Forecast 2009: Print

Facing a brutal economy in 2008, big magazine chains closed some titles deemed to have a smaller chance of survival. At Time Inc., shelter magazine Cottage Living went by the wayside. Condé Nast folded Golf for Women and took Men’s Vogue to a twice-annual supplement of Vogue from a standalone title. Hearst Magazines shut down CosmoGirl!, Quick & Simple and O at Home.As tough as it’s been for the big guys with economies of scale, independents face distinct challenges. All things being equal, 2009 could be particularly harsh for those magazines, observers said. “They’re going to have more difficulty than the multi-title companies because they don’t have [the resources] to do all the integrated and added-value programs for advertisers, and they don’t have as much ability to cut costs,” said Martin Walker, a longtime magazine consultant. Already gone: pop-culture mag Radar; Jewish Living; Harvard grad-aimed 02138; and the New York Sun.In flusher times, publishing chains or private-equity money could toss a lifeline to struggling independents. But with the credit markets dried up, M&A activity has slowed to a crawl. For the first nine months of 2008, consumer magazine deals fell 95 percent in dollar value while newspaper deals fell 93 percent, per the Jordan, Edmiston Group investment bank, which tracks media deal-making. And with the unsettled outlook for print, publishers have been focused on digital buys, not collecting more magazines.One exception is Bonnier Corp., which bought Scuba Diving and its Web site from F+W Media Inc. in December, three months after scooping up Working Mother Media, publisher of Working Mother magazine.Independents that serve a narrowly focused audience may have to work harder to survive, but they also can leverage other platforms to augment print.Jay Lauf, publisher of The Atlantic, owned by David Bradley’s Atlantic Media Co., cited a recent deal the title put together for BP as an example. It involved a microsite, panel discussions in multiple cities, and an advertorial to promote BP’s support of alternative energy.Lauf recently added two integrated sales executives and plans to hire a creative services exec to concoct more custom, integrated programs for advertisers. “Will I be able to compete for ads running across multiple titles?” Lauf said. “No. But advertisers are coming to us for a different reason anyway. We’re reaching influentials. There’s definitely a return to the substance, a return to the Beltway. That puts us in a pretty good position for [this] year.”Similarly, Joe Landry, senior vp, group publisher of Regent Media, parent of Out and The Advocate, said he believes his pubs are well-situated because they serve a niche and can be packaged with the parent company’s other gay-focused assets, including online and TV. “If we were just a magazine with a weak online site, we would have been much more challenged,” said Landry.Meanwhile, buyers are demanding more of large magazine publishers, even as their clients’ budgets shrink. Forecasting vet Bob Coen predicted national ad spending in magazines will decline 7 percent in 2009 after falling 6 percent in ’08. For newspapers, he predicted that while national ad spending will fall 10 percent both years, local spending in newspapers will drop 16 percent in ’08 and another 12 percent in ’09.For local newspapers, the task is to come up with new products to replace revenue lost as mainstay categories like real estate and automotive drift online or go away entirely, said Stephen Gray, managing director of Newspaper Next, an American Press Institute project looking at future models of newspapers. “The big customers we used to rely on are themselves being disrupted, so we’re pretty much forced to…look at all these other businesses that we haven’t been priced for,” he said.

Performance Marketing

Forecast 2009: Print

Lucia Moses

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Lucia Moses