Advertisement

New York magazine to reduce print offerings

Magazines on sale at a newsstand in New York City in 2012.
Magazines on sale at a newsstand in New York City in 2012.
(Chris Melzer / EPA)
Share

Its online readers have been expanding, but even that doesn’t save print anymore -- New York magazine, which has developed a highly successful website, said Monday that it would begin publishing every other week in order to better match consumer habits.

The magazine, which has been published since 1968, currently comes out every week. But print circulation has been dropping, according to data from the Alliance for Audited Media. Paid subscriptions dropped 4.2%, to 330,145, from 2011 to 2012, while single copy sales dropped 12.7% in the same time period.

Meanwhile, online viewership has expanded. New York has developed popular websites such as Vulture, an extensive entertainment site, the Cut, a site for women about fashion and relationships, and NYMag.com. Pieces on those sites reach far beyond New York – an interview in October with Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, in which he talked about the devil, for instance, was recommended more than 17,000 times on Facebook.

Advertisement

The online audience for New York Media, the group that includes the magazines and the websites, was up 40% in October from the previous year, and has 18 million monthly unique visitors, the company said.

The biweekly print magazine will incorporate some of New York’s successful Web offerings, according to a press release this morning. It will have 20% more editorial content, a new fashion section called the Cut, and columnists writing about Hollywood, sex and business. Beginning in March, it will come out 29 times a year, rather than 42.

“Readers will continue to find what they love in the magazine, and we’re undertaking these new changes to meet their changing media habits on all platforms,” editor-in-chief Adam Moss said in a statement.

Meanwhile, the company plans to beef up its online offerings, launching a new blog called the Science of Us. Sites on politics, entertainment and fashion will see staff additions and “substantial investments” while the company will also launch a new Instagram channel curating the best celebrity photos of the day.

New York is by no means the first award-winning magazine to trim its print offerings in recent years. U.S News & World report stopped publishing its print version in 2010, and Newsweek went all digital at the end of 2012. The Onion, a satirical magazine, also said last month it was ending its print offerings. Meanwhile, magazines such as the New Yorker and Time have beefed up online offerings, hiring mostly lower-paid writers to staff the website while vaunted correspondents continue to write long magazine pieces.

Still, there are millions of people who receive print magazines of all types. American Rifleman had 1.7 million subscribers last year, up 2% from the year before, according to the Alliance for Audited Media. Better Homes and Gardens had 7.3 million paid subscribers, Time had 3.2 million, Parenting had 2 million.

Advertisement

Some magazines saw print circulation grow between 2011 and 2012; Family Circle grew 4.9% to 3.4 million; Cosmopolitan saw paid subscribers grow 20% to 1.8 million.

alana.semuels@latimes.com

Twitter: @AlanaSemuels

Advertisement