A Magazine Resurgence? The Numbers Say No

Despite what Disney movies teach us, wanting something to be true doesn't make it become true.

I keep hearing and reading about the resurgence of printed magazines, often accompanied by Monty-Pythonesque "not dead yet" remarks. With CPMs for web ads continuing to droop, publishers have become downright nostalgic about good old dead-tree editions. Noting that printed books are holding their own against e-books, the magazine cheerleaders keep telling us that print is making a comeback.

But that's not what the numbers say. The volume of magazines mailed annually has dropped for 15 years in a row, according to data released yesterday by the U.S. Postal Service.

During those 15 years, "Outside-County" Periodicals Class volume -- by far the best proxy for total magazine volume -- has dropped 44%. That means 4 billion fewer copies were mailed in 2015 than in 2000. (Outside-County periodicals are almost exclusively magazines and represent the vast majority of U.S. magazine distribution.) During that time, entire categories have disappeared or shrunk to the point of insignificance.

For the past three years, the Outside-County declines have been 6%, then 5%, and then 4% in Fiscal Year 2015. So, OK, things are getting a little less bad, but it's no resurgence. More like a reshrinkence, or maybe a resuckance, today's options for Publishing Word of the Day. (For a recent Publishing Executive article, I proposed the latter but the editors thought the former was less offensive. Guess who won.)

Giant sucking sound
By the way, don't look to single-copy sales, the second-largest method of U.S. magazine distribution, for better news. There are only giant sucking sounds, without any resurgence, coming out of Newsstand Land. A 6% annual decline would literally be a cause for celebration in what's left of the newsstand system.

What has improved the past few years is the outlook for printed magazines. The iPad was supposed to be a Print Killer but is already slouching toward obsolescence. Magazine publishers were at first frozen in the headlights and run over by the Digital Revolution. But the titles that didn't become digital roadkill have transformed into magazine-media brands, where smaller-footprint publications thrive alongside a growing panoply of digital, event, and data products.

And every month seems to bring an announcement from another digital-native publisher that is starting a print magazine.

But don't mistake all of this for growth, at least not for the magazine side of the magazine-media business. Launches of new niche titles aren't making up for trimmed circulation and outright closures of existing magazine brands.


Publishing Word of the Day is an offbeat, 31-part look at terms that tell us what's really going on in Publishing Land. Tomorrow's words: Facebump and Facehump.

And the Future of Newspapers Is . . .

. . . Sugardaddying.

Our latest Publishing Word of the Day describes the most successful tactic of late for keeping daily newspapers afloat: Purchase by a millionaire or, preferably, a billionaire.

Motives for sugardaddy buyouts of struggling newspapers range from civic mindedness to a craving for the spotlight to a desire to sway local news coverage.

Often mixed in is successful-entrpreneur, I-can-fix-this-backward-business hubris. (That rarely ends well if the sugardaddy is incapable of humility.)

Some of these plutocrat publishers see past the declining print revenues and the failure to catch the web wave, recognizing the long-term potential of respected, trusted brands.

Corporate newspaper owners try to survive via downsizing and financial engineering. Only a deep-pocketed, patient-money visionary like Jeff Bezos would actually invest in the kind of experimentation and additional editorial and tech resources that are rejuvenating The Washington Post.

Every day this month, all 31 of them (Did I really just promise that?), Dead Tree Edition is presenting a Publishing Word of the Day that sheds light on the state of publishing in 2016. Tomorrow's offering is a choice of two words describing the alleged resurgence of printed magazines.

It's Neither Programmatic Nor Print

Can you really sell print ads
without the use of alcohol?

Programmatic print, which is mostly still a concept, involves selling advertising for printed magazines in the automated, highly targeted manner of many web ads.

Programmatic print ads would be delivered to a reader not based on the magazine she reads but on her specific interests and apparent intent to buy certain products or services. It would require sophisticated customization of copies that is way beyond the current capabilities of most publishers and publication printers.

As currently envisioned, programmatic print wouldn’t be truly programmatic because the interval from purchase to delivery would take days instead of seconds, page-load times would not be slowed to a crawl, and most of the revenue would actually go to publishers instead of to a dizzying array of ad-tech intermediaries.

And it wouldn’t be truly print advertising because there would be no guaranteed competitive separations, no “value adds,” and no three-martini lunches.


Dead Tree Edition is celebrating July with a 31-part Publishing Word of the Day series, which includes new definitions for such familiar words as virtual reality and gravitas. For a more thorough discussion of programmatic print, see The Perils and Promise of Programmatic Print.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Magazine Shelf . . .

The Source Interlink shutdown left many
magazine racks empty in the summer of 2014.

The U.S. publishing industry has a strange habit of referring to retail magazine sales as "newsstand," when actual newsstands account for maybe 1% of copies sold.

It often seems that "newsstrand" would be a more accurate name, because so many copies end up getting stranded rather than being placed where consumers can buy them.

The bankruptcy of Source Interlink two years ago left millions of copies stranded in distribution centers and printing plants, while many retailers' magazine shelves sat empty.

But newsstranding occurs in other ways, such as when publishers pay to have copies placed in highly visible racks, only to have the retailer remove the racks or simply fail to implement the promotion. Or when copies are allotted to stores that then downsize or remove their magazine sections.

And some magazines get newsstranded "just because." Whether you call it the newsstand system, the grocery/discount-store/bookstore system, or the newsstrand system, the way magazines get distributed for retail sale is maddeningly inefficient.


This is the tenth installment in our 31-part Publishing Word of the Day series, which includes such sniglets as denialsizing and listicklers.