Don’t put a time reference in your publication title

The Atlantic Monthly isn’t monthly (10 issues/year). Newsweek isn’t quite weekly (one double issue in late summer). I expect there are many, many other examples. The lesson? Be careful what you promise, and consider whether your frequency of publication is part of the value you provide to be part of your brand.

I think The Atlantic suffers slightly for lowering its frequency simply because it’s a read I look forward to. It’s a weighty read most months, but I think it’s compelling, and getting more so. Certainly, the quality would suffer if the editors attempted to up the frequency.

Newsweek, to me, feels lost. Clearly, the publication long ago gave up being timely, but a week is too short to embrace “timelessness” — I wonder if a focus on being a really good summary of what happened in the past week (see The Week), thereby replacing the need for people to even attempt to keep up with a daily paper, is a viable option?

The Atlantic long ago reduced the emphasis (understandably!) on the Monthly in its name, as you can see in the September 2005 cover in this post. So maybe it’s only old-timers like me who will even associate the publication with the time period. We’ll disappear.