Journalism.org- The State of the News Media 2009

Magazines: Summary Findings

For American news magazines, 2008 may be seen as the year when the traditional mass audience model finally collapsed. U.S. News & World Report effectively abandoned the print news magazine format in favor of producing monthly guides, leaving news coverage to its website. Newsweek, following multiple layoffs and tweaks to its print and online editions, announced in February 2009 that it was remaking itself into a niche publication aimed at a smaller, high-end subscriber base. Time continued to straddle two worlds, keeping a smaller but still large audience base while shifting to more thematic coverage driven more by columnists and analysis.

Audience

Of the eight publications that PEJ tracks as news magazines, circulation dropped 4.8%, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. Newsweek fell the most, down 13% to 2.7 million copies per week in the first six months of 2008, from the same period in 2007. U.S. News & World Report fell 10% to 1.8 million. Time had a negligible decline, down three-tenths of 1 percent, to 3.4 million.
Several niche publications had better results. The Economist added circulation for the third year in a row, up 8% to an average of 747,254 per issue in the first six months of the year versus the same period a year earlier. The Week increased 2%, to more than 500,000. The Atlantic was up 12% to nearly 400,000.
Over all, the audience for magazines of all kinds decreased by 7% in 2008.
According a survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, less than a quarter of American adults said they read a magazine of some kind the day before—down from a third in 1994. When asked specifically about news magazines, 12% reported reading one “regularly,” down 2 percentage points from 2006 and down 6 percentage points from a similar survey in 1994.

Economics

Ad pages were down 16% for news magazines in 2008 compared with the previous year, according to estimates from the Publishers Information Bureau. Just one news magazine studied, The Economist, succeeded in increasing ad pages and advertising revenue in 2008.

Time’s ad pages fell 19%. Newsweek’s ad pages were down 19%. U.S. News & World Report’s ad pages fell 32%.
Across the 251 magazines analyzed by the Publishers Information Bureau, ad pages were down 12% through the first three quarters of 2008, compared with a 1% drop in the same period in 2007.

Ownership

The major owners consolidated and even closed some publications in 2008. For the second year in a row, fewer new magazines were introduced and sales dwindled. There were 42 mergers and acquisitions among consumer magazines, a drop of 25% from the year before and the smallest total since 2001, and the value of the deals fell a staggering 97%.
Advance, owner of Condé Nast magazines, was the top-earning magazine owner based on 2008 rankings, with $3.9 billion, topping Time Warner’s magazine division, Time Inc., at $3.6 billion. Hearst followed with $2.3 billion.

Opinion Titles

As the Democratic tide rose in 2008, the conservative opinion magazines National Review and The Weekly Standard both boosted circulation, while the liberal journals The Nation and The New Republic saw slight circulation declines.

Less than two years after selling The New Republic to Canada’s largest media company, long-time editor-in-chief Martin Peretz emerged among a group of private investors who bought it back in early 2009. CanWest Global Communications paid $2.3 million for its initial 30% stake in 2006 and took full control in 2007 for an undisclosed additional investment.

Digital Trends

According to Veronis Suhler Stevenson, digital ad revenue represented just 2% ($542 million) of all magazine revenue in 2007, compared with 41% from circulation ($10 billion) and 58% ($14 billion) from advertising.
The share from digital revenues was projected to increase to about 3% in 2008, but the growth rate is expected to taper off over the next four years. By 2012, digital is expected to have grown to only 7% of all magazine revenues. In short, the Web will not be the future of the magazine industry, at least according to current view.

Circulation for the Big Three News Magazines Over Time

1988-2008