BoSacks Speaks Out: The Magazine Reading Pipeline Is Cracking

Let’s stop pretending reading is some quaint pastime, like churning butter, dialing a rotary phone, or knowing how to fold a road map. Reading, Bo says, is the infrastructure of the magazine industry. It’s the wiring, the plumbing, the HVAC system of an informed society. Remove it, and the whole building starts making funny noises.

And I’ve seen the power of the ritual up close.
My wife, Carol, read to each of our four grandchildren religiously. Every night before bedtime, a reading session was performed with the kind of consistency airlines wish they had. Besides my kids having excellent parenting skills, I’m convinced Carol helped create a bedrock of literacy in those kids. I watched it happen. You could practically see the vocabulary points stacking up like interest in a high‑yield account.

Because when you read to a kid every night, you’re not being cute. You’re quietly pumping thousands of extra words into their heads before they ever meet a teacher. Vocabulary compounds. Curiosity compounds. Confidence compounds. Stop doing it, and the cracks don’t show up in next month’s financials, they show up in the circulation report ten years later, right after someone mutters, “Huh… that’s odd.”

Meanwhile, the dashboard is flashing brighter than Las Vegas in blackout mode. Most U.S. fourth graders can’t read at a proficient level. The next statistic still blows me away: half of adults are reading at or below a sixth-grade level. And over the past decade, parents have quietly decided that reading aloud is optional, right between flossing nightly and returning the shopping cart all the way to the corral.

In 2012, almost two‑thirds of parents read to their toddlers regularly. Today? Four in ten. And kids who are read to daily are nearly three times more likely to pick up a book voluntarily. That’s not a “fun fact.” That is your future subscription and retention data waving its arms like an air‑traffic controller.

As I see it, kids who aren’t read to at home don't grow up with nostalgic memories of curling up with a magazine. There is no habit to return to. Youth publishers now have to work Jedi‑level magic, puzzles, play, games, visual storytelling, basically everything except a pop quiz. If it feels like homework, congratulations, you’ve already lost them to a YouTube algorithm.

If the reading ritual weakens at home, publishers cannot sit back and hope new readers magically regenerate like starfish arms. We have to earn them.

And yet, I’m torn about what we’re supposed to do as an industry. Are we designing for slow readers now? Should every issue be a literacy gym, either building reading muscle or letting it atrophy? Do we end up running a two‑tier system: one edition for the avid reader and another for the folks whose reading skills have been short‑changed by circumstance?

Probably. Maybe. Both. It’s messy.

But let’s be honest with ourselves: literacy isn’t just an education issue.
It’s a market issue.
Shrink the reading habit and you shrink the entire publishing ecosystem—circulation, engagement, ad revenue, the whole enchilada, beans included.

I’ve said it dozens of times: the publishers who adapt will survive.
The question now is the uncomfortable one:

How do we, should we, adapt our industry to a sixth-grade reading level without turning our magazines into sixth-grade magazines?

That is the riddle in front of us. And ignoring it won’t make the numbers any prettier.