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Time Inc. plans to sell 18 special interest publications in order to improve revenue, banking on its mass audience titles such as Time and People to help pull it out of its slump. The sale comes after parent company Time Warner singled out the division as one of the reasons for the conglomerate’s recent and disappointing financial report.
The sale includes special interest titles Popular Science, Field & Stream and Outdoor Life. It also includes its Parenting Group, which publishes Parenting and Baby Talk, and its Marine Group, which includes Yachting, MotorBoating and SaltWater Sportsman, and TransWorld Media, publisher of TW Skateboarding, TW Snowboarding, TW Surf, TW Motocross, Ride BMX and Quad, writes MediaPost. Mountain Sports Media will also be sold, including Ski, Skiing and Warren Miller Entertainment.
According to Samir Husni, a professor of journalism at the University of Mississippi, Time Inc. is “saying they think there’s a future for the big general interest magazine, but also predicting the demise of special interest titles that are not extremely specialized.”
People is still the No.1 celebrity title, selling 1.3 million of the August 21 issue on the newsstands, according to sources close to the publisher. But the No. 2 title, In Touch, is gaining, and came within 200,000 copies of People for the Aug. 21 issue, selling 1.1 million on the newsstand.
Data from the Audit Bureau of Circulations shows that many of the magazines on the block have seen significant drops in subscriptions. Popular Science, for example, saw a 10.2 percent drop in subscriptions in the first half of ‘06 compared to the same time period in ‘05, and Parenting saw a 6.1 percent drop in subscriptions and a 25.8 percent drop in newsstand sales.
Ad pages for many of the titles have been down as well: Outdoor Life’s pages dropped 13.7 percent, with a 4.7 percent drop in revenue through the first 8 months of ‘06 compared with the same period last year, while Field and Stream’s ad pages plummeted 18.5 percent for a 14.1 percent drop in revenue. Parenting was down 16.5 percent in ad pages and 11.3 percent in revenue.
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