Business

Magazine launches slowly coming back to life

New magazine launches outpaced closures by more than a four-to-one margin in the first quarter of the year, offering fresh evidence that the magazine industry is stabilizing, new figures show.

In the first quarter, there were 52 magazine launches and only 12 closures, according to Mediafinder.com, the database company owned by Oxbridge Communications.

Magazines were folding at the rate of more than 700 per year in the 2007-09 period, in the darkest days of the recession. Now, it appears the industry is on target for fewer than 50 closures this year.

The current startup activity is on a par with the year-earlier quarter, when there were 54 new magazines launched. However, the shut-down rate in the current quarter is half of what it was a year ago when 24 titles closed.

“It feels like it has stabilized,” said Trish Hagood, president of MediaFinder.com.

The industry was particularly devastated in the years from 2007 to 2009, when shutdowns were running more than double the pace of startups. In 2007, 702 magazines folded and 404 were launched.

In the worst year, 2008, there were 766 suspended publications and only 383 launches. In 2009, shutdowns were still far outpacing launches, with 712 going under and 333 starting up.

If the failure rate has slowed dramatically, so has the launch rate. “The big magazine companies are very cautious, they are taking fewer risks, but the smaller magazines will be helped by being able to go digital only,” said Hagood.

There’s still a dearth of new mags from the publishing giants. HGTV Magazine, a joint venture between Hearst and Scripps Networks, is one of the few launches from a major magazine company in the past six months.

Collier’s was sold to JTE Multimedia and is being brought back as a 25,000 circulation magazine, which Hagood said is a scale that a mainstream consumer magazine would ignore. JTE Multimedia publishes smaller magazines such as The Physician & Sportsmedicine.

Professional Yacht Broker is a digital-only controlled-circulation magazine founded by Jim Ramsey, a one-time advertising representative for the now-defunct Motor Boating & Sailing in the days when it was owned by Hearst.

It eventually ended up at Bonnier Publications, where the print version folded last year, long after Ramsey had exited.

More recently, he started Coastal Yachting, a consumer magazine that folded in 2007.

Of his digital-only trade publications, based in Charleston, SC, he said, “We could not do it in print, no way.”

Ward to MWW

Graydon Carter, the Vanity Fair editor-in-chief who did an in-house raid to bring architecture critic Paul Goldberger over from the New Yorker earlier this week, has also lost a veteran contributing editor.

Vicky Ward, a one-time features editor at The Post and a best-selling author, has left her contributing editor job at the Condé Nast monthly to start a public relations stint at Michael Kempner’s MWW Group.

“She’ll bring an extra grounding in skill sets across our client base,” said Kempner, whose client base includes JetBlue, Sara Lee and Nike and McDonalds.

Kempner said Ward will be focusing on everything from crisis communications to executive emanations, crafting individual and corporate messages.

“If anyone understands crises, it’s me,” said Ward. Her first book, “The Devil’s Casino,” about the collapse of Lehman Brothers, was published by Wiley and became a best-seller. Her VF profiles over the years zeroed in companies in crisis from Morgan Stanley to Hewlett-Packard.

While Ward is moving away from magazine journalism, she’ll still keep a hand in the publishing world. Her next book, also for Wiley, is on the history of the General Motors Building, a prime piece of real estate in Midtown that was once a showroom for cars but now houses the flagship Apple store.

Vice squad

The American Society of Magazine Editors released its list of finalists yesterday for the National Magazine Awards, known as “Ellies.”

Vice, which was nominated for a general excellence award, issued one of the more hilarious press releases to chronicle its achievement, but it probably did not score any points with the judges who will vote on the awards to be handed out May 3 at the Marriott Marquis.

“It is the magazine’s first nomination in its 18-year run and the first time we can tell our parents what we do for a living without shame.

“To the rest of the industry, we would like to say thank you for finally waking up and realizing we do it better than you. We will not forget and will make sure you don’t either,” the release said.

In the general-excellence category, it is competing against the New Yorker, New York, GQ and Bloomberg Businessweek.

kkelly@nypost.com