(To paraphrase the old saw.... "The King is dead....")
The Future of the Magazine Industry Doesn't Include Magazines - Posted by ptucker on Fri, 10/22/2010 - 8:12pm
I just returned from the annual American Magazine Conference, or AMC, this year in Chicago, where I got a front row view of the future of my industry. In one presentation after the next, the heads of such giants as Hearst, Condé Nast, and Time (along with Oprah Winfrey) reassured one another that the future was increasingly bright.
“This year, magazines saw media share increase second only to TV,” said Nina Link, president of MPA: the Association of Magazine Media.
“Advertising sales are increasing again,” reported John Griffin president of National Geographic’s publishing division.
“Total magazine readers increased four percent in the last four years, second only to the Internet,” said Jack Griffin, (no relation) CEO of Time. Numbers from other sources bear out the grand recovery story. Last year, some 60% of magazine titles analyzed by the group Magazine Radar were flat or up in terms of revenue, and a third of them were up by at least 10%.
This resurgence of confidence among the publishers in attendance wasn’t just a product of positive sales numbers. A shift is taking place in the way people consume media. The days of being bullied by Huffington Post, Google, and other content aggregators are drawing to a close. The Web, you see, is dead, as noted by Wired Editor in Chief Chris Anderson in the magazine’s September cover feature. Consumers are turning away from searchable sites and moving toward what Anderson calls “semiclosed platforms,” devices that deliver a certain type of content over the Internet through specially designed software packages—read that as the iPad and all that apps that come with it.
Rest here:
http://beta.wfs.org/content/future-m...lude-magazines