COLLIER'S CLOSES

Magazine Economics

The closing of Colliers magazine in 1956 shockingly illustrated the postwar changes in magazine economics and the entertainment and editorial tastes of the American reading public. A venerable name in magazine history, Collier s had reached its peak of circulation of above four million at the time of its demise. But rising costs and competition from television and more nimble and aggressive magazines had cut drastically into advertising revenues.

Early History

The magazine began publishing as Once a Week in 1888 and as Colliers in 1895. It finally became consistently profitable in 1929 as circulation broke through the two million mark. During the Great Depression Collier's prospered. This was the result of the magazine editors' decision in 1925 to reverse their stand and editorialize against Prohibition; after the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution was repealed in 1933 and liquor again flowed legally, Collier s became a favorite of liquor advertisers.

Editorial High Point

The 1930s were its editorial high point. Editorial precision, however, was never the hallmark of what was a competent, popular, general-interest magazine. The lack of a precise market to which the editors could attract advertisers was a serious problem in the postwar magazine world.

Postwar Decline

Beginning in 1947 Collier's advertising revenue dropped every year except 1953, when the weekly switched to biweekly publication. Revenues dropped after World War II partly because of the new outlets for advertisers. Magazines not only had to compete with newspapers and each other but also with radio and the new medium of television. Even rising circulation could not offset stagnant advertising rates. Falling revenues combined with increasing operating costs—salaries, postage, paper—to squeeze the bottom line.

Management Problems

But it was not purely economic factors that drove Collier's into oblivion. The management of the Crowe 11-Collier Corporation, the owner of Collier's, also contributed to the demise of the magazine through their ill-judged business decisions. In 1932 Crowell-Collier began declaring large dividends to share-holders, paying an average $2 million yearly until 1953, when the firm began to lose large amounts of money. The big dividends removed the funds needed for new editorial investment in the magazine.

Competition with Television

Editorially, the magazine found itself competing in a new media world. Collier's, which looked at the venerable Saturday Evening Post as its main competition, was, according to Printer's Ink, "almost in direct competition with TV in the fiction-entertainment area." Oblivious to its new competition, Collier's was fighting blind.

THE LORAIN (OHIO) JOURNAL CASE

On 11 December 1951, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the Lorain (Ohio) Journal could not legally refuse advertising in order to coerce clients not to advertise on radio. The Elyria, Ohio, radio station WEOL initiated the lawsuit in 1948 when the Journal refused to accept advertising from businesses that used WEOL. The radio station asserted that the Journal had engaged in illegal restraint of trade prohibited by the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. As part of the judgment, the Journal was forced to print the details of the court's decision once a week for twenty-five weeks. Civil libertarians decried the decision, saying that it made the Journal the first U.S. newspaper to be told by a court what to print.

Specialization

Too late, the editors and management realized that the magazine world had also changed. Specialization hit the industry, and new magazines with narrow foci were launched even as the older general-interest magazines were folding. Playboy, founded in 1953 by Hugh Hefner, targeted men with its pictorials of nude and provocatively dressed women. Sports Illustrated, first published in 1954 by Henry Luce's Time empire, targeted sports fans, mostly men. Specialization aided in attracting advertisers, who could choose what type of reader would see their ads.

Decline of General-Interest Magazines

Such trends worked against magazines such as Collier's. The number of general-interest magazines dwindled in the 1950s and 1960s. Important names in magazine history disappeared—Collier's the American, Woman's Home Companion, Liberty—but the number of new magazines increased to fill the void.

Sources:

Hollis Alpert, "What Killed Collier's," Saturday Review, 40 (11 May 1957): 9-11, 42-44;

James Playsted Wood, Magazines in the United States, third edition (New York: Ronald Press, 1971).

Collier's (1888–1957), weekly magazine founded by Peter F. Collier to promote his installment plan for selling books. It soon became an illustrated literary and critical journal, and under the editorship of Norman Hapgood (1903–12) and Mark Sullivan (1914–17) was a leading liberal and muckraking publication. After the editorship of F.P. Dunne (1918–19), it was less concerned with influencing social opinion and more with furnishing light fiction and articles for the average reader. Although it participated in new crusades, e.g. against the 18th Amendment, it concentrated on fiction, cartoons, and popular articles on current events written by famous persons, together with discussions of Hollywood, Broadway, and athletic events. Under this policy, the circulation rose to more than 2,500,000, but in the 1950s it hit hard times (becoming a fortnightly in 1953) as newsstand sales dropped and advertising declined. In 1957 Look assumed its debts in exchange for its subscriptions.