• Advertising Age, Tuesday, January 13, 2009 9:30 AM

American Media is amputating about 80% of Country Weekly's paid circulation to keep the title publishing. The 15-year-old magazine is abandoning subscriptions, lowering the cover price and returning to a weekly schedule. Instead of guaranteeing advertisers a paying audience of 435,000 people, the mag will sell about 75,000 copies per issue on newsstands.

The move is unusual because magazines generally depend on subscriptions to supply a steady base of customers. Newsstand sales are far more volatile, with no guarantee that the same number of copies will sell week to week.

American Media faces challenges beyond the recession. CEO David Pecker and his private equity backers once envisioned taking the company public, but they now struggle under $1 billion in debt.

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