Business Management - Industry Trends

In her first couple months as chief executive of Time Inc., the country’s largest magazine publisher, Laura Lang took some time to hold town hall style meetings and field questions from many of the company’s 9,000 employees. Those questions included: “Do you think print is dead?” “Will magazines survive?”

Lang talks about Time Inc. not as a magazine publisher, but as a branded news and entertainment company. She believes she can sell digital products tailored to a level of specificity not previously available.

Her theory: if users’ personal information is a treasure trove for Silicon Valley businesses, it should be equally valuable

Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Inc.’s  second-quarter loss narrowed as the media-and-merchandise company’s struggling publishing unit continued to weigh on its revenue. “We anticipated much of the weakness in publishing, and it’s important to note that while our publishing strategy is gaining traction, it will take additional time to yield the targeted results,” said President and CEO Lisa Gersh.

The company said its struggling publishing division is set for a turnaround in the second half as it expects newly installed advertising-sales teams to drive improved results.

Martha Stewart Living reported a loss of $2.7 million, compared with a loss of $2.94 million

Barry Diller’s cryptic comments yesterday about Newsweek have led to much speculation, some misquoting and downright erroneous reporting by the media, and charges of “scaremongering” from editor Tina Brown. Diller didn’t say exactly what will happen to Newsweek...except that its manufacturing costs will be significantly lower next year. By “manufacturing,” he almost certainly means not just printing but also freight, paper, and postage.

If you’ve seen Newsweek lately, you’ll know the cuts won’t come from having fewer pages. One option is publishing less frequently. (Newsmonth, anyone?) Another is to provide incentives for people to switch to digital versions.

It looks like September is set to be a record-breaking month for a whole slew of fashion titles. Following Hearst’s news that Elle and Marie Claire are publishing their largest-ever issues (the former for Hearst, the latter for the magazine itself), Vogue, InStyle and People StyleWatch are on track to set their own records with impressive ad gains.

The official report from Vogue publisher Susan Plagemann has the Condé Nast flagship trouncing its competition with its largest September issue to date. With a whopping 658 ad pages, the magazine is up 14 percent, making this the third year

A drastic fall in Canadian newsprint shipments to traditional export markets in Asia and Latin America this year is creating more storm clouds for the industry. For all North American mills, June offshore shipments were down 23 percent from a year earlier and down 25 percent for the first six months of 2012. Offshore business represented 28 percent of total shipments.

“Export markets are heavily oversupplied and the lower Euro and weaker Indian rupee have led to non-competitive U.S. dollar-based prices for North American newsprint,” said Paul Quinn, forest products analyst at RBC Dominion Securities. Asian shipments were down the most

Bloomberg Insider, a daily magazine to be distributed at the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, will expand on daily convention coverage. Bloomberg will distribute 15,000 copies per day at each convention and in Washington, DC. A digital version of Bloomberg Insider will also be featured on Bloomberg.com.

Weekly Reader, a staple in American classrooms for a century, has some hard news for its young readers: it’s shutting down. Chief rival Scholastic, which bought the school newspaper earlier this year, is folding it into Scholastic News and axing all but five of Weekly Reader’s 60 employees in White Plains, NY, The Post has learned.

Like all papers, Weekly Reader was struggling with changes roiling the print world and was under pressure to develop digital editions. Along with school budget cutbacks, those challenges were compounded by ownership turmoil that left the paper with few resources to invest, sources said.

On Thursday afternoon, the Free Library of Philadelphia was ready to go with a Sept. 6 event for Joe Posnanski, the author of “Paterno,” a forthcoming biography of the famed and now vilified football coach. On Friday morning, the book’s publisher told the library to cross it off the calendar.

Simon & Schuster is backpedaling quickly in the final weeks before the publication of “Paterno,” which has emerged as perhaps one of the most unfortunately timed books of 2012

Simon & Schuster acquired the book for a reported $750,000, and Karp said he expected the company would print close to 75,000 copies.

According to BookStats 2012, eBooks ranked as the year’s top individual format for adult fiction—based on net revenues for all individual print and electronic formats—for the first time in 2011. However, brick-and-mortar stores remain the biggest sales channel.

Don’t be surprised if you start seeing special offers soon for magazines’ iPad or Kindle Fire versions of back issues. Sketchy sales data from Apple and Amazon have led to a loophole for magazines whose circulation is checked by the Audit Bureau of Circulations. The loophole will enable them to bolster the reported circulation numbers of a weak-selling issue with single-copy sales of better-selling issues.

For printed magazines, ABC is accustomed to publishers providing elaborate reports that document exactly how many copies of an issue were sent to legitimate subscribers or sold to customers. Not so with Apple and Amazon,