Is Time’s Time Up?

Folio has the latest magazine circ figures : And Time has taken a beating in paid circulation, down 17.57%. While it’s still the No. 1 newsweekly, Newsweek isn’t that far behind. Its numbers are also down, but by a mere .30%, and if Time continues to sink, the gap in total circ numbers is bound to narrow.

The obituary for print journalism is written (or redacted) daily. Yet AARP’s publications have seen steady increases, due no doubt to a steadily aging population. So, do periodicals geared to an older demographic—more comfortable with paper than with an iPhone, perhaps—have an edge in terms of continued growth? If so, why the near collapse of Reader’s Digest , which has seen its circulation cut almost in half since its high-tide days of the 1970s, when it had 18 million in paid circ? Certainly RD is your father’s (and your father’s father’s and mother’s mother’s) favorite coffee-table magazine.

But RD has been trying to “remake” its image over the past few years—and I wouldn’t be surprised if it has succeeded only in alienating its most loyal subscribers. The muckety-mucks over at Pleasantville (actually, Chappaqua—Pleasantville’s just a mailing address) probably saw only that its reader base was dying off—rather than that it was being replaced with yet another generation for whom RD might have proved appealing if the magazine weren’t so busy trying to situate itself as Oprah lite. But why settle for a knock-off when the real thing is sitting on the same shelf? (I used to make a similar argument when I worked at RD several years ago, as the humor editor. They wanted more “contemporary” humor—Letterman-style copy—but didn’t want to pay for it. They expected late-night snark from the Midwestern housewives who regularly submitted the material from which the humor columns mostly are culled. I, foolishly, assumed that readers of Reader’s Digest expected the humor associated with Reader’s Digest —not The Daily Show .)

I imagine institutional mags such as National Geographic enjoy a built-in hedge against digital-journal inflation: When libraries across the country have been subscribing to your book since Millard Fillmore was president, it’s a lot easier to keep your numbers up. The problem is trying to get into those institutions now . (If you wonder how some tiny journals you may be familiar with are able to keep their pages open, check to see how long they’ve been around. Guaranteed they’re sustained primarily by decades-old relationships with libraries, colleges, and seminaries that wouldn’t think of cutting them off when their stacks can boast a jaundice-yellow copy of Volume 1, Issue 1, with cover lines like “British Burn Capitol: Is It Worth Rebuilding?”)

The celebrity rags are up and down, depending. But when you can get the latest Brangelina sighting sent directly to your iPod, how much longer will those super-disposable glossies last?

First Things’ numbers, by the way, are just below the fold . . .

Update: Traffic to magazine websites is up 8.1% . A coincidence? The question is whether traffic is up on those magazines whose paid circ is down—and if so, is that Web audience younger than the readers they’re losing on the newsstands . . .