Las revistas y los nuevos nichos

La lectoría de las tres principales revistas en EE.UU. alcanza un promedio de 52 millones de personas anuales. Sin embargo, a pesar que la circulación se ha mantenido las evidencias del desgaste son claras, especialmente cuando se revisan sus ingresos y utilidades. Por lo mismo, Time, Newsweek y US.News están realizando transformaciones importantes para no perder lectores y acercarse a internet, como una manera de concentrarse en nuevos segmentos. En Sudamérica Televisa se mueve con mayor lentitud, acercándose especialmente a contenidos globales acompañados de temas específicos, lo que hasta ahora le ha dado resultados. Su fuerte es identificar nichos y complacerlos sin el nivel de especulación (terror) de las revista de más al norte. Tal como lo indica el último informe de The State of the News Media la tendencia a buscar la segmentación se acentúa y acelera. Desde que los diarios reemplazaron a las revistas en su función de entregar interpretación y nuevas historias los cambios no se han detenido. La "liposucción al exceso de grasa" se está reflejando en despidos, cambios en las planas ejecutivas, nuevos diseñadores y un renovado enfoque para los websities. Pero principalmente, un desafío para cambiar y sobrevivir. El siguiente texto de AJR revisa estas transformaciones y lo nichos que se abren.
Por Rachel Smolkin
http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=4297
When Edward R. McCarrick, the president and worldwide publisher of Time magazine, says the genesis for his weekly's new direction came when "I went to St. Patrick's and I prayed," he's kidding. Probably.

McCarrick follows this bit of whimsy with a hearty laugh and a more measured explanation for changes at his magazine that have included a shift from a Monday sale date to Friday and a vastly increased emphasis on the Web. "The marketplace never stays static," he says. "It constantly changes. It constantly evolves. And you have to stay contemporary. You have to stay in step with what marketplace demand is all about."

The weekly newsmagazines could use some divine inspiration as they grasp for a foothold in a media landscape increasingly dominated by the Web. Over the last few months, the repositioning has been illustrated most dramatically at Time. In addition to shedding about 50 staffers as part of a larger contraction at parent Time Inc., the magazine has hiked its newsstand price by $1, reduced its guaranteed circulation to advertisers from 4 million to 3.25 million, debuted a new advertiser option for counting readers and unveiled a redesign in its March 26 issue. Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report are adapting as well, if at a less precipitous pace.

As newspapers embrace more analysis, enterprise and lifestyle pieces, long the province of magazines, to distinguish themselves from their fast-paced television and Internet competition, the newsweeklies are betting there is still room in the marketplace for them to tackle such work. They also are experimenting with the appropriate online role for publications that have specialized in long-form (or longer-form) journalism, adopting somewhat different approaches to their Internet identities and to the relationships between Web site and magazine.

Newsweek Editor Jon Meacham, who says his Web site roughly equates to a daily paper and the print edition to a Sunday paper, uses an assembly-line analogy to describe the shifting place of weekly newsmagazines in the media pantheon over the last two decades: "What's happening now is that headlines are delivered by the Web. That has pushed newspapers to become more like the newsmagazines were in '82, and it's pushed the newsmagazines to produce a monthly-quality product on a weekly basis, and it's pushed the monthlies into the place of the great quarterlies, and now the quarterlies have become books."