A News Weekly and A Sports Weekly Are Switching To Biweekly – Beginning Of A Trend For News Magazines?

Philip M. Stone June 12, 2008

Life for a news or sports weekly magazine is really tough these days. By the time you hit the newsstand most of the publication is basically history of the week before and circulation declines at most such magazines indicate the world has moved on. So why not give up the print ghost of telling people what they already know and instead concentrate on the future, on the kind of full length in-depth news and sports articles that a weekly schedule doesn’t permit?

Thus it is that within a couple of days of one another US News and World Report and Sporting News announced they were giving up on weekly publication. Luckily neither has the words “week” or “weekly” as part of their masthead!

US News will complete the switch next year, but in reality it’s pretty much there already since it is publishing from 32-36 editions this year, down from 46 last year. For Sporting News the switch comes sooner, in September.

US News, with circulation around 2 million, has always been the poor cousin to market leader Time (circulation around 3.4 million), and Newsweek (around 3.1 million) – how would Newsweek handle such a transition with the word “week” shouting out at you? But truth be told none of these magazines have much to shout about these days. The financials, in fact, are a bit horrific. US News ad revenue for Q1 this year is down some $20 million over the same period last year, a 35% drop, but some of that can be laid off to fewer issues already this year than last.  There were 137 fewer ad pages, a 37.5% drop.

At Time, ad revenue was down $15 million, a 13.3% drop, with ad pages down by 80, a 17.8% drop. Newsweek ad revenue was down $22.4 million, a 232% drop, with ad pages off 54, a 13.9% decrease.

But that’s not to say there isn’t growth in the news weekly markets; two British-owned weekly news magazines have found their niche. The Week has seen circulation jump to around 500,000 although its Q1 ad revenue was down $435,000, off 7.4%, with the number of ad pages down by 20, a 15.5% fall-off. But the real star is The Economist that has seen ad revenue soar by nearly $7 million, a 27.3% increase, and ad pages are up by 30, a 5.3% increase. Its circulation keeps jumping higher and it ended last year with 720,882 in North America.

The Week caters to the crowd that has little time for world events and just wants brief snippets of what has occurred in the past seven days (it’s done on the cheap by summarizing long articles written elsewhere). With The Economist, on the other hand, there is very little fluff, a great deal of detail and read cover to cover one really does know most of the important things that occurred in the past week, why they happened, what the future might have in store, and you can’t help but feel it is written by people who actually know what they are talking about!

So the low-end The Week and the high-end Economist are doing pretty well, but those caught in the middle – not sure whether they should be the tellers of what happened or the purveyors of what they think is going to happen – are the ones who seem to be stuck in the mud.

US News has found a niche with very successful issues covering rankings for various subjects – their annual ranking of US colleges and universities is a best-seller – but it has always been in third place in weekly circulation and ad pages. It’s owned by Mort Zuckerman who also owns the New York Daily News, so there is money there but the question really is whether Zuckerman is willing to throw more good money after bad, particularly investing on the digital side, or this is just a retrenchment – there have been plenty of budget cuts over the years. The basic point is that no matter what it has tried US News just never has had the popularity of Time or Newsweek.

Advertisers seem to be divided whether US News has made the right move. Brenda White, senior vice-president at Starcolm Worldwide told Advertising Age, “It’s a very smart, strategic move. When you think about it, what their brand stands for is the rankings. There is a franchise there.”

On the other hand Marty Walker of Walker Communications told Media Life, “I think it’s a dying gasp, or last gasp. There’s no way of being biweekly and being news-oriented, so it’s moving to more feature-oriented product. All the news magazines are suffering from the newspapers and internet taking their news space away, so they’re becoming more feature and analysis –oriented. I don’t know what US News is really planning to do, although I read they may do more “Best of” listings. But I don’t know how viable that is.”

One thing that might attract advertisers to US News with the biweekly schedule is that each edition will be on newsstands longer, thus more advertising shelf life.

The newsweeklies are investing in their web sites – basically they are letting the web carry the breaking news while the print editions have far more depth and look to the future. Newsweek which has always played second fiddle to Time in print sales is actually ahead on the Internet, according to Nielsen Online, where it has 6.5 million average monthly unique visitors (up 38%) compared to Time’s 4.35 million (up 34%)  with US News down at 1.3 million,(up just 6.5%). 

But circulation for the print edition continues to look sickly. Time’s 3.4 million last year is down 17.6% with a 19.4% decline in newsstand sales, Newsweek’s circulation was flat at 3.1 million but newsstand sales were off 16.3% and US News, flat at 2 million, saw its newsstand sales down 7.9%.

As for The Sporting News the biweekly print edition in September will have more color, better quality paper, and better known columnists. It’s owned by American City Business Journals that prints some sports magazines, some 40 local business journals and has 200 radio outlets and it says all of those newsrooms will be at the disposal of TheSporting News.

The magazine currently has about a 700,000 circulation and it’s expected that might drop by around 100,000 with those readers instead staying with just a free daily digital newsletter. The idea is for the newsletter to handle breaking news and statistics, video, picture slide shows and the like while the print magazine can concentrate on analysis and commentary. Unlike its major print competition there will be no swimsuit edition.

So is biweekly the solution for weekly news and sports magazines? Vanity Fair media columnist Michael Wolff said at the I Want Media symposium last week that news weeklies are looking at “obsolescence." He told his fellow panelists, “If Newsweek is around in five years, I'll buy you dinner."  Newsweek editor Jon Meacham later responded, “I like steak and look forward to dinner.”

But will he really be there?