What happens when a retail giant who controls 20 percent of magazine newsstand sales drops 1,000 titles from its racks? Untamed terror!
Wal-Mart this week announced the major trimming, dropping the heaviest anvil on Meredith Corp., ousting circulation stunners Better Homes & Gardens and Ladies Home Journal, as well as Fitness. Fellow heavyweight Town & Country, from Hearst, will also disappear, as will Hachette’s Home and Metropolitan Home.
The overarching trend, however, is to kick spin-offs to the curb. In Style’s kid sister In Style Home won’t be stocked, nor will Sports Illustrated for Kids. That, and any magazine aimed at the wealthy, sophisticated, or cultured goes into the trash heap: The New Yorker, W, Saveur, The Economist, BusinessWeek, Forbes, Fortune, and Robb Report.
The celebrity weeklies? They’re staying — and will have plenty of new room to breathe.
For Meredith, buying out Gruner + Jar just wasn’t enough. So they set their eyes on indy mag ReadyMade. And now they have it under their DIY belts, right next to Family Circle and Better Homes & Gardens. And while we’re sure the Ready Made girls are saying cha-ching and scampering off to buy more yarn and clay, it makes us wonder why Don Welsh could never make this happen for Budget Living? Sigh.
Anyways, if you’ve never heard of ReadyMade is, Ad Age has the lowdown.
ReadyMade, described by some as “Martha Stewart for 20-somethings,” has accumulated increasing attention and admiration since it first appeared in 2001.
Well, we have a feeling that Martha Stewart might call that magazine Blueprint, but … it’s kind of like Bust without the bitch.
‘ReadyMade’ Snapped Up By Meredith [Nat Ives, Ad Age]
• If Sara James‘ list of media holiday parties at WWD wasn’t enough for you, the Observer surely rounds out the list. Well, ours isn’t included, though it might help if we were celebrating with more than our reflection and a bottle of Ketel One. [NYO]
• Now that Wikipedia has been outed as entirely inaccurate on occasion, NYT staffers are now prohibited from using it to fact check. Judith Miller, however, is still an A-OK source. [Romenesko]
• Katie Couric’s interview with TV Guide might as well have been an open letter to Les Moonves. [TVNewser]
• Turns out G+J didn’t accurately represent the circulations of the three family titles it unloaded on Meredith Corp. [AdAge]
• The NYT claims to have “not lost one ad” to the WSJ’s Weekend Journal. Uh huh. [AdAge]
• With Oddjack folding, Gawker kingpin Nick Denton needs to keep his blog roster figures up. So welcome The Consumerist, a goth approach to spending. [The Consumerist]
• Radar staffers will no longer have to go to work wearing Kevlar: Neighbor The Source is being evicted from West 23rd Street. [NYP]
• Lots of reporters, killed at once. [LAT]
• Dick Cheney is the original source of the Valerie Plame leak, despite what the veep’s chief of staff Lewis Libby told a federal grand jury. Scooter says he got the name from journalists, while some legalese leakers say it was Cheney who informed his wingman. (And then the game of telephone stopped when Sally’s mom made the girls turn the lights off.) [E&P]
• We heard over the weekend that Wenner Media was dropping its book division entirely, but now it turns out it’s just department chief Bob Wallace who, along with his assistant, is out the door (who, it’s no surprise to share, we hear has “long been unhappy” with the gig). The publishing unit will stay on, but only because its ties to Disney’s Hyperion Books allow Jann Wenner to maintain control of a media “empire.” And just when Wallace actually got a staff! [WWD]
• Don’t get the wrong idea: When Viacom splits itself into two major units, chairman Sumner Redstone doesn’t plan on exiting, nor (he says) did he ever give that impression. Instead, he’ll help fuel ego battles between Tom Freston and Les Moonves. [NYDN]
• Three hours of American Morning just isn’t enough, so CNN is cutting Daybreak from the 9-10am slot for a fourth hour of O’Brien Squared chatter. [TVNewser]
• Meredith’s purchase of five magazines from Gruner + Jahr might actually have been a wise decision: first quarter profits are up 11 percent. Morale, meanwhile, hovers at Conde Nast levels. [Des Moines Register]
• As expected, David Lee Roth is taking over Howard Stern’s West Coast market on Infinity, while Adam Corolla mans the East Coast gig. Stern, fresh off learning his studio would be outfitted with waterproof walls, is already disinterested. [SmartMoney]
• Diane Sawyer is not taking over Peter Jennings‘ World News Tonight gig, lest you think a major media company would put a woman in such a commanding position. For the record: We said “woman,” not Elizabeth Vargas. [Houston Chronicle]
• Does anyone want the top spot at Men’s Journal? Zinczenko? Foxman? Essex? Bueller? [WWD]
• Paul Rodriguez, the jury foreman during Michael Jackson’s molestation trial, is pairing up with Fox News’ Aphrodite Jones to – you guessed it – pen a book.
• Meredith Corp., hot off its Gruner + Jahr yard sale purchases, ended its fiscal year with $129 million in profits. Which is great and all, but compare that to Time Inc., which reaps $350 million in profit from People alone.
• Circulation (and ad pages) is up at Martha Stewart Living, though parent company MSLO is still expecting losses as it spends cash to launch her new TV shows.
• Bigger girls get their due in Dove’s new ads, which we’ve had a lovely time covering this week.
• Conservative warlord Ann Coulter must be getting scared from liberal hatred, as she’s beefing up her Palm Beach home’s security system.
Greg Lindsay (My. God. This. Man. Is. Everywhere.) is tired of everyone picking on Meredith Corp. Just because the publisher lacks the sex appeal of Conde Nast or the breadth of Hearst doesn’t mean it shouldn’t sit at the big kids table. It is, after all, bigger than nearly all the rest of them when it comes to ciruclation and hangs on to three of the Big Sisters (Greg says there are six sisters, we thought seven): Better Homes & Gardens, Ladies’ Home Journal and Family Circle.
And yet nobody’s paying attention – even as they take a load off Gruner + Jahr.
But no one has really stepped forward to sing the praises of the big winner — the most stable and clearheaded publisher in business today and now the second-largest magazine publisher in the country in terms of circulation. Meredith is bigger than Cond???? Nast and bigger than Hearst, but it’s a safe bet that no one is scheming to crash the next Traditional Home party held in Manhattan, and no one is sending surreptitious cell-phone photos of Ladies’ Home Journal’s editor to Gawker Stalker.
Did we mention Meredith is headquartered in Des Moines? Do you even know what state that is? (It’s Iowa.) Well, that at least explains the lack of Gawker Stalker items.
There’s also the small matter of Meredith’s source of true wealth: its database of 80 million names, addresses, demographics and sales data, which extends to more than three-quarters of America. Family Cicle will always take a back seat to that.