Monday

In death dangle,
Worth retreats

Long-ailing title slashes staff and cuts frequency

By Jeff Bercovici

    Desperate times are occasioning desperate measures at Worth magazine.
   In a highly unusual move, the struggling New York-based personal finance title has temporarily laid off its entire staff and declared plans to reduce frequency from 10 to eight issues this year.
   As word of the companywide layoff circulated on Friday, so did rumors that Worth owner and CEO W. Randall Jones was planning to suspend publication of the magazine altogether.
   "There is truth that we have had some layoffs," Jones told Media Life Friday.
    "There is no truth that we are preparing to close. We are in full war effort as we speak."
   Full war effort in this case entails firing the magazine's staff of around 40 and rehiring them as needed beginning tomorrow.
   It also means combining the April and May issues as well as two more issues from later in the year, resulting in a frequency that’s not quite monthly and not quite bimonthly.
    These measures, it is hoped, will allow Worth to stave off the fate of Mutual Funds, Individual Investor, Family Money and Your Money, all of which have succumbed to recession over the past two years. Most recently, Bloomberg LP shuttered the 400,000-circulation Bloomberg Personal Finance in January.
"Nobody's doing well now. It's just degrees of pain," says Knight Kiplinger, editor in chief of Kiplinger's Personal Finance. "The ad slump has been just brutal for this category."
     Kiplinger says he wouldn't be surprised if Worth folded "because to the best of anybody's knowledge the magazine has never been able to cover its losses."
   "Nobody's gloating over the misfortune of anybody else," he says. "The magazines that went into this slump in good shape -- Money, SmartMoney and ourselves -- we're in pain too. We just have more resources to weather the storm."
    Ad pages for the five leading financial advice titles that survived 2002 -- Barron's, Kiplinger's, Money, SmartMoney and Worth -- were off an average of 11.8 percent from the previous year at year's end.
   In the first two months of 2003, Worth's ad pages have fallen an additional 8.2 percent, totaling 42.9.
Circulation has also been a problem. At 500,000, Worth is the smallest title in its competitive set. (Barron's, though smaller, is a weekly.)
   Total paid circulation was flat last year, but newsstand sales, an important indicator of consumer interest if not a major source of circulation, were down more than 20 percent, averaging 19,445 in the second half of the year, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

-Jeff Bercovici is a staff writer for Media Life.

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