HOT TYPE Paul D. Colford
The Nation leads mags race
As the nation awaits the formal start of the presidential race on Labor Day, The Nation has picked up the most support among political magazines.
Circulation of the liberal journal, a weekly voice of opposition to George W. Bush, has risen 71% during his presidency so that it's now the top seller in the field of opinion mags.
At 165,000 copies, The Nation's circ is still dwarfed by the size of The New Yorker (1 million), The Atlantic Monthly (448,000) and other glossies.
But The Nation's growth in the past four years, including some 24,000 new subscriptions since the Iraq war began, is striking compared to the performance of the three other leading political mags.
Circ in the first six months of 2004 was out this week from the Audit Bureau of Circulations.
At The New Republic, which initially backed Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) for president, circ has dropped 39% since 2000, to 63,500, as the mag focused on what publisher Stephanie Sandberg calls a core audience of opinion leaders.
A decision to cut the guaranteed circ last year - to 60,000 from 85,000 copies - and the launch of a more cost-effective online edition followed the arrival of two new co-owners.
New York financiers Michael Steinhardt and Roger Hertog, now chairman, bought two-thirds of the Washington-based mag in 2001 from editor in chief Martin Peretz, previously the chairman and sole owner.
On the conservative side, National Review, a strong supporter of Bush and Dick Cheney ("Veep for the Ages"), has grown just 6% on their watch, to 154,800, while The Weekly Standard is up 30%, to 69,700.
"Four years of an Al Gore administration would have been a dramatically positive thing for circulation," said National Review president Thomas (Dusty) Rhodes, echoing the view that a political mag thrives when the opposition holds power.
"Certainly Bill Clinton helped a great deal," Rhodes added.
Conservative giant William F. Buckley Jr., 78, who introduced National Review in 1955, recently contributed his controlling shares in the mag to a new nonprofit entity that he picked Rhodes and others to run.
Circ of the Standard, launched nine years ago in Washington by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. and the mag's editor in chief William Kristol, is measured by BPA Worldwide.
It shows that 3,700 free copies are delivered weekly to Capitol Hill lawmakers and other Washington players - a sum that hardly reflects the mag's popularity among key figures in the Bush administration.
"Dick Cheney does send over someone to pick up 30 copies of the magazine every Monday," Kristol told The New York Times last year.
The Standard will publish three daily editions in New York during the Republican National Convention.