is sunday shrinking?

In its March/April 1992 issue, cjr reported on the slow disappearance of locally produced Sunday magazines, down from about sixty to almost half that over the last decade, and the rise of the national syndicated magazines, USA Weekend and Parade. Since then, Dallas Life of The Dallas Morning News, the Minneapolis Star Tribune's Sunday Magazine, and the Rhode Islander Magazine of the Providence Journal-Bulletin have also folded. Today, with their mortality in mind, Sunday magazines are adapting to competition for readers and advertisers.

The adaptations often don't bode well for the kind of journalism the magazines can do best -- getting at the news "a little more slowly, in better context with more emotion, storytelling, and nuance," as Avery Rome, editor of Inquirer Magazine, The Philadelphia Inquirer's Sunday magazine, put it. Last fall, The Boston Herald replaced Sunday People with four rotating theme supplements -- Informed, Home- Style, Your Style, and Health and Fitness. The Detroit Free Press Magazine is planning to replace its long pieces -- called "downers" by some readers, according to deputy editor Wendy Warren Keebler -- with shorter stories.

 On another level, and in a unique and potentially compromising arrangement set up for survival, the editorial department of Images, the magazine of the San Antonio Express-News, now reports to the newspaper's vice president of advertising. "We do have a better communication with our advertising department," says Images editor Beverly Purcell-Guerra, who adds that "we have also been allowed to keep our distance and integrity." Images was revived by the advertising department, she says, after the Express-News discontinued production of a Sunday magazine. In the new version, editorial and advertising cooperate in deciding the theme of stories.

The recently launched Houston Life, published by Gulf Communications, was distributed by TheHouston Post before that paper's demise. Gulf Communications is talking to the Houston Chronicle and, meanwhile, switching to subscription circulation. Former associate publisher Roger Tremblay describes the publication as "an upbeat, positive magazine that says Houston is a wonderful place to live." Next year, Gulf Communications will begin a similar life-style magazine for the Chicago Sun-Times. Elliot Krieger, the editor of the Rhode Islander Magazine of the Providence Journal-Bulletin before it was replaced by Parade, describes this trend as "the Wal-Marting of Sunday newspapers."

Meanwhile, local Sunday magazines are facing more nationally syndicated competition targeting niche markets. Tilt, owned by Metromarketing Resources Inc., is a pop culture magazine scheduled to appear this August aimed at "the MTV audience." Tilt will enter a revenue-sharing agreement with newspapers. Bloomberg L.P.'s Bloomberg Personal, launched last year, is already distributed by eighteen newspapers. And Disney's Big Time, written for children, will soon be on the Sunday scene.

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