Who Is Gaining and Who Is Not | Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ)

March 15, 2004

Over the past 10 years, there has been a clear division among magazine genres - those that are rising and those that are sitting still. Readership figures from Mediamark Research, the leading U.S. provider of syndicated consumer magazine audience data, indicate that since 1995 the entertainment and pop culture genre has gained popularity.¹ Interest in the news and business genres has remained flat.

Both news and entertainment magazines trended down in readership from 1995 until 2000. Then both categories began to rise again. But the increase in entertainment magazines was much more substantial, increasing 14 percent from 2000 to 2003.² News rose only 9 percent in the same period.³

Business magazines followed an opposite course. These magazines grew in readership from 1995, peaked in 2000 and then began to fall off.

Part of this is explained by the dying off of some magazines that were riding the success of the stock market and the technology boom. But other losses may have more to do with the fact that, when the market dipped, people stopped looking at their copies of Forbes and Fortune. For many readers, no news on their 401(k) was better than the bad news.

The figures also may suggest some shifting going on from genre to genre. Readers have only a certain amount of time to devote to magazines. If that time is not going to one genre, it's going to another. News and entertainment benefited from readers turning away from business publications.

But the uptick in entertainment readership is too sharp to be the result of falling business readership alone. It also follows logically another basic theory about media. If more of the media agenda is focused on lifestyle and entertainment, it increases interest in those areas. The media is both reflecting and reinforcing a broader cultural shift toward celebrity, entertainment and infotainment.

Magazine Readership by Select Genre

1995 - 2003