By Jim Milliot | Dec 02, 2022 It is no secret that the U.S. printing business had been battered for years as the popularity of digital formats significantly reduced demand for magazines, catalogs, and other printed materials. While sales of books held up better than those of their print counterparts, many of the largest printers worked across multiple product lines. And as a result, some of the industry giants (R.R. Donnelley, Quad Graphics) underwent wholesale makeovers, while smaller companies either closed or merged to cope with the plunge in demand. At a spring webinar presented by PW and Westchester Publishing Services, Jim Fetherston, president and

By adding benefit language to their paywalls! Why are newspapers dying? There are lots of reasons, but one contributing factor may be their paywall and subscription offers. Sorry to be blunt, but they’re pretty awful. I spent a few hours reviewing paywall messages on dozens of newspaper websites, and what I found was uniformly unimpressive. In this article I’ll discuss some ways to fix the problem and increase your conversion rates. Here’s the whole message in a nut shell. You have to remember that the consumer’s attitude is “what’s in it for me?” You have to offer something so compelling that he’ll take

By William Turvill Google is struggling to persuade some of America’s largest publishers to sign up to its News Showcase aggregation scheme, an investigation by Press Gazette has found. Armed with a $1bn budget to pay publishers for the use of their content, Google unveiled Showcase nearly 15 months ago. The programme has gone live in 14 countries and has more than 1,000 publication partners, including leading titles in the UK, Canada, Australia and Germany. But the service has yet to launch in Google’s native, and most important, market – the United States. Press Gazette understands that Google started making approaches and contract offers to US

By William Turvill Twitter  America’s largest magazines retained 95% of their circulation through the Covid-19 crisis, Press Gazette research suggests. Strong print subscription bases and growing digital issue readership have helped the likes of Vanity Fair, Vogue and the New Yorker grow over the past year. Our analysis of Alliance for Audited Media (AAM) figures suggests that magazines have fared better than newspapers through the pandemic. Press Gazette’s ranking of the 50 biggest US magazines by circulation shows that print remains the sector’s dominant medium, despite subscription and single-copy sales falling in recent years. On average across the top 50, print subscription circulations have fallen by 7% over the

The majority of subscribers will be light readers — and, INMA argues, publishers should be segmenting and studying this audience. By SARAH SCIRE @SarahScire Oct. 5, 2021, 3:58 p.m.  With a pandemic, U.S. presidential election, and other high-interest news events in the last year, publishers enjoyed a surge of interest from readers who aren’t necessarily news hounds in 2020. Retaining light readers — “casual, infrequent, and picky consumers of news” — are key to a viable subscription business, according to a new report from the International News Media Association. One problem that arises when trying to engage and retain this kind of reader, though? Many news organizations are staffed

September 7, 2021 Bob Sullivan The picture on the left didn’t match what was delivered, on the right. Facebook profits from advertisements it knows, or should know, are fraudulent, a federal lawsuit filed in  California alleges. The social media giant makes it easy for criminals to target consumers who are not only likely to click on certain kinds of ads, but also likely to follow through with purchases, the case claims.  The firm is “actively soliciting, encouraging, and assisting scammers,” the suit claims. Alleged frauds include ads for products that never ship, or are substantially different from what is advertised. Fraud rates for some

The Pandemic Roundtable Talks with Barnes and Nobles Krifka Steffey Few retailers are more important to specialty magazine publishers than Barnes and Noble. The Publishing Pandemic Roundtable (Joe Berger, Bo Sacks, Samir Husni, Gemma Peckham, Sherin Pierce, and me) met with Krifka Steffey, the Director of Merchandise for Newsstand and Media, to talk about the chain’s recovery in 2021, and the fresh, innovative product she’d like to see. Since we last spoke, Barnes and Noble has closed two of their New York offices, the one on 6th Avenue and the 5th Avenue office where magazine publishers have been accustomed to go for

By Jim Milliot | Jul 09, 2021 photo credit: Logos-Bookstore-Yorkville In the first half of 2020, unit sales of print books surprised many in the industry by posting a 2.9% increase over the same period in 2019 at outlets that report to NPD BookScan, overcoming a slump in sales in early spring following the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Print sales finished 2020 up 8.2% over 2019, and that strong performance continued into 2021, with units jumping 18.5% in the first six months over the comparable period in 2020. With the exception of the juvenile nonfiction category, all the major publishing categories had

Wed., May 26, 2021 By Jon Gingerich Few sectors witnessed the financial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic like the print media industry. The coronavirus crisis put journalism’s future in peril, hitting the newspaper sector—already on shaky ground due to years of plummeting ad revenues—with yet another economic downturn, as companies in every sector affected by the disaster scaled back their advertising budgets, setting off another round of closures and layoffs in the print publishing world. Other news media publishers successfully staved off this economic fallout by pivoting to digital platforms, as the pandemic simultaneously drove an unprecedented sea-change in Americans’ media consumption habits, with