2004 Annual Report - Magazine Audience

Other key trends in news magazine readership, according to the Mediamark data, are affluence and age. News magazines are a graying habit. Despite the occasional hiccup in the data, the age gap is quite noticeable. And with few or no new titles entering the news genre, the hopes of significantly lowering the average age will probably go unmet.⁴

Average Age of News Magazine Readers

Compared to U.S. population, 1995 - 2003

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MediaMark Research, ’’Magazine Audience Estimates’’

Average Age of Readership by Magazine

Time, Newsweek, U.S. News

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MediaMark Research, ’’Magazine Audience Estimates’’

Why does age matter? Advertising. Over the long term the aging of the news audience suggests fewer dollars will likely be flowing to news magazines, which have a higher average age than pop culture magazines. Advertisers, who seem ever- interested in younger demographics, will likely be more interested in spending their money on entertainment and pop titles that reach those target age groups.

Offsetting the "age problem" is that along with age often comes wealth. News readers have much higher income then the U.S. adult population overall and have for some time. In 1995 news magazine readers were 28 percent more affluent than the U.S. adult population, and in 2003 that gap was about the same, 29 percent.⁵

The advantage has allowed magazines like Time and Newsweek to charge more for the ads they run. Given that these magazines have had smaller increases in the number of ad pages they run than other magazine categories, this is some consolation.

Average Income of News Magazine Readers

Compared to U.S. population, 1995 - 2003

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MediaMark Research, ’’Magazine Audience Estimates’’

Average Income of Readership by Magazine

1995 - 2003

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MediaMark Research, ’’Magazine Audience Estimates’’

More Demographics: The Affluent Boys Club

The readership data on the newsmagazines are not extensive. But combining what we know about the age, sex and income of the readers, one can draw very rough sketches of the audiences here. Among the big three news magazines, readership tends to be male. Time and Newsweek each have about two million more male readers than female, and U.S. News has three million more men than women thumbing through its pages.

Time, the oldest magazine of the three, has the youngest readership, an average age of 43.1 Newsweek is a bit older with an average age of 44.4. And U.S. News is the highest, with an average reader age of 45.⁶

Newsweek's readers are slightly more affluent than Time's - average annual incomes of $66,739 and $65,697, respectively. U.S. News readers, while still above the industry average as a whole have a slightly lower average income at $63,603. This finding is surprising because it is generally true that older readers have higher incomes. U.S. News seems to be an exception in this regard. Up until 2001, U.S. News actually had a higher average reader income, but in the past few years its figures have been surpassed by both Time and Newsweek.⁷

Outside the Big Three: Younger, Richer, More Female

Move beyond the traditional three news magazines, however, and one can see more differences. Of all those listed in the news magazine category, Jet magazine, a magazine with a predominantly black audience, has by far the youngest readership. In the past decade the average reader age never got above 38.7 years old and some years its average age was in the early 30s. Its readership was also always more female than male, in 2003 it had two million more female readers than males. Among the news magazines examined, Jet also had the lowest median income. In 2003 the median income was $35,536 - below not only the news magazine average but also below the U.S. adult population average of $50,760.⁸

The New Yorker and The Atlantic have the oldest readerships of any of the news magazines examined - 45.4 years and 50.0 years respectively. But they also had the readers with the highest incomes, by a large margin. Readers of The New Yorker have a median income of $78,538, about $12,000 higher than the next nearest news publication, Newsweek. The Atlantic readers' incomes were higher still, an average of $82,983. That pushes The Atlantic nearly up into the range of readers of business magazines. In terms of gender, The Atlantic's readership tends to be more male than female - 774,000 versus 615,000 in 2003. The opposite is true of the New Yorker, which has a few more women readers - 2.1 million females compared to 1.9 million males.⁹