The Press: Moral Obligation

To herald its record-breaking October issue, the Ladies’ Home Journal ran a huge picture of an elephant in full-page newspaper ads. The headline trumpeted: AN ELEPHANT NEEDS NO CERTIFICATE FOR ITS SIZE. Last week the elephant’s ears were drooping.

In a move that set the magazine industry buzzing, the Journal—impelled by a dip in circulation—cut its ad rates 5%. It offered advertisers rebates on several 1948 issues that had not delivered all the circulation expected. It was the first cut by a major magazine since the depression. Though Curtis magazines base their rates on the estimated circulation for six months ahead but do not guarantee the estimate, the Journal felt a “moral obligation” to cancel most of the 7½% rate increase that had helped make its October issue so rich (TIME, Oct. 4).

The Journal was not alone in feeling a sinking sensation. The Audit Bureau of Circulation, the admen’s statistical bible, showed that the Saturday Evening Post and McCall’s had also fallen below their circulation bases for brief periods during last spring’s newsstand slump.

Lowered Sights. All this made the usually astute Wall Street Journal jump to the conclusions that the Journal’s decision “is expected to foreshadow a reversal of the upward trend in magazine advertising fees”; and that subscription sales, as well as newsstand sales, were “sliding.” But A.B.C. figures showed this was not true—not yet, anyway.

The fact was that every big magazine had fewer newsstand buyers—but more subscribers—than a year ago. (Some were converting newsstand buyers into subscribers, to stabilize their circulation.) Most circulations were up a shade, and none had lost more than 90,000 in the first half of 1948. It was the ups & downs of newsstand sales that had hit the Ladies’ Home Journal: its average sale for the six-month period was above its base of 4,500,000, but the April, May and June issues had fallen below it. So now the base was being lowered to a more conservative 4,275,000.

Raised Voices. There was no doubt that competition for the readers’ small change and advertisers’ dollars was getting stiffen One symptom was a rash of big ads in Manhattan dailies, not so much to sell millions of newspaper readers as to impress a thousand or so admen now making up 1949 budgets.

Thus Look bragged that it “delivers reader traffic from cover to cover … in every income group”; the Journal that “more women buy the Journal issue after issue.” TIME advertised itself as “the one major weekly whose circulation has doubled since the beginning of World War II.” But none matched one magazine’s proud boast that “our readers have more inside toilets than most people.”