Time for a change

Time magazine, the stalwart in American weekly news magazines, has undergone a renovation of its marketing technique in 2007 that leaves the educated magazine industry critic to believe that it has fallen or is falling on hard or harder times.
One of the tell tale struggling signs of a magazine, despite what the company’s PR staff attempts to spin it as, is a redesign in their layout. In a sneaky last-ditch effort geared towards gaining more peaks at the newsstand, redesigns aren’t effective for much more than giving a fresh new look at the same dry content.
Time has also remodeled their website in an attempt to draw subscribers away from their print copies and towards the online sector, which is cheaper and easier to maintain the relevance which is so essential in today’s flash-flood news market. As well as admitting to their advertisers that there may be a nearly 20% drop in print readership.
But a much more direct admittance of financial strife is a slash in circulation, which Time also underwent this year by an estimated 750,000 copies, according to a study done by the Christian Science Monitor (http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0514/p13s01-wmgn.html?page=2).
The Time newsroom cannot be as comfortable as it once was either. The magazine has cut 140 journalists from its staff in the past year, dropping from 362 people in 2006 to 226 in 2007 according to CSM.


So what does this all mean for the titan of newsweeklies?

According to Shirrel Rhoades, magazine consultant and former VP of Reader’s Digest, Goliath is falling at the feet of an army of David’s armed with specialized weapons.
"The trend in the whole magazine industry has been from the general to the special interest," says Rhoades.
Niche marketing, which has been the calling card for the magazine industry of recent memory, is sending the generalized publications scrambling for new ways to make themselves seem more marketable.
Americans are now willing to purchase multiple magazines solely dedicated to one topic rather than solely one magazine dedicated to multiple topics.
Time has also pushed its publication date back from Monday until Friday so that by the time it reaches readers at home or on the racks, it seems a bit more contemporary in its review of the week’s events.
But in today’s age of pocket-sized internet connectivity and mobile news consumption, Time is going to find something more than facelift in design that separates them from the rest of the pack, or the Godfather of American magazines will become a casualty of the change that comes with its name…time.