No field of dreams for sports magazines - effects of baseball players' strike

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Nov 15, 1994 by Steve Wilson

Fans of the national pastime weren't the only ones mourning the early demise of the baseball season this year. The players' strike had sports magazines scrambling to fill the void and cope with the impact on their bottom lines.

USA Today's Baseball Weekly had to cut its size from 72 pages to 40, and its circulation from 340,000 to 240,000--it even ran its own football preview to fill pages. Century Publication's Baseball Digest dipped from a circulation of 300,000 to 285,000. Time Inc.'s Sports Illustrated was forced to can a scheduled World Series insert. And Sports Publishing Group, a division of Times Mirror Magazines' Custom Publishing Division, ended up having to shelve the World Series programs it was producing for Major League Baseball (the contract will be renewed next year).

Still, it could have been a lot worse. Thanks to the change in seasons, most of the general sports books claim to have suffered minimal damage. "Fortunately, when baseball broke, we were only 10 days from the start of football season," says SI publisher David Long. Had the strike occurred instead between April and July, he notes, the blow would have been much tougher to cushion.

"We've had some [ad] cancellations," says Baseball Weekly publisher Keith Cutler. "But right now, a majority of our advertisers are still with us."

In general, ad departments stuck to their usual strategies, although SI did offer discount "strike rates" to its customers. Long says most of the magazine's regular advertisers remained in the book, but some of the traditional World Series marketers, such as Chevy, had not yet bought space in early October.

Editorially, magazines dealt with gaps in their content by reappropriating pages to America's other pastimes. The Sporting News trimmed its baseball coverage to around 12 pages, from an average of 18 to 24, giving more space to football and hockey, according to editor John Rawlings. Although baseball dominates the trading-card industry, Collector's Sportslook editor Tucker Smith says there are plenty of other subjects for his magazine to cover, from football to mountain biking. "Every sport has its own card set," he explains. Tuff Stuff, another title for collectors, spun off a weekly newsletter called Baseball bulletin to cover the strike's effect on the trading-card industry.

If Ken Burns's recent epic, eighteen-and-a-half-hour "Baseball" documentary proved anything about the game, it's that people can always find something to say about baseball. Titles like Baseball Weekly (which publishes weekly from March through October and biweekly from November through February) and the monthly Baseball Digest have relied more on stories about the sport's history and the strike from the average fan's point of view. "We're having to be more enterprising with our content," Cutler admits.

Under such circumstances, it might be logical to assume that these magazines are already shouting the perennial rallying cry, "Wait till next year." But at this stage of the game, next year is far from certain from a baseball standpoint. The all-important, all-lucrative February spring-training preview editions cannot be planned without assurance of a 1995 season, and monthlies need to know before 1994 is over.

"The strike might not be resolved until spring, and we have to close on our preview issue in November," says Jacobs. "If this thing could be settled right now, we wouldn't have a problem."

That's a big if.