A Trip to the Newsstand

Lunchtime brought me to the newsstand at my local independent bookstore to see firsthand what the magazine landscape was looking like. There were far fewer titles than in past years, this fact poorly masked by stacking survivors directly over themselves in three rows. But some magazines were still going strong.

The latest issue of Brides Magazine topped out at about 496 pages. Now wait a minute – didn’t they…. Something is certainly badly wrong in Conde Nast-ville if they can’t bring expenses in line on this title, which as we all know is all advertising anyway. 500 pages and this is the off-season for bridal titles! Are all those ad pages really going to go into Modern Bride which wasn’t even ON my newsstand? No. Some will go to competitors while others will sadly just vanish.

Hemming Motor News was almost 600 pages. This is getting out of hand. Hemmings is almost all classified advertising for classic cars - the type of product that the Internet was personally hand-crafted to disintermediate entirely? How does this title keep thriving in print?!!

Another magazine bucking the trend was High Times. The venerable how-to guide for stoners was a beefy 138 pages with more growing lights, pipes, scales, soda-can safes, and “Indoor Hydro Superclosets,” than certainly I ever dreamed even existed. I guess there is still a decent market for, er, highly-focused niche titles, including this new one I noticed, “A Bear’s Life,” which is targeted at large, bearded gay men. Now that is a niche magazine!