Topic: Media
"All the news that fits" indeed. Rolling Stone magazine has announced that it is giving up its over-sized format for a more conventional 8 x 11 size in October.
“Sadly, Rolling Stone stopped being Rolling Stone, a long time ago. I was a near charter subscriber to the Stone and watched its Gibbon's-like fall into ruin and ashes with dismay and anger ineluctably morphing into the 20th century's great disease: apathy.”
On the other hand, you have to admire Jann Wenner’s bravado-and staying power. There’s a reason Rolling Stone continues to thrive as a business, instead of being some kind of historic relic of the hey day of Haight-Ashbury (which the original long abandoned RS culture that Gary rightly mourns actually is). Wenner’s always followed the money, and in that sense he’s always been more attuned to the self-centred, coolly calculating Boomer generation than that cohort with its mythical peace, love and freedom rep would like to admit. This quote from the New York Times piece this week about the change says it all: “All you’re getting from that large size is nostalgia.”
The Times reports that Rolling Stone’s current 1.4 million paid circulation is the highest in its history. But newsstand single copy sales, always a key barometer of publishing buzz, have tumbled from 189,000 in 1999, to 132,000 last year. “Magazine racks at bookstores, newsstands and checkout counters tend to be made for the standard dimensions, and if Rolling Stone is there, it is often on a high or low shelf, out of eye level, or even on its side or folded over.” This aims to fix all that.
By the way, the latest data on Canadian magazine newsstand circulations, also out this week, are fairly distressing. According to the Audit Bureau of Circulation, single copy newsstand sales are down a precipitous 22.3% this year over last, with total circ down 6.3%. There are methodology nuances that might be at play here, but this is yet more hard evidence of which way the wind is blowing. And, to paraphrase another iconic voice from the 60s, you don’t need a weather man to tell you that.
But in case you do, Bruce Claassen, chairman of Aegis Media Canada, and CEO, Genesis-Vizeum Inc., told Marketing Daily the other day that a single year drop like this is “in and of itself is not something for publishers to get alarmed about,” but...
“Consumers are much more comfortable reading digital products than they once were and publishers need to find a way to both track those readership numbers and generate revenue from online content. The big challenge for publishers is how do we work on multiple platforms and how do we monetize that content.”
