Archive for the ‘Magazines’ Category

The new magazine numbers from the Audit Bureau of Circulations are out, and they’re grim. Newsstand sales are down 12.4%. SmartMoney was one of the worst — down 35% and Redbook was down 23.5%.

The New York Times has a nice roundup.

Reader’s Digest has announced plans to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. It’s an organized bankruptcy with the  support of most of the magazine’s creditors. Within a couple of months or so, they’re expected to emerge with about 75% less debt.

Like every other publication, they’d been hammered by drops in advertising, and general-interest magazines have long struggled against niche publications.

Time Inc. announced today that it’s shutting down Southern Accents, one of its highest-profile titles with a circulation of 400,000. The magazine has a circulation of 400,000, published six times a year by Time’s Birmingham-based Southern Progress group. However, Time spokesperson Sylvia Auton said the company was seeking to “focus our energy, resources and investment on our biggest and most profitable brands.”

The company stopped publishing Cottage Living in January.

Advertising had dropped 37 percent for the first six months of 2009, compared to the same period in 2008, according to the Publishers Information Bureau.

BusinessWeek’s going to try to to sell a repackaged version of content that will remain free on its web site.

According to the MediaWeek story, Businessweek.com General Manager Roger Neal said the content would be the same as that available for free, but paid subscribers would get a “different experience” of the content. Among other things, it will be more “print-like” and users will get instant access.

I don’t want to criticize this effort sight unseen, but I’m a skeptic. Forbes and Fortune are both selling subscriptions via Kindle, and people seem to be willing to pay a small amount for the convenience. But paying just for “different experience” on the desktop? I’m not betting the rent money on that.

A Pew survey conducted in April found that only 43% of Americans would personally miss their newspaper if it disappeared. Only 43% felt that it would hurt civic life in their community “a lot” if the paper went away. Read the Pew story.

Meanwhile, Slate, the enormously successful web-only news site, has a nice story on Time’s experiment with an online magazine custom-built especially for the reader. Of course, it doesn’t do anything an aggregator page can’t do, but it’s a little slicker. Slate story.

As noted repeatedly over the last couple of years, I’ve been struggling for quite a while to identify the future business model that will ensure the continuity of the quality reporting that makes our form of democracy possible.

Since the bloodshed we saw in the first quarter of 2009, all sorts of ideas have emerged — micropayments, low-rate subscriptions, you name it. But for the first time in a couple of years I’m ready to venture a guess (that’s all it is) as to what shape it may take, and I think it has little or nothing to do with your desktop and even your laptop.

I now think it will be driven by a future generation of hardware. If I knew what it would look like and had a few billion dollars to develop it, I’d be the next Bill Gates. But I’m thinking it will be some hybrid between two products now on the market: Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iPhone. Read the rest of this entry »

With so much attention focused on the 140-character limit of Twitter and the rapid-fire nature of electronic media, it may surprise some people that the top three magazines on Amazon’s Kindle reader are weekly publications that provide in-depth, substantive coverage — New Yorker, Newsweek and Time.

It is also noteworthy that Newsweek just announced a redesign to clean up its look and try to recapture some of the high-end audience it has been losing to New Yorker and The Economist. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve had my Kindle 2 for a week now. I was skeptical at first, but after toting around a few ounces instead of three or four pounds of books on a trip last week, I warmed up to it pretty quickly.

While I don’t think this is the final “destination” technology, it could well play the same role for the written word that the Ipod plays for audio. The similarities are startling: Read the rest of this entry »

From Jon Friedman’s Marketwatch column.

Newsweek looks like a magazine in decline
Commentary: Parent Washington Post should combine it with Slate

By Jon Friedman, MarketWatch
Last update: 12:01 a.m. EST Dec. 15, 2008

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — Remember Newsweek, once widely recognized as one of the great brand names in the media world

Yes, you read that correctly — I wrote “once.” I don’t think it’s true any longer, sorry to say. This looks like a magazine in decline, both financially and journalistically. Read the rest of this entry »