Magazine news: Help! I'm Shrinking!

Like the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz, the magazine industry is getting smaller and smaller.

Okay, that's an exaggeration, but it is shrinking, and I really wanted to get the Wicked Witch thing in there. (Go ahead, click on the link above; it's worth it.)

Anyway, the New York Post's Keith J. Kelly says the magazine industry is becoming like Germany or other advanced Euro economies, whose populations are declining because births and immigration are outnumbered by deaths. (Okay, he didn't use the Europe-as-magazine-industry analogy, I did. But I'm trying to offer something for the people who didn't climb aboard for the Wicked Witch thing.)

The point is, as Kelly writes, "For the first time in memory, the magazine death rate has surpassed the magazine birth rate." He's referring to the vicious slaughterhouse that was the publishing economy of the first quarter of this year, in which the number of magazines that died just slightly outnumbered the new-birth rate.

It's sort of like ...

Condé Nast Hit Hard

The usually high-flying Condé Nast publishing empire has hit some severe turbulence as its stable of luxury goods advertisers cuts back on spending, reports the New York Post's Keith J. Kelly. With Portfolio and Wired both down about 60 percent in advertising (the industry norm lately is much less), things are serious.

Quoting publishing people who say Condé's "overstaffed and overpaid," Kelly notes, " Much of the problem rests with Condé's policy of never discounting off the rate card.'Advertisers are finding that they can buy around them,' said [a] former executive."


It is, of course, pretty easy to change a policy about rate card negotiation -- assuming there's not a big mental block on the matter among the company's leaders. But serious economic times have a way of changing things.