Tuesday, June 27, 2006

Maclean's closing...early

[THIS POST HAS BEEN UPDATED] The current Macleans (July 1) contains the news that the magazine, which has been published on Mondays for as long as anyone can remember, is going to come out on Thursday from now on.

"After nearly 30 years of putting out a magazine every Monday, Maclean's has decided to stop. From now on, we'll be putting out a magazine every Thursday," said the upfront note from the editors.

"Weekly current affairs magazines in North America have been published primarily on Mondays for as long as they've existed. There may have been a rationale for this long ago, but we don't believe the schedule suits the lives and habits of our readers today. The simple fact is that people have more time to read at the end of the week and on the weekend. And since we've increased the amount of content offered in each issue of Maclean's by 50 per cent over the last year, it makes sense to deliver it when readers have more time to enjoy it."

The old newsmagazine model was to close the issue as late in the week as possible. For years, Maclean's closed its last edit page sometimes as late as 5 p.m. on Saturday and would often tear apart and remake whole forms late in the week. Once the magazine was printed, this necessitated airfreighting copies to the west coast so it would be on Vancouver newsstands first thing Monday morning. A few years ago, it was decided that this punishing schedule was unnecessary, and that the late nights and weekend work wasn't resulting in a magazine that was any newsier, or beloved, than one that closed routinely at 5 p.m. Friday. And so, it was.

Now, apparently, the idea is to get the jump on the fat weekend papers and the paper will go on sale on Thursdays. Which will mean the magazine will have to close editorial pages on Tuesdays.

Home delivery of Maclean's (and it must be remembered that 97% of the copies go to subscribers) will still depend on the vagaries of the post office, which often doesn't deliver a Monday issue until Thursday. Now, coming out on a Thursday, it is quite possible that some home delivery won't happen til the following Monday. (And gawd help them if Canada Post ever makes good on its threat to cut home delivery back to every other day.)

For now, one has to wonder whether this will make the magazine more attractive to advertisers. It's hard to see why that would be. The nature of the audience is not changing, only the day of the week that the magazine arrives in their mailbox.

[UPDATE] From Maclean's press release on the change:
"We took a look at our audience and our advertisers and we believe that increasing our speed to market will benefit both," says Deborah Trepanier,associate publisher, general manager and vice-president, Maclean's.

The magazine will now arrive fresh on newsstands when buyers are out shopping. Retail traffic is highest at the end of the week. Maclean's newsstand sales were up 36 per cent in the first quarter of 2006 compared to the same period last year, and the magazine expects a further advance as a result of the move.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Nothing's certain here, but changing the delivery day (or the newsstand day) may change the nature of the audience. We've seen newsstand sales increase smartly, but we've also had readers complain that there's more in the magazine than they can get through in one sitting. Now they'll have more time to sit. This may further improve newsstand presence. One suspects the nature of our coverage will change, in ways that we haven't figured out yet -- until now, news that happened on Tuesday was automatically likelier to get big coverage, because of the rhythms of the shop. Now it's hard to predict. I suspect (hope) we'll start working even harder to throw stories forward rather than to cover them retrospectively: to tell you, over the weekend, how (say) Afghanistan is likely to evolve over the next several days, or which CD you need to pay attention to this coming week.


All of this is novel only in the Canadian context. French, British and some American weeklies (Business Week) come out on Thursday. One French magaine used to make this explicit: its title was VSD, for Vendredi, Samedi, Dimanche. It closed. Uh, never mind.

11:31 am  

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home