3W Design Group - Media

Every morning my email contains the daily Ad Age MediaWorks newsletter. It’s always interesting, however this morning it was a cold, sobering, glass of water in the face: Will Print Survive the Next Five Years? The author, Nat Ives, recounts last week’s bad news for magazines including the fact that the venerable Christian Science Monitor is folding its 100-year-old daily print edition in favor of the web and a weekly publication; Time, Inc. announced 300-700 layoffs; Gannett is planning on laying off 10% of its local-newspaper staff; Condé Nast is revising Men’s Vogue to a twice-yearly pub while their newest magazine Portfolio is being shrunk and its website is going to just a few pages. The last batch of bad news was that Radar, the edgy pop culture magazine (full disclosure, I was a subscriber) closed down.

Is there a silver lining in this motherlode of bad news? I think there is light at the end of the tunnel for those news providers who adapt to the news consuming habits of the coming generations. To the twenty and thirty year olds, reading the newspapers mean reading the dot com version, not purchasing the copy you eventually have to recycle. And therein lies the challenge. This landscape is going to look very different in the next 2 years and will affect not only popular titles like Vanity Fair, but trade magazines too, which has both big worldwide players as well as small regional publishers.

It is going to be an exciting time to be in content creation and distribution. There will be bumps along the way, one of which was emphasized in another article in the same Ad Age MediaWorks. The article, written again by Nat Ives and Natalie Zmuda announced Macy’s department store cutting ALL magazine spending for the first half of 2009. Thats SIX MONTHS OF PRINT SPENDING BY A MAJOR U.S RETAILER! That is a big bump and it will be interesting to see how the publishing industry deals with it and what we are left with after the transition.

Stay tuned.