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Suffering. What are the moves all about? Like many magazines, Newsweek has been suffering at the cash register. The recession, the postal rate increase and Phase II have driven advertising and earnings down. The magazine's pretax profit hit an alltime high of $6,515,000 in 1969, dropped to $2,584,000 in 1970, and recovered slightly last year, to $2,738,000.* Newsweek's contribution to the company's consolidated income fell from one-third to under one-fifth. Business has improved some in recent weeks, but advertising was off by 43 pages (10.9%) in January and February compared with last year, and the first-quarter total is still 42 pages (6.6%) behind 1971.
*The profit figure would have been down again in 1971 were it not for a new bookkeeping method adopted last year. Commonly used in the industry, the system spreads the cost of selling subscriptions over a number of years rather than counting it as one year's expense.