This looks like a horrible year shaping up for the magazine industry. Strong titles will grow but small titles will have a hard time surviving. First they must get their magazines into a consolidated distribution system, where just four companies control 90% of the market. Then they need good "facing" in the increasingly consolidated world of supermarket chains like Safeway and giant shopping malls like Wal-Mart - display space is limited. The cost of acquiring subscribers is tremendously high due to the demise of Publisher's Clearinghouse, the collapse of the sweepstakes companies, and the fact that the do-not-call registry will soon go into effect. Add to all this the Rosie fiasco - Jeff Bercovici in Media Life says that this will be a better year for magazines. Somehow I doubt it. From Media Life:
"Meanwhile, advertisers will be more skeptical than ever of the circulation figures publishers report, thanks to Gruner + Jahr’s book-cooking ways as revealed in the Rosie trial, in which executives admitted they inflated newsstand sales in order to make the magazine look healthier than it really was. “I think we’re really going to suffer from it,” says Kent Brownridge, Wenner Media’s general manager, of the Rosie scandal. He predicts that advertisers will pressure publishers to turn over instant sales estimates based on scan data and postal receipts rather than wait until they have reported their figures to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. “The data is available, the data is accurate and the data is timely, and I think advertisers are going to demand it,” he says."
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