to gain from a move to the Web. Its news-you-can-use franchise translates well to the online world, where data is storable and sortable. And on USNews.com the many special issues and lists that the magazine creates — Best Colleges, Best Graduate Schools, Beat Health Plans, etc. — are given special treatment on the upper left of the screen, where most sites put their navigational elements. There is limited access to these features, but to get any of them users have to “Go Premium” for $14.95.

The site’s daily content comes in the form of “Today’s Briefing” on the page’s top, which features a daily Campus News Roundup (updated through the day) and the Political Bulletin (posted every morning). Brevity is the thing in both of those areas, with items of a paragraph of two. There is also a “Day in Photos” link here with pictures from around the country and world. Far down the page is “Latest AP Headlines.”

If this is the magazine’s attempt to move itself online, it would appear that in the long term U.S. News will be less about magazine pieces or even heavy reporting and more about quick hits and news you can use.

As with many other media, the evidence suggests that news magazines have seen their credibility with the public erode in recent years. News magazines have long sat below television — both cable and network — in public believability. In 2006, there was little evidence that much had changed.

The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press measures “believeability” on a scale of 1 to 4, with 4 being the highest. And in its 2006 Biennial Media Consumption survey those giving Time and U.S. News & World Report the highest rating fell slightly. For Newsweek the rating climbed slightly, but the prevailing trend is clearly downward.¹

News Magazine Believability Over Time

1999 vs. 2005

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, “Public More Critical of the Press, but Goodwill Persists” June 26, 2005. Question 3.

What’s more, the ratings for all three magazines measured continued to lag behind broadcast media.²

Believability of Various News Outlets

Percent of people who say they can believe most or all of what each outlet reports

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Pew Research Center of the People and the Press

It’s interesting that it isn’t necessarily the magazine style of writing that is holding the Big Three back, but perhaps the fact that they are printed on paper. “60 Minutes,” a broadcast magazine, actually scores higher on believability than the news divisions as a whole. And it should be noted the three news weeklies cited in the survey on average have the highest believability numbers of any print publication measured, other than the Wall Street Journal and the person’s local newspaper — and that includes the New York Times, USA Today and the Associated Press.³

Believability of Various Print Outlets

1999 vs. 2005

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, “Public More Critical of the Press, but Goodwill Persists” June 26, 2005. Question 3.

That finding opens the door to several interpretations. Is there a point to the argument that people tend to distrust the idea of objective media so much that they give more weight to outlets that offer more interpretation, or what some might even consider bias — outlets that write with a slant or a “take” as the weeklies like to call it? Is it that outlets that come out less frequently are thought to have spent more time on each item, and their news is therefore more trustworthy?

As the magazines continue to talk about moving more of their operations to the Web, those two theories should get something of a test.

If people are rewarding magazines for coming out less often, the migration to the Web theoretically could hurt the magazine brands. One of the web’s strengths, news on demand, is less about taking time to check facts and more about immediacy. Other strengths of the Web — searchable data bases and access to original materials — are also not the province of news weeklies, which synthesize material into more digestible form. Once the magazines enter that game, if they truly try to compete and break news, will there be less separating them from other Web outlets in the public’s mind?

Those challenges presented by the Web may explain why magazines like the New Yorker are thriving in print. The long-form narratives of the New Yorker — in a stapled and small magazine format — suit themselves more to the portability of print than to the Web. A long New Yorker piece is not digested quickly on a PDA or read at the computer. We take the time to read it on a train, or in an armchair.

If Time, Newsweek and U.S. News are to thrive on the Web, does the mission change? Does the nature of their narrative change? Does the notion of being a weekly publication in itself disappear over time?

What Readers Know

For the vast majority of readers, news magazines are an extra source of news. Their subscribers are generally thought to be more interested in news than average news consumers. In a world where news and information are available in abundance, they pay to get an additional source of news delivered to their homes. What does their desire for more news say about their news knowledge? Perhaps not as much as one might think. News magazine readers are not particularly good students of the news. They know more than some news consumers and less than others.

In the 2006 Pew Biennial Media Survey, 52% of respondents who said they had read a magazine “yesterday” and could correctly identify the Secretary of State. That was a lower score than respondents who said they had read a newspaper yesterday, 55%, or read news online yesterday, 58%. But the magazine readers scored higher than people who said they had watched TV news (47%) or listened to news on the radio the previous day (49%).⁴

On a question involving foreign affairs — can you name the current president of Russia? — the findings for people who had used various media yesterday were similar. Roughly 43% of magazine readers knew Vladimir Putin’s name. That was lower than newspaper readers and Internet users, of whom 47% and 50%, respectively, got the answer right. But magazine readers did better than TV news viewers (37%) and radio news listeners (41%).⁵

News magazine readers scored lower than newspapers readers, Internet users and radio listeners on the question of which party was in control of the House of Representatives (before November’s elections). Some 71% of news magazine readers answered the question correctly, compared to 76% for newspapers readers, 73% for radio listeners and 80% for Internet users.⁶

Which Party is in Control of the House of Representatives?

Percent of ’regular’ audiences answering question correctly

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Pew Research Center for the People and the Press

The meaning of those numbers is hard to know for certain. There is overlap in the data — people use many media every day — but the numbers do suggest that the news magazine audience is not as elite as many believe. It’s interesting, for instance, that radio listeners, who use the lowest-cost media listed here — no subscription cost, free content and inexpensive receivers — score higher than magazine readers on at least one of the questions.

It’s also worth noting that “news magazines” as defined for this survey do not include the niche news titles we discuss in this chapter — The Economist, The Week and the New Yorker — but rather the big news weeklies. When we last looked at the question of audience knowledge, in our 2005 report, the audience of the big news weeklies was broken out on its own and it was shown to rate higher than the audience knowledge of newspaper readers on four questions on current events.

What’s behind the change? It may be that that the audience changes this report has discussed for the past few years — declining readership at the big weeklies and growth of the niche news titles — means that the niche publications are cherry-picking more serious news audiences. It may be that the separation we’re now seeing is simply a matter of the questions that were asked this year. Or it may be a different reason altogether. Regardless, the finding bears watching.

Heading into 2007, the biggest issue for the opinion titles is the big political story from last November — the switch in the party control of Congress. The Democrats’ winning of the House and Senate creates an interesting dynamic not just in political power but, if history is any guide, also in the readership of the opinion journals.

As we have noted in this report in past years, the fortunes of such magazines tend to go up and down in an inverse relationship to the fortunes of the political parties they favor. So the good times for the GOP in recent years helped the readership of the left-leaning Nation grow to record levels, just as the first few years of the Clinton Administration led to a big spike in readers for The National Review.

That pattern suggests that there will be some drop-off in readership in leftist publications as angry Democrats feel some satisfaction, and an increase in right-leaning magazines as formerly content Republicans get their ire raised and are eager to read critiques. And more center-left titles like The New Republic, often focused on policy suggestions, could see a bump from Democrats looking for ideas on how to govern.

For 2007, though, the political landscape suggests a host of provisos for those truisms. The Democrats control Congress, but President Bush is still ensconced in the White House. Many Republicans, meanwhile, while they dislike the Democrats, are less than pleased with Bush, according to polls, and those mixed feelings may still make them less likely to pick up a political journal. The increasingly unpopular war in Iraq could cause people to grow more engaged in politics or push them away from it.

And, of course, the political backdrop of 2007 is likely to be the coming presidential race, which is wide open with no obvious heir apparent in either party for the first time in decades. Intriguing candidates and/or internal party squabbling could steer more readers to the opinion journals.

A look at the 2006 circulation figures for those magazines demonstrates the trend of complicated reverse party trends of the group. The left-tilting Nation continued to grow slightly and lead the pack. The conservative National Review lost some readers though it was not too far behind. Meanwhile, the New Republic, not really at either ideological pole, was essentially flat, and far behind the other two.¹

There was also a big development with the New Republic just before the report was released. TNR was sold in February to Winnipeg-based CanWest Global Communications, a Canadian newspaper publisher that had already owned 30% of the magazine. Immediate terms of the deal were not available, but the company announced one big change immediately. The 93-year-old weekly would begin to publish every other week, “while almost doubling the number of pages.” That follows a noticeable thinning of the magazine in recent years.

It is important to point out that circulation isn’t as critical a measure for those magazines as it is for others. The opinion journals are ultimately as interested in the amount of political sway they hold in Washington and in who their readers are as they are in the pure the bottom line. But circulation is not irrelevant. It indicates where politically focused audiences on the right and left are going for ideas. Here’s a look at where the magazines’ circulation stands today.

Circulation of Leading Opinion Magazines

1988-2006

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Audit Bureau of Circulation, annual audit reports and publisher’s statements

The Nation,the stalwart voice of liberalism, continued its growth in 2006 albeit at a slower rate. As of December of 2006, it had a circulation of 186,528, just up from 184,181 the previous year — an increase of 2,300, or just over 1%.²

Interestingly, The Nation’s circulation has been growing steadily since 1998. That was the year the Lewinsky scandal hit the Clinton White House, and the mainstream coverage of Clinton grew more critical. In the elections up to 2006 the Democrats remained unable to win back control of any of Washington’s centers of authority. Will The Nation’s readers lose interest now that the Democrats are back in power?

There may be some reason to think so. Consider the jump the National Review saw leading up to the 1994 mid-term elections. The conservative periodical went from 163,000 in 1992 (the year Bill Clinton was elected) to 269,000 in 1994. But after the GOP took control of Congress in that election, the Review’s circulation dropped back to 242,000 in 1995, then to 206,000 in 1996, then to 171,000 in 1997. By 1998 it was actually back to pre-1992 levels at 160,000.

One reason The Nation might be different is the change in the media environment since then. Not only is the political landscape considered to be more polarized now, but the Web in some ways feeds that polarization with sites — especially blogs — devoted to particular points of view. The opinion journals know this and have taken advantage of it, making their home pages the place to go for commentary.

Both The Nation and National Review have Web-only content to draw readers looking for a left or right view of the news.

And National Review, the conservative movement’s traditional conscience, saw its circulation drop in 2006, perhaps feeling the pull of the President Bush’s slumping poll numbers. The title’s December 2006 circulation of 152,603 was down 8,000 from 2004’s 160,896 — or more than 5%.³

The magazine’s success is worth pondering. The rise may have had something to do with the start of Bush’s second term and interest among conservatives about where he would try to take the country. It could be that disappointment or confusion over the war in Iraq, and the splintering of Bush’s coalition, led conservatives to search for more voices. Or it could be the open field and the battle for the party after he leaves office.

The obvious question now is whether the Republicans losses in the midterm elections of 2006, and the subsequent usual calls for soul-searching, will translate into even more readers for the National Review. It too has parlayed its Web site into a force in online political debate — more so than The Nation — which may also help explain the magazine’s ability to buck the larger political trend and add subscribers during a time when historical models suggest it would not.

Meanwhile, the New Republic continues to plug along with about 60,000 in circulation. After a drop from roughly 86,000 in 2002 to 61,000 in 2003, the magazine has stayed relatively stable. It gained a few more readers between December of 2005 and December of 2006, going from 61,055 to 61,628.⁴

Looking at the magazine in recent years, even the occasional reader might notice the issues are getting thinner. The 2006 issues averaged just over 37 pages each. Going back to 1998, the average was just over 45 pages. That’s a decline of 21% over that period.⁵ While good economic data aren’t available on the opinion titles, such a thinning would suggest that the New Republic has hit some economic turbulence. And the loss of readers certainly hasn’t helped with advertisers.

New owner CanWest is aiming to make the magazine profitable again – while publishing only every other week – and wants to redesign TNR’s Web site. The first edition of the new New Republic comes out March 19, though the impact of the buyout won’t be known for months at least.

There is, however, some hope that TNR might gain some readers back in 2007. Now that the Democrats are in control the House and Senate they have talked about moving to the center — particularly on social and fiscal issues — to consolidate power. Many of the Democratic freshmen in Washington are moderates. If there really is a more centrist Democratic voice coming out of Washington, the New Republic might benefit in a few ways. It may be the place the politically interested go to get an idea of which direction the party in power is going on various issues and it may be a place where Democratic politicians go to publish essays and op-eds. The next few years could give an indication whether the magazine’s falling fortunes have ideological or editorial roots.