I am not a packrat.
Okay, okay, my fellow Plugged In staffers might scoff at that statement, given that my cubicle is the most clutter-strewn of anyone’s on our team. Still, I’m not a compulsive saver. I have no problem throwing things away. I just don’t get around to it as often as some people do.
But there is one glaring exception to that rule: magazines. I love magazines. I love everything about them—their format, their glossy pages, the way information is arranged. I love the way they invite me in with promises of interesting and engaging and important stories. Give me the choice between reading some electronic facsimile of a story and the “real” thing, and I’ll take the print mag every single time.
I also loathe throwing magazines away. Even when it comes to magazines my wife likes, I’m just as likely to stack them up in the garage than pitch them, because, well, you never know when you might want to reread that one really helpful article or review or opinion piece that was in that one issue, say, oh, two or three years ago. I think it’s in the garage somewhere …
That said, I may be in an increasing minority when it comes to my unabashed affinity for this medium. You’d never know it looking at the hundreds of choices at your local Barnes & Noble, but magazine readership continues to decline in the onslaught of so much digital competition..
In early August, the stuffily titled Audit Bureau of Circulations announced that single-copy magazine sales at newsstands fell 10% in the first half of 2012. Even the title that sells the most on bookracks and at grocery store checkout counters, Cosmopolitan, saw a nearly 16% drop in sales. Other heavy hitters suffered even steeper declines: People’s newsstand sales fell 18.3%, while Time’s dropped 31%.
Now, I’m not about to mourn Cosmo’s sales drop. But I do wonder about the future of magazines. Increasingly, magazine sales trends indicate that today’s tech-fueled consumers prefer the cost and convenience of digital versions over paper ones.
Writing for The New York Times, David Carr said of this trend:
Magazines, all kinds of them, don't work very well in the marketplace anymore. Like newspapers, magazines have been in a steady slide, but now, like newspapers, they seem to have reached the edge of the cliff. … I talked to an executive at one of the big Manhattan publishers about the recent collapse at the newsstand and he said, "When the airplane suddenly drops 10,000 feet and it doesn't crash, you still end up with your heart in your stomach. Those are very, very bad numbers."
Nervous publishers, in turn, are increasingly resorting to what might be called “shock and awe” tactics to lure consumers’ eyeballs. Among the eyebrow-raising magazine covers in the last six months have been Time’s story on breastfeeding, featuring a three-year-old with his mouth on his mother’s chest, and Newsweek’s widely talked about cover featuring asparagus dangling suggestively above a woman’s mouth.
Even if you’re not a magazine aficionado, this struggling medium’s gasping attempts to stay relevant may still affect you, too—if only for a moment of disgust and frustration at the checkout counter as you try to get your kids to look at something else.
Speaking of you, what do you think of magazines these days? Has your own magazine reading declined in the Internet era? Or are you standing by this increasingly embattled print dinosaur, as I am, believing that pixels can never completely replace the satisfaction of turning those glossy pages with your fingers?
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