A Bad Day for Magazines

Magazines that rely on newsstand sales received some pretty depressing news today. Some industries might have leaders who can ignore the news when they want, but from my experience, magazine publishers and editors tend to be news hounds who avidly follow goings-on.
Newsstand sales (single-copy sales) fell by 11 percent in the second half of 2008, reports Reuters. Particularly hard hit were women's and celebrity magazines, such as Life & Style and Us Weekly. (Those magazines apparently didn't learn the lesson to put Barack Obama on the cover as often as possible to boost sales.) Richard Perez-Pena, writing in The New York Times, notes:

In the crowded field of celebrity magazines, In Touch Weekly’s circulation tumbled 29.3 percent, to 899,000, and Life & Style Weekly fell 30.7 percent, to 472,000. Star magazine fell 10.3 percent, to 1.2 million, and the National Enquirer dropped 11.2 percent, to 891,000. OK! Weekly fared better, slipping 2.7 percent, to 910,000.
But sales of People, which only loosely fits the celebrity category, increased 2 percent, to almost 3.7 million, and even single-copy sales rose slightly. Its nearest competitor, Us Weekly, dropped 1.3 percent, to 1.9 million, despite a drop of more than 200,000 in single-copy sales.

News weeklies also were hard hit, but as Perez-Pena notes, some magazines did well. The Economist, The Week, People, and Domino all recorded gains (though Domino was closed in January).

But the bad news doesn't end there. Magazines have been in a death-match squabble with newsstand distribution companies as the distributors have tried to increase the money they get from publishers. And now they've taken their squabble to the American Thunderdome: the courts. Source Interlink, which tried to charge an extra 7 cents per copy to publishers (an action that sparked a revolt among publishers), has given up on the 7-cent extra charge but has decided to sue some distribution competitors and a number of publishers for allegedly conspiring against it; those being sued include Time Inc, Bauer Publications (the folks who bring you -- a dwindling number of you, apparently -- Life & Style and In Touch Weekly), and more.
Who will win? Will anybody win? Will 25-year-old straight guys get their copy of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition? Only time (and probably Time Inc.) will tell.

Magazine News: Writing off $25 billion at Time Warner

At the magazine I edit, I'm paring expenses to the tune of $600 off this photography budget, $1,200 off that production budget, $400 off the staff lunch budget. So I'm – what's the word?? – gobsmacked at the news that Time Warner is writing off $25 billion of the value of its new- and old-media properties. I could buy a lot of staff lunches with even just 10 percent of that.
Time Warner's new-media property is AOL, once a raging behemoth of popularizing the Internet revolution, but it soon turned into a big anchor around the neck of Ted Turner's fortune.
The old-media properties include Time, Sports Illustrated, Entertainment Weekly, and about a zillion more. Each has long been a leader in its respective market niche.
Despite the mind-boggling number of $25 billion, it's really indicative of the loss of value of many media properties, from Playboy's stock drop to Starlog's circulation plunge. And on and on.
It's getting very ugly out there. And my fear is this: Those laptop "experts" who spout off about what everyone else should do in their industry will use this to pound away at anyone they deem "out of touch" enough to still be in the print industry. The Atlantic web site even has someone predicting the end of the New York Time's print edition within the next few months.
There are a lot of people who think print is useless, but I think they're overplaying their hands, because there's still benefit to having a hard copy that one can read while sprawled on a couch and that is – to use a current term – persistent; it's there on the coffee table or next to the bed or wherever.
But my prediction is that they, and the people in financing who rely more on trends and crowd-mentality than on common sense and perception, will use the current recession/proto-depression to kill off as many magazines (and newspapers) as possible, unaware of what's being lost in terms of marketing tools, deep pockets for investigative reporting, and personal reader identification with the hard-copy "product."
I hope they are wrong. I hope they are ineffective. But short-sightedness tends to win out.
Anyone want to fund my awesome new magazine idea?