Baseball-dedicated magazines have been around since time immemorial and – like every other magazine segment – they aren’t exactly killing it these days.  Baseball Digest, founded in 1942, recently downshifted to an 8x schedule from monthly, while the baseball-heavy Sporting News showed a 39% decline in ad pages for the first half of 2009.  The biggest players in sports magazines, Sports Illustrated and ESPN: The Magazine, saw ad pages down 28% and 31% respectively in Q1 2009.  (Curiously SI for Kids is one of only 11 magazinesthat showed an ad page increase so far this year.)

MLB Insiders Club would need to bring something different to the table in order to succeed and what it promises is attractive: “Behind The Scenes looks into the clubhouse and front office of MLB teams” and “MLB Insiders Club Fantasy League Tips!”  First off, it’s surprising to hear that a major league would directly support fantasy leagues.  It would be a lucrative opportunity for a major sport league to get involved in fantasy leagues, but it’s also tantamount to supporting gambling – which has a history, especially in baseball, of being the worst crime a player or manager can commit.  One wonders if the MLB Powers That Be is aware that an official licensed product of this tacit endorsement.

As for “Behind The Scenes,” a review on Baseball Reflection reveals that the magazine practically begs for user-generated content.  The official license may get some access, but it certainly doesn’t guarantee more or better; the premiere issue features an interview with Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane, but he’s probably MLB’s most open GM, frequently giving long interviews to blogs like Athletics Nation.  And if UGC is the majority of content, you can be pretty sure the fans mailing it in don’t have any special access.

MLB Insiders Club is published by North American Media Group, a company that specializes in niche media with a few key licenses, including the Professional Golf Association and History Channel.  In addition to magazines, it also pumps out expensive coffee table books.  So for $24/year, you get some indeterminate number of baseball magazines (they don’t say whether its monthly or what) and the opportunity to buy more books (or as the come-on says “Preview Great Books and DVD’s”).  Ouch.

Baseball’s marketing and media sophistication continue to be disappointing and well behind its rivals for attention in the NBA and NFL.  Few of MLB’s teams or players are involved in social networking, while Shaquille O’Neal is the world’s ninth most-followed twitterer (as of this writing) and the NFL has so many tweeters that it had to conjure a “No tweeting during games” policy.  When these other leagues and their team are putting together their communications strategies, they are way past trying to sell magazines to their best customers. With overall attendance down nearly 6% so far this year, MLB needs to do something to make itself more compelling – more necessary – to its fans.  A clever coordinated social networking policy would be an inexpensive, low-risk way to go, especially in light of the vitality of fantasy baseball – one of the original pre-Internet social networks.

More on point: yesterday the Giants E-mailed me an offer for $5 tickets for next week’s Pirates series for my “vote for Pablo.”  Now that’s something I can use.

As anyone who follows media knows by now, magazines have been hit with a triple-witching the last few years: collapsing CPMs for even the most difficult-to-target audiences (in light of the targeting capabilities of the Internet) and plus collapsing advertising page sales; slackening demand; and rising distribution costs.

The big bellwether is now upon us.� Conde Nast, really the last of the big-spending believers in magazine, first quietly packed off Domino and a few other titles and, more dramatically, this week closed Portfolio, for which the company had reportedly spent over $100mm to launch.� (Portfolio was a poorly-timed entry – a well-written glamor magazine about business caught up in, well, now.� But it was also schizophrenic.� Despite being targeted at business elite, it was also weirdly basic; a column in the first issue, for example, explained how interest rates work[?!?!].)

While most attention has been paid to falling ad pages, it�s really the CPM problem that most fundamentally egs the question of whether the magazine industry will get anywhere close to its old business model ever again.� Publishers formerly charged $30-100 to reach a hard-to-reach passionate target � say, ukulele players � while now that CPM on AdWords is not just catastrophically lower but also available by auction.� In other words, not just the price is better; it�s the buying process, too, with better information creating a more efficient market.

So what for magazines to do?� The most obvious choice is simply to start charging readers, which is what many of the newsweeklies are now trying to do.� Any subscriber to Wired can see that they are getting their magazines at a steep unprofitable discount.� ($12 for 12 issues written, designed, printed and mailed?� Probably more like $30.� Printing and postage alone is probably well more than $1.25 per copy.� I�ve long said that Conde Nast magazines are one of the great bargains of American life, like home plumbing and the US mail.)

But the reality is that it�s going to be a very hard road to convince readers to pay after being trained into receiving content for free (the Internet) or near-free (magazines) for their entire lives, no matter how great the reporting or photography.� In the face of low demand, we�ll see massive changes in how these magazines work in the next few years � maybe months.

Another possible answer could come from the manufacturing side.� The biggest challenge with magazine business models as they stand stems from their battleship-turning nature.� It takes a long time to build circulation to get to a saleable advertising proposition; it takes an equally long time to deflate that unprofitable circulation when the ads dry up.� (This is why you’ll see big circ magazines like George suddenly disappear.)

HP recently debuted a service called MagCloud that could potentially democratize the industry by allowing easy creation of micro-targeted magazines � for example, not just for the ukulele player but for left-handed ukulele players living in the Midwest. A more nimble manufacturing process could allow more short-term plays; imagine for example �100 Days� magazine to follow the excitement around the new President, killing it just as readers start to tire of it.� Magazines may survive in fact by forgetting about brand-building and going after hot content.� In short, a return to the tabloid times of our Founding Fathers.�� More on this in a coming post.