Magazines
Meredith: It's over for Child magazine
By Diego Vasquez
Mar 28, 2007, 08:40

In the magazine business, the challenge increasingly is figuring out those categories that can withstand the onslaught of the internet and those that can't.

One particularly vulnerable category is the parenting titles, and now there will be one less.

Meredith is closing Child, one of five titles it picked up from Gruner + Jahr in 2005. Its June/July issue will be its last and 30 people will lose their jobs. It will remain as an internet destination, explains a Meredith spokesperson. "We felt in the long term as a brand it would be more sustainable as an online product. It’s something we’ve been looking at for a while."

Overall the parenting category has been suffering for some time as both readers and advertisers migrated online, and that suffering has only been heightened by the entry of two new titles, Cookie, from Conde Nast, and Wondertime, from Disney.

Ad pages for the parenting category were down by 11.1 percent through February after finishing 2006 essentially flat, and Child in particular was suffering, with ad pages down 15.2 percent in 2006 and 33.7 percent for the first two months of 2007. Child's circulation was also on the slide, falling down 18.5 percent for the six months ended Dec. 31, 2006, versus the year-earlier period. (See charts, below.)

The closing of Child does not come as a surprise, nor does its timing. Its final issue is out just head of the July launch of a parenting portal by Meredith that will combine the sites of Child, Family Circle, Parents and American Baby with the aim of competing directly with the flush of online-only sites that have made such deep inroads.

"We'll make one giant online resource for moms," Child magazine publisher Richard Berenson told Media Life last July. The idea was to create an online-bridge of sorts, as Berenson explained it, with mothers going online for quick information but turning to the print titles for in-depth stories.

But whether it will make a big dent in the market is open to question.

Meredith faces the same challenges other print publishers have faced when deciding to close print editions to go online only. There are two, and first is that it may simply be too late. The internet has been around a long time, and sites catering to mothers are well established. They'll be hard to knock out, or even challenge.

But the other issue is that same that's come up with the teen titles. Print editorial often doesn't fare all that well online. What people are looking for online is often quite different from what they're getting in print titles.

In the case of moms, they're more likely to spend time visiting social networking sites than magazine sites, according to an eMarketer report.

"So much attention has shifted away from the content producers to information that is produced by moms. There's a lot less interest in published content. There's been a really dramatic shift in where people look for information," Debra Aho Williamson, a senior analyst for eMarketer, told Media Life in a story last summer.

"There are a lot of moms online. They're getting very savvy. They're not the quote-unquote newbies anymore. They're not just going online for basic needs, they're going there to learn and explore."