Less may be more for magazines

Just catching up with a story from a couple of weeks ago in the Christian Science Monitor about the (U.S.) magazine industry. In it, the writer Randy Dotinga points out that Time magazine is actively shucking subscribers in order to get a higher quality, more profitable and attractive audience. The neighbourhood newspaper may disappear soon, he says, but magazines may have more resilience.

In regard to the future of magazines as a whole, industry insiders will be closely following the success or failure of a glossy new monthly business magazine called Condé Nast Portfolio, which published its first issue in April.

"Portfolio is being held up as the last big example of whether an old-school print magazine launch can still make it," says Matthew Kinsman, managing editor of the industry journal Folio:. "Their fate will have a lot of impact on the rest of the magazine world."

Overall, there seems to be much less hand-wringing in the magazine industry compared with, say, the newspaper business. There's plenty of speculation that your local daily newspaper could vanish in 20 years or less, but no one is saying that People, Good Housekeeping, and National Geographic will go the way of Life and Look magazines.

People move from place to place and encounter different newspapers, but magazines remain longstanding parts of people's lives, says journalism professor David Sumner, coordinator of the magazine program at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. "People feel more of an emotional bond to magazines, particularly if they've been long-term subscribers," he says.

Then there's the simple pleasure of reading a long, fascinating story on the couch instead of in a desk chair, staring at a computer monitor. "The portability and convenience factor will ensure that print magazines will be around for a long time," Sumner predicts.