How U.S. News Abandoned Print And Learned To Love Its Data

[ed. note: This post was written by Simon Owens, the director of PR for JESS3, a creative agency in Washington, D.C. He blogs here on digital media and you can follow him on Twitter here.]
As Brian Kelly led me back toward his corner office in U.S. News & World Report’s nondescript Georgetown building, he suddenly paused in the hallway. On the wall in front of us were dozens of printed pages with articles and pictures, arranged neatly in several rows. “This is how we used to put together the magazine every week,” he told me. “Now it’s a very small part of what we do.”
Kelly has worked at U.S. News since 1998. He left a job at the Washington Post to become the national editor and was named the editor of the entire magazine in 2007. In the few years since he took the reins, the magazine has seen drastic changes, the largest of which has removed it from the news weekly game almost completely. Launched in 1933 by David Lawrence, U.S. News competed for decades with the likes of Time and Newsweek, acting as a weekly distiller of national and foreign news. But in 2008 it announced it would switch to a biweekly format and then changed to a monthly later that same year. Finally, in late 2010 a staff memo stated that its December issue would be the “last printed monthly sent to subscribers.”

Since then, the only remnants of a weekly product has been its premium digital subscription. But what’s most interesting is the new direction Kelly has taken the magazine, making it essentially a data-driven consumer resource. “So [U.S. News owner Mort Zuckerman] bought it in 1983 and there were three pretty successful news magazines — Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report,” he told me. “Around that time, people start to say, ‘Is this really going to survive?’ By the late ’80s you have cable TV and instant news and a big change in the landscape, and people were like, ‘What’s the purpose of a news magazine?’ So one of the things we started doing was to focus more not on pure news content, but on consumer content.”
This wasn’t a completely alien concept; shortly after purchasing the magazine, Zuckerman had launched its college rankings, which have gone on to become the most widely respected and cited rankings of American universities. By the the mid-2000s it was shifting more radically in this direction; today it has rankings for hospitals, automobiles, high schools, and even mutual funds. By doing so, U.S. News could get its hands on something that most other news outlets don’t have: hard data.
The question then was how to best present and monetize this data. “A national news weekly had one basic advertising category that it’s drawing from: national advertisers,” he said. “National advertising across the board has been leaving every print product. The news weeklies got hit harder because of the nature of the product, and that particular base was one of the first to leave print almost entirely. People thought [national print advertising] was coming back and we thought it wasn’t coming back, so we just decided to move on.”
U.S. News has launched several channels for each ranking, with the idea that it would serve up both evergreen and new content. Many of the rankings are only updated once a year, and a large percentage of the publication’s 8 million monthly uniques come in via Google. I asked Kelly whether he was nervous about being so reliant on the search giant, especially as it just took a hammer to several search-optimized sites; he wasn’t worried. “We think we’ve benefitted from Google knocking down some of these sites because we are the authority,” he replied. “It hurts us when somebody does a cheesy college ranking because we have the real one. Our data is very high quality, and we would rather all these low rent players get flushed out. It makes me crazy once in awhile when I see us on a Google page with someone who is totally third rate.”
By becoming more consumer focused, U.S. News gained a key advantage: its target readers were people specifically looking to buy stuff. A person Googling his way to the auto rankings is more often than not going there because he’s interested in buying a car, and this fact has allowed U.S. News to diversify its revenue. Not only does it aim to sell niche display advertising across these channels, but it also makes money from lead generation. “You go on the site looking at a Honda Civic, and it says, ‘Here’s all of the data,’ and then it says, ‘Are you interested on a price on a Honda Civic?’ When you click on that button, you’re on a different channel, you’re on a dealership channel, and you’re putting in a request. We get paid for that click way more than you would get paid for a banner ad.”
But by having such exclusive data, the publication is able to target more serious consumers who will actually pay money for information. While its main rankings are free, it has tools like its College Compass and Graduate School Compass that allow, for $19.95, users to drill down into the data to find the best colleges that suit them. “We would run 30 pages of college rankings in the magazine, but we had in our database 50,000 pages of information,” Kelly said. “On the web we started saying, ‘Let’s publish all of it,’ because somebody — it was a sort of early understanding of the long tail — is going to be interested in 15 pages of information about this one particular college. The college is not on anybody’s short list, but they’ll read about that college or hospital or whatever because it’s the one thing they’re interested in.”
Though U.S. News abandoned its weekly print format, it does still regularly release newsstand books for purchase, including its annual rankings and also special topical issues. The latter makes almost all its money from newsstand sales and generates very little in advertising (“We do make a profit from them,” Kelly said). The magazine also licenses some of its massive databases to major institutions and companies.
All together, U.S. News & World Report employs at least five or six revenue streams, whereas most other publications rely mainly on advertising and newsstand sales. Its development team is also in the midst of creating apps for the iPad and Android, though he said he doesn’t expect to see any significant revenue from these mediums for at least a year.
More importantly, the magazine plans to reach its tentacles into even more verticals, with rankings specifically for online colleges and individual doctors to debut soon. These expansions come as Newsweek continues to struggle under the helm of Tina Brown as she attempts to keep the news weekly relevant in a hyper-competitive news cycle.
Kelly, for his part, doesn’t even consider Brown a competitor.
“I’m humble enough not to make comparisons,” he said. “We are in a healthy position, and we’re in a good position to grow. I like where we are, I don’t know about other people. They made the decisions they made, but good luck to them.”