Down East Downsizes

Down East magazine is "reorganizing" which is a nice way of saying they are laying people off. Six people will lose their job while others will have reduced responsibilities, reduced hours, or changed to independent contractor status.

"Even though our magazine readership is at an all-time high, advertising pages are down, mostly due to real estate sales… and when sales are down to this degree, there’s really only so far you can go before you have to come face to face with that reality," said Bob Fernald, president of Down East Enterprises, Inc. -- From Village Soup

If you've leafed through an issue of Down East you probably noticed how much of their advertising comes from real estate -- homes only the wealthy can afford anyway.

When even luxury food magazines like Bon Apetite and Gourmet are trying to change their content to be more frugal, magazines that rely on advertising from cars, real estate, and retail have to come up with new ways to bring in ad dollars. My own parents, who used to subscribe to Down East, stopped reading it because they said there were too many ads. They got sick of looking at them.

So what is a magazine to do? A high ratio of ads to content in a magazine is a turn off for readers, but without ad revenue a magazine can't survive. And luxury magazines are in a tug of war between creating content that is tackling the current economic crisis and potentially losing readers and continuing to create the same kind of content they've been doing all along and losing advertisors.

What's the winning solution? If we knew that I guess the newspaper and magazine industries wouldn't be in such a pickle.