If it bleeds, it leads they say, but it seems that most of the bleeding these days is going on inside the newsrooms. Yesterday, Reed Elsevier’s CEO stepped down after only eight months on the job and Conde Nast reported that its ad pages are down 33 percent so far in 2009.
Reed Elsevier, whose business publishing arm Reed Business Information is dragging down margins according to WSJ, is struggling to make debt payments on the notes it took out in 2008 for its acquisition of Choice Point. Conde Nast slashed pages from most titles and discontinued some, such as Gourmet, after a house cleaning by consultants from McKinsey. Some of the ugliest numbers: Architectural Digest is off nearly 50 percent year over year, and Wired is down 40 percent.
BusinessWeek was sold in a fire sale last month, and there is also chatter that suggests Nielsen will divest its business publications, including the mother of all B2B pubs, Billboard Magazine.
With publishing under increasing pressure from web upstarts and lagging consumer demand, publishers need to evolve a suitable online presence. This has eluded many of them, however, leading to the current turmoil.
I can’t say I see any sort of a turnaround for these publications anytime soon, but if they are to survive another five years in the Internet Age, I’d advise them to mimic ESPN’s successful integration of its magazine, mobile and Internet presence.
- Pete
