News Corp.’s WSJ. Magazine Increases Frequency

Current 10x schedule will bump to 11 in 2013 and 12 in 2014.

By T.J. Raphael
Tuesday, September 18, 2012

The Wall Street Journal's luxury lifestyle publication, WSJ. Magazine, will increase its frequency in 2013 and 2014. The move, says the publisher, is coming at the request of readers.

WSJ. Magazine has a global circulation of 1.6 million and will produce 11 issues in 2013, up from 10 issues in 2012, and 12 issues in 2014. Since its 2008 launch, when it was a quarterly publication, the title has attracted 143 new advertisers to the Journal franchise. According to a statement, the magazine has already seen a 45 percent year-over-year growth in ad pages in 2012.

“The luxury aspect is what we’re projecting to our readership and we want to provide more content to them,” says WSJ. Magazine publisher Anthony Cenname. “The magazine has offered the weekend experience of The Wall Street Journal, keeping us front-and-center with the best readers in the country. Our readership and circulation on the weekend has increased, and the magazine is part of that.”

The weekend edition of The Wall Street Journal takes a more casual content focus, offering more leisure pursuits than its Monday-to-Friday counterpart. The magazine, which is an insert to the newspaper, has seen a growing demand from readers.

“The readers are looking to see a glossy every month,” he says. “People thought we were crazy when we launched in 2008, but we only launched it four times a year with a circulation of 800,000—half of the circulation of The Wall Street Journal nationwide. After a few issues, we found that readers in other parts of the country wanted to know why their edition of the Journal was not coming with a magazine that they were seeing in other parts of the country.”

The magazine, says Cenname, has now become a staple of the weekend experience for The Wall Street Journal readers, and advertisers are increasingly embracing it. The publisher is also hoping the circulation of the magazine will increase once the newspaper’s September Fas-Fax are released.

“The last two ABC statements showed an increase of circulation in the weekend edition, which WSJ. is part of,” he says. “Last September, the weekend edition was up 7 percent, which for us is close to almost 100,000 copies, and in March it was up 2 to 3 percent, which is about 50-60,000 copies. We’re excited to increase the frequency next year and we want to become an even more bonafide monthly, and readers are expecting that.”

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