BUSINESS & YOUR MONEY




The Magazine Isn't Dying
It’s just the badly motivated ones
that are going under.

BY: HARRY FRANKLIN
It seems fitting that on March 11, a week after the Dow Jones industrial average hit its lowest mark since 1997
and shares of Citigroup slid to less than $1 each, the magazine publisher Rodale announced it was shuttering
Best Life. The five-year-old magazine had been positioned as a lifestyle title for wealthy older men who were
too mature for the babes-and-abs pitch of Rodale's most successful brand, Men's Health. But in a time of dis-
mal economic headlines and a culture newly attuned to thrift, a magazine that celebrated the carefree consum-
erism of the bubble years with cover lines like "7 Secret Wealth Builders" and "Upgrade Your Image In-
stantly" seemed like a relic from a bygone era.
The news of Best Life's demise came on the same day that American Express Publishing announced it was
folding Travel+Leisure Golf, an 11-year-old spinoff of its venerable travel title. Taken together, the latest
magazine failures signaled to many publishing observers that magazines—long thought to be partly insulated
from the digital forces battering the newspaper industry—are locked in their own death spiral. For evidence,
they point out that since last March, more than two dozen major magazines have folded.
But a closer look at the types of magazines that have closed reveals a more nuanced and, in many respects,
hopeful portrait of the magazine business. According to a list compiled by Advertising Age, titles that have
shut down in the past year come from the shelter, technology, travel, luxury, and teen categories. The reason
for each category's challenges are obvious, from a meltdown in the housing sector to teenagers' wholesale
abandonment of print for Facebook and Twitter.
Yet the general conclusion that many extrapolate from these recent shutdowns is wrong. It's not that magazines
are dying; it's that magazines that were created solely for advertising or market-share purposes are. New maga-
zine titles often fail from a combination of bad timing, bad thinking, and a bad choice of brands to extend. Put
simply, there are too many mediocre magazines (as anyone who gazes at the newsstand at Barnes and Nobles
would conclude).
In one way, publishers are suffering from the same tendencies as traders binging on mortgage-backed securi-
ties: When the advertising market in a particular genre begins to rain really hard, publishers respond by trying
to create more buckets, instead of working to find the next bucket where passion resides. The reality is that
once a market is mature enough to support a national magazine, chances are it has already peaked.
During the last boom, publishers conceived titles as advertising plays and targeted the areas of a rapidly ex-
panding credit bubble. It's not surprising, then, that shelter titles sprouted up as the housing market inflated or
that Condé Nast launched Portfolio, its business title, just as the finance bubble peaked in spring 2007.
(Disclosure: I was a staff writer at Portfolio.) In many ways, Portfolio signified the strategy embraced by pub-
lishers during the run-up. Back in August 2005, when hedge-fund managers were the new rock stars, Condé
Nast wanted to take a big piece of the advertising pie long dominated by Fortune, Forbes, and Business Week.
Officially, Condé Nast's position was that Portfolio would reinvent the business category with more ambitious
writing, photography, and design. But, fundamentally, Portfolio was a corporate move designed to develop a
new market of business-to-business advertising for Si Newhouse's magazine empire, which had always
counted on fashion and luxury categories for a majority of its ad revenue.
Publishers don't just look to new titles to grow their business. They also seek to leverage existing titles into
new categories. Now, with advertising spending on the skids, spinoffs are another major casualty of the maga
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