Newsstand's Last Stand?

 (Photo credit: New York Public Library)

The Alliance for Audited Media ("AAM") today reported first-half magazine sales figures and the news continue to be bad, with celebrity and women's periodicals feeling the most pain, according to a New York Times article.

Paid subscriptions dipped 1 percent, compared to a 10 percent plunge in newsstand sales of magazines, AAM reported. Cosmopolitan was in free-fall, suffering a near 24 percent decrease in newsstand sales, and Glamour newsstand sales were 28 percent lower than the same period a year ago. Pre-Royal Baby, People witnessed an 11.8 percent drop-off in newsstand sales,  better than Us Weekly's 16.7 percent decrease or Life & Style's 20.9 percent plunge, the Times article reported. Vogue flew off the newstand shelves at a rate 10.4 percent below 2012 figures and Vanity Fair newsstand sales were down 11 percent.

Fortunately for the publishers of these titles, the AAM numbers offered a glimmer of hope through a boost in sales of digital versions of periodicals. in the first half of this year, 10.2 million digital replica editions of magazines were sold, 3.3 percent of all magazine sales, the Times article noted.

Gray Lady's Quote Approval Memo a Positive Step

Image via CrunchBase

The devoted, journalism-as-watchdog lovin' staff of  "TUOL" hales the recent Public Editor's Journal column by New York Times ombudsperson Margaret Sullivan that cites a Times internal memorandum that almost drives a stake in the alarming, spreading practice of journalists granting sources pre-publication quote approval.

As reported by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers ("WANNP") Web site (http://www.editorsweblog.org), the internal Times memo acknowledges: "[D]emands for after-the-fact 'quote approval' by sources and their press aides have gone too far...[so] reporters should say no if a source demands, as a condition of an interview, that quotes be submitted afterward to the source or a press aide to review, approve or edit."

Credit must be given to the recently hired Sullivan, who called for a Times policy on the subject in an earlier column, and to Times media critic David Carr, who condemned the practice of quote approval as "puppetry" in a column that "TUOL" gleefully retweeted.

Quote approval has gained a foothold with admissions by media outlets such as The Huffington Post and Vanity Fair (Michael Lewis's profile of President Barack Obama), Bloomberg News, The Washington Post and Reuters that they had ceded the right to sources on occasion.  Some publications, including The National Journal and The Harvard Crimson, do not permit sources to review quotations.

Unfortunately, the Times' memo, according to  the WANNP post, concludes with a "never say never" escape hatch, admonishing reporters that potential exceptions to the no quote approval rule should be addressed to department heads or masthead editors.

Apparently, every watchdog has an inner lapdog fighting to get out for a good scratch behind the ears.

Magazines' Last Stand at the Newsstand?

(Photo credit: Longzero)Half-year figures are in from the Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC) and newsstand sales for periodicals overall are grim.

As reported by Women's Wear Daily's Web site, Conde Nast flagship magazines Vogue and Vanity Fair respectively experienced 16.5 percent and 18.8 percent declines in newsstand sales, according to ABC unaudited Rapid Report data. Newsstand sales at InStyle dropped 4.5 percent and People StyleWatch plunged 3 percent. Holding one's own is what passes for good news for print magazines nowadays, so Conde Nast's W Magazine's 2.2 percent slippage in sales compared to the first half of 2011 is almost cause to pop the champagne corks.

Meanwhile, paidcontent.org reported this week on circulation figures for digital-replica magazines, which doubled their market share in North America last year. Digital replicas overall account for 1.7 percent of the industry, up from less than 1 percent a year ago.

No surprise to learn that the largest circulation among digital replica magazines are found in Game Informer Magazine, Maxim and Cosmopolitan.