Phoenix’s Echo Magazine goes from biweekly to monthly
by Chuck Colbert
Echo Magazine formally announced that, after publishing 26 issues a year for the past 25 years, the publication would transition into a monthly format with the magazine hitting newsstands on the third Thursday of every month. The change took effect on April 23.
“Readers and advertisers will notice the positive effects of going monthly immediately,” said Bill Gemmill, Echo’s associate publisher, in the pages of his magazine. “We’re cutting ad rates and improving content to offer a more distinctive product to our audience.” We’ve studied all angles of the industry, and it’s time for us to regain our competitive edge in print, while catering to our website and social media audiences, too. Stay tuned for a bigger, better, longer Echo Magazine in the coming months.”
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| Bill Gemmill, Echo’s associate publisher |
Reached by phone, Gemmill said, “The motivation to go monthly was a financial one and one for our advertisers. Our advertisers were saying, ‘You are a tabloid, not a magazine, so our ad is lasting only two weeks. And by the way, we won’t be advertising with you.’ That was the number one reason to go monthly.”
Additionally, “The other magazines that were monthly were selling underneath us saying, ‘Echo is two times as much because it comes out twice a month. So we have to pay twice as much to be in Echo compared to our publication.’”
Gemmill said the transition to a monthly format has gone “very well,” with “some of our readers not aware we were no longer publishing twice a month.”
To supplement the new monthly format, the Echo team invites readers to stay in touch via social media by liking Echo Magazine on Facebook, following @EchoMagAZ on Twitter, and by using #EchoMagAZ.
Gemmill said Echo prints between 16,000 and 18,000 copies of the magazine during the spring, fall, and winter months and between 9,000 and 11,000 during the summer. There are 180 distribution points in the Greater Phoenix metropolitan area, and 20 distribution locations outside Phoenix (Tucson and Flagstaff, for example) and two in Palms Spring, he said.
The publication’s website, Echomag.com, contains all the magazine’s current local news, web-exclusive content, photo galleries, community resources, and a community calendar for LGBT events. The publication’s Echogram is an email newsletter.
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Volume 17
Issue 3
