Endangered Magazines: US News&World Report and Newsweek?

In My Humble Opinion
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      • I just got back from a bookstore jaunt and noticed that both these magazines have gotten very slim over the past couple months. Usually that means they’re close to death - Newsweek I wouldn’t miss so much but USN+WP is a fairly good read. Are these magazines failing financially or is there some sort of housecleaning/personel turnover going on? - MC
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Magazines get thin because they lose advertisng. How much of the advertising loss you see is due to the general economy, and how much of it is due to something specific about those two magazines I’m not sure. But if you randomly survey several magazines against, say, this time a year ago, you’ll see they’ve pretty much ALL gotten thinner.

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One thing you should note about those two, as opposed to their main competitor, TIME, is that they post the entirety of their magazine for free on the Internet at the same time as it’s available on the newsstand. I know I read them both that way, cover-to-cover…as it were.

It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if this is cutting into the print magazine’s circulation and, thus, advertising revenue.

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Wired was really thick for quite a while, but in recent months they’re about half as thick as they were a couple of years ago. Personally, I prefer it – I hated the “48 pages of ads before the index” format. Now, they’re down to about 30 pre-index ad pages.