The Future of Magazines A past in paper and a future on the Web By David Abrahamson Northwestern University Perhaps even more than newspapers, which are geographically limited, and the broadcast media, which are largely derivative--amplifying rather than creating social and cultural trends--magazines reflect and shape their times. In the '50s, the glossy photographs of Life and Look defined a new era of American abundance. In the '70s, as the political activism of the '60s gave way to the "me decade," city and regional magazines such as New York extolled passions for politics and consumer goods. In the '90s, a decade defined by the globalization of commerce and communication, magazines are now in the middle of a new evolution, one distinguished by niche marketing and fertile interaction between print media and the World Wide Web. Where these latest developments will take us is not entirely clear, but it is certain that magazines will both capitalize on and transcend their own recent history. The publications that we read today--whether on printed paper or on-line--are decades removed from what might be termed the "golden age" of magazines, the period beginning after World War I and ending in the late 1950s, when several distinct factors brought the American magazine to a then-unprecedented state of development. The first was business strategy. Most magazine publishers, using the commercial model pioneered in the 1890s by Curtis Publishing's Ladies' Home Journal and Saturday Evening Post, sought large circulations attractive to national advertisers. Most revenue came from advertising sources, while newsstand and subscription prices were kept low, and readers were rarely charged the full cost of producing the publication. As a result, the importance of national advertising grew exponentially. Also during the same period, a variety of unique types of magazines emerged. In the shifting alignments of American demography and culture, publishers glimpsed new pools of readers and devised new magazine genres to serve them. For example, Reader's Digest spoke to America's faith in uplift and self-improvement. Time offered busy readers the news in brisk, capsulated form, and before long other newsweeklies were founded on similar formulae. Time's owners also oversaw the creation of three other important titles. In the depths of the Depression, Fortune was introduced to shore up the nation's shaken faith in the promise of market capitalism. Life, with its pioneering photojournalism, celebrated both the power of the visual image and the marvels of modernity --and was soon imitated by Look. With the 1954 founding of Sports Illustrated, the heightened role of sports in the national consciousness was accurately foretold. Other important start-ups of the era include The New Yorker, which redefined urbane intellectualism and, in the process, challenged long-standing dominance of The Atlantic Monthly and Harper's Magazine. Esquire offered a new Hemingwayesque urbanity, concerned with style, fashion and other matters of the moment, yet it was also introspective and often certifiably literary. Playboy pursued a similar editorial strategy, generously leavened with the mild eroticism of idealized "pictorials." Two other magazines reflected the particular changes reshaping America during the period: the 1945 debut of Ebony, founded by John H. Johnson, mirrored the nascent prosperity of the emerging African-American bourgeoisie, while the first appearance of TV Guide in 1953 followed the ubiquitous success of the new medium. A final aspect of their mid-century "golden age" is the extent to which magazines came to serve as indelible markers of the prevailing social reality. The United States emerged from the Depression and World War II poised on the cusp of unparalleled affluence; an unprecedented percentage of the population--more than two-thirds by most measures--would soon claim membership in an expanding middle class. As a reflection of this social and cultural transformation, magazines, particularly the general-interest publications serving mass audiences, enjoyed a special place in American life. By helping both to define and reinforce the communal, consensual and conformist values of American society in the years after World War II, magazines became the dominant medium for the popular discourse of the nation. Shortly before 1960, however, the magazine industry began to undergo a major transformation, away from serving mass audiences and toward smaller, more specialized readerships. An essential factor in the success of the smaller, more targeted magazines was the changing nature of marketing and advertising during this period. Mass-market advertising revenues, long the lifeblood of the large general-interest magazines, were being siphoned off by television. First introduced in 1947, commercial television's advertising revenues surpassed those of magazines in 1954; less than 10 years later its ad income was double that of magazines. Unable to compete, the three flagship mass-audience magazines, the weeklies Life, Look, and The Saturday Evening Post all ceased publication between 1969 and 1972. Yet at the same time, computerized techniques for finely focusing marketing efforts at specific groups of prospective customers made the more narrowly defined audiences of specialized magazines particularly attractive to advertisers and smaller magazines prospered. Moreover, advances in production and printing technology reduced costs, eliminating many economies of scale and improving the profitability of smaller circulation publications. In concert with television's ascendancy in the 1960s, the advent of "niche" publishing, with its increasing emphasis on the segmentation of audiences, removed magazines from their central place in popular culture. But by explicitly striving to serve the specific informational needs of particular niches, the magazine industry as a whole prospered. Trade and association magazines, for example, did notably well during this period, and by the 1990s there were more than 10,000 titles published regularly in the United States. Similarly, consumer magazines flourished. For instance, those devoted to specific personal interests, particularly leisure pursuits, blossomed; Car and Driver and Road & Track, Boating and Sail, Flying and Pilot, Skiing and Ski were all founded in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and subsequently were turned into notably profitable enterprises by less prominent magazine publishers such as Ziff-Davis, Times Mirror and Hearst. In some cases, established magazine genres benefited; both religious periodicals of all denominations and "handyman" magazines for the do-it-yourselfer proliferated. In others, whole new categories of magazines emerged. These included a new breed of city/regional magazine, largely modeled on New York founded in 1967, featuring a combination of investigative journalism and shopping advice; a wide variety of self- awareness and self-improvement magazines ranging from Ms. to Psychology Today to Self to Men's Health; and magazines such as PC Magazine and PC World, which earned record revenues from the microcomputer craze of the late 1980s. Other narrowly focused magazines offered everything from conservative cultural politics (The New Criterion) to manic humor (National Lampoon) to monomaniacal domesticity (Martha Stewart Living) to relief for the indigestions (Cooking Light) and parental angst (Family Life) of middle- aging baby boomers. Which brings us to the present--and, hence, to the future. It is now clear that the fractionization and proliferation that began in the early 1960s continue to be defining aspects of magazine publishing today. More than 2,000 consumer titles are currently available, and some 900 new titles are launched every year (though the historical record suggests that only a small fraction of these start-ups will actually succeed). Two significant and interrelated consequences arise from the dominantly niche-building nature of the industry, and they will play an important role in determining the future of the magazine form for the next five to 15 years. One is driven by the emerging economic realities of the medium; the other, by the new technological possibilities that magazine publishers, with their expertise at editing for and marketing to specific audiences, are uniquely positioned to take advantage of. The U.S. magazine industry is at present quite healthy and profitable, with more than $13 billion in annual advertising income and $9 billion in circulation revenue, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. Moreover, the Magazine Publishers of America, the industry trade group, reports that the total number of magazine readers has increased by 6 percent in the last decade. But, in large measure the result of the dominant fractionization-and-proliferation paradigm, significant business issues, particularly in the realm of circulation, exist--and are likely to influence the future course of the industry. For example, the costs of building or maintaining circulation are increasing. Magazines with paid circulations rely heavily on the buying of lists of prospective subscribers and mailing offers to them. But the response rates to promotional subscription mailings have been declining for the last few years. In the recent past, a net response rate to a direct-mail circulation promotion of 2 percent was considered acceptable; now 1.5 percent is closer to the norm. As a consequence, publishers have to spend more to maintain their "rate bases"--the levels of circulation promised to advertisers. With newsstands more crowded with more titles, single-copy sales have also become more difficult, and publishers have occasionally gone to great lengths to try to increase them. Consolidation among magazine wholesalers, who control the nation's newsstands and used to number in the hundreds, has left just over 50 in business today. As a result, the wholesalers' bargaining position with magazine publishers has strengthened considerably, and publishers' share of the income from newsstand sales has declined from an average of 45 percent of the cover price to 37 percent. In addition, wholesalers have been able to levy surcharges for special handling or premium placement of newsstand copies. Moreover, these ongoing stringencies on the circulation side of the magazine business, many the result of the fractionization of the market and a proliferation of titles, are matched by similar issues on the advertising front. The heart of the matter is increasing demands by major advertisers for negotiated (read discounted) advertising rates and magazine-funded "value added" merchandising programs. All of which suggests why the potential represented by the World Wide Web may offer commercially attractive possibilities for the future of the magazine. Tremendous advances in both computer and communications technology have made possible newly efficient ways of distributing greater quantities of needed information. By the late 1990s, it was clear that much of the innovation in these "new media" areas would be led by magazine firms. In the main, the reason for this has been the fortuitous convergence between the strengths (and needs) of the magazine industry and the emerging directions in which the Web seems to be evolving. These will include at least four significant trends, the first of which is specialization. In many ways, the development of the on-line realm has followed the historical model of magazine development: mass vehicles that, over time, evolve to define and serve specific niches. In the beginning of the on-line world, many of the newly created sites were fairly general in their orientation. Today, however, despite the widely reported soaring stock prices of "portals" such as Yahoo! and Lycos, the dominant on-line trend seems to privilege significant content specialization. As in the conventional magazine world, beyond the gateway afforded by the portal, there will be more different sites serving more different audiences--and, driven by diverging audience interests, the content of the sites themselves is in turn becoming more differentiated. A corollary of specialization will be that fewer and fewer magazine Web sites will identically mirror the hard-copy print version of the publication. No longer will the Web site be a mere archive of the print product. Many magazine publishers will come to believe that other principles of conception and presentation apply on-line. However, no industrywide agreement has as yet emerged on the operative principles to be applied when taking information originating in print form and putting it on-line. Some publishers, for example, believe that the average reader's on-line attention span is limited to one screen's worth of information; others think that as many as five screens are acceptable. Some believe that on-screen flashing banner advertising makes no difference; others find it an abomination. With all the different on-line presentation solutions currently in use, it is evident that there is as yet very little unanimity on trade practices. In contrast, in the traditional print world, both the visual constituent components--headline, deck, body copy, lead paragraph, lead art, call-out and caption-- and their interrelation are well established, having evolved into their current form over the last 100 years. But the same does not exist on-line yet, in large part because the way information is visually consumed on-line is so different from the way it is consumed on the printed page. Given the limitations of a conventional computer monitor, how the on- line reader actual reads is determined by all manner of visual field factors, cognition/learning theory considerations and ergonomic issues. These are topics about which people have strong opinions, but it is likely that a generally agreed-upon solution, the received wisdom, will soon emerge. A second major point of coevolution between the magazine and the World Wide Web will be the continuing process of commercialization of the on-line world. The economic formula for on-line profitability remains elusive, as Slate's abandonment of subscription charges in early 1999 proved. At present, no one has yet defined a workable model to ensure that an on-line publication is profitable. In the on-line world, there are certainly no guarantees--particularly in the sense, for example, that with a traditional print magazine, with a certain number of advertisers willing to pay a certain advertising rate to reach a certain number of readers and with a certain level of operating costs, you can be assured of making money. On-line, such reliable models do not yet exist, but it seems only a matter of time before they will. Nevertheless, as with most media products, the general principle of keeping costs low and perceived value to the consumer high does seem to pertain on-line. An interesting current example of this, which may serve as a future template for other magazine publishers, is the on-line publication Salon, an upscale magazine of politics, culture and literature. Its 1999 advertising rate, expressed in terms of cost per 1,000 (CPM), is from $20 to $40, which is a number from which a set of inferences can be drawn. In comparison, the median CPM for U.S. consumer magazines is approximately $30. At the low end of the scale are undifferentiated media aimed at mass audiences with no great proclivity to consume; television, for example, has an average CPM of about $5-$10 for a 30-second spot. The major newsmagazines with large undifferentiated audiences have CPMs in the $15 to $20 range. Many women's magazines are in the $20 to $25 range. More specialized publications, however, can charge their advertisers between $40 and $60, because their readers both form a well-defined market that advertisers want to reach and are more active consumers. So the fact that an on-line magazine, Salon, can charge an advertising CPM of as high as $40 is significant. In market terms, it validates the notion that, in the view of Salon's advertisers, the right kind of people are regularly reading the publication and, because of who they are and how they spend, these are the readers that advertisers are willing to pay a premium to reach. As a result, by keeping costs low and editorial value high--and therefore attractive to the readers that advertisers desire--Salon currently reports a modest profit. A third forecast about the magazines' future engagement with the on-line world will focus on a predictable range of commitment on the part of the enterprises that one might presume would be involved. Some media firms have committed and are likely to continue to devote substantial resources in staff and funding to their on-line presence. Time Warner, for example, has spent millions of dollars on its Pathfinder site. Less tangibly but perhaps equally revealing, the third name at the very top of the Time Warner corporate masthead is the person in charge of the firm's on-line efforts. The title is editor of new media, and its prominent position in the corporate hierarchy is perhaps emblematic of the company's commitment to realizing the on-line potential of its publications. At the other end of the scale will be a small number of prominent publishing firms that one might assume would be heavily involved in the on-line development of their print products--and yet for the next few years they will remain tentative and uncommitted in their approach. In one sense, however, this cautious strategy may have a self-fulfilling dimension to it. The fewer resources devoted to on-line development, the less interesting and useful the resulting site will be. The less compelling the site, the fewer readers it will attract. And the more modest the number of hits the site receives, the more convinced decision-makers will be that the company's on-line investment should be kept to a minimum. In many such cases, it will be clear that senior executives are responding to internal norms of their firm's prevailing corporate culture concerning matters of both risk and technology. As one might expect, between these two poles--the truest of believers at one end and the skeptical at the other--will lie a full spectrum of involvement. By all present indications, this vast range of commitment, viewed as a trend, is likely to persist for the foreseeable future. A fourth and final point that underscores the promising future of magazines' on- line potential is especially interesting because few if any observers predicted it: the growing number and importance of women on-line, not only as producers but as consumers of Web-based information. There is a persistent cultural assumption that a predisposition to antipathy exists between females and technology. As a matter of both popular imagination and scholarly inquiry, this is a long-held, historically persistent belief with deep cultural roots. So one of the really fascinating data points to be found in the most current usage figures is the suggestion that approximately 45 percent of the people on-line today are women. It can, however, be argued with some ease that this should not be surprising. When one examines the aggregate data on media use across platforms (books, television, films, periodicals, etc.), the primacy of female consumption is indisputable. And magazines offer a particularly notable case. In numbers of titles, there are roughly one- and-a-half times more women's magazines than there are men's magazines in the United States. Moreover, in terms of readership, women's magazines on average have twice the circulation of men's magazines. What these two comparisons mean in aggregate is that three-quarters of all magazine readers in the country are women. With the growing number of women on-line--which is an expanding subset of the growing number of women who are comfortable using computers -- it is likely that the 1999 figure of 45 percent will increase dramatically over the next five years. Stated another way, there is no reason to believe that the current gender proportions of the readership of traditional magazines and the future gender proportions of their on-line versions will, over the long run, show any variation. It appears that the historic adaptability of the magazine form will serve it exceedingly well in the future. The basic strategic model of "narrow-casting"--serving the specific information needs of specific audiences for whom advertisers will pay a premium--will certainly continue to prevail. In large part due to their skill in applying this niche-driven economic model, successful magazine publishers will remain at the forefront of World Wide Web development, providing on-line information derived from, yet not identical to, that contained in their printed versions. And lastly, despite the importance of the Web, it is clear that both as a self-contained, highly targeted information vehicle and as a core "brand" from which other products will be extended, the magazine in its contemporary printed form will continue to demonstrate its efficacy as a source of information and pleasure for its readers, its utility as a marketing vehicle for its advertisers and its viability as a business enterprise for its publishers well into the 21st century. Copyright 1999 David Abrahamson. All rights reserved.