Washington
The annual “America’s Best Colleges” issue of U.S. News & World Report has long been referred to as the magazine’s swimsuit issue. While the comparison is made in jest, in terms of newsstand sales the association with the popular Sports Illustrated cover is not far off.
Last year the U.S. News college issue was among 17 perennial “moneymakers,” according to a list compiled by min: Media Industry Newsletter. Only one other U.S. News issue (“America’s Best Hospitals”) made that perennials list, which also included the likes of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, People’s “Sexiest Man Alive,” and Forbes’s “400 Richest Americans.” Neither Time nor Newsweek had a cover on the perennials list.
“The college issue generates so much publicity” for U.S. News, says Alvin P. Sanoff, who was managing editor of the magazine’s rankings project for almost seven years in the 1990s. “It helps keep the name of a magazine before people, that you otherwise wouldn’t be hearing a lot about.”
Indeed, the college guide and its sibling, “America’s Best Graduate Schools,” are two bright spots for a magazine that operates in the shadows of its larger rivals, Time and Newsweek, and has endured substantial staff cuts in the last five years.
U.S. News, which has a circulation of two million and advertising revenue in 2006 of $267.6-million, does not publicly break out income from its college-rankings business. In addition to the two annual issues, that business includes separate undergraduate and graduate guidebooks that remain on the newsstand year-round, paid access to expanded data on its Web site, and reprints of specific articles and rankings.
But Brian Kelly, U.S. News’s editor, calls the idea that the rankings sell more magazines “an endless myth.” Mortimer B. Zuckerman, the real-estate tycoon who owns U.S. News (as well as New York’s Daily News), is even more dismissive of the suggestion that the rankings are a big business for the magazine.
“We don’t think about it in those terms,” Mr. Zuckerman said in a minute-and-a-half phone interview that he abruptly ended. “Does it have a value today given the general decline in news interest among the public? Yes. It’s this kind of useful news that people want. But I didn’t do it for business reasons.”
The Power of Advertising
The college issue, according to Mr. Kelly, sells only 5,000 to 10,000 more copies than an average issue. In addition, the magazine sells “a few hundred thousand” copies of the undergraduate guidebook in a typical year. About 50,000 users pay $14.95 for in-depth access to the Web site, and a little more than two dozen colleges and graduate schools purchase reprints every year, which vary in price depending on the number ordered and types of paper used.
What’s harder to measure is the advertising that U.S. News attracts because of the college rankings. The issue last August with the rankings had 126 pages, nearly 50 more than the following week’s issue. Several of the advertisers were colleges, many of which placed ads only in regional editions of the issue, allowing the magazine to sell a space several times over.
Apparently advertising was the reason that the graduate rankings got their start. Even though Mr. Sanoff and his boss, the former executive editor of the rankings, Mel Elfin, had for years suggested a comparable rankings system for graduate schools, it was not until 1994 that U.S. News published its first such list. The reason, according to Mr. Sanoff? Chrysler was looking for a way to sell a car it was about to introduce.
“If an advertiser hadn’t come along, who knows whether the grad guide would have come into being?” Mr. Sanoff says.
These days both the undergraduate and graduate guide have become synonymous with the U.S. News name. When college presidents come to Washington for a visit, the U.S. News office has long been a stop on their itinerary. “Oftentimes they were there to argue against something we did in the methodology,” Mr. Sanoff recalls. “Other times it was to tell us what we were doing right.”
Given the buzz that U.S. News generates with the rankings, some observers, including Mr. Sanoff, have wondered why other publications haven’t entered the business, especially since college officials have plenty of ideas on how to improve the rankings.
Samir A. Husni, chairman of the journalism department at the University of Mississippi, and a leading expert on the magazine industry, says that while magazines “have a love affair with ranking everything and anything,” publications often do not want to copy ideas from their competitors.
“The competitive edge for magazines is that they try to find a unique editorial concept,” says Mr. Husni. “They don’t want readers comparing rankings, and that’s what would happen if there was a competitor to the U.S. News rankings.”
Martin Van Der Werf and Elizabeth F. Farrell contributed to this article.
http://chronicle.com Section: Special Report Volume 53, Issue 38, Page A15
