Since its founding in 1968, New York magazine has served as a prototype of literate, high-tempo publishing, using its weekly cadence and location in one of the world's cultural capitals to usher in a new, more intimate and frank approach to what a publication could be.
Zvi Lowenthal/The New York Times
The cut in frequency will yield about $3.5 million in savings.
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
"You can't help but get wistful about it," said Adam Moss, the editor in chief of New York.
Using the tenets of so-called New Journalism, the magazine helped popularize the knowing, skeptical voices of writers including Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Gloria Steinem and Nora Ephron. It was the birthplace of both Ms. Magazine and the concept of "radical chic."
Now, this magazine that has been at the vanguard of Manhattan publishing for almost five decades is acknowledging that the cutting edge is not necessarily a lucrative, or sustainable proposition, at least on the same schedule.
Beginning in March, New York will retreat from its long-standing status as a weekly and come out every other week instead.
Along with the closing of the printed Newsweek and the planned spin-off of Time Inc., which includes the weeklies Time and People, the move to bi-weekly publishing represents the end of an era and underscores the dreary economics of print and its diminishing role in a future that's already here.
The change will beget misty eyes from magazine geeks — myself among them — while other consumers will shrug and dive into the ever-changing web version of New York magazine that shows up in their browser.
The weekly schedule of New York has already been squeezed, so that the magazine comes out only 42 weeks a year. Soon it will be 26 times a year, with three additional special issues — best doctors, the annual gift guide and a food-and-drink issue.
So will the world, or even just that of New York publishing, tip over because there are 13 fewer issues? No, but something palpable and intrinsically thrilling will be lost with the change in rhythm to a magazine that has been hitting the streets on a weekly basis for more than four decades.
Adam Moss, New York's editor in chief, acknowledges it is a bit of a moment. But last week he confidently detailed the logic as he stood in the conference room of the magazine's lower Manhattan offices, showing off poster boards displaying alternative concepts for the cover, redesigned interior sections and a more visually driven approach to telling stories.
"We've talked about this for a while and you can't help but get wistful about it," he said as Lawrence C. Burstein, the magazine's publisher, and Michael Silberman, general manager of the online operation, listened. "But I would be more concerned if we didn't address how the market and people's reading habits have changed. I would not be doing this if I didn't believe we could make a better magazine and continue to grow what we do both in print and online."
The punishing economics of being a stand-alone weekly can be explained in one word: Newsweek.
The cost structure at a weekly makes the drop in ads across the industry an existential threat and, as happened at Newsweek, its benefactor is no longer in the picture: Bruce Wasserstein bought New York in 2004 and died in 2009.
By all accounts his heirs are dedicated owners, but they know as well as anyone that Newsweek sold for $1 in 2010 and, after its new owner Sidney Harmon died, limped along in a doomed merger with The Daily Beast until it ceased print publication last year. They and the people who work for them are trying to avoid that fate.
Journalistically, New York magazine has prospered, winning a string of big awards on the way to being named Magazine of the Year in 2013 by the American Society of Magazine Editors. But that doesn't pay the bills, a job that increasingly falls to the website, which includes NYmag.com, Vulture.com, The Cut and Grub Street. Digital revenues have been growing at a rate of 15 percent year-over-year, and in the coming year will surpass print advertising revenues, according to Mr. Burstein. But part of the reason those lines are crossing is that the print revenues are plummeting.
New York, with a current subscriber base just above 400,000, according to the Alliance for Audited Media, got clobbered after the 2008 recession when classified ads went missing and stayed that way. So far this year, the magazine is down 9.2 percent in ad pages compared with the same period last year, which was miserable as well.
The brand New York is hardly dying. New York magazine's web traffic grew 19 percent in the last eight months, to more than nine million unique visitors a month, according to comScore. But to keep up that rate of growth in a competitive set that includes publicly held companies like The New York Times and upstarts like the venture-capital backed online news site BuzzFeed, the magazine had to reduce costs to find the money to fund the part of the business that is growing.
Email: carr@nytimes.com;
Twitter: @carr2n
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