Walking magazine takes a hike

'The trend lines on circulation were extremely discouraging and had become that way in the past
two years.'

Walking magazine
takes a hike

Circ woes rose with decline of stampsheet houses

By Jeff Bercovici

    Walking magazine has taken its last steps.
The low-impact fitness magazine from the Reader’s Digest Association is suspending publication with the upcoming September/October issue.
    Following the closure of the main editorial office in Boston on Wednesday, 14 editorial and business-side staffers have been laid off, while two editors have been reassigned elsewhere within the company.
    Earlier this year, Reader’s Digest Association hired the Jordan, Edmiston Group, a media investment banking firm, to investigate strategic options for Walking, a seven-times-a-year title which RDA has owned since 1997.
    Beginning in April, Jordan, Edmiston spoke with around 80 different parties about buying the magazine, but so far none of them have proved interested in buying the magazine outright, says William Adler, head of corporate communications for RDA.
    "One should never say never, but that’s how it looks," says Adler.
     What’s more likely at this point is that RDA will sell Walking’s 575,000-strong subscription list.
     Adler declines to say what parties are in negotiations for the list, but likely candidates include Emmaus, Pa.-based Rodale Press, publisher of Runner’s World and Bicycling magazines, and Woodland Hills, Calif.-based Weider Publications, publisher of Shape, Men’s Fitness and Natural Health.
    Adler says Walking has never turned a profit in the four years Reader’s Digest has owned it, and the likelihood that it would reverse that trend has been steadily diminishing.
    At the root of the title’s problems was its dependence on stampsheet sweepstakes firms like American Family Publishers and Publishers Clearing House for its new subscriptions.
    As AFP and PCH, hounded by expensive consumer fraud suits by states over their marketing tactics, have curtailed their activities over the last five years, many large-circulation titles like Reader’s Digest and TV Guide have lost big chunks of circulation.
    But Walking, without a natural reader base and with no similarly-oriented sister titles to help it out, was more reliant than most on cheap and abundant stampsheet subscriptions, says Adler.
    "The trend lines on circulation were extremely discouraging and had become that way in the past two years," he says.
    Total paid circulation was flat at around 650,000 in the second half of last year, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, while newsstand sales slipped 7.7 percent to 71,525.
    Walking was also one of a number of special-interest titles that suffered from the slowdown in the advertising economy in the first half of the year.
   Through June, its ad pages were down 16.6 percent, to 208.9, and ad revenue was off 11 percent to $7.3 million.

-Jeff Bercovici is a staff writer for Media Life.

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