why do magazines and all such weekly/fortnightly publications always come out in future dated issues? iv seen the phenomenon since i probably picked up my first copy of one. and yet today it struck me as really absurd. especially today, when every two hours or even more frequently the world financial scene is updating. i was reading online and there was so much that had happened in the last two days that i felt i had read volumes on it. and then i turned to the physical library and was faced with the choice between the two available mag prints in front of me. an Outlook dated the 13th of october and another dated the 18th of october. for a minute i lost my sense of real time. what was today. and both these had pages dedicated to the financial crisis. old stale news in the date of the future. upset my sense of reality and my value for information. so why do they do it? there has to be a logical reason for this practise.
some people gave me these answers.
one, a competitive market in which each publication wanted to outdo the other in terms of being 'new' in the market, and because unlike newspapers, such publications do not just report news, they dissect it in hindsight; they could afford to talk about past topics till much further into the future. so if you saw a Business World dated the 5th (Di) and another the 7th (Dj) of the same month the consumer mind would possibly be lured to buy the latest mag, even though the stories would be more or less the same in the two and the date of buying (Db) was say the 1st; which also implies that the rational mind knew the date of reporting/writing (Dr/w) couldn't in either be newer than the 31st/30th.
Choice{Di,Dj} = Dj; when j>i even though (Dr/w)for both i&j <= [31 or 30] < Db
the second answer, a more tangible one claims that vendors of such publications have deals with the mags which guarantees buyback of all unsold copies by the publishers. so the farther in future the date of publication is, the more time is available to sell more copies before the date the magazine is declared old, i.e. the date of publication.
reality may be a combination of the above two or of some more marketing strategies. if the weightage of the first reason is substantial, it would be interesting to do a behavioural/empirical human choice study testing perception of newness.
also in case of either of the two above, wouldn't a magazine be competing with another one of its own brand at a different date? so in the first case, the trick would have trickle down effects on the magazine's own 'older' issues (here i talk about 'older' issues that are still in future dates).
and in the second case, wouldnt there come a date earlier than the date of publication printed on a mag (the date when a more futuristic issue of the same mag hit the stands) when it would be declared old? on the other hand if not for this practise (the alternative being an honest declaration of date of publication), probably a mag issue would have remained 'new' till the next (honest dated) issue was out; thus gaining substantial sale time before the publishers were obliged to buy back. wouldn't that be closer to a mechanism in which truth telling was most efficient? but apparently there is an incentive to deviate.
(on cross checking i notice that all Outlook publishing dates are mondays. and yet 18th of october is not a monday. a lapse of my memory i guess yet i remember it so clearly. even the internet doesn't help reconfirm. the issue is/was too futuristic and is not up on the website)
9 comments:
economics mar di!
is this your own idea/question? it sounds v interesting. main apni productivity index mein laga padha hoon...
but back to your post. this could be written up as a paper, hmmm...
Question: Are you sure you didn't just look at Outlook and Outlook Money? Outlook has the issue dates on Mondays, Outlook Money has it on Mondays. Also, the former is weekly, the latter fortnightly, so they actually would cover different cycles, and are aimed at somewhat different customer segments anyway.
As for setting the issue date as being in the future or the present when the news is from the past, that is pretty much standard practice for all printed publications - the news that a daily newspaper publishes today is of events of the past, and similarly for a monthly magazine, the news coverage is effectively of what happened up until the previous month. It's a constraint placed by physical printing - printed news can only be 'backward-looking'. You're just used to having television and the web delivering the news almost in real-time.
That does not completely explain why the date chosen for identifying the magazine's issue is one in the future, not one in the past. I suppose it could be considered something of an expiry date - 'on October 20th, we will have a new issue out, but until then, this is the latest we've got'. That means that as time passes and you get closer to the next issue date, the old issue gets increasingly out of date, and hence less relevant. That's one reason why a news magazine will try to be weekly, while a glossy or a trade-magazine can be fortnightly or monthly.
To expand on your notation:
Di -> current issue
f -> frequency of publishing
Dj -> next issue
b -> date of choosing to buy or not
j=i+f , obviously
The customer's choice set on day b would actually be something like:
Choice{Di,current utility of waiting for Dj},
which would probably be a function F(j-b), since for some date j-b is so close to j that the customer would prefer to wait for j.
That point of change would again depend on f and on content - if you know that the next issue is going to be out only a month later, say, your choice depends on the type of the content.
If you do write a paper on this, can I get cited based on this comment ;-) ??
hey since you're anyway moderating comments, I may as well ask you this in a comment, and then you can delete it - why do you have a link to the wikipedia entry on anti-semitism?
JC - it wasn't Outlook Money. i have just checked. as to the wiki link, it's my blog i can put up anything
and what made me write this post was the question of choice between two future dated issues of the same mag with approximately the same topics discussed; alongwith the choice to choose other magazines with/without the same options. and the choice in my case is not whether to buy or not but which one to buy.
but that's just it - you'd hardly ever end up in a situation where there are 2 future-dated issues of the magazine available. Anyway, I'll take your word for it. :-)
wouldn't want to pick a fight with you on your blog. once is enough.
ok JC. will go back to office library and check what i saw. feel free to fight
JC you are right! one was Outlook 13th october and the other was Outlook Business 18th october :)
hey you actually went back and checked? you really take this sort of stuff seriously don't you? I'll have to be more careful when commenting from now on...
no JC relax n comment. even u came back here to check the comments to know the results of my checking right? so why not. i am generally a sincere person. not a joke. realised that with something in office today
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