Magazine Meltdown

Last week’s Manhattan  magazine buzz was all about whether Anna Wintour, the imperious editor of Vogue and the model for the Devil in “The Devil Wears Prada” was about to leave the job she had held for almost twenty years.   Wintour, 59, at a panel of Conde Nast editors at the Plaza ,discussing the magazine business, denied the rumor.  She  said,
"I have no plans to leave American Vogue now or in the foreseeable future.”  She also commented, “My father always said to me that when you get too angry that's the time to stop. The day I get too angry is the day I take up gardening."  

So though Wintour  is not yet  ready to gather her rosebuds, she did admit that the current economic downturn has even  made her high-fashion editing more sensitive. For example, she noted she had recently decided  against photographing  a sequined mini-dress with a $50,000 price tag. ( But in the September issue Vogue did  include a feature about  a $64,000 gold-dipped mink coat. Ah, those were the days.

She also saw an upside for magazines in these hard economic times.  “I think it makes you a little edgier,” she declared and later added, "I think we’ve been in difficult times before and we’ve come out of them and I’m sure that we will again.”   The others on the panel, David Remnick  of  The New Yorker and Graydon Carter of Vanity Fair agreed.

“I think magazines have a future,” said Remick.  The New Yorker’s ad pages are down 26% so far this year.  “If your magazine—or your company, whatever it is—has a point it can do well in tough times," said Carter.  Vanity Fair’s ad pages are down 13.6% and Vogue’s are down almost  10% through the November issues. 

 All this bland cheerfulness and glad tidings was even too much for some in the panel’s audience made up of devoted media watchers. . For  the magazine industry is currently  in a meltdown.  Ad pages have cratered.   Several magazines, both old and new, have shut down. .   And hundreds of magazine workers, both on the editorial and advertising staffs,  have been fired.   By the end of September over three thousand  had been laid off.   Just a few weeks ago hundreds more were added to that list  by Time Inc on what their employees called “The Day of the Ax.”  Right now there is a hiatus to the blood letting  because many magazines  do not hand out pink slips at holiday time.   It may be brief. 

Just as worrisome is the precipitous drop in the stocks of the publicly-owned publishing companies.  Eight stocks have lost more than 80% of their value in the past year and six are lower than they were on Black Monday in 1987.   And the privately-owned media giants  like Conde Nast and Hearst have showed they are hurting by also firing staffers and shutting magazines.  Hearst closed CosmoGirl, O at Home, and Quick&Simple.  CondeNast reduced the frequency of Portfolio and Men’s Vogue. 

So do magazines really have a future?  Yes, of course, some very strong magazines will survive.   But magazine publishing, overall, is really  a small business that for too long has acted big, often lavishing salaries and perksout of proportion to the profits a magazine as a business earns. In the future as print advertising continues its downward  spiral, staffs will be smaller and less well paid and  budgets for everything  far tighter.   There just may be no more editors like Anna Wintour. For unless publishing makes some big changes, by the time she starts gardening, it will be the industry itself that will be pushing up the daisies.          

 

Comments

[johndamion]

Alot of people are getting their info. and kicks online these days...for "free." The internet hasn't replaced the demand for books so I suspect magazines will still have a place as well. Look at all the newspapers that have bellied-up or are in trouble. It's the economy and the internet working together that is giving the print media competition. I hope there is a happy ending for all involved, but I expect quite a few adjustments and changes. The "Times" they are a changin' (sorry for the pun!). Like all realignments in business, I expect and am confident we will all survive with a more efficient, competitive magazine world. This is how capitalism works, and there are always winners and losers (unless you are lucky enough to be bailed out...do you have a UNION???).

[Rita@Goldivas]

I subscribed to Vogue at one time, but then got turned off by all the ads, which bordered on porn, and were just too numerous. One benefit of magazines is their portability, but Vogue was getting to be like hauling a phone book around.