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David Carr buries the business magazines in a shallow grave in The New York Times Monday. It's impossible to argue with the chronic woes Carr is responding to: The last few weeks have seen more bad news coming out of once-dominant magazines, like BusinessWeek (unloaded to Bloomberg), Fortune (from 25 to 18 annual issues) and Forbes (50 more layoffs). And Carr touches on the most obvious problem at these former giants: the advent of the Internet, the acceleration of business news cycle and the financial crisis. Advertising has collapsed across the magazine world. But the question Carr inadvertently raises, but glosses over, is: Is that serious problem a matter of readers losing interest or advertisers simply disappearing (or looking for new ways to market)? Carr seems to believe the former. Most of his column is a breathless declaration that consumer business magazines, a category that he argues contains everything from the Big Three to Wired and Fast Company to the personal finance pubs, have lost touch with a recession-wracked audience that no longer believes in clichéd empire-building CEOs or masters-of-the-universe type Wall Streeters. In short, aspirational business coverage is dead in an age of renewed government intervention in the economy; and without it, business coverage (presumably including The New York Times) is kaput. Carr pushes this so far as to suggest that the once-robust audience for the business pubs is now so discouraged and beaten down that it simply doesn't want to read about the subject in glossy magazines -- or at all. "But nobody is going to read, let alone aspire to, magazines called Middled, Outsourced, Left Behind and Clobbered," he writes. "It's as if American business has lost custody of its own story." There are any number of reasons to be skeptical of this broad and gloomy diagnosis. BusinessWeek and Fortune both got going during the Great Depression, which was a lot worse than this. The problem with consumer magazines today is much more general than just the business media: Conde Nast has shuttered Portfolio (a business mag) and Gourmet (which is not) and is frantically trimming across the board, even at Vanity Fair. While there has been pressure on circulation -- and I'd bet newsstand sales are down across the board -- the big business magazines, even BusinessWeek, have supported their high circs far more effectively than their advertising. Certainly, it costs; and arguably, you should let circulation fall to its "natural" level. But readers in large numbers are still receiving and presumably flipping through these magazines. Besides, for all the CEOs who have graced glossy covers, that's not the only thing business magazines did, even in their Panglossian heyday. Carr offers a cartoon, then declares it inadequate. Anecdotally, the magazines began to drift away from aspirational or hagiographic treatment after the dot-com bust, when they were clearly overexposed to tech, and more than a few years before the current crisis. You could as easily argue that the Big Three grew soft and slavishly aspirational during the tech boom and never figured out what to do in a somewhat harsher climate. All three became less clearly defined as they struggled to reach their core readership. Meanwhile, and this seems to me to be the real driving force of change, the Internet was fragmenting the audience, providing information that was much closer to real time and accentuating hard-edged commentary. All magazines, not just business pubs, seemed to lose confidence in their ability to entertain and inform readers in long-form stories. That fragmentation, in turn, helped usher in the devastating advertising drought. Advertisers, which had their own recessionary woes, began to worry if they were really reaching those large circ numbers or, even worse, whether there were more cost-effective and targeted ways to market themselves, whether through sponsorships, podcasts or Web-based ads. That only deepened the definitional crisis at the big magazines, much as it already had for news magazines and newspapers. Some of these problems became self-fulfilling. What has not occurred here is that a vast audience of consumers for business news has not evaporated, or as Carr would have it, slumped off to other preoccupations. They exist, perhaps in greater numbers than before (look at the dynamic business, financial and economic blogosphere, which is undoubtedly younger and seemingly more plugged-in than the traditional older demographics of the Big Three, or consider everyone's contrarian case, The Economist). Besides, large portions of this audience may well become aspirational again, given a conducive climate (Carr seems to assume the current bearish situation will remain a very long time). So the aspirational aspect may well be cyclical. But the fragmentation engendered by the Internet is secular; it's not going away, and it may well be deepening. The real problem of Big Three is how to tap those deep wells of interest and expertise out there, each one served by often-expert and well-informed Web sites, bloggers, data services or news operations. How do they find that sweet spot where the reporting is deep enough and enticing enough to attract a large enough audience craving perspective? How do they tie daily Web operations to deeper magazine reporting and narrative writing? At the end of the day, the problem comes down to finding that spot in the middle of a large, hungry and informed audience and giving it something that they want in, yes, an attractive, even a glossy package. Then you have to do it in a cost-effective way and figure out how to sell enough advertising. Maybe it's a little less aspirational. Maybe it's a lot more defined and a lot less condescending to what Carr calls "Average Joes." Maybe it depends far less on newsstand sales, which is the magazine equivalent of roaming herds of Internet clickers. Maybe it challenges a bit more than treating readers like children, with highlighting, lots of bullet points and simpleminded advice. There's nothing wrong with aspirational, if it's legitimate. There is a lot wrong with aspirational that resembles a Hallmark card. If the business magazines do die, a few too many Warren Buffett covers probably won't be the reason. Not being smart enough in a very complicated world may be. - Robert Teitelman Also see: The complete archive of Media Maneuvers columns Robert Teitelman is editor in chief of The Deal.
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Carr is wrong. Business magazines have same problem afflicting newspapers. Today, more people are exposed to New York Times content than ever before. Far more, when you factor in Web + Print. Trouble is, CPMs on the print side are as high as 40 dollars, while they are as low as 1 dollar on the Web. Consequently, you have advertisers migrating from Print to Web.