No weekly magazine tracked by the Media Industry Newsletter has lost more pages of advertising this year than
The Nation, which did booming business during the Bush years. As of Nov. 8, ad
pages were down 30% compared with last year's figures, remarkable even though advertising accounts for only a 10th of the revenue. Traffic to TheNation.com has also declined recently. And since 2008,
the magazine has run an operating deficit of about $500,000 a year.
Despite all the gloom, could last week's Democratic pummeling actually have a silver lining for the magazine, once home
to writers like Henry James and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Katrina vanden Heuvel, the magazine's editor and publisher, says: "You've got a Tea Party caucus in the Senate, a Tea Party caucus in the House. So I
think you have a lot of rich material." She has a point: from 2001 to 2003, the magazine's circulation leapt from 107,000 to 149,000 and kept growing. By 2006, it had reached its peak at 187,000.
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