A pretty good offer arrives in the mailbox this week. Baltimore magazine wants to start the new year by selling me a subscription for the price of maybe a pretty good cheeseburger: $9.95 for a full year (and it lasts longer than the cheeseburger.) Or, according to standard long division and rounding off to the nearest full number, about 83 cents an issue.
This is known as a sign of the times.
And, as part of a nervous national trend for traditional mass media, not a very glad one. The magazine’s circulation is holding up pretty well — roughly 50,000 copies a month, and most of it to people who have money to spend — which is good news in a time of shrinking print readership.
But the publication is going through the same anxieties as most newspapers and magazines in the age of Web sites and text messaging, and the current economic trauma, and readers whose concentration spans resemble the length of a flea’s.
Advertising is down, which means profits are down, which means everybody’s developing nervous twitches. You offer your magazine for 83 cents a copy, you’re not making money on that end of the deal, but you’re showing advertisers lots of new people who will see their products.
(Normally, a year’s worth of Baltimore costs about $47 on the newsstand. The new $9.95 subscription offer’s a 79 percent discount, as the magazine proudly trumpets.)
“Some businesses perceive advertising as a luxury,” one Baltimore magazine executive said earlier this week. “We don’t think it is. But, if it’s a choice of advertising in the magazine or paying your employees, companies are preferring to pay their employees. We feel it. We’re down in pages. We’re a 100-year-old publication, and we’re an institution, but we’re feeling it.”
The magazine is an institution. It’s a monthly image of the way Baltimore’s professional class sees itself — when it’s feeling pretty good about itself. It’s about possibilities: the best restaurants, the best neighborhoods, the best thoracic surgeons. If you’re looking for the Baltimore of “The Wire,” you’re looking in the wrong place. But, for a good-natured look at the good life around the metro area, it does a nice job.
But it’s also up against a trend facing all print media these days. We know what’s happening to newspapers, where newsroom jobs are disappearing before our eyes. But some magazines are a variation on the same theme.
A few weeks ago, U.S. News & World Report announced it would drop out of its traditional race with the weeklies Time and Newsweek and become a monthly; its advertising has plummeted. Newsweek’s going through circulation convulsions and has seen its advertising pages drop 17 percent this year. Advertising at Time, the leader among the big three news weeklies, has suffered a 19 percent drop this year.
But it’s not just advertising figures that are troubling. The news magazines are trying to re-invent themselves. It’s no longer enough to report the news every seven days. In a time of 24-hour cable news and the Internet, and newspapers analyzing and interpreting each day, basic coverage is stale when it has to sit until the end of each week. So the news magazines are thrashing about like crazy, trying to figure out how to keep themselves relevant in a world speeded up beyond all previous calculation.
Baltimore magazine doesn’t have quite the same problem. It’s still serving up a diet of food and travel, and lifestyle and the arts. That’s how it perceives its mission, and that’s fine.
But magazines are supposed to slow the world down a little, establish a mood, offer pieces big enough to chew on for a while. And that’s the problem facing all print now: How do you offer texture and subtlety in a world where readers — especially young ones — are culturally attuned to the quick snap of the Internet?
“We’re trying to do what every other print publication’s doing,” the Baltimore magazine executive said this week, “trying to balance the readership of the print magazine while we build up our Web site.”
By all accounts, newspaper and magazine Web sites are attracting remarkable numbers of new readers. They’re a hit. But nobody’s figured out a way to translate corresponding advertising dollars to those Web sites.
So the struggle goes on: trying to hold on to the existing print readership, and the traditional advertisers, while building the profitability of the Web sites. The game’s being invented on the run. Some of it’s destructive, as when editorial staffs are decimated to cut costs.
And some of it’s a little more hopeful. As when magazines offer a full year’s subscription for $9.95. It’s the cost of a pretty good cheeseburger. And, when cooked properly, a lot meatier.
