Wednesday

In tough times,
tough go downmarket

How else to explain rise of cheap-living titles?

By Jeff Bercovici

   Magazine publishers are in the business of selling readers to advertisers, so it's natural that they'd want those readers to be as wealthy as possible.
   To attract them, they create magazines filled with glossy spreads of dream homes, designer fashions, pricey gadgets and fantasy vacations.
   Every so often, though, publishers will remember that most people aren’t rich, and that these people still buy things from time to time, including the occasional magazine.
   That seems to be what’s going on at the moment.
   While magazine launches have been scarce the past year, the exception has been titles targeting the middle and lower reaches of the economic spectrum.
   Some of these titles, like Budget Living, Everyday Food, Chic Simple and Living Room, offer content that helps readers get more for less money, whether the topic is clothing, housewares or meals.
   Others appeal to wallet-conscious newsstand browsers, presenting themselves as inexpensive alternatives to popular titles like People and Seventeen.
   In Touch, the new celebrity gossip weekly from Bauer Publishing, sells for $1.99 on newsstands (versus $3.29 for People and Us Weekly), while Teen Vogue, at $1.50, is even cheaper.
   Still others simply have a downmarket sensibility. One might expect that the readers of Justice, a tabloid about celebrity criminals set to launch this spring, will consume more Hi-Life and Doritos than champagne and caviar.
   Why, in an industry known to fixate on median household income, is it suddenly so fashionable to court readers whose homes will never be featured in Architectural Digest?
   Theories abound.
   The most obvious explanation for why publishers are reaching out to people with less money is because, with the stock market down and the economy sluggish, most people have less money than they did a few years ago, or feel like they do, anyway.
   "It's a function of the economy," says magazine consultant Martin Walker.
   "In times of conspicuous consumption you always have the upscale magazines that go after the upper crust. In down economic times they go after the mass market."
   Certainly a large proportion of magazines launched during the boom of the 1990s were devoted to celebrating the luxury lifestyle.
   But the economy isn't the only factor at work here, says Samir Husni, a professor of magazine journalism at the University of Mississippi and expert on launches.
   Husni says the trend in question is at least partly a product of -- you guessed it -- Sept. 11 and the so-called "nesting" instinct it inspired.
   "If there is any effect of Sept. 11, it was bringing in the homey, down-to-earthy feeling," says Husni. Magazines like Budget Living, Everyday Food and Living Room encourage domestic life by providing what he calls "doable fantasies."
   "They have one thread in common: making the best of your life without having to leave where you are."
   If you prefer explanations based on business realities rather than slippery sociological hypotheses, those exist too.
   Consultant Steve Rosenfield says the new crop of magazines reflect changing conditions in the magazine retail environment.
   "What all those magazines have in common is that they rely on supermarket distribution," says Rosenfield of the Manhattan-based Media Resource Group. The single-copy arena, he says, "is so difficult to make money in that you have to move a lot of copies, and the place to move a lot of copies, if you can get this space, is in the supermarket. I think these titles reflect a channel where circulation economics can be attractive."
   Not everyone, however, is convinced that publishers are any more interested in reaching non-affluent readers than they ever were.
   "I can't say I see it as a trend," says Rick Jones, president of DJG Marketing.
    "Magazines inherently go to people who are better educated and more affluent, and who make the time to read. If it's me, I'm going to launch magazines to people who still have money."

-Jeff Bercovici is a staff writer for Media Life

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