Better Times for the Biz Magazines?

The SABEW blog says today that advertising sales improved mightily in August for the major business magazines. I'm particularly pleased to see that Business Week showed a particularly strong increase, even though it still lags the other major biz mags.

This is good news, because--no matter how much journalists hate to admit this--ad sales have a direct impact on editorial content. Magazines with smaller "news holes" have a tendency to drift toward the pedestrian, in addition to cutting down on both the quantity and length of articles. The number of investigative stories also suffers, as does staff morale in general. As I've noted previously, the impact of reduced ad sales has been particularly evident at Business Week.

Hopefully we'll see a pickup in investigative reporting at all these magazines, including my alma mater. Might be nice to see some substance amid all the wine columns and other fluff.

© 2006 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

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