Time Inc. shuts door on Cottage Living

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Magazines
Time Inc. shuts door on Cottage Living
By Louisa Ada Seltzer
Nov 19, 2008 - 1:14:59 AM

As part of major restructuring at Time Inc., Cottage Living is ceasing publication with the current November-December issue.

Begun four years ago with a circulation of 500,000, the eight-issues-a-year title eventually grew to more than a million, and it was able to attract a solid base of advertisers with its upscale readership and niche editorial, which treats the home not as a showplace but where people actually live, and on an manageable scale.

But after a solid start, Cottage Living fell on harder times as the ad recession set in, and over the first nine months of the year saw ad pages fall 9.1 percent, according to the Publishers Information Bureau.

As much as anything that reflected a pullback by advertisers from the shelter category with the weakening U.S. economy and the collapse of the housing market.

Ad pages for the shelter category were down ever more for the period, falling 12.3 percent, compared to 9.5 percent for magazines generally. Back in August, Hachette closed Home, and that followed the close of Martha Stewart's Blueprint last December and Conde Nast's House & Garden last September.

The folding of Cottage Living comes just a day after The New York Times said it was closing its quarterly Play magazine and a week after Hearst said it would close O at Home, another quarterly.

More closes are expected in the months ahead with what's turning out to be a harsher and harsher outlook for the media economy and magazines in particular. Most forecasters now think media won't see a turnaround until 2010. Facing those prospects, many titles struggling with whether to hang in are likely to opt to close down.

For Cottage Living, the decision was made for them by Time Inc., which has said it is trimming away smaller, marginal titles to focus on its mass-market magazines like Time, Fortune and Money, all of which are struggling to hold onto ad pages as this recession worsens. Time was down 10 percent in ad pages through the first three quarters, Money was essentially flat at 1 percent growth, and Fortune was up 9 percent.

Time Inc. released a statement citing the weak ad market for Cottage Living's demise:

"The economic downturn has particularly affected the shelter market and while the brand was genuinely loved by readers and advertisers alike, the economy inhibited its ability to grow and therefore, sadly, we had to make the decision to close it."

Cottage Living’s target demographic at its launch was urban, suburban and rural working women 25-54 with a personal income upwards of $70,000.

The magazine's tagline was Comfort. Simplicity. Style.

It was envisioned as an escape from McMansion life and the obsessive decorating of a lot of the shelter titles of the time.

"Unlike other titles that portray only elegant and perfect houses, we want our houses to look lived in," Stephen Bohlinger, the title's publisher, told Media Life at the time. "We’re featuring kids jumping on the bed, shoes on the floor, Diet Cokes on the table. Basically, we deconstruct rooms before they appear in our pages."

Media Life writer Marisa Hoheb described the magazine thusly: "Cottage Living is not about that second home up by the lake. Second homes are add-ons to an already cluttered life. Rather it is about the home we want to live in, our aspirational home."