More Market News for Magazines and Newspapers

Here are some additional views of the journalistic markets. When you want to get an idea of what might be happening in the publishing world, it's good to listen to media buyers. They are the ones who decide where to put ad dollars, which drives the size and very existence of publications. As with most of us, their perceptions become their own biases, because they'll make decisions based on what they think is happening.

So take a look at this Media Life article, reporting on its own survey of media buyers. In particular, look after the discussion of House & Garden to the categories of magazines perceived as most in danger, where some titles might end up closing:

• newsmagazines


• teen


• celebrity


• business and general interest

These are far from universally accepted among the buyers in the surveys, but it's still worth considering. For example, almost two-thirds of them (and, unfortunately, I don't have details of how the survey was done, which can greatly affect the results) expect a shakeout in the newsweeklies, with US News & World Report being the most likely candidate for closure. Strongest and weakest titles among celebrity titles? People was far out front, with Us far behind. And consider this sentence: "The rest, In Touch, Life & Style, OK! and Star, hardly registered [in perception as strong titles]." In other words, once you're past Us, safety among the famous drops off. More tidbits in the article.

On the newspaper front, we have an article from Rich Edmonds, a media analyst, at Poynter Online. He notes that while newspaper online advertising revenue growth has been the bright spot of the industry, it has been feeling a significant slowdown. As he notes, part of it owes to the calculations of growth percentages: as the total gets bigger, the percentage any addition represents is smaller.

But this so-called “law of large numbers” is not the whole story. As for the rest, "it is all to do with classified upsells," analyst Paul Ginocchio of Deutsche Bank Securities, wrote me in an e-mail. Classifieds are the leading edge of the bleeding in print advertising, with losses substantially worse than even pessimists had forecast for 2007. Unfortunately, as Ginocchio notes, classifieds typically make up about 70 percent of the typical newspaper site’s online ad revenue.

In the view of Edmonds, newspapers will need some significnatly new strategies - not more porting paper to pixels. He has some observations and recommendations worth reading. As always, no single piece of information should determine your business strategy. But, put together, they help to give some view of the near and mid-term futures of your industry.