Mr. Magazine

It is a good sign of things to come. In fact it is a very good sign that this National Magazine Day is not aimed at the advertisers or ad agencies and is not sponsored by a magazine publisher or even an ad club in this city or that. It is the first National Magazine Day organized by a reader, an avid reader who discovered his first magazine, Highlights for Children, at a very young age and never looked back.

His name is Kevin Smokler, a writer and author who lives in San Francisco, CA and the creator of what he hopes to be a national annual holiday event. Mr. Smokler writes on his website, “On Saturday, February 27th, ordinary folk across America (like you, like me) will spend the day “attacking the stack” or reading their way through the unread magazines they’ve accumulated. If you’re a big goody-goody and read your magazines straight through the moment they arrive, you may spend the day at your local library/bookstore/university exploring new periodicals, discussing your favorite magazines with friends, tweeting your favorite articles. As you wish.”

I asked Kevin about the origins of his idea, and his answer did not surprise me a bit. He told me that as a child he used to watch his dad, after dinner daily, go to his study room where a pile of magazines covered his entire checkerboard coach. “It is time to attack the stack, dad would say,” Kevin said. “It was the time to relax.” Kevin learned to humanize magazines and build relationships with them. “A magazine is like a person who will have something for you, whether you have five minutes or two hours,” he said.

Magazine Day is “a celebration of magazines and attacking the stack of unread titles piling up next to your bathroom sink.” Kevin invites folks no matter where they are, to “invite friends over and rumage though each other’s stacks (of magazines). Spend the day reading at your local coffee shop or library. Multch your magazines and construct a giant paper mache wildebeest. It’s up to you. The idea is to spend the day having fun and forming community around a shared love of magazines.”

Congratulations to Kevin on such a great idea, and congratulations to all magazine lovers on finally having a day they can call their own. To find out about the first ever National Magazine Day click here.

If anyone can put a positive and thoughtful spin on the “State of the Newsstand” in the United States after the “2009 worst year ever,” that person would be John Harrington, the founder and editor of The New Single Copy, and the man who knows more about the newsstand business than anyone I know. He has a wealth and depth of information that helps simplify the complex state of the newsstand (hopefully).

Armed with a lot of numbers, Mr. Harrington was my guest speaker at the Magazine Innovation Center at the University of Mississippi’s School of Journalism. He revealed to the students that “last year was the worst year ever in the history of the newsstands, yet we distributed more than 9,000 titles on the nation’s stands.” Yes, folks, you read that right. There were over 9,000 different titles (ranging from a one time appearance to a weekly presence) on the nation’s stands. However, Mr. Harrington revealed that his preliminary findings of the key industry performance figures for 2009 were not as encouraging as the number of titles available at the marketplace. The dollar sales for all magazines (audited and not-audited) was $4.44 billion, down 8.1% from 2008 and the total unit sales was 1.11 billion down 12.9% from 2008. The sales efficiency for 2009 was 36.0% up a little from 2008’s 35.2%.

Mr. Harrington also revealed that his research shows that based on available data from 316 magazines in 2001, the average subscription price for a magazine back then was $1.22, and the average single copy price was $2.83 for a ratio of 43% of the subscription price. In 2008, his research on 437 magazines shows that the average subscription price was $1.12 (down 8.2% from 2001), and average single copy prices were $3.76 (up 32.9% from 2001) for a ratio of 30% of the subscription price. His conclusion: we are still using the subscription copies as “a give away” to meet the rate base. That means we are still focusing on the advertising driven model as the major source of revenue. He went one step further and used as an illustration the revenues of the number one selling magazine on the nation’s newsstands Cosmopolitan. The latest available figures show that Cosmo (although it is the number one newsstand seller) generates 76% of its revenues from advertising, 20% from the newsstands and 4% from subscriptions. Keep in mind that Cosmo sells almost double the number of copies on the newsstands compared to subscriptions.

According to Mr. Harrington, Cosmo is not alone. In 2001 the revenue sources for the major 153 magazines were divided as follows: Advertising 70.9%, Subscriptions 18.9%, Newsstand 10.2%. In 2008 the revenue sources for the major 196 magazines were as follows: Advertising 79.2%, Subscription 11.9%, Newsstand 8.9%.

A lot of the current problems in the American publishing model are related to the economy of revenues that model has depended on for years. When the economy tanked in 2008, the business model followed. Mr. Harrington’s offered three “hopeful” predictions and one “better be”:

1. The newsstand will return to being friendly (hopefully)
2. Subscriptions marketing will be more rational (hopefully)
3. The publishing financial model will be more balanced (hopefully)
4. The world will be a better place (it better be)

And to cap it all, he reminded the students that “the newsstand IS the place where success in our business can truly be measured.” Why, you may ask? “Because folks have to pay the cover price to get the magazine, there is no other way around it.”

Back in the 60s, TIME magazine ran the famous cover “Is God Dead?” in red and black. Half a century later Christianity Today magazine ran a similar cover answering that famous question by stating “God Is Not Dead Yet.” This month Paste magazine took the exact TIME magazine design and asked a similar question, only replacing God with Indie? We may have to wait half a century to get the answer to Paste magazine’s question, however one thing is for sure, good design never goes out of style and is worthy of repeating time and time again (pun intended).