Friday, May 16, 2008

Covert

To be fair to MJ, at least he made sure that his new magazine has a functional website where you can go read the stories to get suitably bored. Then again, going through the stories these guys seem to veering further left of Outlook, the cover is a suitably vicious hachet job on Sharad Pawar. At least, and I repeat, they have a fully functional website (simple, but functional) unlike Sakaal Times or Financial Chronicle.
But here is the problem, Covert (and their Covert funders) does not have the distribution muscle of either the India Today Group or the Outlook Group (of course, those who claim to know Covert's funding sources claim otherwise, though magazines are quite a different commondity for what is usually distributed). And despite that, both IT English and Outlook have seen drops in readership in the IRS R1. India Today English, for example has seen 'Claimed Readership' (CR) decline 4 per cent to about 6.9 million readers. Keep in mind, Claimed Readership and Average Issue Readership (AIR) are two quite different things, calculated in different ways (we'll get to that some other time). The same survey shows Outlook CR declined 10 per cent, to around 1.9 million readers.
The truth of the matter is that while hundreds of new magazines are being launched, magazine readership is declining, even the publication I work for saw a decline, not as scary as the 21 per cent decline for Cosmopolitan, but decline none the less, in fact, lifestyle magazines registered some really scary numbers. And the IRS does not even include many of the new-fangled publications which would barely register a blip, such as those published by the Ponytail (who seems to be skipping salaries). I've gone through the numbers and declining readership copupled with rising newsprint costs and the rise of the internet, is not going to make for a pretty time very soon.

1 comment:

Cristiano said...

Loved the cars in the pictures