Hearst cuts cord on Offspring

Hearst cuts
cord on Offspring

SmartMoney sibling fails to draw parent readers

By Jeff Bercovici

    Sometimes parents have to make tough decisions.
    That was the case yesterday when SmartMoney, the joint venture between Hearst Magazines and Dow Jones, shut down its progeny, Offspring, after only three issues.
    The quarterly title, which launched last March, received solid support from advertisers but was slow in gathering subscribers, says the company.
    That, plus the chilling economic climate, provided SmartMoney executives justification for killing the title, which cost the company a reported $5 million last year.
    The folding should come as something of a wake-up call for a magazine industry that as recently as 18 months ago saw tremendous potential for growth in the parenting segment.
    Meredith Corp. launched the 500,000-circulation Family Money in mid-1998, and the following year Reader’s Digest tested its own entry into the market, Your Family. Besides Offspring, last year also saw the independent launch of Dads, a title intended specifically for new fathers.
    The idea of a magazine that, like Offspring, aimed at parents with slightly older children made especially good sense with the so-called Generation Y, the children of the Baby Boomers, entering adolescence.
    But despite the record-breaking size of Gen Y, Offspring found no immediate reader base. The magazine was guaranteeing a rate base of only 200,000—as good as insignificant by Hearst’s standards—and had managed to collect fewer than 50,000 subscriptions in its first 10 months.
    Much of this likely had to do with the magazine’s rather murky editorial positioning. Wary of having the magazine viewed as a direct spin-off of SmartMoney—and thus pitted against Meredith’s finance-and-parenting title Family Money—former SmartMoney CEO Steven Swartz was more than a little vague in defining the magazine’s mission, saying it was about "the social and economic issues that surround being a parent."
    Swartz’s departure from SmartMoney last month to head up Hearst’s newspaper division likely also came as a blow to Offspring, depriving the magazine of its earliest and most influential supporter.
    Family Life, the largest title devoted to serving parents with older children, has had circulation troubles of its own. After making major gains in 1999, the Time Inc.-owned magazine backslid this year, dropping 8.8 percent in total paid circulation to 464,164, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

-Jeff Bercovici is a staff writer for Media Life.

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