Audience within a magazine

Audience

Three trends in news magazine circulation and readership stand out.

First, readership surveys indicate that the audience for news magazines is holding steady, while the audience for pop culture, entertainment and lifestyle magazines is growing. This fits with the trends in ad pages and revenues and suggests one of two things: Either the market for news magazines is more or less at its capacity or the genre needs to be reinvented.

Second, despite changes in content designed to grab younger readers, the audience for news magazines is aging - more than for most other magazine genres. News magazine readers are also more affluent than magazine readers overall, but that is not a big consolation financially. Advertisers are often looking for youth more than money, particularly in general interest magazines like the news weeklies.

Third, while the big three news magazines are finding it hard to increase their circulation, a few smaller circulation books that focus on news and public affairs have found steady growth over the past 15 years. This may suggest that the genre is ripe for change and indeed that the news magazine audience, or at least part of it, is looking for a new approach.

Who is Gaining and Who is Not

Over the past 10 years, there has been a clear division among magazine genres - those that are rising and those that are sitting still. Readership figures from Mediamark Research, the leading U.S. provider of syndicated consumer magazine audience data, indicate that since 1995 the entertainment and pop culture genre has gained popularity.¹ Interest in the news and business genres has remained flat.

Both news and entertainment magazines trended down in readership from 1995 until 2000. Then both categories began to rise again. But the increase in entertainment magazines was much more substantial, increasing 14 percent from 2000 to 2003.²News rose only 9 percent in the same period.³

Business magazines followed an opposite course. These magazines grew in readership from 1995, peaked in 2000 and then began to fall off.

Part of this is explained by the dying off of some magazines that were riding the success of the stock market and the technology boom. But other losses may have more to do with the fact that, when the market dipped, people stopped looking at their copies of Forbes and Fortune. For many readers, no news on their 401(k) was better than the bad news.

The figures also may suggest some shifting going on from genre to genre. Readers have only a certain amount of time to devote to magazines. If that time is not going to one genre, it's going to another. News and entertainment benefited from readers turning away from business publications.

But the uptick in entertainment readership is too sharp to be the result of falling business readership alone. It also follows logically another basic theory about media. If more of the media agenda is focused on lifestyle and entertainment, it increases interest in those areas. The media is both reflecting and reinforcing a broader cultural shift toward celebrity, entertainment and infotainment.

Finally, it is important you understand who your audience are and who is going to gain from reading your magazine before you even think about creating a new magazine.