Magazines
Joe Davis 

There is a lot of hope for the future role of magazines in the U.S. 
news media mix, PEJ reports. Perhaps surprisingly. 

First the good news. "The overall number of magazines is growing," 
PEJ reports. "Overall, the magazine industry is healthy." After 
trending down from 1995 to 2000, readership of news and entertainment 
magazines has been rising again. Ad pages, ad dollars, and profits 
for the industry as a whole "look relatively stable," according to 
the extensive data collected in the PEJ report. 

But a lot of the bad news is about magazines that publish news. That 
is especially true of the "big three" national news magazines: Time, 
Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report. Publishers are not launching 
new newsmagazines. The readership figures for traditional 
newsmagazines have been flat, even as U.S. population grows. 

And the audience for newsmagazines is aging steadily (not desirable 
from the viewpoint of advertisers). Among all the genres and niches 
in the magazine industry, PEJ says, "Ad dollars and pages are 
increasingly going to places other than news magazines." 

As the big three strain to compete for a bigger, younger audience, 
they have spent more pages and covers on entertainment, lifestyle, 
celebrity, health, and science, "at the expense of what is considered 
more traditional news of government, public policy and the economy." 

That last trend may contain a kernel of good news in disguise for 
environmental reporters. A great many environmental stories are (or 
can be recast as) health, science, and lifestyle stories. The 
economic story PEJ tells about the magazine industry sounds in many 
ways like the story of the media industry generally -- decisions 
driven by profits and an unrelenting trend toward concentration of 
ownership. In general, this has not been good for serious journalism. 

"The largest and most powerful magazine owners," the PEJ authors write, 
"...are heavily invested in pop culture and entertainment magazines, 
which have also seen large growth in the last decade. There is less 
interest at the corporate level in traditional news." 

Nowhere does the report paint a drearier picture for reporters than 
in the section headed "Shrinking Staffs," a phenomenon seen in other 
media and not just in magazines. Admittedly, computer pagination and 
computer research have allowed magazines to be more productive with 
fewer people. But "staffs of the two biggest news magazines have 
declined significantly in the past 20 years," the report states, as 
have the numbers of bureaus. 

The brightest ray of hope for magazine news comes not in the 
mainstream newsmags, but from another quarter. PEJ reports peculiar 
upticks in the fortunes of two special varieties -- one, the "elite" 
strain represented by New Yorker and The Economist, and two, the 
other the "opinion news" strain represented by The Nation and 
National Review. 

The "elite" magazines benefit from higher ad rates they can charge 
for their smaller numbers of upper-income and more highly educated 
reader and also from the appetite these readers have for more 
substantial and sophisticated news. The opinion mags, at least the 
liberal ones, seem to be surfing the wave that always buoys 
"opposition" media.