8 Questions About Newsweek's Future

Google News indicates that more than 1,000 articles were published Thursday about Newsweek magazine abandoning print but continuing as the digital Newsweek Global. Still, many questions remain unanswered, including: 

Recent Newsweek cover -- and a parody

1. Will some of the millions of dollars no longer being forked over to the U.S. Postal Service, paper mills, and printers be reinvested in more and better content? 
2. Will Newsweek Global’s covers still inspire hilarious parodies? Or will lack of visibility at airports, grocery stores, and dentists’ offices mean its covers will no longer matter, regardless how hard Tina Brown tries?
3. What will happen to current subscribers who don’t have internet or computer access or just don’t want a digital publication? Will they get their money back? 
4. How will advertisers respond to Newsweek Global and its lack of ratebase (guaranteed minimum circulation)? 
5. What does this mean for TIME magazine? Will it benefit from its archrival’s loss of visibility, or will it get sucked down the same toilet? 
6. Will Newsweek Global be only a digital magazine – for example, with numbered pages and a regular publication schedule? Or will some subscribers view its content on an unpaginated, paywall-protected web site that is continuously updated? 
7. Is Newsweek truly abandoning print, or will it become a zombie on newsstands like Life and U.S. News & World Report, living on in “bookazines” (special issues)? 
8. Will Newsweek Global survive? 

Added thought: It turns out the Mayans weren't quite right: 2012 isn't the end of Time, it's the end of Newsweek.

Related articles:

• Newsweek Takes a Stand: Profits Are for Wimps
• What Exactly Did Barry Diller Say About Newsweek's Future?  
• Tina Brown Follows Husband's Footsteps -- Sort Of

Invasion of the Bookazines, Featuring the Return of the Living Dead

Blame it on the mooks and their zombie buddies.

Because of all the doom and gloom about the U.S. newsstand system (you know it’s bad when an industry consultant’s blog is called From the Foredeck of the Titanic), Dead Tree Edition decided to launch an in-depth investigation. Which means I ventured out to the magazine sections of three stores.

I was trying to figure out why, as MediaPost reported recently, the combined retail sales of 68 major magazines are barely half of what they were a decade ago. It wasn’t hard to spot one of the culprits.

At first, all seemed OK when I eyed the prominently placed magazine section in a big discount store. There were lots of familiar titles – National Geographic, TIME, Us, Readers Digest, and Better Homes & Gardens. But a closer look showed they were impostors.

The well-known magazine logos weren’t on magazines at all but on mooks – AKA bookazines, SIPs (single interest publications), one-shots, or specials. By whatever name you call them, they are sold in the magazine section of stores but have no specific issue date, can’t be obtained as part of a subscription, and tend to hone in on a single topic that’s in keeping with the magazine’s brand --like Christmas Cooking from Better Homes & Gardens, Us: Stars of 2011, or TIME’s Beyond 9/11: Portraits of Resilience.

Mook sales are usually excluded from the industry statistics reported by the trade press.

The intruders mostly have the same characteristics – little or no advertising, glossy high-quality paper, perfect binding, relatively high cover prices, and on-sale periods of about three months instead of the one month or less typical of real magazines.

The Zombies
Much of the retail space once dedicated to prominent weekly and monthly magazines has been given over instead to these magazine spinoffs. Also taking oxygen away from the sales of real magazines are SIPs published by such non-magazine brands as Pillsbury, the Mayo Clinic, USA Today -- and Life.

Three times Time Inc. has killed Life magazine, only to resurrect it for such bookazines as 100 Photographs That Changed the World and El Papa de Juan Pablo. No wonder they call it Life: This zombie just won’t stay dead!

Also enjoying living-dead status is U.S. News & World Report, which closed down its only print magazine late last year but in one bookstore had four different mooks – Best Colleges, Best Graduate Schools, Best Hospitals, and Amazing Animals. (Wait, shouldn’t that last one be Best Animals? Or maybe Best Veterinary Hospitals? How about Best Obedience Schools?)

The "Best" books all deviate from the usual bookazine model by running ads -- lots of ads in the case of Best Hospitals, way more than the real magazine used to have. My contact at U.S. News says the new 344-page Best Colleges book is the company’s largest “issue” in at least two decades, and maybe ever. It sounds as if the magazine business is looking pretty good for U.S. News now that it’s out of the magazine business.

One-shots used to be the province of enthusiast magazines testing out ideas for a new title: Sportscar Convertible is doing well, so let’s try a SIP called Corvette Convertible. If the response is good enough, we’ll solicit subscriptions and start publishing bimonthly.

But that door is closed. The beleaguered newsstand distribution system no longer has the patience to give untested niche titles a shot.

Favorable Economics
Bookazines from well-respected brands are another matter, and the big publishers are happy to play along even if that diverts attention from their periodical issues. Consider the economics, as exemplified by Better Homes & Gardens: The 232-page October issue is priced at $3.99, but its 144-page SIP siblings – I saw three in one store – sell for $9.99 each.

Here’s my analysis: As consumers have gained greater ability to find exactly the information they want or need, the traditional mass-market magazine with its mishmash of loosely related articles is looking increasingly irrelevant to them. (The October issue of National Geographic has articles on the teen brain, surviving cancer, whale sharks, and Ansel Adams. Who's the target audience?)

But in an age of link-baiting and belly-fat ads, consumers still trust respected magazine brands. When those brands offer content -- whether a mook or an app -- that’s laser-targeted to their needs or interests, suddenly the wallets come out. (A National Geo mook called Wildlife: The Greatest Photographs? Let me see that.)

I was one of those who snickered last year when the Magazine Publishers of America changed its name to The Association of Magazine Media. Now the name is actually starting to make sense.

Just don’t ask me to define “magazine media.”

If you actually made it to the end of this article, you might enjoy suffering through these other Dead Tree Edition analyses of the U.S. magazine industry:

• Is Apple's 30-Percent Solution Really So Bad?
• Stuck at the Borders: Magazine Publishers Have Failed to Explore the Amazon 
• App-oplexy: Magazines on the iPad
• The Yellowing of National Geographic: Will Today's Copies Age Faster Than That Stack in Your Gramma's Attic?
• Viagra to the Rescue? Postal Regulations Are Taking the Life Out of Tabloid Magazines

Viagra to the Rescue? Postal Regulations Are Taking the Life Out of Tabloid Magazines

It may be time to bid farewell to the tabloid-sized American magazine.

A variety of forces have been conspiring for several decades to put oversized magazines onto the endangered-species list. Now the U.S. Postal Service appears ready to put the tabloid magazine (and catalog) out of existence.

Postal regulations scheduled to take effect in June will impose significant penalties on magazines, catalogs, newspapers and other “flat mail” that fail a deflection test – commonly called a droop test. The rules are especially tough on skinny publications and tabloids, according to printers who have conducted extensive tests.

“PostCom’s service provider members inform us that mailers of tabloids are likely to redesign their pieces as quarter-folds to meet the deflection standards,” the Association for Postal Commerce (Postcom) wrote recently to the USPS. Some are considering going to a quarterfold format – folding the tabloid in half and securing it with tabs – which could mean more capital investment for printers and more problems for the Postal Service, PostCom says. Others are considering more radical redesigns.

"Unless we can figure out how to put Viagra into the paper to keep it from drooping, the tabloid size is dead," one magazine publishing executive told Dead Tree Edition.

The video posted here, created by catalog printer Arandell Corporation, demonstrates how to conduct the droop test, though other printers have recommended somewhat different methodology. PostCom’s letter requests that the Postal Service “publish explicit and well-documented instructions on how to perform the deflection test, including a demonstrative video.”

Television helped kill off the iconic photo-news tabloids Life and Look four decades ago. Subsequently, developments in press technology, newsstand display practices, and the need to reduce paper costs have caused most major U.S. consumer magazines and catalogs to adopt the “short cutoff” format, which is 10.5” tall. A notable exception is the 12-inch-tall ESPN The Magazine.

For the most part, the tabloid format – generally, at least 11.5” tall and usually more like 13” – in the U.S. is the province of such trade publications as Nation’s Restaurant News (10.75” x 13.25”) and WWD (formerly Women’s Wear Daily, 10 3/16” x 12 ¾”). Catalogs using the tabloid format also tend to be specialty titles that print and mail fewer than 100,000 copies at a time.

The rapid expansion of co-mailing, which typically reduces postage by 10% to 25% for both magazines and catalogs, the past couple of years pressured the tabloid format because most printers offered little if any ability to consolidate the mailing of tabloids. The exception is Publishers Press, which is focused mostly on producing small-circulation b-to-b and enthusiast magazines rather than the big mass-market titles.

For both Periodicals (magazine and newspaper) and Standard (catalog) classes, failing the droop test will increase postage by 10% to 30%, or even more, in June when the USPS starts imposing penalties.

Results of tests performed by various printers show that the new standards are not kind to tabloids. One found that an 80-page book 9.875”x 13.875” book with a four-page cover failed the test but that cutting a few inches off the height did wonders: A 48-pager of the same width that was only 10.5” tall passed the test, even though it had no cover and used slightly lighter paper.

Tests have been even worse for oblong formats, those with a width greater than their height. That means the new regulations will pretty well kill an idea that occasionally surfaces – reformatting print publications to a horizontal format so that their digital twins are easier to read on a computer screen.

Oversized magazines may still be inserted into newspapers, sold on newsstands, handed out at trade shows, and distributed via alternate delivery. But unless the Postal Service changes the regulations and/or the proposed penalties, the sight of a mailbox containing an oversized magazine or catalog could become extremely rare.

For further reference:

• USPS Revisions to Deflection (Droop) Standards for Flats: Worldcolor explains how much droop is allowed and how to test for droop.
• Eligibility for Commercial Flats Failing Deflection: The recent Federal Register notice seeking comment on the Postal Service's proposed penalties for failing the droop test.
• The USPS Announces Applicable Prices for Pieces That Fail New Deflection Standards: Worldcolor explains the proposed penalties.