Will magazines be taking their own advice and slimming…

Will magazines be taking their own advice and slimming down?

Will magazines be taking their own advice and slimming down?

There are a few things you can rely on in January. You will have marvellous intentions for the new year. Your resolution will falter somewhere around the 15th day of freezing, grey weather. You will be skint. And February's glossies – on newsstands now – will have more tips on how to lose weight than it would be possible to read, let alone implement.

Not that the titles will be following their own advice, of course. The least fashionable look for any magazine in the current climate is a bit on the slim side – much, much better to be plumped up with many pages of expensive advertising. But are they? While there's a school of thought that says luxe won't be hurt by the recession, in the States, there have already been comments on just how thin some of the glossies are getting.

So how are their British counterparts faring? January is traditionally a tough month following the splurge of Christmas advertising - so it's little wonder all the monthlies feel a little less substantial than they did at the end of 2008. Take Easy Living for instance, which is down to 176 pages in its February issue, from 252 pages in December; or In Style, which has dropped to 170 from 234. But over the year that should recover. The question is, in the current gloomy economic climate: will it?

Well, we're going to be keeping tabs to find out. Every month we'll be putting the glossies on the scales, and seeing how they weigh in – and how well the industry really is coping in tough economic times. It's the skinny on the glossies, if you like. We've picked a fairly wide, if slightly random selection of titles to give us a decent overview of the sector — including some magazines that are slightly more targeted than general lifestyle to see if, as predicted, this is the year of the niche publication.

Give us your own predictions below - how big or small will titles be by the end of the year? Like guess the weight … only without delicious baked goods as a prize. Well, unless you ask very nicely ...

Women's lifestyle

Handbag size:

Glamour (Condé Nast): 344g; 232 pages

Full size:

Vogue (Condé Nast): 571g; 220 pages

Marie-Claire (IPC): 467g; 210 pages

Easy Living (Condé Nast): 457g; 176 pages

Psychologies (Hachette Filipacchi): 384g; 162 pages

InStyle (IPC): 469g; 170pages

Elle (Hachette Filipacchi): 488g; 194 pages

Tatler (Condé Nast): 482g; 180pages

Company (NatMags) - 323g; 168 pages