Fit to print
In the early twentieth century Americans seeking the news had plenty of print sources to choose from, many of which were local papers. Even smallish towns had markets deep enough to support multiple publications, each jockeying to make their presence known in a bustling marketplace. Beyond the daily news cycle there was demand for a more reflective, comprehensive perspective. This space was filled by magazines that bypassed regional reporting in favor of issues with national significance.
These titles curated articles across a wide range of topics, assembling them into issues with broad appeal. Among this group Time and Newsweek would become two of the most prominent, launching around the same time and reaching similar audiences.1 Their solidly middle-market voices helped them grow steadily in circulation, able to attract urbanites on the coasts as well as those in the heartland.
The cover of Time would become particularly desirable real estate. Attaining it meant that a topic or personality had a sufficient level of importance for the entire country to merit being framed by its iconic red border. In the quest for circulation numbers Newsweek was in a strong second place, with a personality that was largely indistinguishable from Time’s, understandable given the need to draw in the widest set of potential readers.
These were magazines that could be stocked in doctors’ office waiting rooms or in airport kiosks without a second thought. They were vaguely centrist in political outlook, eclectic in subjects covered, and interleaved with numerous advertisements for sensible automobiles or pharmaceuticals or the latest in consumer technologies.2 Companies seeking to pitch their products to the broadest audiences helped swell ad pages, creating healthy profits and expense accounts for the journalists within their news operations.3
Time and Newsweek were the dominant players among general interest news digests in the United States.4 Niche titles might be better at reaching narrow demographic segments, like car buyers or cooking enthusiasts, but these weren’t enough for marketers looking to make the biggest splash. Companies looking for national channels for glossy print marketing had two obvious choices. For their parent organizations, they were major contributors to the bottom line.
If you can’t be all things to all people, being enough things to a good chunk of them is an attractive place to be.
The great reckoning brought by the rise of the internet would upend this comfortable arrangement. With a proliferation of media options, markets fragmented into specialized verticals, where individuals were now free to tailor their consumption precisely to an audience of one. Mass-market magazines were no longer as essential—either in print or online. Maintaining circulation figures became challenging for publications used to owning large readerships that reliably attracted ad pages.
The center cannot hold
The needs of large constituencies affect behavior across industries. In politics, parties in a winner-take-all environment need to build the largest coalitions possible to reach majorities, leading to policy positions that converge more than the diversity of their electorates might otherwise suggest. Eventually these can fracture along the boundaries, as voters who feel unserved by generically broad promises bolt for more radical candidates.
Restaurants might bring experimental flavors and new cuisines to a market, but when success transforms them into multi-site chains the edges have to be sanded away to appeal to the widest audience. Starbucks may get dinged by coffee snobs for over-roasting its beans, but that’s a sure way to ensure any vagaries of flavor are eliminated. Every customer knows exactly what they will get, whether in Seattle or Sapporo.
Fast food places are knocked for their assembly line offerings, but they’re happy to rake in the profits that come from neutral products with wide appeal. On the biggest scales, consistency is more valuable than novelty. Staying in the middle and targeting everyone can be a good model when the product is close enough to what most people want. This leaves organizations vulnerable to alternatives that begin to pick off segments of the market. Hole in the wall shops provide more authentic experiences because the risks they take could derail a bigger enterprise.
If the bigger players are paying attention to the upstarts, eventually their most promising innovations will get assimilated. Otherwise, stuck in the middle and trying to please all, mass market organizations can’t chase a specific group too aggressively. When something tectonic changes, like digital distribution did to media, a mass audience laboriously built up over many years can evaporate.
A more intractable challenge of size is that growth at some point is mathematically impossible to sustain. If Amazon’s revenues increase at the same annual rate for the next 15 years as they did for the past 15, by 2035 the company would make up somewhere north of half of the entire U.S. economy.5 Whatever your opinions of the genius of Jeff Bezos, even he recognizes that an eventual collapse is more likely than this scenario. A giant enterprise seeking that next ten percent in growth can’t risk compromising the much bigger chunk at the center of its current market.
Find your voice
Starbucks tries to have the best of both worlds, offering a highly standardized mass-market product with the twist of nearly endless customization, preventing would-be competitors from edging into its turf. Print magazines have tried similar tacks—at one point Newsweek gave subscribers an option of adding one of four special sections to their print copies. Given the logistical complexities involved in tailoring mailed issues for thousands of households the experiment was killed off, especially since the internet could do customization far more effectively.
With the value of the asset tanking, Newsweek would eventually be disposed of in a fire sale, and today it limps along with a small fraction of the audience it once enjoyed. Time hangs on with a reader base that has plummeted since its heyday. In a sign of the new balance of power it is now owned by a tech billionaire, whose pockets are presumably deep enough to forestall any more cuts.6
The story holds true for other general interest magazines like Readers’ Digest or National Geographic, which have watched their subscriber numbers crash to fractions of their peaks, despite growing populations. It’s not just a print issue, as the major national evening news broadcasts have also seen plummeting viewership.
In American politics, both major parties have been roiled by candidates that would have been viewed as outside of the pale just a few cycles earlier. The big tent is great, so long as fair goers don’t have other options. Great size can have the effective of locking organizations into a constrained path, creating openings for competitors to break in.
What risks do you face as your organization’s scope increases? Where would a focused offering be more valuable?
Not receiving these articles automatically? 1/week, subscribe here.
- Newsweek was founded by a Time alumnus, in yet another example of a pioneering organization spawning its own competition. ↩
- This may seem like a hindrance to readers but are definitely not for publishers, whose dream is to print issues so thick with advertising that issues need extra pages. Thin magazines = precarious finances. ↩
- Most revenue usually came from advertising, not subscriptions, the latter of which might barely cover the cost of printing and physical delivery. ↩
- U.S. News & World Report was a distant third in this competition, and had more of a wonky politics bent. It carved out a nice niche for itself as a purveyor of college rankings. ↩
- Making the country the United States of Amazon, which may be dystopian but at least the drones will run on time. ↩
- Marc Benioff, of Salesforce fame. Newsweek’s former corporate parent, the Washington Post Company, sold its flagship newspaper to Jeff Bezos. ↩