Magazines are not an endangered species, says Hearst president

A "self-immolating print media has taken to reporting on itself in doomsday terms", says Cathie Black, president of Hearst Magazines. But the American magazine is not an endangered species, she writes in an AdAge article.

Magazine readership was up 14% last year, she points out (while TV and newspaper lost viewers and readers). The number of magazines that suspended in 2008 was a "minuscule" 32 out of 19,500 titles published in the U.S. Single copy sales are down, but largely due to people not going to the store so often, where magazines are impulse purchases.

As someone who's been in this business through several of these cycles, I vividly recall how each downturn was the worst ever and how recovery invariably required a miracle. In fact, the next downturn is always the worst, and some of the recoveries have been spectacular.

Everything has a life cycle. In creative endeavors, however, it's not wise to link success or failure to larger events. No sane publisher would have launched a magazine in 1933, the low point of the Depression, when unemployment was a stunning 25%. But that's when Esquire was born. People made its debut in 1974, with the Dow falling and inflation and unemployment rising. Those two magazines have survived and prospered regardless of competition or economic flux...

In 1933, a year when every dollar mattered, The New Yorker's founders, Harold Ross and Raoul Fleischmann, published a Code of Ideals for their magazine. Ignoring the economy, they boldly announced, "Great advertising mediums are operated for the reader first, for profits second." They got their priorities right: When you truly serve the reader, the advertisers will come....

Let's just hope the failure-obsessed media coverage occasionally devotes a paragraph to the magazines that are smartly changing their business without violating their first commitment to readers who, month after month, can't seem to do without them.