New York magazine to go bi-weekly

New York magazine, which had developed a highly successful website, said yesterday, that even though its online readers had been expanding, it had not helped print.

The magazine said it would start publishing every other week in order to better match consumer habits.

The magazine, which has been published since 1968, is a weekly currently, but print  circulation had been falling, data from the Alliance for Audited Media showed.

Paid subscriptions were down 4.2 per cent, to 330,145, from 2011 to 2012, while single copy sales were down 12.7 per cent over the same period.

Online viewership had however, expanded with the magazine developing popular websites such as Vulture, an extensive entertainment site, the Cut, a site for women about fashion and relationships, and its online edition NYMag.com.

Pieces on those sites had a reach far beyond New York. For instance an interview in October with Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, in which he talked about the devil, received 17,000 recommendations on Facebook.

The online audience for New York Media, the group that includes the magazines and the websites, was up 40 per cent in October from the previous year, and had 18 million monthly unique visitors, according to the company.

Meanwhile, the publishers have pitched the changes as better serving readers and advertisers alike, though readers would effectively be paying more (the sub price for 29 issues would remain unchanged from 42 issues, $29.97.

The newsstand price would increase to $6.99 from $5.99) and advertisers would lose the appeal of a regular weekly product with which to reach customers.

Adweek quoted publisher Larry Burstein as saying, he expected readers to accept the effective price increase as they would be getting a better product.

He said there would be more content and it would be sort of a bigger product. As for advertisers, he said they had "totally embraced" the print frequency cut as the ads would be around longer.

New York is recognised for its excellence in reporting and design and has been winning handfuls of National Magazine Awards under its editor Adam Moss.

The magazine also has a substantial readership outside New York, its home base, with around one-third of its 408,000 circulation coming from outside the New York DMA, and 80 per cent of its web traffic, non-New York.