A richer read

Our bottom line: More resources would mean a better magazine | Joel Belz

Illustration by Krieg Barrie

"What could you do at WORLD magazine," a loyal reader asked me a couple of weeks ago during a visit to western Massachusetts, "if you were able to double your circulation?"

The question startled me for several reasons. But chief among them was that very few folks in publishing circles these days think or talk about increasing circulation—much less doubling it. The newspapers and magazines that haven't already been forced into bankruptcy are taking painful steps to cut costs.

So for starters, I was tempted to tell my friend, a doubling of WORLD's subscriber base would mean we could almost certainly set aside all worries about our immediate future. (Of course, I'm making the implausible assumption that there is no cost associated with finding all those new subscribers.) Nevertheless, if we knew our revenue for this coming year would double last year's revenue, our management task would, theoretically at least, be only half as hard.