When asked if now is a good time for a new magazine, Bryant responds, “I think it’s always been a lousy time. It’s probably about as bad as it could be. Not very good.”
When it comes to the overall health of the industry, statistics tell only part of the story. According to new PIB numbers for the first four months of 2006, magazine ad revenue is up 4.5 percent, compared with the same time period last year, while ad pages inched up only 0.7 percent. TNS Media Intelligence data indicate that the share of all media ad dollars spent on magazines ticked up from 18.24 percent to 19.05 percent from 2004 to 2005. The MPA also reports 101 magazine-launch announcements in the first quarter of this year — a 35 percent increase over last year, with nearly half of the start-ups categorized as lifestyle publications.
Still, the industry is not exactly enveloped in a sense of optimism. An e-mail from the proprietor of the Grim Reaper Web site says, “I know there are many executives in denial and [who] think throwing money at the problem will solve it. But this is not the case — it’s not just that there are too many magazines out there (there are), but the audience for them is changing.”
The PEJ report also warned that “it may be that the structural changes in the media environment — the growth of online outlets, readership and ads — are beginning to have a bigger impact on magazines.”
But while rising gas prices and the new postal increase make life more difficult for magazine publishers, analysts say they still have some advantages over their newspaper cousins. For one thing, they’re not as reliant on the classified ads that have migrated online at a frantic pace. For another, most are not tied into a geographic base. And then there’s the sense that readers have a different psychological relationship with magazines — call it the curl-up factor.
“People want to sit back,” says Link. “The graphics, the design, the losing yourself in the pages. The whole experience is different than the newspaper industry.”
Thriving: Us Weekly, In Touch, Life & Style, Men's Vogue
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Migrating online
For all the tactile or visceral appeal of the print version, magazine companies are keenly aware of the challenges of cyberspace, even if they’ve moved slowly to meet them.The 2005 edition of Veronis Suhler’s “Communications Industry Forecast” concluded that “the Internet side of the consumer magazine business is still comparatively small,” adding that it accounts for only about 10 percent of new subscribers. Kemp says the magazine publishers “were a little bit late to the party online.... I think they’re improving. I think everyone’s scrambling to catch up.”
A clear exception is the Forbes.com site, which was created a decade ago and managed to survive the dot-com bust. Operating separately from the famed business magazine, it now attracts about 16 million unique visitors a month. It has an online staff of about 200 — roughly half of those are editorial employees — that posts about 2000 stories a day. (It was Forbes.com reporter Adam Penenberg who famously uncovered Stephen Glass’s proclivity for fabrication at the New Republic in 1998.)
