Lean magazines?

I was perusing the magazine section at Borders this weekend, and started leafing through a few of the mags I read every blue moon, such as Vanity Fair and GQ. MAN have they gotten thinner!!!!! At first I assumed the Vanity Fair I picked up was just a supplemental edition or something, but it wasn't. The advertising has dropped of dramatically. Sports Illustrated might as well be a newsletter.

In addition to being thinner, it is even being printed on smaller sheets. Not even much use as a birdcage liner....

I am glad that we did not renew our subscription last fall.

A friend of mine said that he was out of town and when he came back, his Newsweek copy was the one edited by Colbert - or something - and he thought it was a one time event but now is ready to cancel his subscription.

in this week's issue. I wrote and told them just that.

You are soo right, I pick it up every couple months and I got this Month's for the"Palin Revelations" and it did seem way smaller. On another note, the big Supermarkets by me have been DEAD
like a ghost town, but our Home Depot is packed in the day during the week, with regular joe's not contractors. Odd because it's like everyone is off of work.

Even the silly fashion mags seem to be going on a diet these days. We're going to start to see another round of huge price increases, something I think a lot of us are willing to pay since we're getting a much better content to fluff ratio in our magazines these days.

Either that, or they'll just go out of business.

This economy has particularly hit the Auto, Retail, Advertising, Publishing, Printing industries hard.

not only have the number of pages shrunk considerably, but the physical size has been reduced almost to the size of the "new" Rolling Stone . . .

and, just as an aside, my local newspaper (the Journal News, Westchester and Rockland Counties in NY) has really shrunk its number of pages . . . probably to no more than half of what it was just a year ago -- and even then it was less than the previous year . . .

seems that the entire publishing industry is hurting, now that so many people are getting their news and info on the net . . . I think I heard that the Christian Science Monitor isn't even doing a print edition anymore . . . now if you want to read it, your only option is online . . .

Overall media expenditures are down and what's left is partially being distributed into the internet and emerging social media networks. Just like we're seeing newspapers go under, I think we'll lose many printed magazines too.

I heard recently that Car'ls Jr. (West coast fast-food chain) employees 20 people as full-time Twitterers. That expense has to come from somewhere -- most likely the marketing budget.

We did have 30, but we just dropped two state issues because of lack of advertising in the areas they targeted. And one of our ad people told me he is having a hard time selling ads.