Product Description

The New York Times Magazine is a weekly publication that is included with the weekend newspaper edition of the Times, as well as published online. It’s unique among the Times‘ other future-facing products in being first and foremost a print product, and over 100 years old. Its role and value have undeniably changed since starting in 1896, and it remains a relevant tool to serve Times readers.

Spin-offs

• T: The New York Times Style Magazine launched in 2004 and is now published 13 times a year. Its staff and operations are separate from the Sunday magazine. It covers fashion, design, and travel, and draws luxury advertisers that provide key revenue.
• Chinese Monthly launched just this May and is distributed by the International New York Times in Hong Kong and Macau.
• Play, a sports magazine, and Key, a real estate magazine, both launched in 2006 in part to attract high-end advertisers, yet have since shuttered.

Competitors

The Magazine is in a unique position as the only largely circulated general interest magazine that isn’t sold on newsstands. As an insert, the Magazine has much more room for creativity with its design and coverage. While other newspaper inserts still exist at papers such as the Wall Street Journal, the Times’ is among the small number of publications today that are outlets for long-form articles resulting from months of in-depth reporting.

The Magazine‘s readers are also very well educated: 82% have graduated college, and 55% have also studied at the post-graduate level.

Advertising Competitors

Here’s a comparison of the Magazine’s reader demographics with two of the publications it competes with when it comes to attracting advertisers:

T, The New York Times Style Magazine has also been an advertising competitor. Its ad pages have grown while the Magazine‘s have declined, as it provides a better home for real estate and finance advertisers.

Journalistic Competitors

The following titles also feature long-form articles with the Magazine’s level of reporting and prestige:

• The New Yorker, which started in 1925 and now publishes 47 times a year. Like the Times, its site has a digital paywall, yet it also has engaging digital counterparts like its podcasts and Snapchat stories.
• The Atlantic, which started in 1857 and now publishes 10 times a year. It successfully digitally rebranded in 2011 and recently redesigned its website to be more pared down and magazine-like.
• Harper’s, which started in 1850 and is America’s oldest continuously published monthly magazine. Its print edition reaches about half a million readers, and is known for being slower than most to expand digitally.
• New York Magazine, which started as a weekly in 1968 and is now printed biweekly. Since Adam Moss left The New York Times Magazine to become New York‘s editor-in-chief in 2003, the title has steadily received National Magazine Awards. Its constantly updated website has its own large following outside of the print version.

A Changed Competitive Landscape

The 21st century has seen a radical change in the climate around print publications, thanks primarily to technology, the Internet, and the Recession. These factors need to be considered when examining the role of the Magazine today.

• As the Internet has become the source for breaking news, newspapers are looking increasingly like magazines. Their editorial approach leans more toward features and long-form, alongside themed packages and emphasized photography and design.
• Many mainstream, news- and ad-driven magazines shuttered during the Recession. (Condé Nast even closed four of its titles in a single day in 2009.) Yet in independent magazine publishing, many key industry people believe they are amidst a “golden age” as of about three years ago. Starting a title is easier than ever, with technology and the Internet providing tools such as crowdfunding and design platforms. This new crop maximizes the medium to its most book-like qualities, with evergreen editorial content and less frequent publication schedules, paired with innovative and daring design.

• Successful digitally oriented brands like Uber and Airbnb have recently created their own print magazines, using the medium to build community, occupy a tangible space, and take native advertising to an extreme. As the Times reported this May, United Airlines just rolled out a “lofty literary journal” with contributions from more than 30 literary fiction writers as a more cerebral amenity for its passengers.
• The Times will one day cease publishing a print product, as publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. conceded in 2010. Yet before that day arrives, the Times will cease being a daily print product. As it stands, its heftier Sunday print circulation already almost doubles that of Monday-Friday, with 1,180,160 compared to 639,887, as of October 2014. The Magazine drives the weekend subscription revenue as an additional and popular component of the paper.
• Overwhelmingly more readers of print publications are found online, necessitating that magazines exist on digital platforms as well. The print Magazine currently reaches nearly four million readers, yet its online readers make up an additional 19 million.

Why It Matters

Despite this digital atmosphere, the print magazine is not a lost medium—it simply has a different value proposition. Today’s magazines need to accept that they can’t keep up with the pace of the Internet, and make the most of their tactility through innovative design and timeless editorial content. While the Magazine could easily go digital-only, that would unwisely put an end to what’s been cited as the most read part of the entire print paper, as well as its 119-year-old legacy and dear place in the hearts of many of the Times’ loyal readers. Sitting down with a cup of coffee to read the Magazine and solve the crossword is a beloved part of many readers’ weekend routines—to the point that editor-in-chief Jake Silverstein announced its recent relaunch with a letter titled “Everything but the Crossword,” and followed up in the new issue, “Lay down your pitchforks! We have not touched the crossword.” And as stated, going digital-only would eliminate a vital part of the newspaper’s weekend subscription packages. Still, it now has some key work to do on its digital counterparts.

The Magazine also has enormous room to take up the editorial and design innovation the independent titles are pioneering. While the biggest challenges to magazines today are distribution and finding an audience, the Magazine is guaranteed to make its way into the homes of the paper’s hundreds of thousands of weekend subscribers. In fact, its design can be as daring as the staff chooses, as it doesn’t have to cater to retail environments. It frequently does test the limits with its covers, which has earned it a valuable reputation among design and indie publishing authorities such as magCulture, It’s Nice That, and Gym Class, all of which have recently published interviews with design director Gail Bichler.

Digital Adaptations

During his time as editor, Adam Moss built up the Magazine‘s brand and editorial voice in the late ’90s, and even put out its first digital-first issue. Yet the Magazine lost direction when Moss left in the early 2000s and the Recession hit. Ad revenues were still declining in 2013, forcing then-executive editor Jill Abramson to prolong her search for the title’s editor-in-chief after Hugo Lindgren left the position. In an internal Times memo from December 2013, she announced that “one of the true jewels in journalism left to covet” first needed help providing the paper’s “richest, most immersive multimedia reading.” She conceded: “ I owe you more than a new editor. I owe you more clarity on how the magazine relates to the rest of our news report and how it can be the most distinctive, edifying, pleasurable part of our news offerings.”

Executive editor Dean Baquet and T’s Deborah Needleman, along with other editors, explored the Magazine’s pitfalls and came to hire Texas Monthly’s Jake Silverstein as editor-in-chief in March 2014 with the express purpose of rethinking the Magazine and bringing it closer to the newsroom. In the following months, they appointed Andy Wright as the Magazine’s first publisher, with the job of growing its print and online advertising revenue, a move that included millions of dollars of investment to attract more advertisers and has since led to entire digital issue sponsorships and collaboration with T Brand Studio, the Times‘ native advertising arm.

Helmed by Silverstein, the Magazine‘s relaunch this February set out to honor its original form, yet added new columns and staff writers, and a more reader-friendly design that included entirely new fonts and sleeker logos for print and online. It also expanded into multimedia: The Ethicist column became a podcast titled The Ethicists, the contributors page features photo director Kathy Ryan’s popular Instagrams, and Jenna Wortham’s biweekly column Search Results is explicitly about “digital culture.” (Wortham, a force on social media, has 563,000 followers on Twitter, three times what the Magazine‘s own account has.)

The relaunch’s digital repercussions have been slower, but are finally making waves as of this month. Silverstein hired 23-year-old Jazmine Hughes as a digital editor this March, though as recent as this April, the website cried out for a redesign with stories from October prominently displayed on the homepage. It’s since quietly and effectively been reorganized so that the week’s four main features are on top, and a section called “Latest” organizes the other posts by their date of publication, next to an audio setup for The Ethicists podcast. Online content is now released earlier and staggered throughout the week, with previews on social media. For example, Silverstein and Bichler tweeted the cover for the May 10th Sunday edition on the preceding Monday, almost a week in advance, and have even been posting “cover Vines.” The cover story was published online that Monday as well.

Walking New York, the April 26th edition, was a landmark issue for reader and digital engagement. Its main feature encouraged readers to submit their favorite New York walking routes and stories on a page that pulls up street view panoramic images of the locations entered, Google Maps-style. For the cover, the artist RJ did a public installation of a giant pasted photograph of a 20-year-old Azerbaijan immigrant in the Flatiron, which was captured in a time-lapse video and turned into a virtual reality feature. RJ also pasted additional cut-outs all over the city, which readers found and posted with the hashtag “#WalkingNewYork”. While this type of interaction would be difficult to reproduce on a weekly basis, it’s a clear show of what the Magazine staff has the capacity to do digitally.

What Works Well

• The Magazine’s long-form writing and reporting are still of top-notch quality, with recent home-runs such as a profile of Toni Morrison and an in-depth article on today’s civil rights movement. As is the case with the Times, its contributors are among the best at their craft.
• The mix of material in the Magazine, which includes long-form features, interviews, photo stories, and poems, makes for an engaging read.
• The thought that goes into the Magazine’s design, even though it is a weekly publication, is consistently impressive. For example, its current fonts were all created for the relaunch. While some are stronger than others, the covers with the most daring design are most effective and often garner reader responses online.

What Needs Work

It’s still unclear to me, and to readers I spoke with, what differentiates the articles that appear in the magazine from those that appear in the newspaper. While the relaunch has seen a rise in more literary articles, the question of what the Magazine’s real mission is remains up in the air. It’s touted as a champion of long-form writing, but the same could now be said for the newspaper. Dean Baquet stated he intended to reevaluate the Magazine‘s relationship to the newsroom, but it seems that still needs to be done, or at least communicated to readers. Clarifying its mission could also help with two other issues: its status as a weekly, and its differing audiences.

The Magazine’s advertiser copy states that “each Sunday, The New York Times Magazine sets the tone for informed debate and thoughtful discussion around the country,” and Silverstein has said he sees it as a week’s must-read for having a successful conversation with friends. Yet the Magazine seems to be expanding outside of a weekly read. Setting the conversation for the week’s news is difficult when features are planned far in advance. In fact, they’re now released almost a week before the following week begins, which for many eliminates the need to read the print version.

More importantly, underlining its position as a weekly mag also reinforces the idea that it is a throwaway, despite the quality of its editorial contents and its recently improved paper stock. It seems wasteful for the print version to only be accessible to weekend subscribers, and while younger readers likely can’t be convinced to subscribe to the weekend paper, they might be willing to buy a magazine on the newsstand.

Right now, the Magazine has a steady readership of older subscribers who have grown up receiving the paper, but it needs to create a steady following among younger readers, who will eventually replace the current crowd. Much of that can be done online, but there needs to be a reason to subscribe to the print product as well. Newspaper subscriptions may be a hard sell, but special weekend discounts for college students or a subscription option for simply the Magazine could work.

Drawing in new readers shouldn’t just mean looking to the younger generations. The Magazine should continue to diversify its audience and content, too. It recently added more black writers to its staff, including Jenna Wortham, Teju Cole, and Jazmine Hughes, and they should be the first of many new hires. (If it needs help finding more writers of color, Hughes has compiled a list for editors of over 600 contacts.) The Magazine also shouldn’t shy from covering topics that may be uncomfortable for some of its readers, in the vein of series such as the Times’ Transgender Lives: Your Stories and NPR’s partnership with The Race Card Project. Recent features on immigrants in New York and black social media activists have been a great start.

Expanding digitally has brought more accessibility and younger readers, but that poses a new problem. The Magazine now must serve the interests and expectations of both its print readers—81% of which are over 35—and its millennial followers. To do so, it needs to cement a cohesive voice, or at least reassess how to best serve its readers. For example, features in the May 10th issue on the Kardashians and Snoop Dogg will get it a wider reach, but may not appeal to its older audience.

The Magazine also needs to adjust to these new readers consumption patterns, starting with a Facebook page outside of the overall New York Times page. Readers could then subscribe to the page, read more articles, and attract more readers through sharing and commenting. It would also be a place to hold author Q & As, which are currently poorly publicized. For example, I only realized there was a Q & A with Emily Bazelon, who wrote the much discussed article The Stanford Undergraduate and the Mentor, when I read its recap in the following week’s print edition. Finding the old Q & A, which wasn’t linked on the article’s page, meant digging through a week’s worth of the many posts on the paper’s general Facebook page. Their Twitter account could also stand to vary the format and even frequency of its article reposts, so that its followers’ feeds aren’t blasted with the same story over and over, as is often the case with its main features.

While the Magazine has noticeably improved its digital presence even just within the last week, it still has yet to deliver on its plan of having a different daily product online. Its online platforms still seem to reproduce what goes in the print magazine without changes for the digital medium. The online components should offer further reading or components like audio for what goes in the print magazine, in a way that is more engaging than telling readers to look at the website. Smaller follow-ups to stories could also be published throughout the week to keep stories alive with different angles.

Suggestions

• Reevaluate and clarify the new magazine’s mission and audience, really considering why a print magazine is the right medium for what it publishes.
• Be even more daring with design and taking advantage of the print medium. Hire more innovative designers from independent magazines like art director Matt Willey. Every single cover should be striking, memorable, and treated as a social media event.
• Be more accessible to young and diverse readers. Further explore options of selling the magazine outside of the paper, and then innovate with its marketing, perhaps as an alternative to apps.
• Start columns that make art and music a steady presence in the Magazine, and hire younger writers to write them. Instead of having a column about the Internet, a topic that is woefully unspecific to younger readers, consider columns on current topics that are less familiar, such as the vibrant scene of independent magazines.
• Keep up with the promise of more daily online posts—or don’t. There’s enough content on the Internet and even on the Times’ main website that online-only, daily posts should only be added if they are extensions of the stories that allow further investigation and even participation, or give behind the scenes looks into the Magazine.
• Find further ways to engage with the Magazine’s dedicated and educated readership. The response to the Walking New York issue shows that readers within the city are ready to engage, which should hasten the development of the Magazine’s planned event series. Consider hiring a community or multimedia planning person. Also, further market the reader demographic as a way to keep advertiser numbers up from the relaunch.
• Continue cultivating and promoting the personality of staff and contributors. Following people like Jenna Wortham and Jazmine Hughes on Twitter is fun and gives more insight into what’s going on at the Magazine, and I’d love to get to know more of the design team, too. Consider following The New Yorker‘s lead with podcasts that further explore its features, and Snapchat stories that go behind the scenes. With a redesign, the old 6th Floor Blog could be great for that, too.

Key Links

• The New York Times Magazine
• The New York Times Magazine on Twitter
• Editor’s Letter about the Redesign
• FIPP, How the Sunday magazine redesign at the New York Times could benefit its readers and bottom line
• Capital New York, The Times Magazine Problem
• Capital New York, ‘Cleaning Up’ at The New York Times Magazine
• Capital New York, The 60-second interview: Andy Wright, New York Times Magazine publisher
• Columbia Journalism School Video Interview with Jake Silverstein
• Ad Age, New York Times Invests Millions in Sunday Magazine to Lure Advertisers
• Poynter, Jake Silverstein Named Editor of NYT Magazine
• Poynter, Jill Abramson on NYT Magazine