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halts publication
In talks to sell investor title. Fall relaunch eyed.
By Jeff Bercovici
Long-troubled Worth Media has suspended publication of its personal finance title as it negotiates to sell it.
If the sale goes through, Worth would resume publishing in the fall under its new owners, according to the company.
Worth Media president Alison Parks says talks are likely to conclude in two to three weeks.
"I think we're going to pull it off," she says.
She maintains that the would-be owners are looking to keep publishing the title and not just cannibalize its subscription file.
With publication halted, however, this appears to be a last-ditch effort for Worth. If the deal falls through, it's likely that the personal finance category, which has lost a slew of titles over the past two years, will contract still further as Worth disappears.
All this is an abrupt change from four weeks ago, when Worth Media's management announced a radical plan to keep the company afloat. The plan involved cutting back Worth's frequency from 10 to 8 issues a year and laying off the company's entire staff of 40 with the intention of rehiring employees later as needed.
The plan also called for Worth to publish an April-May issue and a summer issue. Those issues have been canceled.
Parks cites a nondisclosure agreement in deflecting further questions, leading us to speculate: Who would want to buy Worth?
The magazine has been a longtime money-loser in a sector that has seen a rush of shutdowns – Mutual Funds, Individual Investor, Family Money, Your Money, Bloomberg Personal Finance – over the last two years. The closure of those magazines resulted in a bonanza of cheap circulation for survivors like Money and Kiplinger's Personal Finance.
Rick Jones, president of DJG Marketing, speculates that the party in question is a financial buyer rather than a strategic buyer, expressing doubt that the latter would be interested in acquiring such a troubled title.
"You're looking at a franchise that's consistently gone through a lot of turmoil," says Jones. "The prospect of it being a very profitable magazine is probably -- I want to be real careful with the word I pick -- the simplest one is 'challenging.'"
While Money and SmartMoney have seen advertising rebound this year, and Kiplinger's is on pace with last year, ad pages at Worth have continued to plummet. Through March, they were down 26.5 percent, totaling 86.1 year-to-date.
Total paid circulation was flat in the second half of last year, but newsstand sales were down more than 20 percent, averaging 19,445, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. With a circulation of 500,000, Worth is smaller than Kiplinger’s, Money and SmartMoney.
April 29, 2003© 2003 Media Life
-Jeff Bercovici is a staff writer for Media Life.
