In a somewhat shocking turn of events, Condé Nast, the publisher of magazines such as Vogue and GQ, has to find ways to cut back on expenses due to falling advertising revenues.

Management consultants McKinsey & Co have been retained to provide guidance for cost-cutting measures that can keep Condé Nast profitable in the recession. As its magazines are known as the high-end publications of their respective markets, it is somewhat surreal to think of publications like Vanity Fair having to tone down their expenses. Much of the success of these businesses has been based on living and reporting on the high life, so it will certainly be a challenge for McKinsey & Co to define what constitutes unnecessary expenditure.

This news is particularly interesting when compared to the falling advertising revenue coming in to newspapers. Many have speculated that it’s the news element of print newspapers that has caused it to suffer with the rise of Internet news sources, so papers are devoting more of their pages to lifestyle sections and the like, in order to appeal to those after more timeless content. This strategy may be ill-advised, however, if magazines are set to fare just as badly in the future as newspapers feel they are faring now.

People may not yet be entirely used to the idea of blogs acting like columns, but they are becoming more comfortable with reading opinion pieces online. Online magazines have often been failures in the past, with people somewhat unwilling to pay for online content, but there are some examples of successful online magazines. Newspapers may need to focus more on building better business models for the online realm rather than trying to simply retool their dying print editions.