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thing in magazines?
Think regional and ethnic, also aging boomer
By Jeff Bercovici
During the latter half of the '90s, the magazine publishing industry grew at a furious rate, but that growth was far from uniform.
A disproportionate amount of it was concentrated in a handful of categories, including teen magazines, business/technology titles and beer-and-babes-style men’s magazines.
In most of these cases, the expansion was made possible by a demographic or cultural shift, such as the dot.com boom or the coming-of-age of Generation Y.
Then came the advertising slowdown, forcing many publishers to shelve their launch plans.
But a stronger economy will return, and when it does a new generation of magazines will rise to greet it.
So we ask: Which categories will be the hottest of the hot? Where will the next Maxim or Teen People turn up?
Clues may be found by looking at current demographic trends, and no trend is more significant right now than the passing of the baby boomers into retirement age.
"Demographically, the big category that has to pick up is the whole maturity category," says magazine consultant Martin Walker of Walker Communications.
"I don't mean so much the 70-plus or AARP category but leisure time, hobbies, personal finance--all the things that relate to being 50 or 60 and still active."
Inspired by the success that Meredith Corp. has had with More, a Ladies Home Journal spinoff for women over 40, publishers have been pursuing older readers more aggressively in the past couple years. Last year, AARP launched My Generation, a mass-circulation lifestyle magazine aimed at the leading edge of the baby boom generation.
The retirement or semi-retirement of such a huge age cohort will likely have knock-on effects on other categories, says Rick Jones, president and CEO of the Douglas/Jones Group.
As boomers spend more time around the house, magazines in a range of diverse fields, from cooking to music to health and fitness, may see their audiences swell, says Jones. In contrast, the benefit for magazines like My Generation will be relatively small, he says.
"Populations do not necessarily segment demographically," he says. "People tend more to segment by their lifestyle."
Another demographic trend to watch is the accelerated growth of the Hispanic population of the U.S. While this trend has been emergent for some time, the expected boom in Latino-oriented and Spanish-speaking magazines has yet to materialize.
But Walker says it is only a matter of time.
"We tend to think of it as the Hispanic community, but it's really not--it's Cuban, it's Mexican, it's Dominican," he says. "It's only the younger generation who've been educated here who are sort of blending in and view themselves as Hispanic."
But growth need not be the result of tapping into a new reservoir of readers, says Jones. It could come from the rebirth of a category that has gone stale, of the sort that was triggered when Felix Dennis revitalized the men’s market by bringing Maxim over from the U.K.
"If you look back on the '90s, one of the biggest surprises was that men age 18-34 would read lifestyle magazines," says Jones.
"Right now, I think we're looking at the re-engineering of the women's service magazine," he says, citing the rise of magazines like O: The Oprah Magazine and Real Simple.
But at least one industry analyst believes explosive expansion of any sort is unlikely in the foreseeable future.
"I don’t see any hot new areas," says Dan Capell, editor of Capell’s Circulation Report. "I think we’ll see the opposite: less magazines."
Possible exceptions, however, are city and regional magazines, which have been thriving of late.
"They’ve kind of bucked the trend in terms of circulation growth, and I think there’s still more there," says Capell. "Why is that happening? I don't know."
January 23, 2002 © 2002 Media Life
-Jeff Bercovici is a staff writer for Media Life.
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