Meanwhile, in magazines ... chop-chop

Reacher, it's that and also the fact that most magazines don't have to be as timely as a newspaper is. You don't have to wait for the morning paper to get a boxscore, because you can just fire up a web browser. A magazine that offers enterprise stories and after-the-fact analysis faces a threat from the Internet, but it's not as acute.

The magazines mentioned in the first post were niche magazines. It will be very worrisome when you hear that magazines like Entertainment Weekly or Vanity Fair are folding. The first magazine mentioned was definitely a casualty of the economy, not of the magazine business. When we were in a housing boom, they launched all these titles to take advantage, and there was an audience with money buying them. A lot of new home owners, people doing renovations and an economy in which people had some spare money to spend on a magazine. They oversaturated the market with those sheleter titles, and now that we are in a housing bust and have a bad economy, they are trimming away the fat that no one is buying anymore. Those first magazines the story mentioned are getting pruned for the same reason Home Depot's stock is suffering compared to where it was during the housing boom.

Magazines have also tended to always do this. If a niche is successful, they copy cat it to an extreme and then some of the copy cat titles end up casualties. It happened when Maxim and FHM created a new niche that did really well. There were a zillion copy cats launched and after a while most of them folded.

 

Niche publishing has been a successful trend for years and these types of publications, although not as big as the established general-interest publications, can become tidy little cash cows. The more narrow the niche, the better. I have been involved with this type of publishing, and I've seen the good and the bad. Advertisers are buying this line of thinking more and more, too. It used to be that niche publications had to rely on smaller, endemic advertisers. It's somewhat easier to get consumer advertisers to look at small publications, though, if you have a very targeted, good demographic for them. The sell goes like this: "With the large publication, they get it and don't even look at half the issues. They have always gotten it and they just get it out of habit. Our niche publication is tied to their interest or passion or hobby, and they actively sought it out, so they spend more time with the magazine. You are getting a better reader." (No, I am not in advertising, but I have seen it done).

It only doesn't work when too many publications jump on board a niche. That is also less likely with narrower niches, though, because publishers can see straight off that the market can't absorb more than the one or two publications that beat them to the party.