Magazine Roundup: Newsweek on the Block, Playboy Rebounds

As reported yesterday, Newsweek magazine is being put up for sale by its parent company, the Washington Post Co. OVer at Folio:, Jason Fell looks at possible buyers for the troubled newsweekly, including some intriguing possibilities (such as ultra-right-wing competitor Newsmax).

Meanwhile, things are looking better over at Playboy, where some dramatic cost-cutting and outsourcing over the past year and a half have seriously improved the financial picture. According to a report on Folio:,  the magazine's print/digital division losses for the first quarter of 2010 were about $1.1 million, less than one-third of the amount it lost for the same period last year. This follows an actual profit at the magazine in the final quarter of 2009.

According to Folio:, Playboy – which published two combined issues in the past year – is returning to publishing a full 12 issues a year.

It's Official: Ellie Awards Are Boring (for the 99% of Us with no Chance to Win)

Folio: has a nice column today by Jason Fell in which he clearly shares my views (here and here) that the Ellie Awards are a big party for any magazine with "yorker" or "geographic" in the title. Not so much for the rest of us. (I'm going to change the name of the magazine I'm planning to Condé Nast's Geographic Yorker. You'll love it. Really.)

The Ellies recognize excellence in various categories of magazine publishing. There are some new names in the nominees list each year, but it's a depressingly small percentage of the total. Considering the thousands of magazines being published, are we really to believe that only a handful achieve excellence? Even if we go by Sturgeon's Law that 95-percent of everything is crap, that still leaves many, many magazines that are clearly being overlooked.

Condé Nast CEO: No More Magazine Closures

Condé Nast President and CEO Chuck Townsend informed Folio:'s Jason Fell that yesterday's closure of Gourmet, Elegant Bride, Modern Bride, and Cookie are the last Condé Nast titles to fold.

The closures, which came about in the wake of a McKinsey & Co. report commissioned by Condé Nast, were reportedly made because those four titles had less long-term growth possibilities than other titles. (Without knowing the details, I don't know if that means they could be expected to be profitable, just not as profitable as other titles in the Condé stable -- and therefore it's really just a matter of highest and best use of company capital -- or whether the magazines were so unprofitable they were never expected to contribute positively to the bottom line in a consistent manner again. But I don't have Chuck Townsend's e-mail address, and Fell doesn't go into that, so I'll have to remain in the dark.)

Fell's article does have some interesting musing about other Condé Nast titles that are perceived to be weak -- but if Townsend is to be believed, they are going to continue to be published.

Stubborn Adherence to Ad Model Is Killing Magazines

In the April 2009, Jason Fell looked at why publishers are ceasing publication of successful magazines. In "Why Are Successful Magazines Folding?" Fell quotes some publishers -- such as my former boss, Hanley Wood's CEO, Frank Anton -- who stubbornly stick to the ad-driven model for magazines. For them, there are too many magazine pages seeking a limited number of ads, so their should be shrinkage in the magazine marketplace.

I was pleased, however, to see U. of Mississippi magazine expert Samir Husni give a deeper perspective: "The publishing model ... served us well since World War II, when we switched from a circulation-driven publishing model to an advertising-driven model." We now have magazines that devalue their content by practically giving away subscriptions, expecting to get a good rate base to charge advertisers. Hanley Wood, of course, publishes a lot of B2B titles, and they largely live in that world of ads-over-paying-circ.

But it's not the only way, and there are many magazines that survive by subscription and/or newsstand revenue. Put out a magazine that people actually want to receive, are willing to pay for, and it's one they're also more likely to stick with during down times because it has value to them. If Husni's correct, then since WWII, we've traded a solid long-term magazine model for one that is less dependable, puts readers and content at the whim of advertisers, and that delivers less value to the reader. Not sure that's progress.

Resurrected Magazines

Jason Fell blogs over at Folio: about magazines that died, only to be brought back to life. No, this resurrection story is not an update on my post yesterday about Christian magazines. It's about some mostly small magazines that scrounged up new financing and relaunched their print editions.

Longtime reader(s) of this blog know my favored candidate for resurrection, and my not-favored candidates. But none of that really matters. I'm sure we'll just see another %$@* revival of Radar: The Magazine the Marketplace Could not Kill.