Time Magazine To Switch Publication Date to Fridays But In These Days of Breaking News On The Internet Do We Have Time To Spare Reading A Print News Weekly Any More?

In that vein the announcement by Time Magazine that it is changing its publication date to Fridays starting in January, 2007, makes sense as far as trying to get readers to spend more of their weekend leisure time on the magazine, but the real question is whether Time is one of those publications that should really give up the ghost of print and just settle for an online presence.

Newsweeklies are really a weird hybrid in today’s world. As John Huey, Time, Inc.’s editor-in-chief told the Wall Street Journal, “Time has broken a lot of news in the last year, and none of it was in print.” And so as Time has designated its web site to be the recipient of its breaking news, the time has come to reexamine the role of the print publication.

People aren’t that much interested any more in what happened in the past seven days – the Internet, television and print has that covered pretty well. So it’s natural the focus must look forward -- what might well happen in the next seven days, and that means plenty of analysis and opinion. That’s quite a change when one remembers that it wasn’t that long ago that newsweeklies never even had bylines.

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The financials dictate that Time needs to do something to shake up the ship. Time Inc. went through a cost-cutting purge starting last December that ended with some 455 staff bounced, and Time Magazine, for instance, closed its sole Canadian editorial office in Toronto. The magazine has been hit particularly hard by the downturn in automobile print advertising – Time received more US auto advertising than any other magazine. And while perhaps not a deciding influence, printing the magazine globally on Thursday for distribution on Friday is far less expensive than weekend printing and getting onto newsstands for Monday.

Like many newspapers, Time is suffering from bad demographics – its print readership is aging as the young flock to the Internet. There is very little convergence of the print readership and those who read the web site.

Time still maintains a healthy subscription circulation of around 4 million weekly, but its newsstand sales are down a whopping 24% for the first half of the year. Ad pages have improved a bit this year, but they are still far less than a couple of years ago.

The Time decision makers are no doubt taking a page from the Wall Street Journal that started its Saturday weekend edition last year and is said to be happy with results that indicate people do take the time to read it. The idea was that people have a lot more time to spend over the weekend reading “nice to have’s” whereas during the week they only have time for the “must-have” reading.

Trouble is there is a lot of competition for that weekend leisure time – newspapers are publishing more pages – in some places the Saturday papers are sometimes thicker than the Sundays – and then there is all that time to be spent shopping, socializing and the like. Do we really want to spend that time worrying about all the world’s problems?

What is perhaps more interesting is that Time is going to change its focus more onto reporting the future rather than concentrating on looking back on the past week. The magazine will let its Internet site break the news while print focuses on analyzing that news and how it affects us going forward – that analysis is available elsewhere on the Internet for sure, but not to the degree that one finds just straight news.

Direct Marketing News headlined its Time story “Who Needs Newsweeklies?” and that is really THE question. It lauded the weekend move, pointing out that Time’s sister People Magazine did the same a few years back and the sales results were excellent. Advertisers also like the idea that people may spend more time looking at the magazine.

So while the magazine probably has nothing to lose from the change, and perhaps it can gain a great deal, is it a case of “ too little, too late?” Can newsweeklies reinvent themselves? They survived television by adding more lifestyle coverage, there’s no reason they should not survive the Internet by adding more analysis. Which is why we will probably see more and more articles asking such questions as “Who Needs Harvard?”

According to the Audit Bureau of Circulation, US magazine single copy sales dropped more than 4% to 48.7 million in the first half of the year. There are less impulse sales when people visit the newsstand less and less.

That financial environment seems to be slowing the introduction of new magazines, and also encourages publishers to pull the plug sooner than they might have done in the past. A mass magazine rollout today can cost anywhere from $30 million to $100 million and that means only the major publishing houses are really in the game. But magazine introductions last year were well down on the year before and this year they are even fewer. And if the magazine doesn’t make the grade quickly is soon disappears – witness Cargo and Celebrity Living.

Instead of disappearing, Time is trying to reinvent itself. In making its switch to Friday publication Time joins the much smaller Economist. Although its US circulation is only around 600,000, it saw a near 15% increase during the first six months of this year, and the Economist has always been a news weekly never afraid to express an opinion.

Time Magazine To Switch Publication Date to Mondays But In These Days of Breaking News On The Internet Do We Have Time To Spare Reading A Print News Weekly Any More?

The magazine industry is in the dumps – few new launches, some famous titles are experiencing falling circulation – and they’re trying anything they can to buck the bad tidings from changing publication dates to spending more on their online sites.