Newsweek said to be slashing its readership guarantee

Word from a variety of sources is that Newsweek, the number two U.S. newsmagazine, is considering slashing its rate base by 1.6 million, to make the guaranteed delivery target 1 million readers. A story from Folio: says

Executives at Newsweek began discussing a rate base rollback as early as this summer, according to a pair of sources familiar with these discussions.

“A million [rate base] was the extreme,” said the source. But, as the year wore on, and the economic crisis worsened, “[they] didn’t see a recovery."

Time cut its rate base by 750,000 copies in January 2007. Newsweek followed suit, dropping 500,000 copies from its circulation in November of that year.

But a cut of this size is nonetheless risky. “To make that jump, you better increase your CPM dramatically,” noted the source, “or you’ll lose millions.”