The Magazine Business: Bad, Getting Worse

It's a massacre out there on the newsstand. The Audit Bureau of Circulations released its semi-annual report yesterday, and, man, are there a lot of major titles showing double-digit declines in the single-copy (or newsstand) column. To name just a few: Good Housekeeping (down 20.7 percent), Playboy (down 35.8 percent), Vanity Fair (down 12.8 percent), Vibe (down 18.8 percent), Marie Claire (down 14.3 percent), Traditional Home (down 15.6 percent).

And that's not even including the titles like Entertainment Weekly, Newsweek, Money and Southern Living that were also down double digits, but whose newsstand sales comprise less than 10 percent of total circulation.

What an ugly picture. The New York Times attributes all the minus signs in the report partly to a round of cover-price increases, but to me it looks like a simple acceleration of a trend that's been years -- no, decades -- in the making.

For a couple of good charts that put the carnage in context, check out this Folio story.