In terms of advertising, 2004 will certainly be better for magazines than the three years that came before. But the year will be no less tough for a number of titles.
 It will be, as was last year, a year for the haves versus the have-nots, with the stronger titles growing stronger and weaker titles continuing to struggle. A number will fold as category leaders soak up most of the returning dollars. 
   Indeed, if the model of previous recoveries was of a rising tide lifting all boats, this time around it may simply be to swamp those that were barely keeping afloat.
   Universal McCann’s chief forecaster, Robert Coen, predicts a 5 percent hike in ad spending, while Veronis Suhler expects to see a 7.2 percent increase.
  Yet magazines will actually grow more slowly than other media, with cable and the internet in particular taking ever more share away from them.
  Print sellers will have to make stronger arguments not just for their individual titles but for magazines overall.
   The circulation picture will continue to deteriorate as retail space disappears and the cost of acquiring subscriptions rises. 
   One category to watch is business, which has seen some of the steepest declines of any category from the page levels of 2000. Business publishers have been saying all along that their pages would come back when top-line corporate earnings began to improve. 
   Now that that’s happening, the question is whether titles like Business 2.0 and Fast Company, which have had to reposition frantically since the dot.com crash, will take off, or whether marketers will ignore them in favor of the big three books.
   Celebrity gossip titles will continue to proliferate.
   G+J will try to capture the high end of this market with Gala, while American Media will attack from below with the revamped Star. Time Inc. also has a celebrity title in development.
  Can the market, previously limited to People and Us, bear so many entries? 
  Probably not. Even if consumer demand were unlimited, supermarket display space is not. Expect to see a shakeout.
  Another area seeing a lot of launch activity is shopping magazines, with Hearst, Conde Nast, Fairchild and Primedia all hoping to replicate the success of Lucky. Other publishers will inevitably follow suit with copycat titles.
   Conde Nast’s Cargo and Fairchild’s Vitals must prove they can overcome manly reluctance to embrace a decidedly girly pastime.
    An explosion of new magazines of all types will be the year's most visible trend. The rate of launches is on pace to match the level last seen in the late ‘90s. The proportion of launches that fail within a year has risen since then, however, from half to six in 10.
   For all the industry's difficulties, it’s practically inevitable that it will post an increase in single copy sales for the first half of the year, if only because first-half 2003 was so terrible.
   But the larger trend is downward, owing to worsening economics in existing circulation channels and the failure to develop new channels.
   Changes at retail, particularly the rollout of self-scan checkout counters in supermarkets, are cutting into single-copy sales. Telemarketing, an increasingly important source of subscriptions since the collapse of the sweepstakes companies, will be severely curtailed once the national do-not-call registry goes into effect.
   “Circulation dynamics are under tremendous pressure,” says Steve Aster, head of consumer marketing for Primedia. “People are hard-pressed to find something that’s trending upwards.”
   You can thus expect to see more magazines follow the example of Seventeen, YM, Martha Stewart Living and Motor Trend, all of which chopped their rate bases last year.
     Meanwhile, advertisers will be more skeptical than ever of the circulation figures publishers report, thanks to Gruner + Jahr’s book-cooking ways as revealed in the Rosie trial, in which executives admitted they inflated newsstand sales in order to make the magazine look healthier than it really was.
   “I think we’re really going to suffer from it,” says Kent Brownridge, Wenner Media’s general manager, of the Rosie scandal. 
   He predicts that advertisers will pressure publishers to turn over instant sales estimates based on scan data and postal receipts rather than wait until they have reported their figures to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.
   “The data is available, the data is accurate and the data is timely, and I think advertisers are going to demand it,” he says.