I've had a fun time watching the New Republic's circulation atrophy in this digital era. Where once it was a mighty and influential publication, it is now struggling to hold on to an increasingly smaller pool of readers.
Here are its circulation numbers from 2000-2006:
Year Avg Paid Circ % Change
2000 101,651
2001 88,409 -13.0
2002 85,069 -3.8
2003 63,139 -25.8
2004 61,675 -2.3
2005 61,771 0.2
2006 61,024 -1.2
What happened in 2002 and 2003? The Iraq War and the rise of bloggers who knew better than to champion what would soon become one of the greatest foreign policy disasters in our nation's history.
Today I decided to see if their 2007 numbers had been released, but the Audit Bureau of Circulation was no longer tracking the site's circulation. That was weird. So a little Googling brought me to this, from Pew's Project for Excellence in Journalism's 2008 annual report:
One name missing from the audience chart in 2007 is the New Republic. The past 12 months have been eventful at the 92-year-old magazine.
In late 2007, the magazine got new owners, and shifted its publication schedule from weekly to every two weeks. It found itself in another ethics debate over a writer’s work. And it decided on a new way to count its readership, filing to remove itself from the Audit Bureau of Circulations system to go with an alternative auditor, BPA.
The New Republic’s publisher, Elizabeth Sheldon, said the new auditor, BPA, also handles similar magazines and thus the switch would give it "more of an apples-to-apples comparison." While the Weekly Standard, which might be considered a conservative alternative to the New Republic, is audited by BPA, other opinion magazines, such as The Nation and National Review, use ABC audits.
The new auditing firm comes with some advantages. BPA lets magazines count the free copies sent to readers as "qualified circulation," provided those readers are in the market served by the publication. For the New Republic, this means 6,000 free copies sent to Capitol Hill now are counted.
While the ABC does allow magazines to count free copies as "verified," restrictions come with that tag – readers must get an opportunity to opt out after three months, and documentation of subscription orders must be less than three years old.
As the BPA audit ending in June 2007 shows, counting the Hill-delivered copies allows the New Republic to keep its subscriber numbers up above the 65,000 mark (although just barely, at 65,779) . That is a critical point because it means the magazine, which has been losing circulation since 2000, can say that it has stemmed the losses. Keeping subscriptions up at the magazine is a priority for its new owner, CanWest.
You catch that? ABC didn't allow magazines publishers give away for free from being counted, while BPA does.
And while TNR may claim to have stemmed the losses, in reality, the opposite is true: The magazine claims a circulation of 65,779, but 6,000 of those are free magazines. That means their paid circulation is now under 60,000, down to 59,779, or another two percent drop (or so) from their 2006 numbers. On top of everything else, TNR also recently went from being a proud weekly to being published every two weeks.
What's dramatic is that during that same time, the Nation saw its circulation go from about 100,000 -- equal with TNR -- to 181,070 today. It was like a proxy war between the DLC and the people-powered movement, with the results mimicking what we've been seeing in the real world.
Given The Nation's numbers, it's clear that magazines can grow in the era of free blog content. However, they have to be in tune with public sentiment, and it's clear, looking at those circulation numbers, that TNR simply lost touch with a target audience no longer willing to tolerate its heresies. On the other hand, a rejuvenated and refreshed Nation (sporting a more populist edge) rode the wave to greater circulation.