Where have all the magazines gone? is an article by Samir Husni published by Poynter about the decline in magazines on newsstands in the US.
Magazine publishers, folks who work in distribution and retail newsagents will find this article interesting even though it is a US perspective.
In 2014 I wrote an obit for traditional newsstands in America — stores that sold mainly tobacco products and magazines — and about the birth of a new newsstand in grocery stores and bookstores. Tremendous change is now taking place at those new newsstands, which already look nothing like they did just a few years ago.
Though the newsstand was the most visible sign of a magazine, newsstand sales were never a major factor in the circulation strategy of the larger audited circulation publications. The strategic importance of newstands has only shrunk. Newsstand sales fell from a high 35% in the late 1970s to less than 10% in the early 2000s to a mere 3% of the total circulation today. A magazine like Time, which sells almost two million copies, now has very little presence on the newsstands. Overall, the newsstand industry went from about $6.8 billion in revenue in 2006 to about $1 billion in 2022 in a major drop following many changes that can be summed in one word: consolidation.
Consolidation took place in every segment of the magazine media business: publishers, printers, distributors, wholesalers and retailers. With no exception, and to various degrees of volume, each of those industries saw mergers and acquisitions resulting in fewer publishers, fewer printers, fewer distributors, fewer wholesalers and fewer retailers, which, in short, means fewer magazines available for the general public to pick up and buy at retail.
Magazine sales growth is there for the taking in Australia, especially in titles outside the top 200. I am confident that newsagents who want to specialise, those with 1,000+ titles on their shelves, could easily achieve double-digit growth is we had genuine and easy control over the range of titles we receive and the quantity.
That in 2023 we do not have this is a key factor in holding back magazine sales in the magazine specialist retail newsagencies.
Husni’s article is worth reading. It ends on a note relevant to us here in Australia.
My own stats show that the annual number of new magazines has shrunk, too, from a high of 535 in 1996 to a low of 74 in 2022.
But Linda Ruth, an industry consultant and founder and president of PSC Consulting, said that the “special quality, special interest vertical publications are actually growing.”
“The newsstand has become a niche category,” Kotok said, with the high titles selling less than 300,000 copies an issue, a far cry from the 12 million copies that TV Guide used to sell in the late 1970s.
I think it is relevant for newsagents who specialise in magazines and rely on range see ourselves as niche. This means focussing more attention on those specialty titles rather than on the mass titles that are available everywhere else … leave those to the supermarkets who only promote when paid to do so by the publishers.
Poynter is a excellent and trusted resource on news and journalism.