The Week Debuts New Cover Design

Newsstand-friendly treatment an attempt to drive more single-copy sales.

By Bill Mickey
Tuesday, June 30, 2009

The Week quietly debuted a new cover design for its June 26th issue. The design brings the cover in line with its UK and Australian versions while also leveraging some of the newsstand magic the magazine has outside of the U.S. where it is  primarily a subscription-driven publication.

According to U.S. publisher Jed Hartman, the English team had initiated a redesign to capture more single-copy sales in that country's much more dynamic newsstand environment. "Our brethren in the UK had been experimenting with different covers, which we were involved with as well," he said. "They have a much higher newsstand presence than we do. Here, we're a more subscription-driven publication, but the new format is more newsstand friendly. We also, as a global brand, wanted to remain uniform."

The new design drops the left "sidebar" format, instead placing cover lines across the top of the masthead where newsstand browsers are more likely to see them. The leftover space also created an opportunity for bigger coverline treatments.

While the sidebar may have been less noticeable on the newsstand, it did provide a specific function: It acted as an unofficial table of contents, which the magazine doesn't have. "Readers tend to read The Week from cover to cover," said Hartman. "Although we do like to give a little guide to the reader and that's what the sidebar did. So we moved that [function] to the top of the magazine."

The magazine's subscription-driven model can't be overstated. Published 48 times per year, The Week has a total paid and verified circ of about 516,000. Its newsstand sales average only .4 percent—about 1,800 copies—according to the December 2008 publisher's statement with ABC.

According to Hartman, the new design was a "tweak," but a significant one. "This was a major change. We're a formatted magazine that's working, so we're very careful about what we change," he said, adding that it's always better to make changes when a magazine is enjoying some success. "Tweaking a product when it's doing well is a strategy we'd rather do than to completely overhaul it when it's not doing well."