How to Survive on the Newsstand

I went to Curtis’ Promotions Day this week with a mission—actually, several.  My mission for the retailer (I was representing Newsstands of America) was to book publisher promotions for the year 2012.  From my publisher clients, though, I had another mission.

It was this:  to find out what the heck Curtis Circulation Company, a major national distributor, had to say about the declining sales and revenues in our industry, what they thought was going on and what, if anything, they thought that a publisher—or a national distributor—should be doing about it.

After all, the bad news keeps on coming.  Sales overall have dropped 10% this year; and by HALF for the top 60-odd titles, since the beginning of the millennium.  Publishers are moving content online and changing their marketing strategies; and some are just losing interest or giving up.  Curtis has surely discussed this in executive sessions behind closed doors; what advice do they have for a hard-hit publisher?

The national distributors have this to say to publishers:  hold firm.  Some things have changed in this business; some have not. One thing that hasn’t changed:  every time a new medium has come along, people have predicted the demise of the previous ones. The arrival of radio was expected to signal the end of reading; the arrival of TV was expected to signal the end of radio; and so on. 

New technologies change things, sure; but they don’t end them.  Digital is going to change print, but not eliminate or wholly replace it.  One thing that the internet is:  another competitor for people’s time.  And that will eat into print’s market share, no question.  But make print go away?  Not now; maybe not ever.

Some publishers will lose their print franchises; it’s happening already, and it will continue to happen.  It will happen more, and faster, if publishers give up and look away.  Get discouraged, start cutting back, undercut your value, and of course you’ll start to lose your print audience.  Cut off your newsstand spend while spending dollars to make dimes digitally, and you can bet you’ll choke out the life of your print publication.  But before doing that, Ingenito warned, look at your revenue sources.  Even if it were true that in five years there would be no more print, don’t cut off your revenue streams today.  Look at where your money is coming from and protect that source; for many, it’s still newsstand.  Don’t preemptively let go of a source of profit today for what may replace it tomorrow.

Today’s downward sales trends, which we can anticipate carrying over into 2012, have something to do with a shift to digital, sure.  But this downward slide tracks more to economic trends than to digital ones.  Newsstand sales are down—so is everything else.  Bottled water, luxury purchases, you name it.  Walmart recently released a study that indicates that their customers are buying less than ever—how will that not hurt the impulse buy?  And here’s an interesting thing:  internationally, the biggest blows have come from the markets where the economy is the worst.  That’s right—not where digital is strongest, or the shift to digital is the most marked.  And where there are signs of recovery in the economy, sales of magazines show upticks as well. 

In the meantime, here is some advice from the distributors to you:

• Remember you want to reach your audience in multiple ways—and your newsstand circulation is one of them.  Don’t drop your newsstand ball while trying to keep the others in the air.
• Hold your cover prices.  Readers are more price-sensitive than ever;  now is not the time to increase.
• Rather than getting experimental or marginal with content or art, bring some freshness of approach to that which is tried and true.  For a cooking magazine, that might mean new ways of cooking pasta; for a music magazine, it might mean new ways of playing Hendrix; for a science magazine, it might mean a fresh look at Einstein.  A publisher knows what works.  Use it.
• Go back to the basics:  work the distribution, add the copies, take out the non-productive.  Fill in the gaps and pare the fat.  The marginal gains can make the difference between profit and loss this year.

And one more thing, added another executive.  In these difficult times, here’s what a publisher can do:  “you hang in there and you ride it out.”