Douglas McIntyre of 24/7 Wall Street writes about how the big three business magazines — Fortune, Forbes and BusinessWeek — will have to dramatically change to survive in the future.
McIntyre says that all three lost money in the first quarter.
“BusinessWeek could do what US News did last year and reduce its frequency of publication. It might decide to go from weekly (the magazine does publish several double issues) to fortnightly, the same frequency as Fortune and Forbes. In this situation, advertisers will be likely to decrease the number of pages a year that they are running in the magazine if it comes out less frequently.
“The most probable solution for the magazine’s financial problems is staff reduction. This is exactly what large metropolitan newspapers have been forced to do over the last two years. It would not be unusual if the salaries and benefits paid to people who work at the magazine averaged $60,000 a year. Several dozen people would need to be laid off for this solution to have any significant effect.
“No matter what McGraw-Hill does, BusinessWeek will not be a weekly magazine with over 200 employees and a rate base of 900,000 at the end of the year. BusinessWeek will have to become a much, much smaller operation.”
Read more here.
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Please do not forget that BusinessWeek is a GLOBAL magazine with a number of local editions in places like China, Romania, Thailand, and even an Arabic edition. While it's obvious that print media is struggling in many parts of the world please do remember it's not the case everywhere !