Magazine Death Pool

US News & World Report: RIP November 2010

I have come out of retirement to tell say...

I TOLD YOU!!!

What took so damn long? Boy, that Mort Zuckerman has some big, big pockets.

Forget about best colleges. Maybe all that money could have gone to the "Save the Dinosaur Newsweekly Fund."

 

 

Three dead shelter magazines

Gone.

Gone.

Gone.

Might as well live in a shack.

Marked for Death: Essence

From down here, it looks like we're going to be seeing Essence magazine here soon.

Let's see: this is a beauty magazine for black women.

The entire fashion team has gone "AWOL."

Beauty and cover director Mikki Taylor announces her retirement yesterday. NPR is already waving goodbye to her.

Doesn't sound like there will be much of a beauty magazine left, right?

Pilot Journal: RIP March 2010

Pilot Journal is crashing and not getting up.

Actually, it's being merged into Plane & Pilot magazine. Sure, you know that one?

When the airlines cut back, there's less pilots. Less pilots, less people reading Pilot Journal. Simple math, courtesy of the Reaper.

Training magazine: RIP February 2010

The Reaper is back, has cleansed the site of Viagra and propescia spam, and with the usual news -- a magazine has closed!

I was watching the Winter Olympics, my favorite season for this event, and was caught up in all the curling frenzy. I was trying it down here, but I didn't have a sliding rock. So I used one of the $300 ink blotters Conde Nast threw out in its new austerity movement. Worked beautifully!

Training magazine has bitten the dust because, well, there's nobody to train! As a matter of fact, there are less trainers now to train the smaller amount of people who can be trained.

Besides, any magazine that puts a penguin on its cover is immediately penalized, in my book.

Why magazine ad sales people are becoming extinct

According to the Publishers Information Bureau, magazines lost 58,340 ad pages in 2009.

Hearst lost almost 3,400 pages, led by those rich folks' books Town & Country and Veranda.

Conde Nast lost more than 8,000 ad pages, led by the still alive Architectural Digest, W and Conde Nast Traveler.

Hachette lost 1,661 ad pages, with Elle Decor leading the way down.

Meredith was actually up 355 pages, so don't doing anything stupid if you sell ads there.

Five biggest ad page losers for 2009

Time to shake off the cobwebs and recover from that hangover. Miami is just not the Reaper's style as my skin tone does not improve.

Looking back at the wreckage of 2009, it's time to post the magazines which had the largest percentage drops in advertising pages that are still alive, somehow.

Topping the list is one of the Reaper's favorites, Power & Motoryacht, with an impressive 57.3% loss in ad pages, according to Mediaweek.

Take a good look at the cover. Do you know anybody who really wants to show off one of these things in the past 18 months? That is, if they haven't lost a bundle already? The boat shows are coming up shortly. Taking any bets on attendance?

Power & Motoryacht    -57.3%

Architectural Digest    -49.9%

Veranda     -47.7%

W    -45.9%

Town & Country     -45.6%

Happy holidays from The Reaper

You better watch out,

You better not cry,

You better make money,

Or you're gonna die.

The Reaper is coming to town.

It's making a list,

And checking it twice,

Nobody is safe,

Even Cathy Black or Si.

The Reaper is coming to town.

It counts ads when you're closing.

It knows when you're a flake.

It knows when your newsstand is bad or good,

So sell through for goodness sake!

Oh, you better watch out,

You better not cry.

If you thought this year sucked,

The next, you're gonna fry!

The Reaper is coming to town.

The Reaper is coming to-o-o-o-o tow-w-w-wnnnn!!!!

Happy holidays everybody!

I.D.: RIP December 2009

It's difficult to publish a posh design magazine when there's nothing to put the design on.

There's a reason shelter books are folding.

Who can afford this stuff?

The Reaper gets its best design ideas from Highlights, and I do not worry about that going out of business anytime soon.

367 magazines closed in 2009 so far

Mediafinder.com, via Crains NY Business, shows that The Reaper is actually slowing down and may find some vacation time soon: 367 magazines closed so far in 2009, and that's down from 573 in 2007.

Prize under-statement goes to Trish Hagood, president of Oxbridge Communications, parent company of MediaFinder: "This is not a propitious time to launch a magazine."