• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, April 6, 2006

Since last week, when executives at American Media, Inc. disclosed at a sales meeting that Celebrity Living had only a week to live, the magazine industry has been jolted by big-name closings and announcements of sales. AMI also announced it was shuttering Shape en Español and automotive interest mag MPH, while Hachette folded Elle Girl's print edition, but kept the online edition alive. Conde Nast announced it was merging the online portals for its bridal titles. Finally, British laddie mag publisher Felix Dennis announced he was selling Maxim and Stuff. That's a lot of turmoil in a concentrated period of time for an already tumultuous magazine medium that some see as moribund and due for an even bigger shakeout.

Media buyers were definitely sitting up and taking notice as the magazine industry seemed to undergo another convulsion. "I'm starting to wonder if this isn't just the beginning--I'm wondering if we won't see some more big-name closings in the near future," mused Debbie Solomon, senior partner and group research director for MindShare.

Solomon blamed recent waves of "me-too" teen girl and celebrity publications for over-saturation of these markets, while noting the same phenomenon in the young men's market. "The men's category is a tough one. I think with the demise of Cargo, the men's category is difficult, and there probably is over-saturation in the men's category." For one thing, Solomon pointed to lower rates of readership among young men overall, especially for general interest shopping magazines like Cargo.

In this context, Solomon added, AMI's closing of MPH is all the more ominous, because it belonged to a product-specific category that has traditionally done better than general-interest shopping mags. "What men are reading is car books and computer books, but we've just seen that AMI's car magazine, MPH, which generally targeted young men, is closing. That's not good."

At first, Roberta Garfinkle of TargetCast TCM was more sanguine about the shakeup: "The magazine business is a very cyclical business. Once a year, there's some sort of shakeout or another, whether it's magazine companies looking around and saying these particular titles aren't profitable, or looking at categories of magazines--it happens all the time."

When asked about the sale of Maxim and Stuff, however, Garfinkle sounded more pessimistic: "Maybe that is the next big shakeout--maybe the whole laddie boy category is done. It came, it was very successful with Maxim, FHM, titles like that--but maybe it's over." In recent months Maxim's sales have been stagnant, with a 14.7 percent dip in newsstand sales offsetting a 3 percent rise in subscription for a total .6 percent decline in circulation.

Echoing Solomon's statement about men's reading habits, Garfinkle explained why general interest men's magazines may be suffering: "Young men read, but they read about very specific things. They read about consumer electronics, sports--things like that--but they don't read the general interest titles." Garfinkle also voiced an even more ominous speculation: "Maybe the guys who were reading the laddie magazines are growing up, and they're not being replaced with people who have similar tastes."

Whatever the long-term implications for the print magazines, Solomon and Garfinkle agreed there was one long-term trend that was not going away: the shift to online portals, as evidenced by Elle Girl's going Internet-only and Conde Nast's consolidation of its bridal title's online portals. "I think what's more interesting is the Elle Girl announcement that they're folding the print product but keeping the internet-based magazine," Garfinkle said, dismissing arguments that online publication lacked a critical tactile dimension provided by print publications: "Particularly when you talk about the teen category, you're talking to a generation of people who eat, breathe, and sleep the Internet. So maybe for those people, paper magazines don't do it. They want the instant gratification, they want to really interact with the title--and you go where your business is."