{"id":322,"date":"2012-08-09T00:03:33","date_gmt":"2012-08-09T04:03:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.annawahrman.com\/wp\/?p=322"},"modified":"2012-08-09T00:03:33","modified_gmt":"2012-08-09T04:03:33","slug":"latest-magazine-numbers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/annawahrman.com\/index.php\/2012\/08\/latest-magazine-numbers\/","title":{"rendered":"Latest magazine numbers are pathetic"},"content":{"rendered":"

How much longer will making magazines be a viable industry? Audit Bureau figures came out yesterday, and they’re straight-up painful. Basically, magazine profits are way, way down. And this is down not from the heyday before the economy tanked, it’s down from the post-recession numbers, which sucked in the first place. The New York Times<\/em> acknowledges that the industry has been on the decline for years now<\/a>, then quotes industry consultant John Harrington saying that the latest numbers were “the worst I’ve ever seen.” Great.<\/p>\n

My summary of the ABC numbers for magazines:<\/p>\n

\u2193 Overall: Down on newsstands almost 10%
\n\u2194 Digital: Up — doubled from this time last year, in fact — but to only 2% of total circ<\/a>
\n\u2193 Women’s (Cosmo, O<\/em>) and Celeb (People, Us, Star<\/em>) titles: Down solidly
\n\u2193 Literary titles (New Yorker, VF<\/em>): Down seriously
\n\u2193 Newsweeklies: Down significantly, especially Time<\/em>
\n\u2191 Food titles: Up<\/p>\n

I feel privileged to have caught the end, in the ’90s and early aughts, of the old media’s best days. The future is more uncertain than ever. I hope daily that the industry I love hasn’t seen better days, but the numbers and history aren’t on its side. “Adapt or die” is such a cliche that one tends to forget that some die. But die they do<\/a> (or they start to adapt, get diluted enough from their original form<\/a> that they cease to matter, and then they die).<\/p>\n

The Magazine Publishers of America, which runs the ASME Awards, has been renamed and rebranded<\/a> away from a name and logo that represents a page turning into one that looks like…well, whatever this is:<\/p>\n

\"\"
\n<\/a><\/p>\n

As much as I live online, I also love reading magazines, sitting with them, consuming<\/em> them in a way you can’t on the Internet, or even on a tablet. (Print, though its revenues are paltry and getting paltrier by the day, does supply a massive amount of good-quality content online, let us not forget. Let us, however, try to better monetize?) I was recently away from the computer and Internet for a few days; instead I was informed and delighted by the magazines and books I’d brought with me. They were well written, well edited, well designed and well structured. I came back with torn-out bits, dog-eared pages — matter of fact, I tore out a whole article and sent it to my brother. In the mail. With a stamp.<\/p>\n

I’m not a technophobe in the least, and I’m as much a participant in the immediate-gratification culture as the next guy. But I hope I’m not alone in my desire to see the rebirth of the magazine industry. It must find ways to matter to readers\/users or face extinction, plain and simple.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How much longer will making magazines be a viable industry? Audit Bureau figures came out yesterday, and they’re straight-up painful. Basically, magazine profits are way, way down. And this is down not from the heyday before the economy tanked, it’s down from the post-recession numbers, which sucked in the first place. The New York Times […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[12,30,31],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/annawahrman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/322"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/annawahrman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/annawahrman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/annawahrman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/annawahrman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=322"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/annawahrman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/322\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/annawahrman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/annawahrman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/annawahrman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}