2004 Annual Report - Magazine Audience

The other end of the news magazine universe is a group of magazines whose importance may have more to do with influence than economics. These are the nation's major opinion news journals, from The Nation on the left to National Review on the right. Looking at the circulation of these sorts of journals over the past 15 years, one trend is particularly notable. There seems to be an inverse relationship between which party controls the political dialogue in Washington and the circulation of opposition magazines. The last few years have been very good to the liberal Nation. Its 2002 circulation was up to more than 135,000, and increase of 40,000 (42 percent) since the election of George W. Bush in 2000. At the same time, the conservative National Review has seen its circulation fall almost 40 percent (to 114,082) since its high point in 1994, when anger over the presidency of Bill Clinton led to the elections in which the Republicans took control of the House of Representatives.

Circulations of Leading Opinion Magazines

1988 - 2002

Design Your Own Chart

Audit Bureau of Circulation, annual audit reports

The New Republic has been relatively immune from this roller coaster effect. Its circulation is relatively unchanged over the past 15 years. It has experienced a slight drop in circulation, perhaps in part because of a string of problems it has faced ranging from the changes in the magazine's editorial staff (the loss of big-name writing talent), to its less-than-celebrated redesign, to the problems it faced with Stephen Glass, a reporter who made up articles out of whole cloth, to fluctuating changes in its overt political ideology. But as The New Republic has become less overtly partisan, it may also have less appeal to any particular political constituency and for that reason it may be missing out on the circulation increase it could have as a voice for the loyal opposition to the Bush Administration. (The country's other influential conservative news-opinion magazine, The Weekly Standard, is not included in these figures because it has chosen to opt out of the ABC audits).

The circulation gains that seem to come with being the loyal opposition put the news/opinion journals in an odd position. They get the most readers when the views they espouse are out of fashion in the town that matters to them most, Washington. It makes some sense. When one party loses control of the political scene, it is standard practice that its members wander the wilds of policy-journals and hash out what exactly they believe, why they lost control and how to get it back. The opposition opinion journals are, in effect, needed more when their side of the political spectrum is in a funk.

These journals' successes are probably best measured not in economic terms but in the pull they have inside the Beltway. That is quite difficult to measure numerically. Circulation is only one proxy.