Is It Time for Time to Slim Down?
January 16, 2007

My issue of Newsweek Magazine was noticeably thinner this week. "What is going on here?" I wondered. A story about another magazine, Time, may provide the answer. According to a New York Times article, Time, Inc. is planning to reduce the size of a number of its publications, including its flagship weekly, Time, in response to a dropping rate base - off 20 percent in the last six months.

Industry insiders say the drop-off is due to the Internet. As more readers get used to finding their news online, sales of print news publications are gradually but steadily falling.

Time, Inc. plans to keep itself solvent with a three-pronged attack:

  1. It will cut costs dramatically by reducing its size and getting rid of a lot of its editorial staff.
  2. It will beef up its website.
  3. Instead of focusing on the news, it will focus on news analysis.

Time, Inc. is in the process of hiring expert commentators to write essays about news events, rather than simply report them. In taking this tack, Time will position itself as a thinker's tool for affluent people. (In a recent issue that gave an indication of the kind of articles we can expect, the editor of the Weekly Standard and the former editor of the New Republic squared off to debate whether America is still a great country.)

In reviewing the new format, The New York Times said it seems to be "a journalistic offspring of The Atlantic and The Economist" but with shorter articles.

If so, I applaud Time. That's exactly what they should be doing.

You can't stand against the tide ... especially when it's turning into a tidal wave. The Internet is changing the way people get their news. It offers, in one package, all the benefits of all the other news sources: the instantaneousness and visual immediacy of television, the textual depth of a newspaper or magazine, and - as an added bonus - the research capacity of a local library. You can't compete with that.

For many years (and most recently at our Info-Marketing Bootcamp in Florida), we've been making the case that the Internet is a perfect medium for information publishing - but only if publishers abandon the idea of providing general information and focus on highly specialized data and, more importantly, on expert analysis and advice.

That seems to be exactly what Time is doing. Not only will the new approach reduce the cost of printing, production, and editorial (composition and copyediting, since freelance writing requires less copyediting), it will attract a better audience in terms of advertising potential. "Print publishing is becoming a business built on rich people who read," The New York Times said. "Information that can be digitized and commoditized, like the kind of data that weeklies historically traded on, ends up being consumed on the Web."

"We want our product ... to be seen as a premium product, a special and beautiful thing," Mr. Stengel, Time, Inc.'s publisher, said. So far, this has been reflected in the magazine's price, which increased to $4.95 in November.

posted by M. Masterson @ 9:55 AM,

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