Magazine Bargains

I got an email from the Hearst Corporation the other day.  It is running a big sale on magazine subscriptions.

For a limited time, you can subscribe to any of Hearst's 21 magazines for $5 a year.  If you want to give a gift subscription to someone on your Hannukah or Christmas gift list, that will be $5 too.

I subscribe to only one Hearst magazine and so was unaware of the breadth of its reach.  Here are some of its titles.

Most of these magazines cost about as much for a newsstand copy as for a one-year subscription, assuming you can find a newsstand in your town.

Another, smaller magazine house, Rodale, Inc.,  is offering yearly subscriptions for $9.99.  Here are some of Rodale's health and wellness titles.

I've seen these magazines and read them sometimes in the dentist's waiting room.  Most of them seem to be about losing weight or building a flat stomach.  Nothing wrong with that, of course.  But still -- $9.99 for a year's worth of issues researched, written, illustrated, laid out, printed up and delivered to your door or post office box.

From the look of things, these publications are mostly eager to gain readership and to use readership numbers to sell advertising.

Many of these magazines depend on illustrations, and I'm not sure how they would translate into on-line publication.  Makes me wonder if magazines, like newspapers, are on the decline.  Maybe they are being replaced by popular websites like, say, Pinterest or Buzzfeed.

Some of the more prominent magazines still manage to collect better rates:  Vegetarian Times, $14.95; National Geographic, $19; The Atlantic, $24.50;  High Times, (the 40-year-old marijuana enthusiasts' title,) $29.99; The New Yorker, a weekly, $69.99, and The Economist, another weekly, $127.00.

Who knows?  Maybe by this time next year, magazine subscriptions will cost only $4.00.