I was pointed to the original article by a friend via Twitter (I don't twitter, really I don't, but the Writers Festival does...)
Gabriel Sherman writes, in a piece on TheBigMoney.com:
"Taken together, the latest magazine failures signaled to many publishing observers that magazines—long thought to be partly insulated from the digital forces battering the newspaper industry—are locked in their own death spiral. For evidence, they point out that since last March, more than two dozen major magazines have folded.
But a closer look at the types of magazines that have closed reveals a more nuanced and, in many respects, hopeful portrait of the magazine business. According to a list compiled by Advertising Age, titles that have shut down in the past year come from the shelter, technology, travel, luxury, and teen categories. The reason for each category's challenges are obvious, from a meltdown in the housing sector to teenagers' wholesale abandonment of print for Facebook and Twitter.
Yet the general conclusion that many extrapolate from these recent shutdowns is wrong. It's not that magazines are dying; it's that magazines that were created solely for advertising or market-share purposes are. New magazine titles often fail from a combination of bad timing, bad thinking, and a bad choice of brands to extend. Put simply, there are too many mediocre magazines (as anyone who gazes at the newsstand at Barnes and Noble would conclude).
In one way, publishers are suffering from the same tendencies as traders binging on mortgage-backed securities: When the advertising market in a particular genre begins to rain really hard, publishers respond by trying to create more buckets, instead of working to find the next bucket where passion resides. The reality is that once a market is mature enough to support a national magazine, chances are it has already peaked."
The full article is worth reading, if only for the scary (and failed) spinoff magazines he mentions: O at Home? How is that different from O Magazine? More interior decorating? My God, how much interior decorating can the market bear? (Don't answer that, I don't want to know.)
He seems to conclude that advertising-driven spinoff magazines are most likely to fail, and magazines that feel like they're actually written for their audience will keep their readership. Come to think of it, doesn't that sound suspiciously like common sense?
I know that my loyalty to, say, The New Yorker has got to do with issues of identity and community (my family all read it, there is an established image of the type of person that reads it, and I feel that the editors are speaking to me and my community.) If someone tried to spin off a New Yorker Teen, or even a New Yorker Canada, with an eye to generating new audiences, I'd peg that for an underhanded marketing ploy by Conde Nast, and I would be righteously indignant. I also wouldn't buy the magazine.
We've gotten so suspicious of advertising, I think, and so attuned to it, that we resist it in a lot of ways. Another thing that might be going on here is a turning away from static print advertising to more dynamic and interactive kinds of marketing. I'm thinking viral videos on YouTube, feeds on Twitter, and some of the intense website-based promotion that movies are getting into.
Maybe this means - gasp - that magazines will go back to having to focus on quality and content to gain and keep readers. I have no problem with that!
I rang it in last night at the Fireborn reading with the other Kymeras - we also got to plug