InDigestible: The decline of a great magazine

National Review, Feb 11, 2002 by John J. Miller

Hard-news stories such as these were not always the magazine's most popular features, according to the detailed reader surveys the Digest studied every month. Yet they had a distinct following and lent ballast to the whole enterprise. "Sometimes a magazine must lead," says William Schulz, the longtime Washington bureau chief responsible for so many of these noteworthy articles. "We never pandered to people based on what a focus group told us to do."

From its headquarters north of New York City (the address is Pleasantville, but it's really in Chappaqua, present home of the Clintons), Reader's Digest remained distant from the fads and trends of the general publishing world. Astonishing commercial success unrivalled by anything else in the business also helped it stand apart. The Wallaces lived well, but grew embarrassed by the vast riches they accumulated. They had no children of their own, and until their deaths in the early 1980s, they lavished parental devotion on the people who worked for them. The Digest became famous for cushy jobs full of perks, from free turkeys at Thanksgiving to rides home in a limousine for employees who weren't feeling well. The positions were well paid, too; the Digest never crimped on expenses.

Yet one of the Digest's great strengths-its isolation from the buzz of Manhattan-was simultaneously a weakness. It often didn't get the credit it deserved for its journalism. "I can't tell you how many times I've seen our work appear on television or elsewhere without attribution," says deputy editor William P. Beamon. The Digest simply wasn't hip, cool, or glamorous. "For decades, the intellectuals have looked down on the masses," says Schulz. "They've viewed Reader's Digest as lowbrow."

The parent company of Reader's Digest-called the Reader's Digest Association-owed everything to the magazine, but the magazine was not in fact the company's primary cash cow. A subscription simply served as a gateway to a wide range of other Reader's Digest products, such as books and records. The magazine itself was expensive to produce, with its blank-check reporting and close editorial attention. It functioned as a kind of loss leader for everything else.

This model worked well for a long time, but the company began to falter in the 1990s as it faced new challenges from competitors using sophisticated targeting software to boost their own mail-order businesses. Reader's Digest started to lose ground technologically, and the problem was compounded by a legislative crackdown on sweepstakes, the main device by which the magazine had attracted new subscribers. (The practice bordered on deception, as it tricked many people into believing that buying a subscription would increase their odds of winning a prize.) Profitability sank, leading to intense pressure to cut costs throughout the company. The magazine's free-spending ways came under severe scrutiny. There was an additional concern, which in some quarters verged on an obsession, that the Digest's readers were too old-a demographic dead-end in a society increasingly dominated by boomers. The rise of niche media also took a toll, as general-interest magazines such as Life died off. The Digest has survived, but continues to be battered.