Magazine publishers have believed that consumers and advertisers view them as very different from the daily newspaper. The paper is only read by the consumer for an hour, or maybe less. At the end of the day, it is gone. People will take an issue of Newsweek or Good Housekeeping around for days or even months. They may pick it up and read in several times.
Magazines have a longer "shelf life" than newspapers. That should make them more attractive to advertisers.
Some newspaper companies are actually going out of business. Others. like The New York Times Co. (NYSE: NYT) are facing the need to sell assets. The industry has crumbled in just a couple of years as information consumption has moved to the internet.
Early advertising results from this year show that magazines may be the next newspapers and that by 2010 some of them and the companies which own them may be in very deep trouble.
According to The New York Times, in January, "the average decline across all monthly magazines was only 17 percent, and most Condé Nast magazines fared much worse, according to analysis of Media Industry Newsletter data."
Many weeklies and business magazine had ad page declines of over 20% last year. If that continues, publications in these categories may end up operating red this year..
Magazine publishers may have made the same mistake that newspapers did--they moved content to the web too late and did not staff up their online businesses fast enough.
Magazines are going to face a shake-out this year and next and a lot of venerated publications will disappear.
Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 24/7 Wall St.