BusinessWeek

Could it be that print magazines are finally on the positive side of the “U” in their recovery? The most recent stats on print advertising activities suggest that this may be so – if only slightly.

In statistics released this past week by Publishers Information Bureau, this data aggregator found that across all of the magazines tracked by the bureau, print advertising rose ~2.5% during the first quarter of 2011 compared to the same period last year. While not large, it is a gain, which is better news than most publications have had in quite a while.

PIB charted advertising growth in seven of the twelve advertiser categories it tracks, with the following segments showing increases year-over-year:

 Apparel and accessories
 Automotive
 Cosmetics and toiletries
 Drugs and remedies
 Financial, insurance and real estate
 Media and advertising
 Technology

As for the other categories, advertising was roughly even in women’s fashion and beauty magazines, while advertising categories that continued to decline were retail, food, home furnishings, and travel.

More specifically, how did some of America’s largest and most famous magazine brands fare? The answer is: “It depends.”

 BusinessWeek: +49%

 Elle: +15%
 Vogue: +11%
 Glamour: +6%
 The Economist: +4%
 The New Yorker: +4%
 Time: +3%

 InStyle: -4%
 Cosmopolitan: -9%
 Harper’s Bazaar: -11%

 Newsweek: -31%

There are explanations behind the outliers’ advertising performance. BusinessWeek has undergone an extensive redesign since its purchase by Bloomberg, and major resources have been poured into the publication to raise its profile and editorial muscle.

At the other end of the scale, Newsweek has struggled in the wake of its purchase by nonagenarian Sidney Harman, the retired chairman of Harman International Industries (Harman/Kardon) and husband of Jane Harman, executive director of Wilson International Center for Scholars and an ex-congressperson from California. Bringing Tina Brown onboard as “celebrity editor” at Newsweek hasn’t paid big dividends yet – at least in terms of advertisers returning to the magazine.

Does the uptick in advertising mean that print magazines are out of the woods yet? Hardly. Let’s not forget that the improved advertising figures are coming off of 2010’s low base levels that are nothing short of ugly. Print advertising is slowly emerging from the worst business environment faced by magazines since the Great Depression, after all.

But at least the direction is now “up” …

The somewhat breathless headlines earlier this week reporting that China had nudged past Japan to become the world’s second largest economy behind the United States, didn’t particularly grab me.

In fact, it seems almost anticlimactic that Japan has finally been overtaken. Hasn’t Japan’s economy been in the doldrums for years?

In some sense, it seems like Japan has hardly mattered now for the better part of 20 years. By contrast, economies like those in Brazil, India and the Far Eastern countries have been the ones shining brightly and getting most of the business coverage.

Actually, I’m old enough to remember a time, back in the 1980s, when the rise of Japan’s economy was of huge concern to American and European manufacturing and banking organizations. “Japan, Inc.” was a continuing topic in the pages of BusinessWeek and Fortune magazines. Japanese managerial styles and its participatory worker groups were the focus of many a management seminar and how-to business book.

What happened? During the 1980s, Japan’s economic miracle turned into a massive real estate bubble before imploding in the early 1990s. What came next was a “lost decade” – a stagnant economy from which the country has never really recovered.

And today, demographics and other factors are catching up with the country. Things like low population growth (and an aging population to boot), weak domestic demand for goods, slow growth in exports, a strong currency and even deflationary pricing forces … these are the characteristics most observers assign to the Japanese economy.

Some economic miracle, huh?

Meanwhile, China keeps chugging away, charting 10%+ annual growth rates even as the average Chinese citizen continues to earn just one-tenth of what American and Japanese workers make.

But if we look a little more closely at Japan’s experience, there may be lessons for us here in the U.S. In fact, some characteristics are uncanny in their similarity. More ominously, some economists believe that China is on course to overtake the U.S. and become the world’s biggest economy inside of ten years.

That seems startling on the face of it. But when you consider the symbiotic relationship between the U.S. and Chinese economies – we’re China’s largest export customer and they hold a ton of our dollars – it becomes easier realize just how much our two countries need one another.

“Accidental allies,” it turns out.