Monday, September 21, 2009

Atlantic Blogger Andrew Sullivan Makes Pitch for Supporting Print - NYTimes.com

Atlantic Blogger Andrew Sullivan Makes Pitch for Supporting Print - NYTimes.com
Blogs are often criticized for helping to kill print media. Last week, though, the prominent political blogger Andrew Sullivan used his forum on TheAtlantic.com to tell readers to subscribe to the print edition of the magazine.
Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images
The blogger Andrew Sullivan.

It worked. Within two days after last Monday’s post, Mr. Sullivan’s appeal pulled in 75 percent of the subscriptions that the Web site draws in a typical month, the magazine’s publisher, Jay Lauf, said. The Atlantic expects this month’s subscription orders to be double an average month’s.

Mr. Sullivan said he was happy that his “open letter to George W. Bush on torture” had made the magazine’s cover, although such a cover has limited commercial appeal, and that led to the spontaneous post about subscriptions.

“With old media in crisis, a decision like that is understandably making some general interest magazines an endangered species,” Mr. Sullivan said in his post.

The Atlantic is having trouble, at least on the advertising side. Ad pages fell 25 percent in the first six months of this year from the same period last year, according to Publishers Information Bureau. However, there is demand on the reader side: circulation rose 6.8 percent in the same time frame, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

Mr. Lauf said he was delighted with Mr. Sullivan’s note, but it was not anything he was going to instruct other writers to do.

Mr. Sullivan said he had written the post without any input from executives.

“Whenever I feel grateful for some reason that The Atlantic still exists, I give it a shot,” he said. “Many readers care enough to want to support media that say the hard things and do the uncommercial things. It’s actually wonderful, I think, that new media can support old media in this way.”
STEPHANIE CLIFFORD

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