• Newsweek, Monday, May 4, 2009 9:45 AM

It costs $14.99 for a newsstand copy of Apron*ology, a new magazine about "Aprons With Attitude." That is more than triple the $4.50 newsstand average for established magazine titles. The glossy Portfolio fetched only $4.99 a copy on the newsstand and roughly $1 a month for a subscription, right up until its death. Magazine maven. Samir Husni, journalism chairman at the University of Mississippi, says, "It was a crime to sell a subscription to Portfolio, which targeted well-heeled readers, for $12 a year. We don't value our content anymore."

In tough times, a greater reliance on subscription revenue is a safer bet for publishers than relying on advertisers. "The chances of, say, a half-million subscribers going bankrupt and canceling subscriptions is far less than 50 major advertisers going bankrupt or cutting their ad budgets," Husni says. The devastation in business-to-business titles that depend solely on advertising is especially dire, especially for magazines targeting the construction and banking industries. Some 68 business magazines have failed this year, per MediaFinder.com.

Publishers are beginning to recognize the problem. At the newsstand, the average price of new magazines jumped to $8.10 per issue in 2008 from $5.37 in 2000, Husni says. Meanwhile, established magazines boosted single-copy prices to an average of $4.40 to $4.50 last year, up from $3.83 eight years ago.

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