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Magazines

Intro

By the Project for Excellence in Journalism

The change signaled by the biggest news magazines as they headed into 2007 has begun, but it will require more time to judge whether it represents genuine change or just a pause along the way of decline.

The two leaders, Time and Newsweek, both took what they called bold steps in 2007. Time made good on its announcement to change its publication date and cut its circulation numbers to draw in more advertisers and move more of its news online. Newsweek quietly did the same. Time overhauled its Web site and print product. Again, Newsweek forged ahead, breaking away from MSBC.com, and calling its print changes “refinement more than a revolution.”

But an examination of the content in those magazines shows relatively little change so far. And 2007 numbers only show more of the declines in ad pages and drops in circulation that have marked the industry for the past decade.

The strategies may take some time to yield results. But, meanwhile, competition continues to grow in the form of an expanding online media and even print magazines, such as The Week, that are grabbing readers.

How low will the circulation numbers fall? How many times can a magazine and Web site be redesigned? The two dominant players may have to reassess their experimental efforts to keep both advertisers and readers.

For U.S. News & World Report, nothing ventured turned out to be nothing lost. The No. 3 news magazine continues to stand apart from its rivals in holding steady on its circulation strategy and bypassing a softening and broadening of coverage in favor of national and international affairs. Its revenue numbers are moving slowly, but in the right direction.

Two alternative newsweekly rivals, The Week and The Economist, attracted more advertisers and readers in 2007 and look to grow that already healthy readership. The Week does it by replaying material from others, The Economist with an elite analysis of the week’s news and larger trends, reminiscent of an old Time magazine.

We may be witnessing in news magazines what we have seen in other industries such as automobiles: A world with more competitors, with different approaches and styles, creating a pie with more even-sized slices.

Content Analysis

By the Project for Excellence in Journalism

As readers have drifted away, the content of newsweekly magazines over the years has changed as well.

The most basic shift, measured in data kept for advertisers, has been a gradual move away from traditional “front of the book” hard news toward a broader topic base.¹ Editors also argue the magazines have moved more toward analysis and interpretation and away from a digest of the week past. In varying degrees, they have also turned to writers from opinion publications like the New Republic and the Washington Monthly to fill their rosters.

Until now, that process has been largely incremental, something done with an eye to not alienating existing audiences and usually without grand or far-reaching proclamations about redefining the news magazine genre. But 2007 has seen more concrete changes. U.S. News is now more akin to Consumer Reports, focusing more on “news you can use,” and Time is becoming more like The Atlantic, moving toward analysis and interpretation.

The evidence at the end of 2007 suggests we are only at the start of wherever that journey will lead.

In 2006, Time announced what sounded like a radical change. It promised to overhaul its magazine and Web site and change its delivery date from Monday to Friday.

As Time described it, the moves included contracting with more columnists and using the Web site to stay more on top of the news in the time of the 24-hour news cycle. Time’s new Web site was to be “a different Time.com,” its managing editor, Richard Stengel, wrote, “a sharp, dynamic, constantly updated news site.” ² The redesigned magazine would have more voices and generally shorter pieces, an approach that moved away from Time’s omniscient writing approach of the past. “Henry Luce may be rolling over in his grave over this,” Stengel told the New York Times. “But it had outlasted its usefulness.” ³

After offering little in the way of response, in October 2007 Newsweek also declared it was redesigning its Web site and print magazine. The changes in the print magazine were billed as more subtle – “refinement more than a revolution,” Newsweek’s editor, Jon Meacham, wrote in an editor’s note – but the goal, in theory, according to the magazine, was longer stories. Like Time’s redesign, Newsweek’s also created more space in the print edition for reader e-mails and letters. (For more details, see Online Trends.)

U.S. News, the regular third-place finisher in the three-magazine race, watched and waited.

What have the changes brought?

It is too early to say for certain. Time’s redesigned book hit the newsstands on March 26. Newsweek’s did not make its debut until October 15.

It will take some time to see if the promises of change are realized and have any long-term impact on content. But here is what a qualitative and quantitative accounting shows.

Inside the Magazines

The most basic data on news magazine content is derived from Hall’s Media Research, which goes through magazines page by page for each issue to determine what topics are receiving coverage.

In previous years, the Hall’s data had shown two clear trends. First, Time and Newsweek over the years have broadened and lightened the range of topics they covered. There was less coverage of national government news as well as fewer high-culture book reviews or media analyses. In their place were interviews with Bill Gates and the comedian Dave Chapelle and a story on, say, Microsoft’s latest game box. In effect, they had shifted from being traditional newsweeklies to general interest magazines that cover news. U.S. News & World Report, in contrast, has retained a heavier orientation to traditional topics of national and international affairs and less focus on lifestyle or “back of the book” coverage.⁴

The second general finding was the extent to which Time and Newsweek covered the same topics week to week. As national affairs coverage dropped in 2005, for instance, culture news went from 11% to 15%, health and medical science and international news were up 2 percentage points, to 10% and 17% of all pages, respectively. And business pages and entertainment and celebrity both grew to 9% each.

What do the data show for 2007? Only Time made its changes early enough in the year to expect any real difference. According to the basic accounting of topics, however, the subject matter of the magazine had not changed. Through August, Time devoted virtually the identical amount of space to subjects as it did in 2006, before the redesign.

That means the slight differences in topic in Newsweek, and more substantial ones from U.S. News, also continued to hold true. Time continued to have slightly more coverage of foreign affairs than Newsweek (or U.S. News) and slightly less of national affairs. But otherwise the two publications cover roughly similar subject matter in similar degree.

Newshole by Topic at Time, Newsweek, U.S. News

News Magazine Topics, 1980-2007

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Hall's Media Research, unpublished data 2007 data from January-August for magazines studied by PEJ (see sidebar in Audience for details)

U.S. News & World Report continued to stand in contrast to its rivals. Just 2.8% of its newshole was devoted to celebrity/entertainment, travel and leisure, home and gardening, lifestyle.⁵ That compares with 17.3% at Time and 13.1% at Newsweek.

On the other hand, 57.3% of U.S. News’ coverage was devoted to national, international and business coverage, compared with 51.2% for Time and 48.9% for Newsweek.

And 18.9% of its space was devoted to consumer-oriented pieces — that is, health and personal finance -- compared with 7.2% at Time and 11.2% at Newsweek.

Another indicator of the content and personality of the newsweeklies is how they sell themselves to the public: What is on their covers?

The cover pictures and text not only tell readers what is inside, but they also set a tone and evoke a personality. What is the image and message they want their audience to take away from a quick look – including on a newsstand surrounded by many other possible purchases?

Looking at content through this approach – 46 magazine covers between January and the end of November – Time and Newsweek were selling slightly different content. Time leaned somewhat more heavily toward national, military and foreign affairs than Newsweek, and somewhat less toward health and lifestyle than U.S. News.

At Time, 20 of those 46 covers (or 43%) were about national affairs, compared with 15 at Newsweek (33%) and 10 at U.S. News (22%). Four covers (9%) were about military or international affairs (compared to three at Newsweek and two at U.S. News).

U.S. News, with 34%, was most likely to feature topics specific to lifestyle or health on its cover; Newsweek and Time followed at 15% and 11%, respectively.

Cover Story Topics in Time and Newsweek, 2007

Design Your Own Chart

Source: PEJ Research

.But reading the magazines, rather than just looking at the covers, we sense a more subtle difference. By our reckoning, following its redesign, the new Time magazine tended to be more conceptual in its approach, using issues in the news to get at concepts, while Newsweek seemed more simply topical.

Consider, for instance, the way both magazines approached global warming coverage in 2007. Each devoted two covers to the issue.

The two feature articles in Newsweek looked at two facets of the global warming debate. “The Green Giant” was a celebrity political piece about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s effect on the climate change debate both substantively in what he has done as California governor as well as to change the image of environmentalism.⁶ The second article, “Global Warming Is Hoax,*” is a straightforward description of how the various groups that say that global warming is not scientifically proven fact have organized and managed to influence the debate around the issue.⁷

Time ran two covers that featured global warming as an issue, as well. One was a “news you can use” cover, “The Global Warming Survival Guide.” Featured with this cover were two other articles on global warming that looked at the various ways to try and fix the problem.⁸ The other cover featured a story entitled “Fight for the Top of the World.” This article tried to connect global warming to a larger subject rather than focusing on a single aspect. It put global warming in the complex context of international affairs and a looming battle for resources, using the Arctic as a case study.

“But now that global warming has rendered the Arctic more accessible than ever – and yet at the same time more fragile – a new frenzy has broken out for control of the trade routes at the top of the world and the riches that nations hope and believe may lie beneath the ice. Just as 150 years ago, when Russia and Britain fought for control of central Asia, it is tempting to think that – not on the steppe or dusty mountains but in the icy wastes of the frozen north – a new Great Game is afoot.” ⁹

This conceptual approach could be seen in other pieces during the year as well. Time took several stories that were not really in the nation’s headlines – things like national service for youth and the Democratic Party’s handling of religion – and turned them into national affairs cover stories. The national service cover, moreover, was championing an issue, not just talking about it.

By year’s end, it was less certain whether Newsweek’s changes were a new approach or amounted more to a redesign and response to Time. “It was stealth redesign,” editor Meacham told the New York Post.¹⁰

What is clear is that Time is making a point of announcing that it is trying something dramatic. That involves raising expectations, but it also implies that the editors have a bold vision. Newsweek has downplayed its moves, which may give it more room to maneuver but also risks suggesting that there is less of a plan.

The New Yorker

Hall’s data also track one of what might be considered an alternative to the newsweeklies, the New Yorker. As we have seen in past years, the New Yorker’s topic range varies in different years. During election years, coverage of national affairs grows

In the non-election year of 2007, despite substantial coverage of the campaign in the media generally, the pattern held. National affairs made up 7.2% of the space in the magazine, down slightly from 12.2% of the magazine's pages in 2006.

New Yorker Magazine Topics

2004-2007

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Hall's Media Research, unpublished data Topic areas defined by Halls Media Research

This might be somewhat surprising. A new Congress should have given the magazine a lot of opportunities to deal in its stock and trade – the personality profile. Through the election and all of 2007, however, a piece on new Speaker Nancy Pelosi had not been done. The magazine had already profiled new Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in 2005. Much of the coverage of the new Congress was up front in the magazine’s shorter “News and Comment” column. The prominently placed column by Rick Hertzberg, offering analysis of current events, is a seen by many as a signature product of the New Yorker.

Where did the space go? Some of it went to business coverage, which rose from 2.3% to 3.9%. The magazine’s culture coverage, a staple of the New Yorker, also grew from 22.6% to 25.5%

Footnotes

1. PEJ annual State of the News Media reports, 2004-2007.

2. Richard Stengel, “A Changing TIME,” Time, January 6, 2007.

3. Katharine Q. Seelye. “With Redesign of Time, Sentences Run Forward,” the New York Times, March 12, 2007: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/ 12/business/media/12time.html.

4. Hall's Report, January 2007-December 2007

5. This figure includes fashion/food/beauty

6. Karen Breslau. “The Green Giant,” Newsweek, April 16, 2007.

7. Sharon Begley. “The Truth About Denial,” Newsweek, April 16, 2007.

8. Mark Hertsgaard. “The Global Warming Survival Guide” and “On the Front Lines of Climate Change,” Time Magazine, April 9, 2007.

9. Jeff Graff. “Fight for the Top of the World,” Time Magazine, October 1, 2007.

10. Keith J. Kelly. “Newsweek Gets a New Look in Print, on Web,” the New York Post, October 13, 2007.

Audience

By the Project for Excellence in Journalism In November of 2006, Time magazine promised to trim its advertising rate base – the amount of paid circulation its promises advertisers. While it seems like a promise that would work against a news outlet, the strategy is becoming more common at newsweeklies. Ad rates — the set fee advertisers agree to pay — are based on a promised circulation number for each issue. If a magazine promises too much, it has to spend money in discounted subscription pricing and heavy promotion to get to the promised number. When the give-away numbers get high enough, the magazine loses money over all. Time’s plan was to cut its circulation number from 4 million to 3.25 million in 2007, making its subscriber list more exclusive, more devoted to the magazine and, it hoped, more attractive to advertisers. How did Time fare in reducing its reader base in 2007? It did not take long for the dominant news magazine to keep its promise and for the cuts to manifest themselves in an actual circulation drop. The last issue in December 2006 had a paid and verified circulation of 4 million. The first issue in January 2007 had a paid and verified print circulation of 3.4 million. The suddenness of the change suggests how easy it was for Time to lop 600,000 in circulation off its guarantee to advertisers. That only hints at how much work, and money, Time might be spending in circulation promotions and discounts to live up to those guarantees. The ease with which the magazine dropped almost a seventh of its audience raises the question of where the loyal base circulation number is for Time – as well as for its closest competitors, Newsweek and U.S. News and World Report. Newsweek did little at first. Its only official announcement was it would not be making any changes. But in November 2007, without much fanfare, it quietly slashed its rate base as well, down to 2.6 million from 3.1 million – a cut of 500,000 readers. That represented a 16% drop. U.S. News and World Report, for the time being, has decided to hold steady. Newsweek’s move was so quiet that at first the magazine did not acknowledge that it was making the cut, but advertisers confirmed in the trade press that Newsweek had informed them about it. The magazine still has not discussed the move publicly. Certainly, however, Time’s cuts gave it room to remove costly circulation while remaining a clear No. 2. By the end of 2007, it appeared that Time and Newsweek circulation numbers had played out as planned. According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations report for 2007, Time’s circulation held steady at 3.4 million after its initial cut. Similarly, Newsweek’s November rate base cut kept circulation at 3.1 million at year’s end. U.S. News and World Report’s circulation remained essentially flat, as it has over the past three years, hovering around its rate base mark of 2 million (2.038 million, from 2.036 million in 2006). The robust growth seen by the other weeklies in 2006 more or less continued. The Week added 36,000 readers, finishing with 480,084 in circulation, but its growth has slowed somewhat – in 2006, the weekly gained more than 75,000 readers. The Economist grew circulation by 81,000 to 720,882. In 2006, it added 70,000 to end with a circulation of 639,205. Jet’s circulation of 943,702 was up 42,000 from the 2006 total of 901,594. The New Yorker, which hit an all-time circulation high in 2006 with 1.067 million, held on with only a fractional drop in 2007, to 1.062 million. The Atlantic, which in 2007 cut back publication from monthly to 10 times a year, increased circulation to 431,625 from 404,688 in 2006, up almost 27,000. What we have seen since the beginning of this report is a struggle by the big news magazines – particularly Times and Newsweek -- to hold onto readers. In 2007, readers deserted again. The question is how much lower do the magazines let those numbers fall?.1 The answer isn’t clear, but one thing is – the magazine landscape is still shifting. Who are the Readers In 2007 the audience of news magazines held its age but got richer. The median age for readers of the seven news magazines we examine (see Sidebar) was 46.3 years old, according to reader surveys by Mediamark Research. That ties the all-time high set in 2005. In 1995, the median age of readers was 41.1. The climb to 46.3 is a steep increase in just 13 years. And news magazine readers would actually trend older if it were not for Jet, targeted at African American readers, and The Economist, with their younger readership, holding the number down. The population over all, however, has aged at even faster rates than magazines. Thus, the gap between the ages of magazine readers and the general adult population was not as wide as it was in 2005. Average Age of News Magazine Readers Compared to U.S. Population, 1995-2007 Design Your Own Chart Source: MediaMark Research, "Magazine Audience Estimates"

The flip side is the relative affluence of news magazine readers, which also has been rising steadily. The median income of readers of the magazines we study is $71,612, a step above last year’s $70,409. That is also substantially more than the average income of all magazine readers in a Mediamark Research sample, which was $53,593.

Even better for magazines, the audience is getting richer faster than Americans over all. Since 1995, the median income of magazine readers has climbed more than 55%. That is slightly higher rate of increase than the 48% growth in the median income for the U.S. population in general.

Over all, more men than women read the seven news magazines we study, with The Economist and Jet at the two ends of the spectrum.

Of Economist readers, men (1.14 million) outnumber women (586,000) nearly 2 to 1, according to Mediamark Research numbers, with the median age for men at 38.7 and for women at 43.6. The Economist also is the only magazine we look at with female readers ($100,025) earning nearly as much as men ($101,771).

Jet, on the other hand, is the only magazine we study with more female readers than men -- 4.9 million vs. 3.2 million. The median age of men and women, at 40, is virtually identical and, as with most other magazines, male readers have higher incomes -- $43,901 to women’s $37,895.

Average Income of News Magazine Readers

Compared to U.S. Population, 1995-2007

Design Your Own Chart

Source: MediaMark Research, "Magazine Audience Estimates"

Across the board, income figures are again boosted by a few key magazines with readers in much higher income brackets – The Atlantic and, particularly, the Economist, which has a median income that rises into six figures.

The big three newsweeklies are all bunched relatively close together in Mediamark’s age and income data. Time’s average readership age of 45.8 is slightly younger than that of Newsweek (46.9) and U.S. News (48.8). Newsweek’s readers, meanwhile, are a tad wealthier, with a median income of $69,100 – Time’s is $67,284 and U.S. News’ is $64,288.

Median Age of Readers by Magazine

1995-2007

Design Your Own Chart

Source: MediaMark Research, "Magazine Audience Estimates"

Median Income of Readers by Magazine

1995-2007

Design Your Own Chart

Source: MediaMark Research, "Magazine Audience Estimates"

The New Yorker and The Atlantic sit above the big three newsweeklies in both median age and income. The median income of the New Yorker’s readership is $78,815 and the Atlantic’s is $80,012. The Atlantic has the oldest readership of all the news magazines we look at, with a median age of 51.4 years. The New Yorker’s median age is 50.4 years.

The Atlantic saw some worrisome numbers in 2007 – its median reader income fell from $83,984 and its median age rose slightly from 50.3 years. The magazine did make some changes in late 2007. It quietly cut the number of issues it publishes from 12 to 10 a year, and, accordingly, dropped the Monthly from its name in December. It also is searching for a new publisher to replace Elizabeth Baker Keffer.

The Economist, again, is the exception in the reader survey data. Other than Jet, it is the magazine with the youngest readership that we examine, with a median age of 41, but it also has the highest median income at $101,221.

Those numbers, combined with The Economist’s growing circulation figures, make the magazine a growing and seemingly formidable challenger to the dominant news magazines.²

How We Choose the Magazines We Study

The magazine categories identified here were devised by the Project using Mediamark Research categories as a starting point. Mediamark, a company that studies magazine audiences, places every magazine it studies into a category. Some magazines occupy several categories at once. Newsweek, for instance, is classified as a “news publication” but also under “general interest.” In such cases PEJ picked the most appropriate category.

In some cases, such as The Economist, which Mediamark classified as a “business & finance” publication, PEJ disagreed. We classified The Economist, which calls itself “a weekly news and business publication,” as a news magazine.

We created a news category based largely on Mediamark groupings of news magazines, which includes Time, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report and The Week, as well as The Economist, The Atlantic, the New Yorker, National Journal and Jet.

The category we have created here is broad, and some readers might object to a “news” category that contains some publications not normally considered news magazines, such as the New Yorker, Jet and The Atlantic. There are two primary reasons for this broader definition.

First, the news environment has changed and grown in recent decades (with the arrival of 24-hour cable television networks and the Internet, to name just two changes). As a result we believe readers have reached beyond the traditional magazines for news. Broadening the “news” category lets us consider that phenomenon.

Second, our source of data for ad pages and revenues, the Publishers Information Bureau, has a limited number of traditional “news” magazines on which it collects data. The major news-and-opinion journals, such as the New Republic and National Review, do not list with the Publishers Information Bureau. We thought it was only right to make “news” a bit more comprehensive. Without broadening the “news” category, the number of magazines in the group would have been extremely small and narrowly focused.

Footnotes

1. All circulation numbers from the Audit Bureau of Circulations

2. Mediamark Research, “Magazine Audience Estimates” 2007.

Economics

By the Project for Excellence in Journalism

Magazines publishers looking for good news on the advertising front did not find it. For the most part, advertisers and readers continued to fall away in 2007.

Over all, in the 250 magazines analyzed by the Publishers Information Bureau, ad pages were down slightly -- .6% -- in 2007, compared to a tenth of a percent drop in 2006.

Three news magazines -- The Economist, The Week and the New Yorker -- managed to buck the downward trend, adding pages and revenue, while blending focus on both their print and online products.

The most closely watched news magazine experiment in 2007 has so far failed to produce hoped-for results. In an attempt to stem ad revenue and circulation losses, leaders Time and Newsweek slashed their rate cards and made over their looks. Yet early signs show the decline in ad dollars continues for both.

With worsening economic indicators and the slow exodus of readers and advertisers, turning around the dispiriting pattern that started in 2005 for magazines as a whole seems more and more unlikely.

News Magazine Ad Pages

Over all, of the nine news magazine we examine, ad pages were down 1%, as were ad dollars, by nearly 5 percent. A closer analysis reveals some individual successes among more niche publications.¹

All three of the big newsweeklies lost ad pages in 2007.

At Time, ad pages fell 6.9% and ad dollars 18.3% and Newsweek saw a 6.7% drop in ad pages with a 1.8% decline in ad dollars, numbers that put both magazines precariously close to previous lows in 1990 and 2001, respectively.

U.S. News and World Report was not far behind, with a 4.6% drop in ad pages and a small -- 1% -- increase in ad dollars.

Time and Newsweek, which have experienced especially hard times with double-digit percentage declines in 2005 and a relatively flat 2006, took steps in late 2007 to try to change direction.

First, both magazines initiated major redesigns, with Time putting its efforts into an online and print overhaul.

Both magazines slashed their ad rates, which are based on promised circulation. With some fanfare, Time cut its circulation by 600,000. Late in December, Newsweek quietly followed with a cut of 500,000. It is too early to tell if the lower rate bases will draw advertising back.

Will Time and Newsweek give up on their circulation strategy? It is unclear how the leaders will adapt if ad pages continue to fall away and dollars move into Web-based media.

Three of the six other news magazines we analyze fared better.

The Economist and The Week – both benefiting from sizable circulation increases -- continued to add advertisers. At The Economist, which has made no secret of its intentions to hit 1 million in U.S. circulation, ad pages grew by 8.5%, with a 24% increase in ad dollars.

The Week continued its success with a 5.3% increase in ad pages and a 15.8% jump in ad dollars.

A change in publisher at the New Yorker three years ago appears to have helped the magazine get back on its feet after a rocky 2006. Heading into 2008, it is on a path toward aligning its growing readership with ad revenue.

Louis Cona, the former publisher at Vanity Fair, took over at the New Yorker after the departure of a highly successful leader, David Carey, in 2005. The following year was an especially rough one, with an ad page drop-off of 13%. But Cona may just have needed some time to settle in. In 2007, the New Yorker increased its ad pages 4% and ad dollars 10.6%.

The National Journal saw minuscule improvements, with ad pages growing by 0.1 percent and ad dollars by 5.8 percent. So far, at least, there is no discernible effect from its 2007 partnership with NBC News to field “mobile campaign bureaus” to cover the Presidential candidates, a move aimed at broadening its online and broadcast exposure.

Following flat numbers in 2006, Jet posted a bigger loss in 2007, with ad pages falling 4.8% and ad dollars dropping 4.6%.

At The Atlantic, where much effort has gone into building a livelier Web site, the number of ad pages barely budged from 2006, with a 1% drop. The magazine saw more ad dollars come in, though the rate slowed; in 2006, ad dollars went up 16.6%, but in 2007, the increase was only at 7.9%.

As part of its online focus, the Atlantic is hiring more ad sellers and announced in 2008 it will drop Web subscriptions and open up its site for free. The goal: More traffic and more advertisers.

Over all, these wide-ranging strategies -- individual magazines tinkering with online identities and rethinking their established print brands -- suggest the industry is still piecing together the ad revenue puzzle.²

Footnotes

1. While the ad dollar and ad pages figures will be discussed in this chapter, the ad pages are the more concrete figures that indicate financial health of a magazine. The total dollar figure is calculated by multiplying the rate given on the rate card by each publication by the number of ad pages. This is an inaccurate representation of actual ad revenue because advertisers rarely, if ever, pay the rate given on the rate-card. Therefore, it must be noted that experts in the industry say that actual revenue is often half what the ad dollars are reported to be.

2. All ad revenue and ad page data from Publishers Information Bureau report January 2007-December 2007 vs. 2006.

Ownership By the Project for Excellence in Journalism After five years of buying and selling by the industry’s biggest players, the landscape of magazine ownership is no longer dominated by giant Time Warner. The field is now more evenly split among three big companies – Time Warner, Advance and Hearst – each with more than $2 billion in annual magazine revenue. No other company has even $1 billion. As recently as 2002, Time Warner towered over the industry, with annual magazine revenues of roughly $4.8 billion. It was more than double the size of Hearst, with about $2.2 billion. Advance was third at less than $2 billion. Now, Time Warner finds itself in a virtual tie with Advance – both had roughly $3.6 billion in magazine revenues in 2006. Hearst has climbed slightly above $2 billion. The moves are due to both a decline at Time Warner, at least in part the result of conscious choices, and growth at Advance and Hearst. Time Warner The percentage of revenues Time Warner draws from magazines may fall even more in the coming years. Over the past two years, the company pruned from its portfolio several of its weaker performing magazines aimed at smaller audiences. It focused its future instead on bigger magazines and new Web site audiences. Total Revenues of the Three Biggest Magazine Publishers, 2002-2006 2002-2006 \ Design Your Own Chart Source: Ad Age, Top Ten Magazine Companies

In 2006, it closed Teen People and Family Circle in the United Kingdom and folded its magazine for teenaged boys, YM, into Teen Vogue. It also announced plans to sell 18 magazines, including Parenting, Popular Science and Field & Stream. In 2007, Time Warner completed that sale – the group of publications went to the Scandinavian company Bonnier for $300 million – and closed two more magazines -- Life, which it had reincarnated as a newspaper insert in 2004, and Business 2.0.

The company held onto its largest earners, mass-market magazine brands such as People, Sports Illustrated and Time. Not only do they bring in more print ad dollars, but as CEO Ann Moore sees it, the bigger magazines are also more likely to find financial success online. As ad dollars continue to disappear for print products, the company has hopes that mass-audience Web sites can make up for some of that loss. ¹

Advance

A different strategy seems to have paid off for Advance, the company that owns a wide range of magazines, including the New Yorker and Vanity Fair, as well as Parade, the lucrative and largest Sunday newspaper supplement. As Time Warner began divesting, Advance added magazines in strategic younger markets and saw its revenues grow. Among the major niche publications added were Modern Bride in 2002 and YM in 2004. The industry-wide slowdown in ads over the past three years has not affected the company, which is seeing some of its better-known publications – such as Vogue and Vanity Fair – thrive.

And even as the business magazine field was suffering, Advance went forward in April 2007 with the high-profile (and, at $100 million, expensive) launch of the business monthly Conde Nast Portfolio.

Advance did have one death in the family. In November 2007 the company announced the closing of venerable House & Garden – for the second time in 106 years – saying the magazine was “no longer a viable business investment for the company.” But there immediately was talk of taking House & Garden’s high-end, high-style approach to interior design to its new Vogue Living, scheduled to make its debut in 2008 after two test issues in 2007.

Hearst, in third place among the magazine companies by revenue, maintained its low profile of recent years. It last launched a new magazine in 2004, Shop Etc. , which folded in 2006. In 2003, it bought Seventeen and launched Town & Country Travel and the now-defunct Lifetime magazine as a joint venture with Disney. Since then, much of the company’s energy has been focused on purchasing online properties, such as handbag.com, ecrush (a youth networking site) and caboodle (a shopping community).

Others Owners

Beyond the big three owners, the magazine field is strikingly different than other media sectors.

Rather than media conglomerates, many of the bigger players are companies that specialize in magazines. Other than Time Warner, the top 10 companies in the sector all derive the largest share of their revenue from magazines. And most of these magazines are aimed at niche audiences with specialized advertisers. After the top three companies, none of the top 25 media conglomerates in the country have substantial magazine holdings.

Magazine Revenue of Top 10 Companies, 2006

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Ad Age, Chart: Top 25 Magazine Companies

Newsweekly Owners

The year was quieter among the owners of the newsweeklies (other than Time). Two transactions stood out: The Washington Post, owner of Newsweek, ended its content relationship with MSNBC. And, Dennis Publishing, owner of The Week, sold off all its holdings except its growing weekly news digest.

Over all, the trend toward smaller owners in magazines is doubly true for news magazines. Other than Time, none of the big three news magazines is owned by a media conglomerate. The other two big players in the market, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report, are owned by the 28th- and 62nd-largest media companies respectively – the Washington Post Company and Zuckerman Properties. And even in the smaller universe of magazine owners, the Post and Zuckerman are not among the biggest.

The Washington Post Company generates roughly 38% of its revenues from newspapers, 16% from television and 15% from magazines. Much of the magazine revenue comes from Newsweek, but it also owns newsweeklies in Russia and Greece.

After a rough 2006, when revenues fell 4%, the company had a relatively quiet 2007, neither making major purchases nor sales. Instead, the company focused its attention and resources on a redesign of its centerpiece, Newsweek, and plunged more deeply into the Web. Newsweek’s separation from MSNBC also gives it more control over its own Web site content and ads (See Online Chapter ).

The Washington Post Company did see an 11% increase in online revenue in 2007 – up to $27.2 million from $24.5 in the third quarter of 2006. But those numbers lag behind those of its major competitors, namely the New York Times Company, which saw third- quarter numbers near $80 million.

Donald Graham, CEO and chairman of the Post Company, sees the Web as critical to the newspaper’s survival. “ If Internet advertising revenues don't continue to grow fast,” he told Fortune,. “I think the future of the newspaper business will be very challenging. The Web site simply has to come through.” Judging by the moves made with Newsweek, he seems to believe improving the magazine’s Web traffic and ad revenues also are key.

Zuckerman Properties also had a quiet year with its lone magazine, U.S. News & World Report. After major cutbacks a year earlier, its owner, Mortimer Zuckerman, avoided headlines in 2007. U.S. News revenues grew in 2006 to $254 million, up from $246 million in 2005 – an increase of a little over 3%. The company is not among the top 20 in magazine revenues.

The Week Goes Solo:

The year 2007 was not so quiet at the fourth, and newest, name in the U.S. newsweekly business. Briton Felix Dennis made news in 2007 by divesting three of the magazines that made his Dennis Publishing famous. Dennis, who breathed new life into the male magazine market with “lad” magazines, featuring scantily clad starlets, decided it was time to bid farewell to Maxim, Stuff and Blender and their decreasing circulations. He sold the magazines to Quadrangle Partners, a private investment group, for $250 million.

With the sales, a company poised to become a major force in the magazine world has disappeared from the top-20 list.

The one magazine Dennis held onto: The weekly news aggregator and summarizer, The Week.

The divestiture apparently allows Dennis to focus more intently on the multi-platform magazine he calls “my baby.” The Week has proved to be a cash cow with very low productions costs (a small staff and no outside bureaus). The magazine’s Web site was updated (See Online Section) to focus more on daily headlines with new stories every day – a move that makes creating content more labor intensive.

“The Week is going to be a huge global brand,” Dennis said in an article that appeared in the New York Times. “Cross my heart and hope to die, I have already been offered hundreds of millions of dollars for it. I will throw The Week onto no pile until it becomes a half a billion or billion-dollar franchise.” ²

The sale of the “lad” magazines has two meanings within the world of magazine ownership.

First, a company that was growing to become a major force in that world has disappeared from the list of biggest magazine owners. The Week may be doing well, but the company lost a lot of revenue streams when it dumped its other magazines.

Second, it shows that at least one owner sees the long-moribund news magazine field as a potential big money-maker, if only from the ultimate sale of the property.

Footnotes

1. Wall Street Journal, September 13, 2006.

2. “A Magazine Challenges the Big Boys,” David Carr, the New York Times, November 26, 2007.

News Investment By the Project for Excellence in Journalism The trend lines at the two biggest news magazines in recent years have traced different paths. The newsgathering resources at Time have been shrinking. Newsweek, the smaller of the two, has bounced up and down. In 2007, those trends continued. Time made further cuts, reducing its staffing to new lows and replacing those people with high-profile opinion columnists, and shifting resources to the Web. Newsweek, although it is harder to gauge, appears to be holding steady and making fewer changes in personnel. U.S. News and World Report, stable for the past two years, saw a marked drop in 2007. All this stands in contrast to a fourth entrant in the newsweekly competition. The Week, a digest of accounts from other news sources, has editors but no reporters. It is built on the implicit notion that the news is now a commodity in such large supply that distilling it, rather than gathering it, is the key task. Using the same measures we use for Time and Newsweek (counting staff box personnel that are involved in the week-to-week editorial production), The Week’s staff count would be 20. And that’s a deliberate move on the part of its publisher, Felix Dennis. “The American magazine industry has been massively overstaffed for years,” Dennis told the New York Times. “It is one of the most inefficient industries in the history of the world. And you know what? The chickens are coming home to roost.”.1 The biggest question heading into 2008 for news magazines is what is the relative value of reporting, distillation and analysis and commentary? And what role in those three tasks does a fee-based print magazine play vs. its free companion online? Staffing at Time and Newsweek As a part of a steady decline since 1983, the first year for which PEJ has data, total staff at Time in 2007 dropped below 200 for the first time. Over all, its staff box included 181 people who put out the magazine week to week. That is down 20% from the 2006 figure of 226. That is a particularly steep decline compared with previous years, which mostly saw drops of around 10%. The biggest hits came in correspondents, which dropped to 31 from 48. The number of staff writers and senior writers each fell by four. The figures did not come as shock to anyone who follows the industry. The magazine had announced it would eliminate 50 jobs across the business and editorial departments and close some bureaus, as it took a new approach to its content: analysis in the printed magazine and coverage of events on the Web site. The numbers by this count come in under that. News Magazine Staff Size Over Time Time and Newsweek Select Years, 1983-2007 Design Your Own Chart Source: Project for Excellence in Journalism, from magazine staff boxes And, according to the staff counts, the magazine indeed augmented its commitment to its Web site. The number of people listed as working for Time.com doubled, from seven to 14. At Newsweek, tracking staff is even more complicated. The last staff box to appear in the magazine was in the June 4 edition, and, since that is the only reliable way to track news staff changes at the magazine, it is difficult to get a clear picture of where the publication was headed as of the end of 2007. The June figures suggest a small increase of three people. That followed a steep decline in 2006 after two years of modest increases. Wherever the magazine may be heading into 2008, the up-and-down numbers suggest that it is relatively close to the staffing level it wants to maintain. The longer-term trend shows a bumping along between a staff of 176 and 168 over the past five years. It is also noteworthy that unlike Time, Newsweek does not separate out its Web site staff. Other than a managing editor, Newsweek does not yet list any employees of Newsweek.com, which, although based in New York, is part of Washington Post Newsweek Interactive (www.wpni.com), with offices in Arlington, Va. It is worth watching, once Newsweek again publishes a staff box, whether it decides to reflect the 2007 redesign of its Web site. U.S. News, according to figures supplied by the magazine, saw its editorial staff fall to 168, down by 20 from 2006. Correspondents and Bureaus One major change over the past year lies in the number of correspondents Time and Newsweek place in bureaus. For the first time since this report has tracked staffing at the two magazines, Newsweek’s staff accounting lists more people in its bureaus than Time – and by a fairly sizable margin, 44 vs. 31 – at least as of June 2007. For all other years that PEJ has data, except 1993, Time’s bureau staff outnumbered Newsweek’s. In 2006, the two were fairly close, with Time having 48 staffers in its bureaus to Newsweek’s 42. Time’s cuts came through both a reduction in bureaus ( see below) and a reduction in the number of staff in those bureaus. For instance, the magazine cut by one its staff in its Hong Kong and Beijing offices. Number of Correspondents in Bureaus Over Time Time and Newsweek Select Years, 1983-2007 Design Your Own Chart Source: Project for Excellence in Journalism, from magazine staff boxes

Time also shuttered offices in Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles and San Francisco. The closing of domestic bureaus resulted in 13 fewer staffers in 2007, a reduction of almost 30%.

At Newsweek, bureau staff climbed to 44 from 42, and with one noticeable addition – the creation of a bureau in Cape Town, South Africa.

The location of the bureaus, however, suggests something more nuanced than simply cutbacks. Time, at least at the moment, is more international.

News Magazine Bureaus Over Time

Time and Newsweek Select Years, 1983-2007

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Project for Excellence in Journalism, from magazine staff boxes

Newsweek has one more bureau over all, with 18 compared to Time’s 17. But as of December 2007, Time had 14 bureaus internationally to Newsweek’s 11. Time also has fewer domestic bureaus (three to Newsweek’s seven). In particular, Time was alone in having bureaus in three countries: India, Germany and Egypt.

It is unclear as yet whether this bigger global footprint is part of Time’s new strategy or the vestiges of a once-extensive bureau network. As the magazine goes forward with its online focus, this question may be answered.

Contributors

News magazines can use the Contributors or Contributing Editors listed in their staff boxes in different ways. Sometimes magazines use the category as a way to bring in celebrity names (well-known journalists, professors, doctors, etc.), who add cachet to the magazine’s reputation and write occasionally. Contributors also might be former staffers who, whatever the reasons for their departures, may still contribute pieces from time to time.

Time and Newsweek had tended toward different approaches.

Time primarily had tapped well-known outsiders. Newsweek leaned toward former staffers. Following Time’s staff cuts in 2007, that began to change.

Newsmagazine Contributors Over Time

Time and Newsweek Select Years, 1983-2007

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Project for Excellence in Journalism, from magazine staff boxes

The number of contributors for Time grew by five to 36, but several of those new faces moved from elsewhere in the staff box, former full-time employees moved to this new part-time status. Contributor Cathy Booth Thomas, for instance, used to be in the magazine’s Dallas bureau, while new contributor Douglas Waller had been a senior correspondent.

Thus this could be a signal of cost cutting. Or moving these names to the Contributors area may signal the magazine’s desire to let them write (contributors usually write essays or special pieces in a particular area where they have knowledge) and keep their voices as a part of Time. Bringing more writers’ voices to the magazine – with a less uniform style for the magazine over all – was described as a goal in Time’s redesign and Web re-launch. The test will be how many of their bylines show up in the magazine’s pages and Web site.

Time did lose two neoconservative voices in December 2007 with the exodus of columnist William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Charles Krauthammer, an occasional but long-time Essay contributor. Kristol, who was introduced into the commentary pages just 11 months earlier as a star columnist, and Krauthammer both were staunch supporters of the Iraq War.

Newsweek’s Contributing Editor area remained essentially unchanged, with only one name dropping out, bringing the total to 16.

What seems clear is that the days of news magazines with extended bureau networks, at least for the time being, is over. And the other constant, the notion that Time, whatever else its differences with Newsweek, had more boots on the ground, appears to be a thing of the past.

Footnotes

1. “A Magazine Challenges the Big Boys,” David Carr, the New York Times, November 26, 2007.

Online Trends

By the Project for Excellence in Journalism

The online magazine revolution, evidenced in 2006 with Web site redesigns for both Time and The Economist, played out slowly in 2007.

In October, Newsweek formally ended its seven-year distribution agreement with MSNBC to become a stand-alone Web site. The Week launched its new site, which applies it weekly aggregation model to the daily news cycle. Even the New Yorker, the venerable book dedicated to long-form journalism, re-launched its site in February, adding animated cartoons and blogs. The redesigned sites took different approaches to pay-for-content, with Newsweek and the New Yorker making everything free and The Week putting its current issues behind a pay wall.

In short, magazine owners still struggle with how to incorporate the Web into their business and content plans. To what extent does the print product refer people to the Web site for additional information? And does the Web site in turn recruit subscribers to the print version? Heading into 2008, the only thing they seem to agree on is the need to somehow incorporate the Internet, and blogs in particular, into their magazines.

How the move to the Web ultimately shakes out for news magazines is foggy. How different do their online personas have to be from their print personalities? What is the proper mix of new Web-only content and print content? And how will magazines handle the free-vs.-fee content debate?

While most of these questions still linger, a few things seem clear.

It’s taken a while, but news magazines have decided that blogs and a more casual approach have a place on their sites. This is particularly noteworthy for a medium the prides itself on strong identity.

And while the picture of how magazines fit onto the Web is still fuzzy, as of 2007 the audience numbers seem to indicate there will be a place for their content in the digital world.

What’s New for Newsmagazines

Newsweek.com: In September, the Washington Post Company, which owns Newsweek, announced that the magazine’s Web site would be breaking away from MSNBC.com. Newsweek.com would continue to share content with MSNBC.com, the Post announced, but the magazine would take more control over advertising and content. The move appeared to be in line with the Post’s larger corporate goal of investing in its Web sites to attract advertising revenue lost at its flagship newspaper and at Newsweek.¹

The net result was a new Web address, www.newsweek.com, and a revamped look that greatly resembled … the redesign of Time magazine’s site in late 2006. As of late November, the dominant graphic feature is a photo box on the upper right of the page that rotates through five images and stories – like Time’s. The red banner across the top of the page mirrors Time’s as well. And, of course, there are blogs by Newsweek writers.

There is video on the upper right along with two other tabs for photos and audio, some of it from Newsweek, but most (at least early on) appears to be Associated Press video of big breaking stories. Conventional Wisdom, the Newsweek franchise featuring up and down arrows charting the week’s winners and losers, followed by pithy comments, has a prominent place on the home page – and its own page inside the site with a long list of topics.

Perhaps most significant, the content on the home page is refreshed every day, not just recycled from the magazine. This was true with Newsweek’s old site as well, but there is more of it now.

One noteworthy feature is a Recent Magazine link that takes users to a page where they can scroll through previous issues of the magazine (iPhone-style, with big cover images) and read cover stories going back many months.

Newsweek did not use its redesign as a chance to pursue a pay-for-content approach. As seems to be the trend with many news outlets, all the items on this site are free – including the week’s magazine contents.

TheWeekDaily.com: As it has done since its inception in 2001, The Week has gone in a different direction with its site redesign, judging by our inventory of it in February 2008. The overall look is sparse. The visual elements are subtle – no giant photos here. If one thing dominates the page, it is text. The lead items from the day, aggregated briefs citing other publications, are teased with a few lines of text and a small photo.

There are also two text-only business shorts teased on the front. Farther down the pages, small square photos and headlines link to Arts & Leisure items. The banner across the top of the page is also fairly minimalist -- just “The Week Daily” in black and gray on a white background and a red line underneath.

There is one bigger difference here, though. Daily content is free to all who come to the site, but if you want to read the magazine online you will have to pay. Next to those lead items is a blue box with the headline “For Our Print Subscribers” that offers headlines from the week’s print magazine. “Subscribers,” the site says, “have access to all the content from the current issue, plus a full searchable archive.”

Why the difference? Unlike Time and Newsweek, The Week is having no problems getting people to purchase its hard-copy version. In fact, its subscriber base is growing and it is not eager to tamper with those numbers. The Economist, which is also seeing subscriber growth, uses the same mix of free and pay on its site.

NewYorker.com: As the world of Web 2.0 took off, it looked like the New Yorker was left in the dust. Yes, there were online archives and the editors would occasionally make old pieces available free (and even feature them) if those pieces were thought to have significance to current events. But the Web pages, with their left side for navigation and right side for ads, left little room for text. And the columns for text very much evoked an online version of the print product, not a new Web identity.

The new NewYorker.com, going by our February inventory, is much more a creature of the Web – even the butterfly that Eustace Tilley studies through his monocle is animated. Navigation has moved to the top of the home page, leaving more room to display content. And the dominant color is white, giving the pages and airy, open feel.

The site offers audio podcasts and a slate of blogs, some by staffers and some by contributors (and some simply links to contributors’ off-site blogs). The magazine also took the opportunity to animate some of its famous cartoons, with mixed results – the humor of one-panel New Yorker cartoons may not translate well to 30 seconds of animation.

While the blogs on the site (which cover everything from politics and foreign affairs to pop music and life on the West Coast) are intended to give it a fresher feel, this is still the New Yorker – where thoughtfulness counts more than speed. In other words, blog authors here are not under orders to write something fresh daily. Days can go by without an entry.

More important, the New Yorker has largely gone with the free-content option on its redesigned site. Some articles are held back, but much of the magazine is available to online users free of charge. Still, that fact that the New Yorker does not post some content is interesting in that it also is still gaining subscribers.

It seems that the Web model for magazines is if your print publication is doing well, don’t offer all of your content free online.

TheAtlantic.com: It did not get near the volume of press of its competitors, but the Atlantic did redesign its site.

Like the New Yorker, it moved a navigation bar to the top of the screen, under the header. The site also added a new set of (yes) blogs, with the goal of “pursuing the truth through collegial combat among bloggers who have different points of view.” And the home page features a sequence of five photos that rotate and link to stories.

With its changes, the home page of the new TheAtlantic.com (formally renamed from The Atlantic Online) looks pretty much the same as Time.com or Newsweek.com – minus much of the clutter. There is even a video link featuring original content, generally a longer-form piece of at least five minutes.

Going its own way, TheAtlantic.com has abolished its tiered-content system and offered all of its content free online (the New Yorker does not require subscription for online content, either, but not all of its print articles are available online). The Atlantic, taking advantage of the literary bounty it has amassed as the nation’s oldest news magazine, has made some of its archives free as well, offering articles from writers like Mark Twain.

The Atlantic’s goal, one that many publications are moving toward, is to establish an online identity separate from the print magazine. James Bennet, the Atlantic's editor, told the New York Times that the magazine's Web site “functioned for too long as just a marketing arm for the print magazine, rather than a publication in its own right.” This revamp is an attempt to redefine that identity.²

Web Economics

What the Web will mean for the news magazines’ bottom lines is not clear, but the early numbers are not promising.

Advertising Age magazine ranked the top 25 magazines in percentages of “overall digital revenue” for 2006 (the last year for which Ad Age has figures) and found only one news magazine – Newsweek – which tied for last.

On the surface that number still sounds somewhat promising -- at least one magazine is in the top 25. But only 5% of Newsweek’s total revenues came from digital in 2006. Newsweek’s parent company, the Washington Post, is seeing better digital revenue numbers – about 11% -- from its newspaper division’s Web site, washingpost.com.

What kinds of magazines are successfully mining the Web? First, those that target niche audiences. The leader is Entrepreneur, a magazine aimed at helping people start and grow small businesses, with 33.3% of its revenues coming from digital. Magazines that feature pay-for-content areas also do well – Consumer Reports has the second highest portion of online revenues at 33%.

Business publications also score online revenue. Fortune, Fortune Small Business and Money all were in the top 25, each pulling in 12.5% from digital.

While it is too soon to see an impact on Newsweek’s digital bottom line -- its restructuring and redesign took place only in the third quarter of 2007 -- Time’s changes have been in place since early 2006. And the early results have not been good.

As part of its new focus in 2006, Time Inc., and Time magazine in particular, announced its intent to become a “multi-platform content company.” The magazine cut back its rate base (the number of print subscribers it promises advertisers) to improve audience measurement and increase visitors and advertisers. Through the first two quarters of 2006, though, online ad revenues at Time grew only 1%.

Some analysts defend the company, arguing that it is still recovering from its decision to give AOL control over its Web sites following the Time Warner-AOL merger in 2001

Time Warner’s new chief executive, Jeffrey Bewkes, comes to the company’s top spot from AOL, where he tried to revive that company’s revenue stream after it did away with online subscriptions. His Web background suggests Time is focused on continuing its multi-platform content plan.

Some predict the company will continue to struggle. Alan Schanzer, managing partner of the digital media planning firm MEC Interaction, told Crain’s New York Business in August 2007 that "Time Inc. has yet to find a central digital strategy for itself.” ³

Online Audience

It is too early to judge how news magazines’ online focus will affect audience numbers, but the strategies bring their own challenges.

For instance, Newsweek.com will be free of MSNBC control and will be able to sell and place its own ads. But much of Newsweek’s site traffic has, in the past, come courtesy of MSNBC, which teased major Newsweek stories on its front page.

In August 2007, Newsweek.com had 7.2 million total unique monthly visitors and half of those came from MSNBC.com. Eliminate linkers from MSNBC.com, and Newsweek traffic drops to 3.6 million in August. During that same month, the Web site of Time magazine had 4.4 million unique visitors.⁴

At U.S. News & World Report, which has not retooled its site, the audience numbers were flat through the same period.

Critics have argued that the Web is an odd fit for magazines. Unlike television or newspapers, which both seem suited for the Web with their focus on breaking news, the magazine franchise usually involves analysis – not easy to do on the fly.

The numbers, however, offer some interesting challenges to this idea. What is less clear at this point is what that implies.

Is it that the Web represents something more than immediacy? Or does being online offer magazines a way to compete in a more fast-paced culture, and also draw in people who might not otherwise come to their more considered work? Or, alternatively, is the Web undermining that old form and making magazines faster, but also less thoughtful and more transitory?

The numbers suggest something is occurring. Time, for instance, saw a 34% bump in its unique monthly audience, comparing Nielsen Online measurements of unique audiences of November 2006 to November 2007. The number of unique visitors to its Web site climbed to 5.22 million from 3.89 million.

Newsweek also saw a smaller increase in numbers of 9% – from 5.12 million in October to 5.58 million in November, the first full month after the magazine split with MSNBC.com. Next year’s figures may tell the tale for Newsweek’s online experiment.

Unique Visitors for Select Magazine Web sites

November to November 2006 v. 2007

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Nielsen In November 2006, Atlantic did not meet the minimum requirement for measurement

Footnotes

1. Washington Post “Investing” column, September 25, 2007.

2. Richard Pérez-Peña, “A Venerable Magazine Energizes Its Web Site,” the New York Times, January 21, 2008.

3. Matthew Flamm. “Digitally Challenged Time Inc. Past Prime?” Crain's New York Business.com, August 18, 2007.

4. Keith Kelly. “Newsweek Gets a New Look in Print, on Web,” New York Post, October 13, 2007.

Opinion Titles

Circulation of Leading Opinion Magazines

1998-2007

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Audit Bureau of Circulation, annual aduit reports and publishers' statements The New Republic Circulation numbers as of June 2007; all others as of year-end 2007

The New Republic

One name missing from the audience chart in 2007 is the New Republic. The past 12 months have been eventful at the 92-year-old magazine.

In late 2007, the magazine got new owners, and shifted its publication schedule from weekly to every two weeks. It found itself in another ethics debate over a writer’s work. And it decided on a new way to count its readership, filing to remove itself from the Audit Bureau of Circulations system to go with an alternative auditor, BPA.

The New Republic’s publisher, Elizabeth Sheldon, said the new auditor, BPA, also handles similar magazines and thus the switch would give it “more of an apples-to-apples comparison.” While the Weekly Standard, which might be considered a conservative alternative to the New Republic, is audited by BPA, other opinion magazines, such as The Nation and National Review, use ABC audits.

The new auditing firm comes with some advantages. BPA lets magazines count the free copies sent to readers as “qualified circulation,” provided those readers are in the market served by the publication. For the New Republic, this means 6,000 free copies sent to Capitol Hill now are counted.

While the ABC does allow magazines to count free copies as “verified,” restrictions come with that tag – readers must get an opportunity to opt out after three months, and documentation of subscription orders must be less than three years old.

As the BPA audit ending in June 2007 shows, counting the Hill-delivered copies allows the New Republic to keep its subscriber numbers up above the 65,000 mark (although just barely, at 65,779) . That is a critical point because it means the magazine, which has been losing circulation since 2000, can say that it has stemmed the losses. Keeping subscriptions up at the magazine is a priority for its new owner, CanWest.

When CanWest bought out the former owner and editor-in-chief, Martin Peretz, in March 2007, assuming full control of the magazine, the talk then was about making it profitable and more like a consumer magazine. That would mean, of course, selling more ads, which might be easier with higher circulation figures.

Can West made its biggest move in March, when the magazine switched to a publication schedule of once every two weeks. The magazine was redesigned, as well, with a new title font and thicker paper stock. CanWest also updated the look and content of the magazine’s Web site, with a more modular design and staff blogs.

But soon the magazine found itself enmeshed in a dispute about its reporting after dispatches from its “Baghdad Diarist” were called into question. Scott Thomas Beauchamp, a 23-year-old soldier serving in Iraq, wrote three accounts that were described as first hand about U.S. troops’ behavior, which included running over dogs with Bradley fighting vehicles and playing with the skulls of Iraqi children. The stories appeared in January, June and July. Beauchamp, it later was discovered, began working for the magazine in large part because he was the husband of a New Republic staffer.

An army investigation found the reports to be false. The New Republic initially stood by Beauchamp and his accounts, something he himself later refused to do. Still the magazine defended its stories, saying independent sources had come forward to verify them.

But in December of 2007, the editor, Franklin Foer, wrote a 7,000-word piece acknowledging that the magazine “cannot stand by these stories.” “In retrospect, we never should have put Beauchamp in this situation,” Foer wrote. “He was a young soldier in a war zone, an untried writer without journalistic training. We published his accounts of sensitive events while granting him the shield of anonymity – which, in the wrong hands, can become license to exaggerate, if not fabricate.”¹ Also in December, the New York Times reported that the soldier has continued to insist that his articles were true.²

The situation uncomfortably echoed other controversial events at the magazine. In recent years its reporters have been accused of such journalistic malfeasance as misquoting and plagiarizing, and, in the case of a former staffer, Steven Glass, making up stories out of whole cloth, which Glass has admitted.³

Much of the magazine’s drop in circulation has been attributed to its pro-Iraq War stance early in the conflict. Since Foer took over as editor in 2006, the magazine has taken a more critical view of the war. Beauchamp’s stories clearly took the magazine in that direction.

With the Beauchamp controversy quieting down, and the presidential election on the way, the magazine might be able to rebuild its subscriber base with political coverage.

Footnotes

1. Franklin Foer. "Fog of War," The New Republic, December 2007

2. Patricia Cohen. “Magazine Voices Doubt Over ‘Diary’ From Iraq,” the New York Times, December 4, 2007.

3. 60 Minutes, August 17, 2003, http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/05/07/60minutes/main552819.shtml