Magazine Ownership

Other than Time Warner the biggest magazine companies have shied away from news titles for years, in good economic times or bad. That reluctance was particularly apparent this past year when Condé Nast, looking to expand its number of titles, chose the slumping business magazine market over news.

What is new now is that some of the smaller owners have made a push into the arena.

Case and point is “The Week” owned by Dennis Publishing, the 18th largest company, according to Ad Age Magazine.9 Dennis, owned by the Briton Felix Dennis, is in many ways an odd entry into the news magazine world. Other than “The Week”, Dennis is primarily known for its “lad” titles — Maxim and Stuff, whose main selling point is pictures of starlets in bikinis. And it may be the size of the company and its lack of history in the news arena that led it to experiment as it has. Some may like The Week’s “print blog” approach to news and some may not. Some may think it is only an attempt to do news on the cheap, but it is a different approach that other larger companies probably wouldn’t have tried.

Meanwhile, David Bradley is reportedly still weighing the possibility of launching another news weekly and in the meantime has taken steps toward reworking and consolidating his titles. Bradley moved the Atlantic from Boston to Washington , with some staff coming along and some not, freeing him to remake the magazine. Bradley also may have put another piece into place this year for a new title — luring he Economist’s deputy editor, Clive Crook, to Atlantic Media where he serves as Bradley’s senior editorial adviser. Since rumors about a Bradley-backed news weekly began, the Economist has been cited as the likely model. In a memo announcing Crook’s hiring Bradley told the Atlantic staff that Crook would “help think through and execute our larger editorial ambitions: creating a great journalism destination, recruiting and advancing exceptional talent, thinking through new publications, vetting the possibilities for acquisition.”10