Given the great diversity in magazine content and ownership, it is hard to offer a common profile of a successful magazine. However, large or small, online or in print, most magazines deal with the same basic functions: production, content, ads, and sales. In this section, we discuss how magazines operate, the ownership structure behind major magazines, and how smaller publications fulfill niche areas that even specialized magazines do not reach.

Magazine Departments and Duties

Unlike a broadcast station or a daily newspaper, a small newsletter or magazine can begin cheaply via computer-based desktop publishing, which enables an aspiring publisher-editor to write, design, lay out, and print or post online a modest publication. For larger operations, however, the work is divided into departments.

Editorial and Production

The lifeblood of a magazine is the editorial department, which produces its content, excluding advertisements. Like newspapers, most magazines have a chain of command that begins with a publisher and extends to the editor in chief, the managing editor, and a variety of subeditors. These subeditors oversee such editorial functions as photography, illustrations, reporting and writing, copyediting, layout, and print and multimedia design. Magazine writers generally include contributing staff writers, who are specialists in certain fields, and freelance writers: nonstaff professionals who are assigned to cover particular stories or a region of the country. Many magazines, especially those with small budgets, also rely on well-written unsolicited manuscripts to fill their pages. Most commercial magazines, however, reject more than 95 percent of unsolicited pieces.

Despite the rise of inexpensive desktop publishing, most large commercial magazines still operate several departments, which employ hundreds of people. The production and technology department maintains the computer and printing hardware necessary for mass market production. Because magazines are printed weekly, monthly, or bimonthly, it is not economically practical for most magazine publishers to maintain expensive print facilities. As with USA Today, many national magazines digitally transport magazine copy to various regional printing sites for the insertion of local ads and for faster distribution.

Advertising and Sales

The advertising and sales department of a magazine secures clients, arranges promotions, and places ads. Like radio stations, network television stations, and basic cable television stations, consumer magazines are heavily reliant on advertising revenue. The more successful the magazine, the more it can charge for advertisement space. Magazines provide their advertisers with rate cards, which indicate how much they charge for a certain amount of advertising space on a page. A top-rated consumer magazine like People might charge almost $340,000 for a full-page color ad and $108,700 for a third of a page black-and-white ad. However, in today’s competitive world, most rate cards are not very meaningful: Almost all magazines offer 25 to 50 percent rate discounts to advertisers.11 Although fashion and general-interest magazines carry a higher percentage of ads than do political or literary magazines, the average magazine contains about 45 percent ad copy and 55 percent editorial material, a figure that has remained fairly constant for the past decade.

The traditional display ad has been the staple of magazine advertising for more than a century. As magazines move to tablet editions, the options for ad formats have grown immensely. For example, Condé Nast magazines offer static display ads with a link for its editions on the iPad, Kindle Fire, Nexus 7, and Next Issue app. But they offer almost thirty other premium ad types, which can include audio, video, tap and reveal, and panoramic views. A single-issue Web-enabled ad in tablet editions of titles like GQ, Wired, Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, and Vogue would cost $5,000. A premium ad with effects such as animation or a slide show costs $25,000, while a premium plus ad with effects like a virtual tour or full interactivity costs $45,000. (The cost per ad is discounted with purchases of multiple issues.)

A few contemporary magazines, such as Highlights for Children, have decided not to carry ads and rely solely on subscriptions and newsstand sales instead. To protect the integrity of their various tests and product comparisons, Consumer Reports and Cook’s Illustrated carry no advertising. To strengthen its editorial independence, Ms. magazine abandoned ads in 1990 after years of pressure from the food, cosmetics, and fashion industries to feature recipes and more complementary copy.

Some advertisers and companies have canceled ads when a magazine featured an unflattering or critical article about a company or an industry.12 In some instances, this practice has put enormous pressure on editors not to offend advertisers. The cozy relationships between some advertisers and magazines have led to a dramatic decline in investigative reporting, once central to popular magazines during the muckraking era.

As television advertising siphoned off national ad revenues in the 1950s, publishers began introducing different editions of their magazines to attract advertisers. Regional editions are national magazines whose content is tailored to the interests of different geographic areas. For example, Sports Illustrated often prints five different regional versions of its College Football Preview and March Madness Preview editions, picturing regional stars on each of the five covers. In split-run editions, the editorial content remains the same, but the magazine includes a few pages of ads purchased by local or regional companies. Most editions of Time and Sports Illustrated, for example, contain a number of pages reserved for regional ads. Demographic editions, meanwhile, are editions of magazines targeted at particular groups of consumers. In this case, market researchers identify subscribers primarily by occupation, class, and zip code. Time magazine, for example, developed special editions of its magazine for top management, high-income zip-code areas, and ultrahigh-income professional/managerial households. Demographic editions guarantee advertisers a particular magazine audience, one that enables them to pay lower rates for their ads because the ads will be run in only a limited number of copies of the magazine. The magazine can then compete with advertising in regional television or cable markets and in newspaper supplements. Because of the flexibility of special editions, new sources of income opened up for national magazines. Ultimately, these marketing strategies permitted the massive growth of magazines in the face of predictions that television would cripple the magazine industry.

Circulation and Distribution

The circulation and distribution department of a magazine monitors single-copy and subscription sales. Toward the end of the general-interest magazine era in 1950, newsstand sales accounted for about 43 percent of magazine sales, and subscriptions constituted 57 percent. Since that time, subscriptions have risen to 91 percent of print magazine distribution and 75 percent of print magazine revenue. (Single copies are more expensive, so they generate more revenue.)13 One tactic used by magazines’ circulation departments to increase subscription sales is to encourage consumers to renew well in advance of their actual renewal dates. Magazines can thus invest and earn interest on early renewal money as a hedge against consumers who drop their subscriptions.

Other strategies include evergreen subscriptions—those that automatically renew on a credit card account unless subscribers request that the automatic renewal be stopped—and controlled circulations, providing readers with a magazine at no charge by targeting captive audiences, such as airline passengers or association members. These magazines’ financial support comes solely from advertising or corporate sponsorship.

The biggest strategy for reviving magazine sales is the migration to digital distribution (which also promises savings over the printing and physical distribution of glossy paper magazines). The number of magazines with iPad apps (which enable users to click on the app and launch the magazine) has grown rapidly. Although the iPad still reigns supreme in the world of tablets, other touchscreen color tablets, like the Amazon Kindle Fire, the Google Nexus 7, and the Samsung Galaxy Tab, have offered competition in the expanding market. Other models, such as the Next Issue app, offer unlimited access to 133 titles ($9.99 a month) or 143 titles ($14.99)—a Netflix-like plan for magazines.

Major Magazine Chains

In terms of ownership, the commercial magazine industry most closely resembles the cable television business, which patterned its specialized channels on the consumer magazine market (see Figure 9.2). Even though more than two hundred new commercial magazine titles appear each year—many of them independently owned—it is a struggle to survive in the competitive magazine marketplace.

Time Inc. is the largest U.S. magazine chain (by circulation) with twenty-three print titles in the United States—including People, Time, Sports Illustrated, and InStyle—and seventy international titles, plus forty-five Web sites.14 In 2014, Time Inc. became an independent company, spun off from the media conglomerate Time Warner because of its weak financial performance. (It wasn’t the first time Time Warner reduced its holdings; it spun off both Time Warner Cable and AOL in 2009.) Time Inc.’s fortunes reflect the difficult digital transition for the magazine industry: By 2014, its revenues had dropped to $370 million annually, compared to $1 billion in earnings less than ten years earlier.15

The Hearst Corporation, the leading magazine (and newspaper) chain early in the twentieth century, still remains a formidable publisher, with titles like Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Elle, and O: The Oprah Magazine. Long a force in upscale consumer magazines, Condé Nast is a division of Advance Publications, which operates the Newhouse newspaper chain. The Condé Nast group controls several key magazines, including Vanity Fair, GQ, and Vogue. The Meredith Corporation, based in Des Moines, Iowa, specializes in women’s and home-related magazines (Better Homes and Gardens, Family Circle). Other important commercial players include Rodale, a family-owned company that publishes health and wellness titles, such as Prevention and Men’s Health.

In addition, a number of American magazines have carved out market niches worldwide. Reader’s Digest, Cosmopolitan, National Geographic, and Time, for example, all produce international editions in several languages. In general, though, most American magazines are local, regional, or specialized and therefore less exportable than movies and television. Of the twenty thousand titles, only about two hundred magazines from the United States circulate routinely in the world market. Such magazines, however—like exported American TV shows and films—play a key role in determining the look of global culture.

Many major publishers, including Hearst, Meredith, Time Inc., and Rodale, generate additional revenue through custom publishing divisions, producing limited-distribution publications, sometimes called magalogs, which combine glossy magazine style with the sales pitch of retail catalogues. Magalogs are often used to market goods or services to customers or employees. For example, Rodale produces the biannual Whole Foods Market Magazine magalog, and Time produces the quarterly My Ford, distributed by the automobile company to buyers of its vehicles and also available digitally via the iTunes App Store.

Alternative Voices

Only eighty-five of the twenty thousand American magazines have circulations that top a million (see Figure 9.3), so most alternative magazines struggle to satisfy small but loyal groups of readers. At any given time, there are over two thousand alternative magazines in circulation, with many failing and others starting up every month.

Alternative magazines have historically defined themselves in terms of politics—published by either the Left (the Progressive, In These Times, the Nation) or the Right (the National Review, American Spectator, Insight). However, what constitutes an alternative magazine has broadened over time to include just about any publication considered outside the mainstream, ranging from environmental magazines to alternative lifestyle magazines to punk-zines—the magazine world’s answer to punk rock. (Zines, pronounced “zeens,” is a term used to describe self-published magazines.) Utne Reader, widely regarded as “the Reader’s Digest of alternative magazines,” has defined alternative as any sort of “thinking that doesn’t reinvent the status quo, that broadens issues you might see on TV or in the daily paper.”

Occasionally, alternative magazines have become marginally mainstream. For example, during the conservative Reagan era in the 1980s, William F. Buckley’s National Review saw its circulation swell to more than 100,000—enormous by alternative standards. By 2014, the magazine continued to be the leading conservative publication, with a circulation of about 150,000. On the Left, Mother Jones (named after labor organizer Mary Harris Jones), which champions muckraking and investigative journalism, had a circulation of 215,200 in 2014.

Most alternative magazines, however, are content to swim outside the mainstream. These are the small magazines that typically include diverse political, cultural, religious, international, and environmental subject matter, such as Against the Current, Y’all, Buddhadharma, Home Education Magazine, Jewish Currents, Small Farmer’s Journal, and Humor Times.